Putting It Together; Turning Sow's Ear Drafts into Silk Purse Stories Part 1

Putting It Together.

Turning Sow's Ear Drafts into Silk Purse Stories.

by Mike Resnick.

For Carol, as always And for the 100+ members of the Resnick List, without whom this book would be both unconceived and unwritten.

Introduction.

I have something called a Listserv, run by a fan named John Teehan, the same fellow who runs my web page. It's a group of fans from all over the world, plus a few writers and editors, who have a common interest in me and my work, and hundreds of e-mails are exchanged each week. It works like an apa (Amateur Press a.s.sociation), which is to say that any member can post an e-mail and it will instantly be delivered to every other member of the List.

(You can join it, if you're so inclined, through my web page, which can currently be found at www.MikeResnick.com, and also at www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/farmer/2-and doubtless subject to change.) Anyway, at one point in the autumn of 1999, one of the members was asking me how difficult it was to write for the movies compared to writing books and short stories, and I replied that it was a totally different discipline and that I had a horrible time with it when my producers kept sending me the shooting scripts ofLawrence of Arabia andChinatown to study.

So how did I finally learn? I convinced them that I couldn't learn from these screenplays any more than someone could learn to write novels by studying Nabakov and Kazantzakis and h.e.l.ler. What I needed, I explained, was a series of drafts of the same script, so that I could see what changes were made and why.

The other way I learned was from sitting down with a couple of journeyman screenwriters and asking them a zillion questions about the choices they made in the process of writing a saleable script.

Gee, said the List member, if only someone could do that for prose writers ... especially hopeful science fiction writers.

Didn't seem likely. Since the advent of the computer, most writers don't keep early drafts of their stories and novels. You tend to edit right on the copy, so there is only one draft-or else you keep the old drafts until you come up with a better one and then dump them.

But I happened to have my first two drafts of "The Land of Nod", a Hugo-nominated novelette. I kept them for only one reason: to remind me that good writing takeswork , and that even after thirty years as a writer with dozens of awards and a few bestsellers, I was still capable of turning out not one but two totally unsaleable versions of a story.

I a.s.sume that you can see where this is leading. I hope you can, and I hope you'll find it useful, because I am not especially keen on public humiliation-but I happen to believe that you'll learn more by seeing how I improved those two early drafts than by simply reading the very polished final version.

As I was kicking this around with the List, I sold "The Elephants on Neptune" toAsimov's -and because I kinda sorta knew I was going to bite the bullet and expose Resnick at his worst, I hadn't yet erased the first draft.

Problem was, I had no other first drafts, and what I had wasn't enough for a book, even a thin one.

Then List member Adrienne Gormley reminded me that, a few years back, a number of hopeful writers on the CompuServe network had asked me endless questions about my Hugo-nominated short story, "Mwalimu in the Squared Circle".

I searched my hard disk, found the discussion hiding in a corner, and added it plus "Mwalimu" to the other two stories-andstill didn't have enough for a book.

That's when the List members came to my rescue. Having come up with the notion of the book and convinced me to do it, they weren't going to let it die for lack of another 15,000 words. They could, they a.s.sured me, ask as many intelligent questions as the CompuServe group did, probably more. All they needed was a story.

I left it to them to choose the story we would discuss in minute detail, and they opted for my most recent Hugo winner, "The 43 Antarean Dynasties".

Nowwe had enough for a book ... and then I decided to add one more story, "The Kemosabee", because I felt that the Q and A about a funny story would differ considerably from the kind of discussion the other four stories engendered.

So here it is-a book that couldn't have existed without the members of the Resnick List. And a book with enough bad versions of ultimately decent stories for convention toastmasters to tease me about for the next couple of decades.

I hope someone out there thinks it was worth it, he grumped.

THE ELEPHANTS ON NEPTUNE -1st draft.

by Mike Resnick.

When men finally landed on Neptune in 2473 A.D., the very first thing they found were the elephants.

You can't imagine how distressing this was to both parties. Or maybe you can. A lot of it depends on whether or not you're an elephant.

"We thought you were extinct," said the men accusingly. "Youare elephants, aren't you?"

"Of course we are," said the elephants, trying not to look too insulted.

That being settled, most of the men wanted to continue calling them elephants-but the scientists, who vigorously protected their prerogatives and were b.i.t.c.hy sorts anyway, insisted on dubbing themloxidonta neptunus . It didn't really matter, though, because they all answered to "Jumbo".

"That sure is an impressive-looking ship," said the elephants nervously when the formalities of greeting were over. "You aren't carrying any weapons in it, are you?"

"Why?"

"Well, in times past you have been known to-"

"Forget all that," interrupted the men impatiently. "We have more important things to talk about. For example: this world hasn't got much atmosphere, and what it does have is poison. So tell us: how do you breathe?"

"Through our noses," said the elephants.

"That's not much of an answer," said the men after some consideration, "but at least you seem like friendly sorts."

"Well, we go back a long way, elephants and men," said the elephants.

Which was true. It was also true than an elephant never forgets, no matter how hard he tries.

One of the first things they didn't forget was the Battle of the Jhelum River. That was where Alexander the Great fought Porus, King of the Punjab of India.

Almost n.o.body remembers Porus today (except for the elephants, of course), but he had quite an army back in 326 B.C.-and, even more impressive, he had 200 elephants, the first that were ever used in war.

