“Someone told me they’re adding my story to their Nebula ballot!” I gushed to my friend Nyla.
“Which story?” she asked, since, as a member of my writing workshop, she gets to read them all.
“Knit Three, Save Four,” I said.
She frowned. “But that’s not your best story this year.”
And I laughed, because she was right. I never expected this story to be anything other than pulpy fun. “Knit Three, Save Four” is a standard action story with a simple plot and wacky characters trying to save a spaceship through knitting. I wrote other stories last year that are more polished, or more emotional, or more impressive technically.
But that’s not what awards are about.
As writers, we like to think that awards are about Value. That the story has intrinsic qualities that make it Better, and the story that is Best will just… wow everyone with its goodness.
In reality, our reactions to stories are subjective. I am always going to like a story with a hot male character in it more than a story without a hot male character. Better if he suffers tragically. Like, for love. Throw in some football and, I dunno, a cat? I will overlook every typo.
The compliments I’ve gotten on “Knit Three” are often about the characters, the cheerfulness of it. “A refreshing antidote to ‘The Cold Equations'” one person called it. I wrote the thing mostly as a dare, to have someone knit a spaceship. Not thinking too hard, I chose a standard plot formula: I set up three attempts to save the ship, and the last one succeeds. I could point to five over stories I’ve sold that have the same structure and less silly set-ups. I’ve spent longer writing stories. I finished it in a hurry because I wanted to enter the Baen short story contest. It didn’t place. It was rejected four times by other places before selling to F&SF.
I want to write stories that attract attention and win awards. Sometimes I’m genuinely trying to write something award-worthy; I’m really pushing to come up with the most heartfelt scenarios, the deepest thoughts … but ultimately what landed me on the first page of Nebula recommendations, and then later in “The Year’s Best Science Fiction” was a story leaning lazily on all my favorite garbage. (One of the characters is a dang inside joke for Dice Land!) Is it my best story?
By any meaningful metric, yes. So there’s a lesson in there, for me if no one else. Whether a short story garners attention after publication is not something you can control or write toward. As Robert Crais said to my Clarion class about fame, “It’s something that happens to you, it’s not something you do.”
You do not control how people react to your work, or if they react to it. I think the best story I ever wrote is “Flying Cars” and it’s gotten its 40th and probably last rejection as I am retiring it as unsellable. What the heck do I know? I also thought my first sale to F&SF “Battle Robot 37 Dreams of Trochees” was sure-fire award bait, it had violence, war, death and poetry! It won over C. C. Finlay! It barely generated any response. Friends, no. It was the story I wrote as a dare.
So relax, self and others, and just write the garbage you want to write. Chances are, it’ll do better than that very high-brow idea you’re struggling to make fun.
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