Welcome to Trent Hergenrader.com

I attended the 2004 Clarion Writers Workshop in East Lansing, MI. The six-week workshop (from June to mid-July) featured new instructor each week plus a bonus editor, and the last two weeks featured an anchor team. The instructors appeared in this order: Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Suzy McKee Charnas, Nancy Kress, Andy Duncan, Gordon Van Gelder, Kelly Link, and Jeff Ford.

This page, written on my one-year anniversary of coming home from Clarion, is intended primarily for people considering attending the workshop. I know I wanted to read as much about the workshop as possible before attending.

• Clarion? What's Clarion?
• Pre-Clarion Jitters and Boatloads of Questions
• Kappa Kappa Sci Fi - My Humid Home for Six Weeks
• The Workshop Experience - Writing and Critiques
• The Workshop Experience - Learning from the Pros
• The Workshop Experience - Socializing
• The Homecoming and Post-Clarion Paralysis
• First Taste(s) of Success, or Thank You Clarion!
• Reflections on What I Learned At Clarion, One Year Later
• Class Bibliography Since Clarion
• My Bibliography Since Clarion

Clarion? What's Clarion?
It was March of 2004 and I was struggling. I'd moved back to Madison, Wisconsin, bought a house, and embarked on the writing career I'd been procrastinating for the last twenty years. Since I didn't move back for a job, my wife and I decided that this was the time (age 30) to go for it. No "real job" but writing. Surely my pure genius would take root somewhere and in a few years it would roll into a modest but sustainable income, right?

Not quite. I wrote a lot. I kept a normal 8-5 schedule and didn't cheat. I cranked out about a story a week for six months and finished about one-third of a novel. Genre? What genre? I wrote what I felt like. I scattered submissions to markets around the country and when my first twenty or submissions hadn't sold I started to become nervous. I had always been a good writer, won awards in school, etc. Why wasn't anyone buying my stories? Many rejections had brief notes from the editor -- 'this is good, but not right for us,' or 'some good writing here, but no thank you.'

Two things happened in rapid succession. I went to the bookstore to find some 'hot' names and picked up Ted Chiang's book, "Stories of Your Life and Others." I read the notes at the end and he mentioned the Clarion workshop.

A few weeks later, I happened to be introduced to Jim Frenkel, an editor at Tor. He was full of good advice for a beginning writer and said I should think about looking into the Clarion workshop. So I did.

I went the Clarion website and saw that it was a workshop for science fiction. I was wary. I wasn't quite sure if what I was writing constituted science fiction. So I looked up the list of instructors' works -- I had heard of none of them, to be perfectly honest -- and read a few things by Jeff Ford and Kelly Link and thought, "That's fantasy? I thought fantasy was elves and dragons. I guess I am writing a lot of fantasy."

So I applied and a few weeks later, I got in. Then I got nervous.

Pre-Clarion Jitters and Boatloads of Questions
I was, and still am, woefully underread in the speculative fiction genre. My tastes lean to the ancient--epic poems, tragedies, sagas, etc.--and I was trying to write modernized versions of very old stories. I started doing some research into "speculative fiction" and I felt, almost instantly, that I was in over my head. I hadn't heard of many of the big names and thought I'd be laughed out of the workshop for my ignorance.

I also feared that I was signing up for a six-week Star Trek convention. What if the other attendees were booger-eating nerds? One the guy's names was Arnn, for Christ's sake. Arnn?

Worst yet, the workshop administrators didn't have many definitive answers. We'd be housed in a sorority house with our own private room. Food was the most pressing concern. Would food be provided? Maybe. Will the house cook be available? Maybe. Are we allowed access to the kitchen? Maybe.

I couldn't help but wonder: was this going to be a huge waste of time and money?

