Writing Short Fiction: Suggestions for Academics

I've published fifteen short, philosophically-themed science fiction stories in pro and semi-pro magazines, including in some of the most prestigious venues. Recently, a colleague asked my advice for academics interested in publishing short fiction. I figured I'd oblige with a blog post.

Write and Discard

You're a beginner. You're a beginner with a head start, because you can already write decent academic prose. But still, you're a beginner. Don't expect your first few efforts to be a publishable stories. So don't work on them too hard; don't get too invested in them; don't devote months to them and then abandon the whole enterprise when they aren't published.

Instead, write quickly. Write part of a story as a sketch. Write a whole draft, give it to someone who will provide honest feedback, and learn from that feedback. Then move on to a different story.

Most short fiction writers have large "trunks" of unpublished stories: early efforts, creative experiments, stories that didn't quite work out, stories they couldn't publish.

Writing is a process of discovery. In the course of writing, as the story takes shape, you find out how good the idea really was.

You'll find your voice better, and you'll cook up more interesting ideas, if you write lots and fast than if you belabor and belabor the same few pages.

Cherish and Protect Your Joy in Writing

If the thought of writing and discarding discourages you, ask yourself: Do you want to write? Or do you want, instead, to be someone who has written? If it's mainly the latter, then your approach might be too instrumental. You'll find it difficult to practice and to cultivate the traits that will set you apart.

Writing fiction should be a joy, for three main reasons:

First, if it's a joy, then if you discard many of your efforts, well, at least you enjoyed yourself!

Second, if you write joyfully, your writing will carry your distinctive voice and style. We are more distinct and memorable in our joys than in our forced labors.

Third, joy is intrinsically good, and the instrumental value of your writing fiction is at this point (let's be honest with ourselves) probably dubious. So whatever joy you derive is the most secure ground of value here.

Writing joyfully doesn't mean that you need to wait to write until inspiration strikes. I accept the standard "butt-in-chair" writing advice: Planting yourself in a seat before a blank page for an hour or three at regular intervals can do wonders. So yes, you might need to needle yourself a bit to get rolling. But then, when the words start to flow, follow your joy.

Writing joyfully doesn't mean writing only for yourself. It doesn't mean not valuing publication. Just don't let instrumentality poison your process.

[from my author page at Clarkesworld]

Write for the 10%

I don't care for mariachi music. The world contains, I'm sure, many great mariachi bands -- but however great they are, I won't enjoy them. Your writing is mariachi music.

Most of your friends won't like your writing enough to want to read it. (Maybe they'll politely read one story and say something encouraging.) Forget them. Don't try to please them. Ignore advice from the majority of people. Instead, find the mariachi lovers -- the people who like the particular, narrow type of thing that you are doing -- and notice their reactions. Otherwise, you'll be like a mariachi band taking musical advice from a country-music fan.

Far, far better to write something that 10% of readers will love than something that 70% of readers will think is okay.

The worst is to read some writing guide, or take some writing course, then follow the advice to the letter, trying to write some generic "good" story according to a formula. How depressing. You might as well set ChatGPT on the job. Be weird. Have fun by being different, expressing your quirky self.

Expect Rejection; Where to Submit; Critiques

Expect many rejections. Leading fiction magazines have rejection rates far worse than leading academic journals, often well over 99%.

Notice where short stories you like have been published. Potentially more helpfully, notice other venues -- maybe less prestigious -- where authors you like have also recently published.

You might be interested in my annual ranking of the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy magazines -- a good list for starting to think about venues in that genre. I also highly recommend the Submission Grinder.

If you're interested in exchanging critiques with amateur aspiring writers, Critters Writers Workshop is a good resource. Once you've made your first "pro" sale (at the SFWA qualifying rate or at least $100 cumulatively), Codex Writers Forum is invaluable for community, critique-trading, news, and information.

The Emotional Rollercoaster of Fiction Writing

Writing academic prose is hard. Sometimes I think my stuff is great. Sometimes I grumpily cut and discard, feel disappointed with my work, restart. It varies considerably with mood. (And actually I think the mood fluctuations can be helpful.)

