1. I frequently dream of things that later happen, usually minor things, like ordinary chores or scraps of conversation. I’ve had dreams like this since I was little. I mentioned it to my mother once, and she dismissed it as coincidence. This is impossible. I suppose one could argue that ‘oh, you dreamed it, so you somehow contrived to bring it about.’. Uh, but why? And how could I possible dream a specific conversation; I could say what I said in my dream, but I can’t put words into the other person’s mouth.
2. For several years, I dream about people I knew in high school; some were good friends of mine, others classmates whom I liked well enough. These aren’t memories; we’re never doing things we actually did. Often we’re on secret missions or elaborate trips. This is easier to explain: Where have we all gone, and what have we done?
3. I’ve been reading Lovecraft, and he posits that dream-life is our real life; waking life is the illusion. I think this may vary from person to person. Many people claim they don’t dream, or else they remember dreaming, but never the dreams themselves. I’ve always been a vivid and prolific dreamer. I get many story ideas from dreams, including a recent breakthrough on the fourth and fifth installments of The Lorrondon Saga.
4. Is this meant to be a message, or simply another view of the world? Not exactly a parallel universe, but the same universe from a different angle. (Chesterton called this mooreefoc, coffeeroom backwards. He wasn’t talking specifically about dreaming, but I don’t see why that can’t apply).
Or perhaps dreams are the place where past, present and future meet all at once, which they cannot do in waking life. Last night I realized I had to incorporate this into Book III; it’s part of Neoran religious practice that’s fallen out of fashion, and the attempts to revive it.
If there are ‘messages’ in dreams, as in warnings and such, I’ve never gotten one; Others insist they have, and I don’t doubt them; dreams and dreaming will, of course, mean different things to different people. Perhaps it all depends on what the individual expects expect from dreaming; if you expect warnings, premonitions, etc, you’ll get them. If you expect (or hope) for breakthroughs on plot points in your fiction, you’ll get those.
5. It’s a shame that too many people are familiar with Freud; the knowledge of modern psychology can’t be good for the imagination. But it’s impossible for educated people (the ones most likely to write/paint/etc) to avoid. It’s difficult to banish that ‘clinical’ angle, just as it’s difficult for any intended audience not to analyze. God, but I envy that final generation of writers and artists who didn’t have that monkey on their backs-people like the pre-Raphaelites, and William Morris. (Chesterton was born in 1874; he was relatively free of this, as were Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsly).
That djinn is long out of the bottle. More will follow.
In 1936, Margaret Mitchell was awaiting the publication of her only novel, Tomorrow Is Another Day. It’s a good title, at once wistful and optimistic. And it’s the heroine’s personal philosophy; she repeats it many times in the story. But right before the book went to press, Mitchell instructed her publisher, Macmillan, to change it to a phrase that’s used once, only in passing: Gone With The Wind.
When does an author know when a book is ‘finished’? When have you stopped making your work better, and are now only making it different? It’s hard to answer that question. I’m getting ready to submit my second book to the publisher. I’ve gone through it many, many times now. I’m not finding any more typos; I think I can say I’ve caught them all (or at least I hope so) If not, I can still make corrections when I get the galley-proofs.
But-I don’t quite like the way I phrased that; let me rewrite it. Does this name suit this character? Can I find a better one? (I recently changed a character’s name back to what it was originally). Am I being tasteful with love scenes, or am I just pulling punches? I should explain more about this plot point; nah, readers are smart enough to figure it out.
For writers, books are like children. You’ve done the best you can, and you hope it’s good enough. But you can’t resist the last piece of advice before they're out the door. And once they're out the door, for all to see, they’re not yours any more. They belong to any one who will read them, whether that’s a hundred people or millions. Readers have their own ideas of how stories should go and how characters should develop.
Witness the lively discussion of the final Harry Potter book. Everyone had different ideas, only a few of which coincided with J..K. Rowling’s. Yes, I would have liked to see some things fleshed out more, but it’s her story, and not mine. What looks vital to readers can seem secondary to the person who actually has the whole story in her head; as I’ve said before, authors and their readers have a weird relationship. The Hobbit has millions of fans, myself among them, yet on rereading it in the early ‘sixties, Tolkien was momentarily tempted to rewrite the whole thing. Could he have improved it? Who knows.
So, you proofread, or pay a professional if you can afford it. You weed out the typos and the homophones. Then you do it again. And again. You fill in that bit of back-story and change that person’s name. Finally, you must say that’s finished-and let it go.
