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January 6, 2010

by Joel Derfner

So Michael Swanwick is teaching his week at Clarion [a science-fiction writing workshop], and one of the students hands in a long somber story full of angst and sodomy. Swanwick considers it and says, “What this story needs is more dinosaurs.”

The next story the student turns in does have dinosaurs in it, but it’s a piece of fluff. Swanwick shakes his head. “It needed more sodomy,” he says.

The student is flummoxed, and protests that he’s just trying to put into practice what he’d been told. Swanwick explains, to him and to the rest of the students, that writing is a matter of finding the appropriate balance of dinosaurs and sodomy.

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