Kappa Kappa Sci Fi - My Humid Home for Six Weeks
After a tearful goodbye to wife, dog, and cat, I drove the six hours to East Lansing. To make a long section short, the Kappa Kappa Gamma house was great. It had the right amount of private space and social space. The whole ordeal over whether we'd have access to the kitchen was resolved after the first week, and all the problems had to do with the sorority management trying to back out of the housing contract in the eleventh-hour. The poor admin staff--Lister, Mary, Sarah, and Amelia--were just as frustrated as the rest of us at a situation they had no control over. We had access to the refrigerators but not the stove, but we did have a grill and microwave. Fine.

We had our morning critique session in the house's main sitting room. We also tended to hang out in the television room, the patio, the balcony (once we discovered it), and (most of all for me) the cool, cool basement. The heat and humidity was terrible and it rained often. I have a hard time sleeping in anything but a cold room so I didn't sleep well for the first 10 days until an absolute downpour took most of the moisture out of the air. It was tolerable most nights after that.

So I guess it's fair to say that you don't go to Clarion for the food or to catch up on sleep.

The Workshop Experience - Writing and Critiques
Nina Kiriki Hoffman, our first instructor, picked two stories for our first critique session and chose one of my submission stories. I thought about it, and decided that was good. That first morning, I volunteered to have my story critiqued as the first one of the workshop.

Everyone got two minutes to comment, except for the instructor (who could talk at length) and the writer, who spoke last to add commentary or answer questions, or ask some of his/her own. It was odd having complete strangers with credentials unknown talking about something I had written. Long before the circle came to Nina, I realized two things: everyone was giving extraordinarily good feedback, and this workshop was exactly what I needed.

The basic formula for the workshop was a follows: people dropped completed stories off first thing in the morning and copies were ready by noon, the usual time we wrapped up the critique session; we'd pick up the new stories, read, and critique them for the next morning and, if you were good, you made notes so you don't waste your two minutes; when you found time, you wrote; if there was still time after reading, critiquing, and writing, you ate; if you were lucky enough to have even more free time, you slept. Repeat for six weeks.

We were told by each instructor that we had an extremely good group -- everyone started with positive comments, and most criticisms were tactfully stated, and just as tactfully received. We bucked the "everything goes to hell in week four" prediction -- things remained civil if not downright chummy until the very end.

Over time, there were some harsh comments like, "Throw this story away," and often people told you things you didn't want to hear, or you'd be forced to listen to two minutes of someone talking when it was clear after the first five seconds that they'd misread the story. For my part, I never got any pointed critiques, rather just some blah reactions to my stories. I tended to divide the room into people who really liked my stories and those that thought they were okay. It's interesting to note that the groups were never the same.

The Clarion experience can never really be replicated. One of the biggest benefits is the number of comments you get, especially whether there's consensus on both things you do well and areas where you need improvement. I remember the first three people critiquing one my stories all started with, "I didn't like the beginning of this story," and I thought, "Oh boy, here we go." But the rest of the class said it was fine. Had I only gotten those first three critiques, I probably would have been convinced that the beginning had to be changed. The other fifteen opinions changed my mind.

You also quickly learn that not all crits are equal. Often, people wanted you to change your story in a fundamental way. So you learn to listen more to the critiques that seemed somehow on-base. You can't please everyone and it's a real danger to water a story down so no one has strong reactions to it.

The "write-a-story-a-week" expectation didn't intimidate me as I'd been doing it for awhile. But the pressure to produce doesn't leave much time to edit and some of my stories felt awfully naked when I dropped them off. They were never as bad as I feared and I realized my habitual mistakes I made in draft seven are there, waiting to be nipped in the bud, in draft one.

Providing quality critiques was the harder part, especially when I perceived a story as terminally ill. More than once, I fell asleep reading a story which said more about my sleep depravation than the quality of writing at hand. Overwhelmingly, the stories ranged from good to excellent with only a few total bombs. Still, if you expect good critiques you have to give them as well, so it's worth the time to do it right.

Sure, it gets old. Six weeks is the perfect amount of time because, at that point, just about everyone is burned out of the critiquing process. Any sooner and you'd be wondering, "What if I'd had more time?" Any longer and the East Lansing news would have been reporting a massacre at a sorority house.

