From one of my favorite blogs, Making Light

Making Light

Incorporating Electrolite

Language, fraud, folly, truth, knitting, and growing luminous by eating light.

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(Background info: Clarion runs for six weeks, with different instructors coming in for one-week stints.)

So Michael Swanwick is teaching his week at Clarion, 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.

Then he goes home. The next instructor is Gardner Dozois.

A week later, Gardner comes home and says, “Michael, what the hell did you tell those kids? All week long, they were handing me stories about dinosaurs and sodomy!”