CHRISTOPHER MCKITTERICK

SHORT WORK

LIKE MANY WRITERS, my publishing career started in the magazines. Modern American science fiction traces its roots primarily to the early adventure magazines and SF mags like the originals, Astounding and Amazing (read James Gunn's Road to Science Fiction anthologies for an excellent history of SF). Over time, the SF field has been influenced more and more by novels, and now by the media (that's a different discussion). But without Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell - along with all the editors who've shaped the field since - we might never have seen our genre blossom into what it's become.

I love short SF - especially now that I have such a demanding day job - because I can sit down and not come up for air until I've finished most of a rough draft. Sometimes that means a solid day or weekend of writing, but that's how I mostly do it. To manage this, I've already reached what I call my "critical mass" by then - the plot is outlined, I've gotten to know the characters well, and I have a good feel of the setting and actions involved. I usually start with an idea, say, "what if our relationship with aliens were like our relationship with dogs?" Then I start to flesh out that idea, find out who's most affected by its implications or applications, where they live (to reinforce the theme - oh, yeah, and come up with a theme in here somewhere), and so on. Only when it's more work to hold all the material in my head than to write the thing do I turn on the computer and start typing. But I've learned to never hit the keyboard until I'm confident with as much as I can possibly know about the ideas, technologies, second- and third-level effects, characters, civilizations, etc.

Here's a list of short work for which I managed to pull all these elements together enough that editors bought them.