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BY BRENDAN WORK

In print | March 8, 2007

Aspiring writers and long-time readers alike turned out on Tuesday night to hear award-winning science fiction author Connie Willis’ lessons and literature. The eight-time Hugo Award and six-time Nebula Award recipient read an excerpt of her latest work-in-progress “All-Clear,” her 11th novel, and answered questions regarding her views on thinking, writing and publishing.

Willis, whose time travel stories “Doomsday Book” (1992) and “To Say Nothing of the Dog” (1997) received high acclaim, explained that her latest exploration of the genre would follow a similar theme. In “All-Clear,” time-traveling researchers from Oxford College find themselves in WWII-era London — a setting in which Willis hopes to describe the non-military British war effort on the ground, which has seen less literary showcase than the battle heroics of D-Day, for example.

“It’s a grim novel — I mean, it’s set in World War II,” Willis said. “I’m always interested in how people work when the chips are down.” But she admitted the novel has posed more challenges than she expected. Referring to the British vernacular, she said, “Basically I’m writing the whole damn thing in a foreign language. I despise it.”

The chosen excerpt from “All-Clear” captured Willis’ audience, including Swarthmore Fiction Writer’s Workshop Director Gregory Frost, a longtime colleague of Willis and critically acclaimed science fiction author in his own right. He applauded her skillful use of literary reversals — plot twists, essentially, which in Willis’ words “change the nature of the story.”

“The notion of reversals is fascinating,” Frost said. “She has given me another tool for my toolbox.”

Though Willis’ fiction is known for its strong, multifaceted characters, she and Frost were both quick to qualify the claims.

“She has no vivid characters, but perfect structures in which they manifest themselves,” Frost, who introduced Willis, said.

“I never do character studies,” Willis said. “I have the story and I say, what kind of characters do I have, and how do they react to the world? Plot and character are two sides of the same coin.”

Willis went on to offer a wealth of advice about the writing process, aimed at an audience which, though primarily over 50, held more than a few young Swarthmore writers.

“I always write stories about things that bother me,” she explained. “I’ll explore that in the story. If you write a lot of stories, you keep coming back to similar ideas. Eventually, you’ll write more valuable, deeper stories.”

Not too cautious to debunk what she saw as an overrated half-truth, Willis also explained that the axiom “`Write what you know” was missing the point.

“If you just write what you know, that’s an essay,” she said. “Your material is made from the things you feel. Literature is about the stuff you don’t understand.”

She further explained that most of what one writes is from the subconscious: “Your conscious mind does all the organization. Like, I’m going to lie to the readers here, I’m not going to tell them about the dog until the end. But your stories are about the things you think about when your guard is off.”

Daisy Yuhas ‘09, a student in Frost’s Fiction Workshop, found Willis’ preparatory and structural suggestions particularly helpful.

“I found it interesting to hear about her process of developing a story,” she said. “The use of a plottingÊperiod,ÊmultipleÊdrafts for a single scene, historical sources — things like that.”

However, Willis was most candid, perhaps, about her at-times disappointing history with publishers, claiming she had been rejected more times than she cared to count.

“I saved all my rejections,” she said. “Really, no one can take rejection. You just have to hang in there. People become writers by perseverance.”

With more than a dozen science fiction awards under her belt, rejection isn’t a concern for Willis anymore, but finally finishing “All-Clear” may be.

“It’ll be done soon,” she said, “and then we can all feel better.”

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