In writing fiction, the ups and downs are -- for me and most others, I think -- substantially more intense. Take heed.

This, plus the rejection, makes cultivating the joy both harder and more important. It can be easy to feel like everything you do is mediocre and you've wasted your time. Avoiding instrumentality is the most reliable cure. To repeat myself: Try to love the writing at least as much as the having written.

Also, look, even if it's bad, there's a lot to be said for the value of bad art, enjoyed by one or a few. I plan to write a post on this topic, but in the meantime, consider my daughter's art car and The Vengefull Kurtain Rods.

The Rhythm of Stories and Articles:
initial hook → engagement of interest → developing trust → satisfying resolution

You're already familiar with the intellectual arc of an academic article. Your title is your initial hook. Your introduction builds up interest. By several hundred words in, your reader should feel they are in competent, trustworthy hands, headed along the path of a worthwhile argument or exploration. By the end, the reader should feel that you've presented a satisfying overall package.

For a short story, you need to transpose that knowledge into a different key.

Initial hook: The initial hook of a story is the title and the first few sentences. You can't yet emotionally engage the reader, but you normally (1.) convey something about the style, tone, and topic of the story, (2.) give the reader a little something to be curious about.

On 1: If it's a humorous space comedy, that should be evident right away. Same if it's an emotionally dark story of witchcraft. Of course you can't convey everything immediately and shouldn't overburden those sentences. But readers judge by their first nibble. If the first nibble doesn't match the overall meal, then readers who like that nibble might not like the whole story, and those who would have liked the whole story might not get past the first nibble.

On 2: Although you can't really emotionally engage readers in the first paragraph, you can draw them along by piquing their curiosity. This could be a bit of action you've dropped them in the middle of or an unusual social or physical event that has begun to unfold. Or it could be a more intellectual curiosity: an intriguing term, idea, event, or action they don't quite understand.

Engaging interest: The title might be great, but if the introduction isn't promising, you'll give up on reading an academic article. Same with a story. By about the end of the first page, the reader should move from initial curiosity to engaged interest.

In fiction-writing circles, you'll often hear advice to start the story in the middle. This isn't really necessary, though there's nothing wrong with it. Beginners often make the mistake of opening with not-especially-interesting background or scene-setting. Starting in the middle is one way to avoid this error -- and if it's slightly confusing as a result, that can actually serve as a bit of a curiosity hook.

The first page of your story serves some of the same purposes as an academic introduction. It's not of course an overview, but it is a promise. The reader should think, "Interesting, let's see where this goes."

Developing trust: By about page three or four of an academic article, the reader should feel that they are in good hands. It should be clear how the author is building toward the essential moves. Otherwise, you won't trust the author enough to give them more of your valuable reading time.

Analogously, in a short story by about page three or four the reader must feel emotionally invested or intellectually intrigued. They should trust your storytelling. They should feel the arc building. They should care about what happens next, due to engaging characters or fascinating ideas. If and only if they care by page three or four will they read to the end.

Reach a satisfying conclusion: Of course! Every scene, every thread, should come together by the end -- ideally, but not necessarily, with some development or revelation, not out of the blue but neither entirely expected, that suddenly shows the beginning and middle in a new light. Unless, of course, you don't want to.

A Dilemma for Nonlocal Theories of Consciousness

Call a theory of consciousness nonlocal if two entities that are molecule-for-molecule perfectly similar in their physical structure could nonetheless differ in their conscious experiences. My thought today is: Nonlocal theories of consciousness face an unattractive dilemma between (a.) allowing for physically implausible means of knowledge or (b.) allowing for the in-principle introspective inaccessibility of consciousness.

Clarifications:

Of course everyone agrees that entities with different causal histories and environments will tend to differ in their physical structure. Nonlocality requires the more unusual (and, to many, unintuitive) view that two entities could differ in their conscious experiences even if their local physical structure were somehow exactly the same.

