Connie Willis<\/a>, author, says. \u201cI can\u2019t remember a time when I didn\u2019t want to be a writer and didn\u2019t make up stories and things.\u201d<\/p>\nWillis is an award-winning, Greeley-based science fiction author responsible for 1992\u2019s <\/span>Doomsday Book<\/span><\/i>. She grew up with \u201cgirls\u2019 books\u201d such as <\/span>Little Women<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Anne of Green Gables<\/span><\/i>, but eventually discovered the work of sci-fi author Robert Heinlein and fell in love with science fiction. Soon, she had devoured all the science fiction she could find at her library, including<\/span> The Year\u2019s Best Short Story Collections<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThey were wonderful,\u201d she says. \u201cI got them even more than Heinlein. I think that was what converted me to science fiction, because you had all these very different writers doing a whole variety of different stories. I was just completely blown away by how many different things you could do with science fiction, and it wasn\u2019t one kind of story, it wasn\u2019t one kind of character. You could do almost anything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWillis says she was completely convinced that she wanted to write science fiction, but not novels.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI still want to write short stories,\u201d she said. \u201cI spent the first ten to fifteen years of my career writing exclusively short stories.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nDespite her interest in just writing short stories, Willis eventually published her first novel <\/span>Lincoln Streams<\/span><\/i>. She said she was backed into it by her writer\u2019s workshop.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cEverybody said, \u2018This needs to be included, this needs to be included.\u2019 I was like, \u2018oh, okay, I think this is actually a novel and I can\u2019t do it at this shorter length,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cSo that\u2019s why I wrote my first novel. I did not become a convert to novels. I write novels, but I also write short stories.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSince 1980, Willis has been regularly published with a majority of her work focusing on time travel, particularly a series of her books focusing on a distant future Oxford that sends historians back to certain time periods for research purposes, such as World War II and The Black Death. When she first started writing, however, time travel was considered a dead genre.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cTime travel has been a part of science fiction from the very beginning,\u201d Willis explains. \u201cIt had been very popular in the 1940s and \u201850s and then it kind of died out, and so when I wrote <\/span>Fire Watch<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> nobody was writing time travel, so that was a very different kind of thing. When I took it to workshop, everybody said, \u2018Time Travel is dead. This is ridiculous. You can\u2019t write a time travel story. They\u2019re dead.\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018Well, it won\u2019t be dead after I write this one.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWillis says that a ton of authors do follow trends, such as zombies and vampires, but she personally thinks it\u2019s a dead end for writers, adding that trend-followers publish faster but also die faster.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cAll you have to offer is your own personal view of the world and your own unique thing,\u201d she says. \u201cI think the most successful writers are the ones who follow their own star. There are millions of ideas that float past you everyday, all the time. But it\u2019s the ones that emotionally grab you I think are the ones you should be writing about, and if you\u2019re emotionally grabbed by it, then your readers will be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWillis also mentioned another dead-end for writers: e-books and self publishing. While Willis is a fan of e-books, she is not into self-publishing or self-published works.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI think people think of it as a short-cut,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re not edited. I don\u2019t know if you read self-published things, but they\u2019re terrible. They need editors, and they need copy editing, obviously, for grammar and punctuation and spelling. I was at a library conference that had millions of these self-published authors. There was an 18-year-old girl there who had published her fourth novel, and she was like, \u2018You should really buy it, it\u2019s really good.\u2019 I was like, \u2018No, it\u2019s not, without even looking at it because you\u2019re 18-years-old.\u2019 And maybe she\u2019s a genius, but she still needs editing. The New York Times did a piece not too long ago where they said the average amount of money made by a self-published novel, online: $753 a year. It\u2019s a dead-end for writers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWillis recommended starting in short stories, submitting to magazines, both print and online.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI know people who only write novels and they\u2019ve sold their novels. It\u2019s hard to sell a novel without being agented,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of way to get noticed. If you are good enough, you will be successful. If you are good enough, they won\u2019t be able to ignore you, whatever the system is. You have to focus not on the selling, but on the writing. The writing has to be the main focus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nFor aspiring writers interested in seeing Willis in public soon, Willis will be teaching a writer\u2019s workshop on plotting for ReadCon, hosted by High Plains Library, at Zoe\u2019s Suite 100 on September 12 from 3-4 p.m. For more information, visit Willis\u2019 blog at http:\/\/www.sftv.org\/cw\/.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Willis is an award-winning, Greeley-based science fiction author responsible for 1992\u2019s Doomsday Book. She grew up with \u201cgirls\u2019 books\u201d such as Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, but eventually discovered the work of sci-fi author Robert Heinlein and fell in love with science fiction. Soon, she had devoured all the science fiction she could find at her library, including The Year\u2019s Best Short Story Collections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":14572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":""},"categories":[4,14],"tags":[1786,1785,1777,1783,1784,37,1781,1782,1780,1778,1779],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n