Dragonwriter (14 page)

The internal conflict is trying to cope with being “adult.” What decision does he make in regard to things he can control? How grown up does he want to be? Does he try to be responsible or does he focus on having fun? Does he really want to be in a relationship as serious as living together?

For the first time, I realized that there could be a disjuncture between what a character was doing and what he was thinking. Zac could be trying to dance with one eye out for his apprentices, but what was going on his mind wasn't
step one, two, three, spin, clap . . . was that a wherry?
No, no, he was thinking
Move in together? Oh shards, what do I say? What do I say?

None of my college courses or writing books ever explained conflict in this manner. I don't think I would have easily made the realization writing short stories set in worlds of my own creation. I would have been too caught up fighting with world-building to pay attention to that fine point.

With this freedom, there was also this wonderful feedback from Julia explaining where I'd gone wrong with a story (often demanding rewrites until I got it right) and the general membership telling me that I was great. (I wasn't actually “great,” but I was writing exactly what they loved: Pern.) Even in the age where we were photocopying all the stories and mailing them to the membership with regular postage, the feedback was rich and heady.

Anne was six books into Pern when I started to write fanfic. Once I got a handle on the basics of storytelling, I wanted to expand my story arc, to reach more toward novel length via a series of related short stories. But to grow, I first had to understand Pern. How the weyr and holds worked together. How they came into conflict. How the crafts fit in.

Pern at the basic level is man versus nature. Thread would destroy all life on the planet if given a free rein. The dragons, while full of wonderful beneficial abilities, came with negative side effects, from the dangerous awkwardness of hatching, to the uncontrollable mating flight, to the perils of going between. I quickly learned that primal forces result in simple conflicts with fairly straightforward plots. The character has only one choice: do or die. It made for exciting action scenes. A longer story arc, however, required complex conflict to support it.

What Anne did so ingeniously was set up a three-branch society structure of dragonriders, holders, and craftsmen. They desperately needed each other to survive, but were in constant conflict on multiple levels. In addition, each branch was hierarchical in nature, so each group also contained conflicts within itself.

While many of the dragonriders might have started as hold-bred, the very nature of being searched and then impressing conveyed a sense that they had been elevated above the normal man. If they didn't feel that way, their dragon telling them that they're the greatest thing on the planet would soon convince them. They then risked life and limb to protect the planet. It is natural that they would assume that they were owed a comfortable life, if not the best of everything. And they brought their living “jet fighter” to any meeting to back up their demands of being supported by the holders and crafters. Given their dragon and an open field, they could win any one-on-one fight. It led to a certain “oh
yeah,
me and my
fire-breathing
dragon will take on you and your flashy runner” arrogance to their interactions with the holders and crafters. Their sense of entitlement, however, did not sit well with the other two.

The fact that there are five different dragons—gold, bronze, brown, green, and blue—creates division within the weyr. Anne set up that there was only a handful of gold dragons per weyr during the earlier passes and a score or so of bronze. The riders of these colors could and often would suddenly find themselves in leadership positions. A senior queen dies, a bronze unexpectedly wins a mating flight, and the weyr's highest positions would suddenly change hands. It meant that candidates for these dragons had to be vetted carefully. There would be fierce and often bitter competition for the gold and bronze dragons, and people would be disappointed to be rated “just a blue.”

Because the dragons control who sleeps with whom, the weyr's society had to be free of moral judgment on sexuality. For the weyr to function, a person couldn't be shamed for acts that the dragons forced them to commit. This included women having children with multiple partners and same-sex pairings. Nothing put this into perspective more clearly than a dice game we came up with to play at the club's Gathers. People would often announce that their dragon/fire-lizard was rising for a mating flight to create a random element to their story fodder. For pure bragging rights (the clubs were mostly women after all), people would attempt to “catch” the rising female. Bronzes were given the best odds, but browns and blues would occasionally win due to a combination of who was competing, when the flight was announced, and pure luck. Add in the fact that Anne wrote of males on female green dragons that rose in mating flights every few months, and homosexuality had to be considered as a natural consequence.

The title “Lord Holder” goes far to understand the moral mentality of the larger holds. The lord holders supplied the world with food and shelter. They were kings, complete with armies, and expected to be in charge. They tended to see craftsmen within their territories as talented servants, to be fed and housed only as long as they produced. As with kings of old, they are concerned with passing on their wealth to their heirs. Since a man can only be sure that he's providing for his children if a woman only has sex with him, the holders value female monogamy and morally view sex as “for procreation only.” All sexual freedom is considered perversion. They viewed the dragonriders as morally corrupt mercenaries.

Within the holds were dozens of levels of society, from the lord holder's family, to “cot holders” who headed up satellite households, to drudges. In Anne's books, each lord holder dealt with those under him differently. In the Harper books, the Half-Circle Sea Hold is staffed mostly by extended family. (Yes, I know that it's not a major hold, but it serves as a point of reference.) Under Fax, Ruatha's drudges were slaves living on the edge of starvation, constantly beaten. Under Jaxom, the same drudges lived more like maids and butlers of an English manor.

The crafters had the short end of the stick on Pern. Intelligent and guarding over the ancient knowledge of their past, they nonetheless needed the food and shelter that the lord holders controlled. Steeped in lore (especially the harpers), they respect the dragonriders but rarely can openly act against the will of the lord holders. In order to protect their craft, they need gifted children, which means the child's parentage doesn't matter. There are indications that the crafters have a less rigid sexual moral code than the holders.