I intend the "could" in "could nonetheless differ" to reflect natural or nomic possibility, that is, consistency with the laws of nature, rather than conceptual or metaphysical possibility. So a view, for example, that holds that consciousness-lacking "zombie" twins of us are metaphysically but not nomically possible still counts as a local theory if molecule-for-molecule locally identical twins would be nomically guaranteed to have the same conscious experiences.

"Local" needn't mean "in the brain". Theories on which conscious experience depends on states of the body or nearby environment still count as local in the intended sense. I won't try to draw a principled line between local and nonlocal, but nonlocal theories of the sort I have in mind make consciousness depend on events far away or deep in the past.

For sake of this argument, I'm assuming the falsity of certain types of dualist and non-naturalist views. If consciousness depends on an immaterial substance not located in space, today's arguments don't apply.

Examples of nonlocal theories:

David Lewis's view in "Mad Pain and Martian Pain". Lewis holds that whether a brain state is experienced as pain depends on the causal/functional role that that type of brain state plays in an "appropriate population" (such as your species). This is a nonlocal theory because what role a brain state type plays in a population depends on what is going on with other members of that population who, presumably, can be far away from you or exist in the past.

Views on which conscious experience depends on functions or representations that nonlocally depend on evolutionary or learning history. Fred Dretske's view in Naturalizing the Mind is an example. Your heart has a function of circulating blood, due to its evolutionary history. If by freak quantum chance a molecule-for-molecule locally identical heart-looking-thing were to congeal in a swamp, it would not have that evolutionary history and it would not have that same function. Similarly for mental states, including conscious experiences, on Dretske's view: If a freak molecule-for-molecule duplicate of you were to randomly congeal ("Swampman"), the states of its brain-like-subpart would lack functions and/or representational content, and on views of this sort it would either have no conscious experiences or conscious experiences very different from your own.

The Dilemma, Illustrated with a Simplistic Version of Lewis's View

Consider a crude version of Lewis's theory: You are in Brain State X. Whether Brain State X is experienced at painful depends on whether Brain State X plays the causal/functional role of pain for the majority of the currently existing members of your species. Suppose that Brain State X does indeed play the causal/functional role of pain for 90% of the currently existing members of your species. For that majority, it is caused by tissue stress, tissue damage, etc., and it tends to cause avoidance, protective tending, and statements like "that hurts!". However, for 10% of the species, Brain State X plays the causal role of a tickle: It is caused by gentle, unpredictable touching of the armpits and tends to cause withdrawal, laughter, and statements like "that tickles!". On Lewis's theory, this minority will be experiencing pain, but in a "mad" way -- caused by gentle, unpredictable touching and causing tickle-like reactions.

Now suppose a tragic accident kills almost all of that 90% majority while sparing the 10% minority. Brain State X now plays the causal role of pain only for you and a few others. For the majority of currently existing members of your species, Brain State X plays the causal role of a tickle. On this implementation of Lewis's theory, your experience of Brain State X will change from the experience of pain, caused in the normal way and with the normal effects, to the experience of a tickle, but caused in a "mad" way with "mad" effects.

If this seems bizarre, well, yes it is! With no internal / local change in you, your experience has changed. And furthermore, it has changed in a peculiar way -- into a tickle that plays exactly the causal role of pain (caused in the same way as pain and causing the same reactions). However, as I have argued elsewhere (e.g., here and here), every philosophical theory of consciousness will have bizarre implications, so bizarreness alone is no defeater.

If I can tell that my pain has turned into a tickle, then physically implausible forms of communication become possible. Suppose almost all of the 90% of normals, pre-accident, live on an island on the other side of the globe. I am worried that a bomb might be dropped which would kill them all. So I pinch myself, creating a state of pain: Brain State X. As soon as the bomb is dropped, Brain State X becomes a tickle, and I know they are dead, even though no signal has been sent from that far-away island. If the far-away island is on a planet around a distant star, the signal might even constitute an instance of faster-than-light communication.

