Memoir Techniques for Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy— COMING SOON

You’ve heard it repeated at F&SF conferences that to be a good writer we need to read widely–not just fantasy and science fiction, but non-fiction as well. It’s sound advice. One way to keep your writing fresh and grounded, making the more fantastic elements feel believable, is to read essays and memoir. Memoir is also highly reflective and often emotionally moving and often requires a narrator to be vulnerable. They are sharing difficult moments, revealing themselves in ways that make them and the reader feel uncomfortable.

I like reading contemporary essay/memoir. I admire a lot of younger writers in Narrative Magazine, and vloggers who are part of the Youtube New Wave, who use video and narrate their own lives in a raw, unfiltered way. I also learn a lot from the essayists Ive read again and again, Tobias Wolff, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Vivian Gornick, Mark Doty, Mary Karr, Richard Rodriguez, Anne Lamott. All of them have a lot to teach science fiction and fantasy writers if we look closely at their work.

This class serves as an introduction to memoir and essay writing specifically for your science fiction and fantasy stories. We will look at contemporary memoir in many forms and write memoir and write F&SF. We will start by unpacking several pieces of memoir, unpacking them. We’ll explore memoir-writing techniques that can transfer very effectively to writing science fiction and fantasy. Ground your narrative and a) make a first-person narrator more complex, and feel more believably there in your fantastic world, and b) connect your reader emotionally with your characters and setting by using aspects of familiarity and memory without having to resort to a full flashback, c) incorporate biases, beliefs, interests in the voice of your character using your own memoir writing, and the writings of others, as templates. We will discuss how to establish your character’s voice from the first paragraph, how to increase your character’s believability and your reader’s trust in a story that may be wildly improbable but will actually resonate on a realistic, emotional level.  We will talk about how to play with our own “selective memories” so we can think about the selective memory tendencies of our characters.

Between the weekly sessions you will receive readings and prompts to create short writings, and then bring them to share and talk about. You’ll be writing about yourself, people you know, places you are familiar with at first–and then mining those writing for those fibers of authenticity to thread into science fiction and fantasy writing in later sessions.

Participants should have some experience in writing and reading F&SF, as most of our readings will be essays and memoir to add skills to your already growing toolbox.

If you are interested in taking this course, email me at jeromestueart@gmail.com

Jerome Stueart (2007 Clarion Workshop) is a queer illustrator, writer, and professional tarot reader.  His writing has appeared in F&SF, Tor.com, On Spec, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Geist, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for a 2020 World Fantasy Award in Short Fiction for “Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun” (F&SF).  His PhD in English (Texas Tech U) with specialties in Creative Writing, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Spiritual Memoir put him forever in debt, but has allowed him to live and work as a teacher for more than 25 years, running writing workshops in academia and through city programming, in schools, in churches and online. Both American and Canadian (Yukon), he lives now in Dayton, Ohio.