I don’t remember exactly when I began the story of the Lorrondons. So much of it existed only in my head for so long-as much of it still does. I know that by the late winter of 1979, when I began to write things down, these people were already becoming known to me. So, the beginning must have been the fall of 1978. I was twelve.
I was also perfectly miserable, both in my own mood and to other people. We had moved a year and a half earlier, and I still missed the large trees in the backyard of my former home. I was doing poorly in school, and had no wish to improve (I wouldn’t until the ninth grade). I skipped a lot of school and spent the time listening to records and reading.
Tolkien was my lifeline, as he was for so many unhappy kids. By the end of the school year, my grades had picked up (a smidge) and I had already lost track of how many times I had read The Lord of the Rings. I seldom went away without my copy of The Tolkien Reader. I read a wonderful novel called The Book of the Dun Cow. I read the romances of Barbara Cartland, more for her descriptions of historical setting than for the romances themselves. I discovered Norse mythology and Iceland's bloody, brooding history told in the sagas. I read a lot of things I don’t remember in detail.
And I began a story of my own, like many other kids with a penchant for science-fiction and fantasy. The long tale of this family of mixed Galactic heritage(Terran and Neoran) came to me in pieces. Scraps of the Lorrondon children’s childhoods, how treachery and lust for power tore their lives apart, and how they survived and in some cases, prevailed.
For years I wrote nothing but scraps. Episodes, incidents, family trees, charts, lists of planets. It wasn’t until 1990 that I began anything like a complete manuscript. I still have hundreds of pages of scenes, Many will be in the books, but much changed (and, I hope, improved). Many will not. All of the principal characters were there from the beginning, Rusorin, Rob Lorrondon, Enrik Ratt, Anna Helsak, Walsam (the earliest name still in use). The overall story of galactic war and the efforts to build peace has never changed.
Like the tales that inspired me, this story was never happy, but it wasn’t quite as grim as Njal’s Saga. A few years ago I read through some of those old sketches and was amazed at how many of the things I wrote down had to do with death, or battle, or estrangement.
From the beginning I was interested in the romance of space itself; the distances, the incredible things like nebulae and black holes, and the possibility of other peoples out there. My galaxy was never as crowded as Gene Roddenberry’s or George Lucas’s. Space travel is a lonely and dangerous endeavor.
Even as I wrote more and more things down, and filled in more and more aspects of this world, I knew I was years a way from being able to write this story, or to write it the way I felt it deserved. I served a long apprenticeship, reading everything, fiction and nonfiction alike. Tolkien, Faulkner, Le Guin, Clarke, Poe, Undset, Woolf, Lessing-these were among my teachers. In college I majored in English, and continued to write out scenes. If you want to learn to write, read. That’s no guarantee, of course, but it’s the best training you’ll get.
It wasn’t until the late nineties that I finished the first book, The Bretton Katt Alliance. For one thing, it took years for me to decide what was necessary to the story, and what wasn’t. How many books would I need to tell the story-or rather, how many books could I break this into. I decided on six. I didn’t want to put out eight-hundred-page tomes when three to four hundred could do the job.
The book was self-published almost two years ago now. I’m still foolishly pleased when somebody likes it. We’re never the best critics of our own work, but I think my book is pretty good. Will it Teach People Anything? Is it inspiring, enlightening, life-changing? Darned if I know. Those calls are for other people to make, not me. I’m just telling a story, one that’s important to me, and that I hope will become important to other people.
And after thirty years, I will see this through to the end, sweet or bitter.
I deliver newspapers for a living. Yes, with three years of college, in which I read Kafka and Mann in German, and snippets of Plato in Greek. I studied the criticism of Walter Benjamin and the poetry of Yeats, and the logic of language. Which is why I drag myself out of bed at 3:30 in the morning to roll a hundred copies of the Medford Mail Tribune. I may live to write, but I deliver papers to eat.
It’s now late November, so those mornings are cold. And this is the time of year when I see the most wonderful things.
The other morning, my husband was driving me. A raccoon and a cat scurried across the street. My husband braked quickly. A second coon waited, while his companions chittered at him from the other side. I leaned out the window.
"Come on, sweetie. It’s okay."