But maybe I can't tell that my pain has turned into a tickle. If the causal role of Brain State X remains exactly the same, and if our knowledge of our own conscious states is an ordinary causal process, then maybe this is the more natural way to interpret this implementation of Lewis's view. I will still say and judge that I am in pain, despite the fact that my experience is actually just a tickle. This is a bit odd, but introspection is fallible and perhaps even sometimes massively and systematically mistaken. Still, my ignorance is remarkably deep and intractable: There is no way, even in principle, that I could know my own experience by attending just to what's going on locally in my own mind. I can only know by checking to see that the distant population still exists. Self-knowledge becomes in principle a non-local matter of knowing what is going on with other people. After all, if there was any way of knowing, locally, about the change in my experience, that would put us back on the first horn of the dilemma, allowing physically implausible forms of communication.

(For a similar argument, see Boghossian's objection to self-knowledge of externally determined thought contents. The externalists' containment/inheritance reply might work for Boghossian's specific objection, but it seems more strained for this case, especially when the difference might be between Experience X and no experience at all.)

The Dilemma, for Evolutionary Types

Alternatively, consider a view on which Brain State X gives rise to Experience Y because of its evolutionary history. Now of course that particular instance of Brain State X, and you as a particular person, did not exist in the evolutionary past. What existed in the past, and was subject to selection pressures, were brain states like X, and people like you.

We thus end up with a version of the same population problem that troubles the Lewis account. If what matters is the selection history of your species, then whether you are experiencing Y or experiencing Z or experiencing nothing, will depend on facts about the membership of your species that might have no physical connection to you -- members who were not your direct ancestors, who maybe migrated to a remote island without further contact. If you have any way to tell whether you are experiencing Y, Z, or nothing, you can now in principle know something about how they fared, despite no ordinary means of information transfer. If you have no way to tell whether you are experiencing Y, Z, or nothing, you are awkwardly ignorant about your own experience.

The dilemma can't be avoided by insisting that the only relevant members of the evolutionary past are your direct ancestors. This is clearest if we allow cases where the relevant difference is between whether you currently experience Y or nothing (where the latter is possible if the state doesn't have the right kind of evolutionary history, e.g., is a spandrel or due to an unselected recent mutation). If whether you experience Y or nothing depends on whether the majority of your ancestors had Feature F in the past, we can construct alternative scenarios in which 60% of your ancestors had Feature F and in which only 40% of your ancestors had Feature F, but the genetic result for you is the same. Now again, you can either mysteriously know something about the past with no ordinary means of information transfer or you are in principle ignorant about whether you are having that experience.

Other ways of attempting to concretize the role of evolutionary history generate the same dilemma. The dilemma is inherent in the nonlocality itself. To the extent your current experience depends on facts about you that don't depend on your current physical structure, either you seemingly can't know whether you are having Experience Y, or you can know nonlocal facts by means other than ordinary physical Markov processes.

[Whitefield Green Man by Paul Sivell]

The Dilemma, for Swamp Cases

Let's tweak the Swampman case: You walk into a swamp. Lightning strikes. You black out and fall on your face. By freak quantum chance a swamp duplicate of you is formed. You wake fifteen minutes later, face down in the mud, side-by-side with a duplicate. Are you the one who walked in, or are you the duplicate?

If an evolutionary history is necessary for consciousness, and if you can tell you are conscious, then you know you aren't the duplicate. But can you tell you're conscious? If so, it wouldn't seem to be by any ordinary, locally causal process, since those processes are the same in you and the duplicate. If not, then introspection has failed you catastrophically. So we see the same dilemma again: either a source of knowledge that fits poorly with naturalistic understandings of how knowledge works, or a radical failure of self-knowledge.

Or consider partial swamp-cases. You and your twin stroll into the swamp. Lightning strikes, you both collapse, to one of you the following happens: One part of their brain is destroyed by the lightning, but by freak quantum accident 15 seconds later molecules congeal with exactly the same structure as the destroyed part. Suppose the visual areas are destroyed. Then you both wake up. On the natural reading of an evolutionary account, although both you and your twin are conscious and able to use meaningful language (unlike in evolutionary interpretations of the original Swampman case), one of you has no visual experiences at all. Again, either you can know which you are by some method at odds with our usual understanding of how knowledge works, or you can't know and are radically in-principle ignorant about whether you have visual experience.

