Kate Wilhelm -- Storyteller
Writing Lessons & More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers Workshop
Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller is part-memoir of the Clarion Workshop, and part 'how-to' writing book which perfectly complements husband Damon Knight's Writing Short Fiction
Kate Wilhelm has been writing for over fifty years. For twenty-seven of those years, she taught at the Clarion Workshop, together with her husband, Damon Knight. Together they made a formidable team. Knight was the founder of the Milford writers workshop, whereby professional writers would spend a week if they could pare the time -- and a weekend if they could not – work-shopping each other’s stories, the founder and first president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, winner of the Hugo Award for his book of literary criticism, In Search of Wonder.
Wilhelm was the quieter of the two, more inclined to simply write and workshop and raise her family, and write and…no less formidable than Knight, with her twenty-two Hugo and Nebula nominations, including four winners, amongst them the landmark Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, an atypical Hugo winner from 1976, but very much of its time, with eco-catastrophe and cloning interweaving snake-like in the narrative.
Storyteller is in part a memoir of those Clarion years, and partly a book on how to write short stories – or more often, how not to write. Wilhelm’s advice on what to avoid in the first paragraph runs to nearly a page of bullet points. It also concentrates on short fiction because the workshop was intended for short story writers.
Novels are longer, and it is that need for endurance and lack of confidence that deters novice writers from writing novels. Those novice writers who can finish one novel, particularly if they can sell that novel, tend to forsake short fiction, which in Wilhelm’s (and many other writer’s) opinion is harder to do well. “Every single word has to help the story or it hurts it.”
Some of that advice – such as covering the whole page apart from one sentence, and working through that sentence to see what it contributes -- parallels that given in Knight’s Writing Short Fiction, which is understandable, given that they were a teaching partnership. In the same way, stories attributed to one or other of husband and wife writing team Henry Kuttner or C.L. Moore often had input from the other.
Some of it is uniquely Wilhelm’s own, where she writes of constructionists and visualizers, or of turning dream-imagery into elements of a story.
Just as the couple complemented one another as teachers, “he was a wordsmith and I’m a storyteller,” Wilhelm says, so do their books. Knight’s Writing Short Fiction is all about technique and construction, with charts and diagrams. Wilhelm’s Storyteller is all about imagery and memory. They complement one another, and taken together are and should be inspirational.
