On a roll here! Okay, it’s 15 months overdue, but I was so psyched by yesterday’s submission that I grabbed my notes on the 2005 WotF workshop story ‘Into the deep’ and started revisions.

The Writers of the Future workshop includes a brilliant writing exercise. Each participant (Writers of the Future contest winner) is given a ‘pretty much entirely useless object’ (Tim Powers, ‘Giving them a chance’ documentary) as seed for a story; a mission to interview at least one random stranger about their life and use the interview in the story; and a chance to do some library research. After this (minimal) preparation, participants have to write a complete speculative fiction story in exactly 24 hours.

We got the Go at 2pm and everyone turned in a story at 2pm the next day. All of us got copies of each story, because the next morning, three stories would be ‘workshopped’. Workshopping a story means that every participant gets two minutes to say what they liked about the story and what needs improvement. After that, workshop leader Tim Powers gets his say and the last word is for the author of the story. Of course, the purpose of the exercise is to learn about what does and doesn’t work in general, but the secondary effect is that the author gets a ton of invaluable feedback. And the amazing thing is that in my two WotF workshops, the stories written this way were of amazing quality. The message, of course, is that it is possible to write good material in little time and under pressure. (In the 2004 workshop, I wrote ‘Beans and marbles’, which later sold to Andromeda Spaceways.)

I was lucky enough to be one of the three participants selected for workshopping, got enough compliments for ‘Into the deep’ to feel heady, and a ton of great feedback. I lugged home a pile of copies annotated by all the other participants, Tim Powers and K.D. Wentworth. And last night I finally got around to working their feedback into version 4 of the story, now titled ‘Diamond sharks’. A complete and submissible version is only three paragraphs and some tinkering away…