Of course all such swamp-cases are far-fetched! But on current scientific understandings, they are nomically possible. And they are just the sort of pure-form thought experiment needed to illustrate the commitments of nonlocal theories of consciousness. That is, it's a distilled test case, designed to cleanly separate the relevant features -- a case in which entities are locally identical but differ in history and thus, according to history-based nonlocal theories, also differ in conscious experience. (If there were no such possible cases, then consciousness would supervene locally and history would contribute only causally and not constitutively to conscious experience.)

The Dilemma, in General

Nonlocal theories of consciousness allow in principle for local twins with different experiences. If the local twins' self-knowledge tracks these differences in experience, it must be by some means other than normal causal traces. So either there's a strange form of knowing at variance with our ordinary physical accounts of how knowledge works, or the differences in experience are in principle unknowable.

---------------------------------

Related:

"The Tyrant's Headache", Sci Phi Journal, issue #3 (2015), 78-83.

The Weirdness of the World, Chapter 2, Princeton University Press.

"David Lewis, Anaesthesia by Genocide, and a Materialistic Trilemma" (Oct 13, 2011).

Kings, Wizards, and Illusionism about Consciousness

The Difference Between Kings and Wizards

In 16th century Europe, many believed that kings ruled by divine mandate and wizards wielded magical powers. With apologies to certain non-secular perspectives, they were wrong. No one ever had divine mandate to rule or powers of the type assumed. Since no one could cast magic spells, we now say there were never any wizards. Since no one had divine mandate to rule, we now say there were never any kings.

Wait, no we don't!

Why the difference? It turns out that able to cast magic spells is an essential property of wizards, but having divine mandate to rule is not an essential property of kings. Denying that anyone has the first property means denying that wizards exist, but denying that anyone has the second property does not mean denying that kings exist. A divine mandate is to kings as pointy hats are to wizards -- stereotypical perhaps, or even universal on a certain way of thinking, but not essential.

Kammerer: "Phenomenally Conscious" Is More Like "Wizard" than "King"

In his recent paper Defining Consciousness and Denying Its Existence: Sailing between Charybdis and Scylla, François Kammerer argues that the relationship between "phenomenal consciousness" and is non-physical and is immediately introspectible (in a certain naturalistically implausible sense) is akin to the relationship between "wizard" and able to cast magic spells. Arguing against my 2016 paper "Phenomenal Consciousness, Defined and Defended as Innocently as I Can Manage", Kammerer contends that non-physicality and immediate introspectibility are implicitly essential to our concept of phenomenal consciousness. Nothing wholly physical could be phenomenally conscious, just like no spellless muggle could be a wizard.

[A wizard (Merlin) carrying a king (Arthur), by N. C. Wyeth]

Can "Phenomenally Conscious" Be Defined Without Problematic Presuppositions?

My approach to defining consciousness aims to be "innocent" in the sense that it doesn't presuppose that phenomenal consciousness is, or isn't, wholly physical or immediately introspectible. Instead, I define it by example:

Notice your visual experience right now.

Close your eyes and thoughtfully consider the best route to grandma's house during rush hour.

Mentally hum the tune of "Happy Birthday".

Pinch yourself and notice the sting of pain.

These events share an obvious common property that distinguishes them from non-conscious mental states such as your knowledge, five minutes ago, that Obama was U.S. President in 2010. That shared property is what I mean by "phenomenally conscious". Actually, I prefer to just say that they are "conscious" or "consciously experienced", in line with ordinary usage; but since the term "conscious" can be ambiguous, the jargony term of art "phenomenally" can help to clarify. ("Phenomenal consciousness" in the intended sense is meant to disambiguate rather than modify the ordinary term "consciousness".)

On Kammerer's view, as I interpret it, my "innocent" definition fails in something like the following way: I point to one purported wizard, then another, then another, then another, and I say by "wizard" I mean the one obvious property shared among those men and absent from these other men (here pointing to several people I assume to be non-wizards). Although this might purport to be an innocent definition by example, I am assuming that the first group casts spells and the second doesn't. If no one casts spells, I've picked out a group of men -- and certainly those men exist. But no wizards exist.

