Voneth said:
What do people think of the Clarion, West Clarion and SF Odyssey genre workshops?
I went to Clarion West in 2000 -- it was fantastic. Life-changing experience. Huge. Absolutely rockin'. If you want to write, it's the best thing that can ever happen to you. Well, okay, short of publication.
2. Intensive training, this is not a correspondence school. You have to take the classes on campus and you bascily talk, listen and do writing every day and night for those 6-weeks.
That sounds a whole lot more literary than it actually is. Here's how it went on an average day. Call it "Day X".
You walk from the dorm to the class, usually leaving at 8:30 if you want to stop and grab coffee. You get there at about five 'til nine, come in and sit down. The chairs are arranged in a bigass circle -- it's the old chair-with-writing-attachment model that is so hugely uncomfortable. In the center of the circle are a whole bunch of small stuffed animals, rubber sea monsters, green plastic army men, and whatever else has been donated.
At nine, you start -- whoever is teaching that week (individual instructors or a pair, different perseon each week, one week has an editor) gets everyone seated, and, since this is day X, you critique the stories that were submitted the day before, on day X-1. Everyone critiques each story, teacher last, going around the circle -- part of going to Clarion is learning how to give a good critique, too, because you get better at critiquing your own stuff.
There are usually around 3-4 stories per day. Sometimes between stories, the teachers will give a short lesson, if they think there's something everyone is lacking -- soul, well-defined characters, setting, whatever. I'd classify this as the exception rather than the rule, though. It takes about 45 minutes for each critique, meaning that if you have 4 stories, you're going from 9 to noon -- and they don't like going past noon. At the end of the class, you get copies of all the stories turned in today that need to be read and critiqued for tomorrow.
After class, everyone grabs lunch -- often together, sometimes separately (If you've just had your baby torn apart, you might need some alone time -- or you might THINK you need alone time while everyone else thinks you need to be comforted and told how totally wrong those guys who hated your story were...) After that, the rest of the day, from noon on, is yours. Some people read in the afternoon and write in the evening. Other people write first, then read. Some people screw around and have waterfights and watch TV and then panic and scramble some time around 10:30.
Repeat every weekday for six weeks.
So it's much less like a CLASS and much more like a writer's retreat. There's much more writing and critiquing than there is listening to a writer tell you about narrative flow.
3. The cost of the workshops, dorm rooms included, is more than $1,500, with one work study position available.
The year I went, everyone who applied got a partial scholarship, and multiple people got full scholarships.
I was working at a startup and preparing for my wedding, which my fiancee and I were paying for ourselves. What she said to me when I had decided we couldn't make it work financially that year was, "Look, there's never going to be a time when you have six weeks and $2000 that you don't need. So do it, and we'll MAKE it work."
6. Rumors abound that some editors love to get work from the graduates and other immediately roundfile the submissions. Its like you've gone from being lost in the crowd to declaring your alliegence in a politcal race.
As someone who worked as an assistant fiction editor for one summer, I can tell you that that's largely an unfounded rumor. When my editor showed me the ropes, she said, "There are two things that should get a story straight to my pile -- if they have prior publications from somewhere you've heard of, or if they're an SFWA member."
Most editors like Clarion stories because they at least get into the upper echelon of garbage. The "complaint" I've heard about Clarion stories is, "It took me until the end of the story to reject it," as opposed to the stories the editor can confidently reject after going no further than page two.
If an editor specifically says, "Bah, I HATE stories from Clarion grads," they have some political stuff going on that has very little to do with the writing. Same if they only buy stories from Clarion grads.
ANYWAY -- much more than you wanted to know.
The best thing for Clarion for me was this:
Have you ever said to yourself, man, I KNOW I could crank out the prose if I didn't have that job to do all day? If I didn't have my wife/kids bugging me when I got home? If I didn't have all these other distractions? You go to Clarion, and suddenly those distractions are gone for six weeks, and you get to find out if you were just making up excuses, or if you really CAN crank it out -- 'cause one story per week, every week, is a lot of writing. I could do it. I loved it. It rocked. Other people hit the wall and realized that it hadn't been work/school/spouse holding them back -- even with those distractions gone, they couldn't put the words on the paper.
So hey, that's me. Like I said -- there's never gonna be six weeks and $2000 that you don't really need. So if you want to do it, do it, and it'll find a way to happen.
-Tacky
PS: Old One: How many Takyrises are there out there? And how many would shorten their name to Tacky? S'me. But thanks for recommending my book back to me.