The Workshop Experience - Learning from the Pros
The instructors weren't just professional writers, these were some of the most award-winning, critically acclaimed writers in the biz. The list of awards and nominations between the six of them (plus Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) was staggering. So it's no surprise they know their way around a story.

In addition to glimpsing their boundless wisdom (okay, that's a bit of hyperbole) in the critique room, each student gets a private, hour-long conference with each instructor. It's more or less a Q&A session, so you'd better have some Q's ready. Sometimes it was a more in-depth critique of a story, sometimes it was a discussion about "the writing life," sometimes we talked about markets, sometimes about good books and stories we've read.

What's most amazing is that most students -- including me -- didn't get consensus on their stories from the instructors. Some instructors told me they really liked specific stories and didn't like others, and the next instructor would tell me just the opposite.

Best of all, all seven of them told me I could do it, I could get stories published. I was on the right track and actually pretty close, and I could tell they meant it. Talk about a confidence boost.

The Workshop Experience - Socializing
My fears about my workshop classmates were totally unfounded. I don't go out of my way to make friends, and I told myself if I could just tolerate these people for six weeks and maybe make a friend or two, that would enough. Just don't make any enemies.

Well, I came home with seventeen close friends. Some closer than others, naturally, but I genuinely enjoyed everyone's company and, in retrospect, is that so hard to believe? We were brought together for a common purpose and had similar interests in the whole spec-fic genre in every medium. We told funny stories. We talked about our favorite books. We watched "The Iron Chef" into the wee hours of the morning. We cooked for each other. We went to Cold Stone Creamery too many times and to the local imbibery not enough (for me, at least.) We did, however, have a cross-dressing party and some of us engaged in one of my favorite college past-times, watching Blade Runner drunk.

There is time to get out and do stuff, but in Lansing there's not a lot to be done. You end up spending a lot of time at home, so to speak, and as a result you get to know folks pretty well.

About half the class keeps in what I would call "constant contact," meaning weekly, if not daily, updates. The other half keeps in touch. No one's really fallen off the face of the planet. We have a website to continue the critique process, although only about a third of the class uses it with regularity.

So you'll be surrounded by kindred spirits and, if you're like me, you'll surprise yourself by how much you genuinely like them.

The Homecoming and Post-Clarion Paralysis
Transitioning to normal life completely sucks. Your head is still spinning from the last six weeks and there's a void that your classmates -- your air, your water -- used to fill. There's a palpable sense of loss.

But you get over it.

I think most Clarion graduates think they've got all the tools to write the perfect story once they get home. Actually writing is hard, though. Everything seems to be not quite right, so you edit while you write. This isn't genius, you think as you write. This actually blows. The more you put your shoulder to it, the more it settles in and refuses to move. I call it post-Clarion paralysis and it seems that tons of Clarion grads suffer from it.

It took about eight months for the paralysis to lift, for me at least. I was back to writing regularly and not worrying about everything so much by about January. I was writing up to that time, but not writing well. Everything written in that time comes across as terribly constipated, almost as if the person writing it was hyper-conscious of every word being written. Then one day, the burden was lifted. Can't explain it, won't try. Writing just came easy again and has to this day.

And boy, is my writing better for it. Don't believe me? Keep reading...

First Taste(s) of Success, or Thank You Clarion!
In March, eight months after Clarion, I sold my first professional story to Cicada, a literary magazine for teens. This is a big market that pays $.20/word, about four-times the rate most spec fic mags pay. Fittingly, it was a story I'd written in week three at Clarion.

Nancy Kress presided that week and, during our conference, she was highly complimentary of my story which had received a lukewarm reception from many in the class. She didn't agree with any of the negative things people said. Nancy said the story was very close to being publishable; something I'd been hearing about my writing for over a year. She suggested I rearrange the opening three paragraphs so they packed more of a wallop. There were some grammatical changes and she thought I needed to vary my sentence structure a little. Other than that, it was good to go.