Alexander wasn't called the Great for nothing. He had his men sneak up on King Porus' elephants at night and, at a signal from him, they fired thousands of arrows into extremely sensitive trunks and hurled hundreds of spears into equally sensitive legs and bellies. The elephants went crazy with pain and began killing the nearest men they could find, which happened to be their keepers and handlers-and when the dust had cleared and the blood had stopped spurting, Alexander had won the Battle of the Jhelum River without losing a single man. Now I ask you: How'sthat for Great?

He promptly rewarded his commanders with a bunch of promotions. The reward for the elephants who had actually won the battle for Alexander was a little more problematical. Since they were understandably tired after a hard night of bloodletting, and since the few survivors looked exactly like giant pincushions, they hardly protested at all when Alexander conferred upon them the high honor of providing his troops with some necessary protein during the next few days by slaughtering them in the morning.

That was when elephants realized there was more to both warand men than they had imagined.

"That was a long time ago," said the men, without actually apologizing. "We haven't done anything like that lately."

"You haven't seen an elephant in three hundred years," replied the elephants.

"Details, details," muttered the men, shrugging in unison.

It was Ptolemy IV who first created prejudice in elephants. His battalions rode their African elephants into battle against the Indian elephants of Syria's Antiochus the Great in 217 B.C.

Ptolemy won the war, but all the survivors on both sides agreed that Antiochus' elephants performed better. The Indian elephants didn't let Ptolemy's elephants forget about it, either. They giggled and teased and razzed them without mercy.

There are lots of reasons scientists give for the fact that African and Indian elephants never interbreed, but if you ask the elephants on Neptune, it all goes back to Ptolemy.

Now, while Ptolemy was doing terrible things to Syria and even worse things to his elephants'

self-esteem, Hannibal gathered 15,000 men and 37 elephants in 219 B.C., marched them over the Alps, arrived at Carthage seventeen years later, and won a major battle.

"Well, he never told us he was in a hurry," said the elephants on Neptune, refusing to meet their visitors'

gaze.

"By the way, how are we communicating?" asked the men.

"Not very well," said the elephants. "We thought you'd be friendlier and more articulate."

"What we meant was, what is the mechanism by which we are communicating? You don't wear radio transmitters, and because of our helmets we can't hear any sounds that aren't on our radio bands."

"Besides," added the scientists, who had to get in their two cents' worth, "there are hardly enough air molecules to carry any sound."

"But that doesn't matter," said the men irritably, "because even if there was, we'd have to take off our helmets to hear it, and then we'd freeze to death."

"You'd inhale poisonous fumes and die before you could freeze," said the scientists, who could never let anyone else have the last word.

"If you interrupt us once more," said the men, "we're going to take your helmets off and see which of us is right."

Which shut the scientists up, at least for the moment.

"Thanks for hanging around," the men said to the elephants. "We apologize for these guys, but you know what scientists are like-from earliest childhood they spend all their time with vectors and angles and formulae. They never quite get around to studying manners." The men shook their heads sadly. "So can you answer the question now?"

"Sure," said the elephants. "We communicate through a psychic bond."

"Not a telepathic one?"

"Absolutely not, though it comes to the same thing in the end," answered the elephants. "We're sure we sound like we're speaking English to you, except for the guy on the left there who thinks we're speaking Hebrew. On the other hand, you sound exactly as if you're making gentle rumbling sounds in your stomachs and your bowels."

"That's amazing!" said the men. "Disgusting, but amazing."

"You know what'sreally amazing?" responded the elephants. "The fact that you've got a Jew with you."

"What's surprising about that?"

"We always felt we were in a race with the Jews to see which of us would be exterminated first," said the elephants. "We used to call ourselves the Jews of the animal kingdom." They turned and faced the Jewish s.p.a.ceman. "Did you guys think of yourselves as the elephants of the human kingdom?"

"Not until you just mentioned it," said the Jewish s.p.a.ceman, who suddenly found himself agreeing with them.

The Romans decided to set up a no-lose situation in the theater at Alexandria. They led a bunch of Jewish prisoners into the arena, and then turned a herd of fear-crazed elephants loose on them.

The Jews stood perfectly still, probably because they were too weak from hunger and repeated beatings to run, and the spectators began jumping up and down and screaming for blood-and, being contrarians, the elephants attacked the spectators and left the Jews alone, proving once and for all that you can't trust a pachyderm.

That was the day the Jews knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were G.o.d's chosen people.

They weren't the Romans' chosen people, though. After the Roman soldiers killed all the elephants, they put all the Jews to the sword, too.

"But that was all before Christ," said the men. "It doesn't really count."

"We never thought Jesus was all that fond of elephants," said the elephants.

"He loved all living things," said the men with absolute certainty.

"Well, now, we don't know about that," said the elephants. "He put devils into the Gadarene swine and made them run down the hill and into the sea. So he certainly didn't love pigs, did he?"

"Well ... um ... er ... well..." said the men.

"And if he loved elephants, he'd never have let you kill the last mammoth on those islands off Canada."

"That was ten thousand years before he was born!" protested the men.

"No, it was 400 years after he died," said the elephants.

"403 years, 8 months, and 3 weeks," corrected the scientists. "Pacific Daylight Time."

"But they were mammoths and you're elephants," said the men. "It's not the same thing."

"Don't be so hasty," said the scientists. "Mammothis just a corruption ofbehemoth , and surely loxidonta neptunus is a behemoth."

"You keep out of this!" said the men angrily.