The coon looked skeptical, as if he thought my husband were fully capable of squishing him beneath the tires (he probably didn’t care for the ‘sweetie’ either). He ran across to his comrades; with his great bowed back and his huge plume of a tail, he looked a bit ungainly, but he was as swift as a gray hound. Then all three disappeared into the bushes.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen raccoons, or even seen them with house cats. A few years ago, I was crossing an intersection on my bicycle when I saw a neighborhood cat sitting placidly next to a storm drain. A raccoon’s head was visible above the level of the pavement, and he and the cat were having what looked like a cordial conversation. Think of it, people. House cats and raccoons, working together. Be afraid.
This job certainly gets me my exercise. In the summer months, I can eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s for lunch without worrying. It isn’t ice cream weather now; it’s time for longjohns and fleece gloves and my bright blue jacket (no yellow boots though). People sometimes ask me how I manage in the cold. I just do.
Sometimes these fall mornings are Gothic to the point of corniness. Clouds scudding across the moon, leaves blowing across the yards. Today it’s foggy. Mercifully, it isn’t too heavy. Everything looks soft and slightly blurred; there are halos around the street lamps and the almost-full moon. The fog acts like a prism on the moonlight; the colors are muted pastels. The blue is the brightest. I stop the bike and watch for a moment. It’s maybe 4:30, 4:45. A few houses have lights in the windows, but outside it’s totally quiet. No traffic, no wind, no barking dogs. The yards and walkways are full of leaves, but right now they don’t rustle. It’s as if the whole world is asleep, except for me. It’s beautiful. The air is cold, damp rather than crisp, because of the fogwet.
Sometimes I love this job.
I have thirty papers to go, and about ninety minutes to deadline; I’ll be done in twenty.
Done for another day, I turn back onto my home street, which is an incline. Too shallow to really be called a hill, but enough to get the bike rolling with no peddling. I coast home, through the fog. Now there are some cars around, a few front doors shutting. The world begins to stir.
The other night my husband and I were watching The Return of the King (I lost track long ago of how many times we’ve seen this movie). Like all great moves, and books, there’s plenty that resonates and will for centuries to come. But the following exchange really hit home this time
Pippin (Billy Boyd): Tell me, Gandalf, is there any hope, for Frodo and Sam.
Gandalf (Ian McKellan): There never was much hope-just a fool’s hope.
Last Tuesday, I refused to tune in to any news. We live on the west coast, so there’s really no point until later in the evening anyhow. But my mother called at seven o’clock, and said that Obama had taken Pennsylvania and Ohio. "It’s looking good." she said. Even then, I refused to hope. I had been refusing to hope for months. That this long nightmare of the G. W. Bush Administration was ending, and would not continue under John McCain, was too good to be true. Not until nine o'clock was I finally able to let go and start dancing around the livingroom.
When I first heard the title of Obama’s memoire The Audacity of Hope, I thought, here’s another one of those titles that sounds good, until you pick at it, and then it doesn’t really mean anything. The other day, after the movie ended, I though about it again, and realized what a profound statement it is. What does make anyone think that anything will get better, especially after an eight-year crime wave?
Yet now, I too, am daring to hope. I hope that Americans have realized at last that we need grown ups in charge, not drinking buddies. I hope that the war against science and reason will come to an end, and we can begin a serious transition to alternative energy (everything thus far has been half-assed). I hope that Obama will once again ban torture, and restore the rule of law, which is what made this country so great in the first place. I hope conservatives will stop acting like anyone with a different opinion is an enemy who must be vanquished; we’re all Americans.
It's funny, because I've made this point in my own work, but before this election I never truly understood it. We're here, so we might as well try to make things better. Heck, I think we must be hardwired to try, and to hope, even in the face of calamity, or true evil, or perhaps worst of all, indifference. I am human, therefore I hope, and try. (I don't care what Yoda says; trying counts).
I also must be realistic. Obama is just a man, albeit a better one than many. I hope our faith in him isn’t misplaced, and that he can get something done, for the first time in a decade. People are eager for improvement, for better schools, for an end to a stupid, wasteful war, for an end to pointless bickering that’s more about the prestige of ones’ own clique than anything else. With all of that good will and energy behind, maybe Obama really can bring this country back to the light. And I hope that now I can get back to the business of writing, without worrying.
It’s not possible for writers to keep their personal opinions out of their work. The finished product is a manifestation of who the writer is; unless you're a boring little blank with no strong feelings or opinions about anything, people will come away from your novel, or short story, with some idea of your favorite foods, whether you like to fish, whether you’re left or right of center, and so on.
