Magic, Theft, Time, and Money

I was angry with my mother, so I did a foolish thing.
— The Conqueror’s Child
On a Tuesday morning Katje discovered that Dr. Weyland was a vampire, like the one in the movie she’d seen last week.
— The Vampire Tapestry
Bob W. Netchkay wanted my ship, and I was damned if I was going to let him have it.
— "Scorched Supper on New Niger"

l. Magic

Three opening lines, from two novels and a story, all written by yours truly. Let me present myself to you as a writer, since a writer is what I have been since I was six years old, a published writer since my early thirties (I’m just pushing into my sixties now).

First, here’s what I love to read about: mystery, passion, horror, wonder, joy, danger, love, and surprise. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most mainstream fiction leaves me cold. The passion is tired, the love superficial or artificially inflated, the danger phony, the horror and wonder and joy muted by "good taste" and dull subject matter or blown up out of all proportion into grotesquery, and the mystery tame. Even the surprises, when they are there, are mundane and predictable (oh, there’s a murdered sibling/lover/parent buried in the garden; oh, they were molested by their father; oh, that was suicide instead of natural death, or murder instead of suicide, or embezzlement instead of a V.A. loan, and here comes another middle-aged man or woman having a mid-life crisis, etc. etc. etc. you could die of boredom, or anyway I could).

Now, if it were an alien buried in the garden — or strange, life-altering sex with a troop of werewolves — or ritual translation to another plane of existence instead of suicide — that would catch my attention and — if the writing were good and the quality of imaginative exploitation high enough — hold me spellbound ’til the end. Examples of books I’ve loved: Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (although I can’t read most "magical realism "because it’s just too whimsical for me); Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, which while not fiction is packed full of true, honest stories and the amazing vagaries of history; Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, a mystery driven by a passion for truth and justice; and a couple of SF classics, George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and C.L. Moore’s Judgment Night.

All of which may tell you a little, I hope, about what I write, and why. Most authors, if we’re economically able to write what we want instead of writing to one commercial formula or another, write what we wish somebody else had written so that we could read it: we write what we love to read. We were all readers first, stumbling on the intrinsic magic of words-on-the-page early, and later we all regret not having enough time left over from our own work (it is a full time job, after all) to keep reading other people’s writing at the same rate and in the same quantity as we did when we were children.

A word about magic: it starts out simply. Somebody reads you a bed-time story, and pictures making up that story’s scenes blink on in your head, one after the other. In time, you get to sound out the words for yourself on the page, and the pictures blink on in your head at your own will — whenever you pick up the book to read for yourself. Meantime, you begin running other stories in your head (stolen from the ones you’ve been read of course, but changed to make them your own), but it’s hard to pin them down and to remember them accurately. Comes the day when you realize that you can write them down yourself, which means that you can get exactly the story-pictures you want in your head each time you want to, by reading the words that you wrote down to cue them. And then — Pow! — it registers that if somebody else reads the words you have written to herself, she will get some version of the same pictures going off in her head that you refined so lovingly in your head before you wrote down the words. Your reader will, in a rough but real way, think what you think and know your story that you have created more or less as you know it. Your mind will make something happen in some one else’s mind through the transmission medium of words on a page.

Here you are, a powerless child ordered around by anybody older or taller than you are, and you get a grasp on this incredible, magnificent, sneaky power — and you’re sunk: you try it, you write it, you bully your parent or your best friend or your little sister into reading it — presto, you are an author.

And a magician. This is the only real magic I know of in this world. It is a very potent magic, particularly if you are a child in an ordinary family with no access to the levers of "real" power in the "real" world. You have hold of a mighty secret here, and most of us never want to let it go again. As (and if) you grow up, you come to realize that nobody but the George W. Bushes and the Ayatollahs of this world ever get their paws on those real-world levers anyway, and then only for a limited time and to unpredictable effect at that (for all their bombast about changing life for the better and doing in the bad guys, blah blah blah, what crap). But as long as Shakespeare or Dumas pere or fils or G.B. Shaw or Ursula K. Le Guin are read, they can still exert a sort of power in this world that is outside of the powers of laws and nations: the power to stimulate the individual imagination of the individual reader.

That’s nothing to sneeze at.