So send it out I did, but not immediately. I left it for a few months and came back to it in October, three months after being home and in the grip of the post-Clarion writing paralysis. I made the changes Nancy suggested, tinkered with some clunky grammatical problems, and sent it to Cicada. Little did I know that they would be the first and only market for this story.

Six months later -- an eternity for a response time -- I despaired when I saw my SASE in the mailbox. I tore it open and saw four block paragraphs. Usually, the opening line is "Dear author, we read your story but it didn't hold our interest. Below we've listed flaws we commonly see in stories."

But that's not what it said. That's not what it said at all. In short, they wanted to buy it -- and just like that, I'd made my first pro sale. I couldn't be happier that it was a Clarion story. A Change of Seasons won't be in print any time soon, probably in late 2006 or even (gulp) 2007. I'm not complaining, though.

That's not all. Three months later I'd sold my second pro story, this time to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a market I hoped to break into at some point in my career, much less in my first year after Clarion. The story was written pre-Clarion and had been bounced a couple places so I posted it to our group's message board when I got home and got great feedback. I changed the ending and sent it out. About two months later I received an envelope from F&SF -- which should have tipped me off, it wasn't in my SASE -- and enclosed was a contract and a check. From the Mouths of Babes should hopefull appear in print in late 2005, early 2006.

So let's recap: that's two pro sales to big time magazines in one year after Clarion. And I'm not being overly generous when I say I couldn't have done it without the workshop. Let's just hope it continues.

What's more remarkable is how little I've sent out. I'm taking more time and really studying my stories before just winging them out there. I expect dozens upon dozens of rejections before my next sale but I've cleared two very important hurdles: the first big sale, and the second big sale (which proves the first one wasn't a fluke!) And notice that I said next sale. I'm confident I will get number three sometime in the future, hopefully sooner than later. And then on to sale number four and five and six and seven hundred eleventy-nine. Click here for my bibliography.

Reflections on What I Learned At Clarion, A Year Later
Good lord, why did I pick this heading? It could fill a book. I'll try to be brief and use bullet points:

• You keep learning long after you're home. This, from what I can gather, is quite common. Certain things people said, usually the instructors, don't fully hit home because there's a lot knocking around upstairs while you're at the workshop.
• You've got to really read and study the markets. Anyone can go to Ralan.com for places to send stuff or check out SFWA's list of pro markets, but you really need to read several issues of a given market to really "know" it. Questions to ask: what do all the stories in the given market seem to have in common? How much of spec fic element is needed? Does it tend to come early or late in the story? Why do you think this story, out of the hundreds of stories rejected, was chosen to be published? What makes it unique? There are no definitive answers to any of these questions, but asking them helped me learn the difference between SCIFI.com and F&SF. Or least what I think the differences are.
• Send out a story even when you're not 100% convinced it's brilliant. At a certain point, a story needs to get shipped. Only the author knows that point but tinkering forever doesn't fundamentally change the story. Good stories find homes.
• Start high and work your way down. I had no idea what the top markets were until I went to Clarion and learned, basically, that they're the SFWA pro market list. Send stories there first before submitting to smaller, not as well known markets. Who knows? Your story might just sell to one of the Biggies.
• Weigh sentences and paragraphs to maximize the power of certain words. Ignore strict grammatical rules (use of passive voice or using more words that absolutely necessary) if it interrupts a sentence's flow or diminishes the emotional impact.
• Dissect stories that you love to see where, how, and why they work. Reductionism of this sort doesn't always work, but it often does. Model your stories after ones that clearly work. Count the verbs, adjectives, and descriptive phrases and compare it to your own work.
• Try to reduce whole flashback/backstory scenes into single sentences of characterization. Flashback and backstory is often written for the author's sake in order to flesh out their characters but more often flashbacks are unnecessary and slow down the plot.
• Don't put anything in your cover letter besides your name, your story's name, word count, and relevant publications. Use standard manuscript format, including Courier 12-point font. Follow the guidelines to a tee.
• The most important lesson of all, I learned I have the ability to write and sell a story.