The social structure of the crafts, however, was very rigid and constantly marked by the rank knots that the crafters wore. Competition between individuals was often fierce for coveted positions of higher rank. Piemur is made a target not so much because he is small but because his intelligence quickly put him on the fast track in the drumming heights. Judging by Menolly's testing to become journeyman harper, the merit advancement protected the craft against its knowledge base eroding, but a great deal of politics went into any promotion. It seems to indicate that walking the tables also controlled who had power within the craft.

(Interestingly, the clubs chose to echo Pern's political structures. New members often were asked for real-life experience to match up with fictional ability. For example, the beast healers of one club wanted writers who had some veterinary medicine training. In addition to knowledge, the new members were vetted as to how well they played with others in the shared world prior to being able to claim a higher fictional rank. I joined an online role-playing club and applied to be an apprentice beast-herder. The person playing the master beastherder interviewed me to see if I was knowledgeable enough to be an apprentice. Since I'd been raised on a farm, I surpassed even their level of understanding of what herding animals required. I was only allowed to apply to be an apprentice. If I proved myself over time, they would allow me to advance to apprentice and then to journeyman.)

Thus Anne became my teacher in world-building. Looking back, it's almost like she took my hands, ran them over the bones of her world, showing me the layers so I could do it myself. The key lay in simple complexity. With a handful of sentences scattered through the first book, she set up the basic structure of weyr, holds, and crafts. From the lord holders to the drudges, from F'lar to the lower cavern workers, from Master Robinton to the apprentice harpers—all three branches of Pern society are sketched out to be later filled in.

As a writer of fanfic, what I was doing was filling in at even smaller details. Anne stated that there was a beasthold at the weyr for the animals that the dragons fed on. There are mentions of a lake and the feeding pens. I took my own knowledge of farms, animals, and butchering animals to weave a reality. It made me realize that that was what Anne was doing in every book. In
Dragonflight,
she created Master Robinton and the concept of harpers. In
Dragonsong,
she added in the details of the harper hall based on her knowledge of boarding schools and opera.

Step by step, I was learning more and more about writing. After dozens of independent short stories that only occasionally shared plot points, five of the fan club's writers decided to write one massive joint story about a Threadfall that goes horribly bad. We gathered at my house and created a plot line. We would write the same event from the point of view of our character. Everyone's first scene would be the morning of the Threadfall as the weyr prepares to fight, and would introduce our character's individual conflict. A second scene would establish the location of everyone as the dragonriders met the leading edge of the fall. The third scene would detail the cascading disaster that would have dragons falling from the air. A fourth scene depicted all the characters reacting as the enormity of the disaster struck them. The fifth and six scenes showed the struggle to save the day and then deal with the aftermath. The last scene wrapped up each character's own personal storyline as it had been detoured by the accident. Seven scenes times five characters gave us thirty-five scenes for a total of 50,000 words, which is the technical definition of a novel.

At the time, my character Zac was the journeyman in charge of the beasthold. He'd been recently searched, which meant that someday he would have greater responsibility than just taking care of a couple hundred wherries and a handful of troublesome apprentices. Would he be able to handle the duties of being a dragonrider in a fighting wing? Would he be able to instantly react to protect not only himself and his dragon, but his wing-mates and all of Pern? What if he impressed a bronze and one day became a wingleader? As the wounded came flooding in, he suddenly found himself as the person in charge on the ground. It made him realize that he had what it took to stay collected while making life-and-death decisions.

A whole Christmas tree full of light bulbs went off in my head. For the first time I understood the structure of a novel. It was this simple unit I'd been practicing over and over, just expanded. The four-scene short story was in truth echoing the basic building blocks of a novel: setup, complications, resolution, and wrap-up. Each of these four blocks can be treated as separate subbuilding blocks. For example, the setup itself can be broken down to the character's discovery of a problem (setup), the elements that complicate that problem (complications), the character coming to terms with—and thus the reader becoming fully aware of—the scope of the problem (resolution in terms of setting up the story arc), and the first plan of action that the character takes to resolve the problem (the wrap-up that leads to the four subblocks of the complication). It all clicks together like fictional Legos. A novel with multiple viewpoint characters would only need a few scenes of each building block to tell each character's story arc, just like we did for the Pern fanfic novel. A novel with only one viewpoint character would need several problems presented to the character, each problem being given its own story arc to interweave with the others to create a long enough story to qualify it as a novel. If I did this in a world that I created, then I would have something to sell.

And that's what I did. The hardest part of it was walking away from the rich and heady praise that I was getting from writing fanfic. What made it bearable was that during several failed attempts (and then many successful novels afterward), my first readers have all been members of Anne's fan club. They were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and read my original work. And because I'd read their fanfic, I knew they were good and creative writers in their own right.

In 1989, the club pooled resources and rented a van and drove down to Atlanta to see Anne at Dragon*Con. We had taken a big banner that I had made for our Gathers, and we hung it from our hotel room's balcony, where you could see it from the atrium, announcing to the entire con that Anne's most rabid fans were there. I had a hardcover copy of
Dragon's Dawn,
and I stood in line to get it signed. Not to me, but to my Pern character, bronze rider Z'del, because through him, Anne had totally changed my life.

Just like my first attempts at short stories, it took me several tries to produce a publishable novel. Thanks to my experience with writing fanfic, though, I was confident that I would succeed; I just needed to keep trying. When I received personal rejection letters, I was actually delighted because it meant I had nearly succeeded and that obviously next project I'd reach my goal. In 2001, my first novel,
Alien Taste,
was published. To my ultimate fangirl joy and delight, I learned that Anne had read my novel and loved it. I
grinned
all day and called everyone I knew to let them know. No other review or award that I've received has meant as much to me as Anne's praise.