The purported wizards might all have something in common. Maybe they are members of the opposing tribe, or maybe they're all unusually tall. Even if we can thus pick out a real property using them as exemplars, that property wouldn't be the property of being a wizard. Similarly for my definition by example, I assume Kammerer would say. If we accept Global Workspace Theory, for instance, maybe all of the positive examples transpire in the Global Workspace; but if they aren't also non-physical and immediately introspectible, they aren't phenomenally conscious, by Kammerer's lights.

A Test of Essentiality: What Happens If We Remove the Property?

Imagine traveling back to a simplified 16th century Europe and convincingly delivering the news: There is no divine right of kings, and there are no magic spells. How will people react?

"Oh, really, my king doesn't have divine authority?" (Kings still exist.)

"Oh, really, that weirdo from the other town isn't really a wizard?" (Wizards don't exist.)

Likely, most ordinary users of these terms (or, more strictly, the 16th century translations of these terms) will treat divine mandate as inessential to kinghood but spellcasting as essential to wizardry. A few philosophers and theologians might claim that without divine right, kings were never real -- but this would be an unusual stance, and history sided against it.

This method -- removing a property and testing whether the concept still applies -- also works for other terms, regardless of whether the feature is explicitly or only implicitly essential.

Consider the essential conditions for that hoary analytic-philosophy chestnut "S knows that P". Discovering such conditions can require significant philosophical inquiry. Perhaps one such condition is that the true belief that P be non-lucky, in Duncan Pritchard's sense. To test this, we can hypothetically remove the non-luckiness from a case of knowledge. If it was mere luck that you read the showtime in accurate Newspaper A rather than misprinted Newspaper B, then ordinary users (if Pritchard is right) will, or should, deny that you know the showtime. This is just the good old method of imaginative counterexample.

Analogously, we can ask users of the phrase "phenomenally conscious" -- mostly philosophers and consciousness scientists -- the following hypothetical: Suppose that the world is entirely material and introspection is an ordinary, natural, fallible process. Will these ordinary users say (a.) "I guess there would then be no such thing as phenomenal consciousness after all!" or (b.) "I guess phenomenal consciousness would lack these particular properties"?

Those among us who already think that phenomenal consciousness lacks those properties will of course choose option (b). These people would be analogous to 16th century deniers of the divine right of kings.

But also, I speculate, most ordinary users of the term who do think that phenomenal consciousness is non-physical and/or immediately introspectible would also choose option (b). Imagining, hypothetically, themselves to be wrong about non-physicality and/or immediate introspectibility, they'd grant that phenomenal consciousness would still exist. In other words, ordinary users wouldn't treat non-physicality or immediate introspectibility as essential to consciousness in the same way that spellcasting is essential to wizardry (or non-luckiness is, maybe, essential to knowledge).

A few users would presumably choose option (a). But my empirically testable, socio-linguistic guess is that they would be a distinct minority.

Non-physicalists are more convinced that phenomenal consciousness exists than that it is non-physical. Hypothetically imagining the truth of physicalism, they would, and should, still grant the existence of phenomenal consciousness. In contrast, believers in wizards would not and should not be more convinced that there are wizards than that there are people with spellcasting abilities.

Innocence Maintained

Contra Kammerer, even if many people associate phenomenal consciousness with non-physicality and naturalistically implausible introspective processes -- indeed, even if can be established that phenomenal consciousness actually has those two properties -- those properties are non-essential rather than essential.

Kammerer's case against the existence of phenomenal consciousness therefore doesn't succeed. Ultimately, I take this to be a socio-linguistic dispute about the meaning of the phrase "phenomenal consciousness", rather than a disagreement about the existence of (what I call) phenomenal consciousness.

-----------------------------------------------------

Related:

"Phenomenal Consciousness, Defined and Defended as Innocently as I Can Manage", Journal of Consciousness Studies (2016), 23, 11-12, 224-235.

"Inflate and Explode", circulating unpublished draft paper, Jan 31, 2020.

"There Are No Chairs, Says the Illusionist, Sitting in One", blog post, Apr 24, 2023.