A story where no character ever said anything or stood for anything would be deadly dull. In my own work characters make points all the time; frequently they’re countered by other characters. Sometimes they reach agreement, and sometimes not. Any reader would expect this in a story about a galactic war that features people from different planets trying to get along. Since I just want to tell a story, I try to avoid preaching; thus far I haven’t had any complaints about it.
When a book is written to Make a Point, it’s evident on every page. Characters tend to be one-dimensional, dialog is either cliched or sounds like a prepared speech, the situations are stock, and the reader knows fairly early on how this will end. The worst example of this in recent fiction is, of course, the Left Behind series. Messrs. Jenkins and LeHaye were so wrapped up in glorifying Christ and converting people that they forgot to tell a story. (Not that I buy for two seconds that anyone actually converted after reading this tripe).
Earlier this year I read a novel called Evolution’s Child, in which religious fanatics (Christians and Muslims, natch) are battling for control of the Earth. The moon is a religion-free, rational haven, with all the casual sex you could want. Of course all the fanatics want to destroy the place.
This book isn’t exactly bad, but it has all the classic features of a book written to Make a Point; I couldn’t remember the name of a single character from one day to the next, and it didn’t help that the dialog frequently sounded like a professor’s prepared lecture notes rather than spontaneous conversation. No religious people are moderates, or even happy in their faith. They’re all miserable, intolerant bigots. The atheist residents of the moon colony are just as bigoted and disrespectful of other people’s beliefs, but in the novel this is considered a good thing. It’s a shame, because there’s a compelling story here, but the author was so intent on Making a Point that he forgot about Telling a Story.
Not only can preaching turn people off, it’s also ineffective. I read a story once where the author felt compelled to include the breast-size in his description of every female character. I asked him about his breast-fetish; he explained that he wanted to show that small-breasted women can be beautiful, capable, smart, etc. Well, I already know that. Many people, even many men, know that. People who need to learn it aren’t going to learn it from any fiction. Everyone else will just wonder about the author’s fixation on breasts.
We can learn a lot from good fiction; the best, (works by Dickens, Robertson Davies, Ursula LeGuin, Umberto Eco, among hundreds) shows us new ways of looking at the world. We might even learn some interesting esoterica. But few people will drop their religious beliefs, or accept Christ as their personal savior, or appreciate small-breasted women just because some book says they should.
If you want to Make a Point or teach people something, write an essay, or offer to teach a class at the local community college. When you write fiction, stick to telling a story. If you do that well, any point you want to make will take care of itself.
I wish I could count the number of times well-meaning people (well, mostly well-meaning) have done the following:
Handed me a magazine or newspaper article about how few writers actually make a living at writing.
Smiled patronizingly and gushed "Oh, that’s so noble! Especially when it’s so hard to make a living at it!"
Shaken their heads and said "There’s so many books out there. I've never met any writers. What makes you think you’re any good?"
I get this last from people who’ve never read a thing I’ve written. Their thinking seems to run thusly: Writers are serious, lofty types who don’t live anywhere around here. No one really knows them, except other lofty people who don’t live around here. You live around here, therefore, you can’t be a writer.
The Bretton Katt Alliance has been out for nearly a year now. I must confess it’s not exactly burning up any sales records, either for self-published books or books put out by major houses. I sell a copy this week, two the next. But the response from those few readers has been positive; they ask about the sequel, which gives me some small incentive to keep writing. The small incentive is important, because without it I might feel the urge to stop writing. And no writer can do that, whether you sell ten copies of your book or ten million.
Nobody writes to get rich, or even to pay the bills. (Dr. Johnson was in jest). It’s probably easier to bag a rich spouse-an option not open to me. People who write seriously do it because they can’t stop.
A few years ago, I was foolish enough to listen to people who kept hammering away at me about the pitfalls of the writing life. At that point most of the Lorrondons’ history was still in my head or in very jumbled notes. So I stopped writing and took a course in office management through the local community college. It was a good course, and I did learn some things-no schooling is ever wasted. But in trying to remake myself into something I wasn’t, I triggered a depressive episode that lasted for four years. It wasn’t until I began writing again that I finally pulled out of it. In another year I had the first complete draft of The Bretton Katt Alliance. Now I have the third book in the series close to completion.
I can no more stop writing than I can stop breathing. Writers always give this answer because it’s the only answer we can give. There is no scientific or practical explanation. By some weird cosmic joke, it’s just who we are.
