Reflections (13 page)

It needed something like that to help set the goalposts way, way back—to justify long, inventive fantasies that adults could also enjoy without worrying that it was against the Rules. There were films and TV that helped the process (
Star Trek
and
Doctor Who
). And the result was that, in the general loosening of the Rules, adult fantasy suddenly took off too. This delighted me. I read that just as avidly. And I hope no one will close their minds to the enormous amount of cross-fertilization there has been. Children's fantasy has been called a ghetto, and it is in its way, but it's a ghetto where you can do anything you want—or you could in the early eighties. There were adults reading and writing across all the three kinds I have talked about, and taking in horror on the way. And there were kids growing up on the new children's books, and then taking to the adult kind in their teens, and ending up reading and writing themselves of whatever came along. Everyone was joyfully leapfrogging about.

From my point of view, there was suddenly no need to watch in case I did something terrible like having kids strike matches. I really could do anything. It was just lack of time that stopped me trying. Every book I wrote was a new kind of experiment and nobody minded. There were only a few principles I knew I had to keep to—principles, not Rules—and the first of these was and is: you have to be responsible. By that I don't mean not having kids strike matches. I mean that somewhere, somewhen, someone is going to read your book at a time when such things stick for life. And you have to make it the kind of book that is worth remembering that vividly for that long. You have to make it an experience in its own right. That's the first principle.

My second principle is that you have to make your book follow, as far as possible, the natural movement of the human brain, when that brain is working as it is meant to work. This is not easy. Books have a way of doing their own thing. But what it amounts to is that the human brain really truly revels in solving problems. And the brain uses and needs emotions as part of the problem solving. It likes to do the solving by saying “What if . . . ?” and (sort of) fantasizing about what would happen if such and such were the case. It needs to overcome difficulties on the way to the solution—the difficulties can be intellectual, or terrors, or sadness, or anything else—but the brain also needs to come up with an idea that says “Hey! This is the way to go!” That is not saying that a happy ending is necessary, but it does mean the brain wants to say, “Let's think laterally if possible. Let's be surprised!” I love surprises. I surprise myself quite often.

There are one or two smaller principles too. Such as, you can be funny and serious at the same time, and should be. Your brain likes to laugh. Have you noticed how many jokes are pocket fantasies? What is yellow and dangerous? Shark-infested custard.

Then there is the language you use. My feeling is that you ought to be able to say anything in simple words. And as a rider to that, those words ought to reproduce the thing you are trying to convey without relying on the way everyone else had tried to say it previously.

Those are my principles. I have one or two others, such as a hatred of long descriptions that don't add to the narrative, but I won't go on about that. Think of me having a great time (except no day was long enough) writing and experimenting away.

And then the goalposts moved back in again.

There seems to be something about the human race that makes it crave Rules. Or maybe it's a quirk of the human brain that it gets frightened if it's allowed too much exercise. Anyway, people seem to get agoraphobia without the goalposts huddling on top of them. They don't know where they are unless they can point to the Rule for what they are doing. I met a fine example when I was giving a talk in a library once. This scholarly looking bearded man, healthy, upstanding, middle-aged, asked me politely how long my books were. “How long?” I said, a bit bewildered. “In pages,” says he helpfully. “Oh,” I say, “not very long. I find it hard to get above two hundred pages mostly.” “In that case,” he answered regretfully, “I can never read your books. My Rule is that I never read anything above one hundred and twenty pages long.” Naturally enough, I asked him why. And he couldn't say. He just turned pale and shook a bit. It was as if the wide open spaces of those eighty pages beyond his personal goalposts made him truly unhappy.

They got unhappy in this kind of way in the mid-eighties. They made the goalposts out of Genre.

Genre has been around as a convenient idea for a long time. A friend of mine has written a scholarly book in which he makes of Genre a delicate and beauteous thing, with an ancestry that goes ever so far, far back. But I prefer to think of it as a notion mostly developed in the 1920s, whereby publishers and reviewers could point people at the kind of thing each person most liked to read. It was a useful system of tagging stuff. They sorted books into Detective, Thriller, Children's, Ghost, Horror, and so on. And naturally they went on to do the same with the newer things like SF and Fantasy. Everyone in, say, the seventies knew what Genre was. The Science Fiction Genre was fantasy where you traveled on a spaceship; Fantasy was SF where you traveled on a flying carpet; and Horror was both of those in the claws of a demon. And nobody gave it too much thought. Until the writers themselves began believing in Genre. And it became a Rule.

And the Rule states that each Genre has absolute boundaries which Must Not Be Crossed. And the Rules add that if you do cross these boundaries, what you have written will be called “Not Really Horror”—“or Science Fiction or whatsoever”—and nobody will want to know.

The result is—I hope only temporarily—a fair old disaster for all kinds of writing. Particularly a disaster for the kinds I have been talking about. Each has hunkered down inside what it believes to be its own boundaries, and inside those boundaries the Rules for Being Of That Genre have proliferated and hardened until almost no one can write anything original at all. But the Rules say that if you write the same book all the time, that's okay. That's fine. That's Genre.

Horror obviously comes out of it best, because its Rules have always been most obvious—be as horrifying as possible. Be fiendishly supernatural. But it is so grandly jealous of its Genre that it has demanded sole use of certain topics. While Chris and I were working on
The
Encyclopedia of Fantasy
, there were depressingly frequent occasions when we said “Oh, that's a horror entry. We have to leave that for
The
Encyclopedia of Horror
.” You are almost not allowed to include demons because they aren't fantasy any more. And after
Aunt Maria
was published, I got stick from reviewers for writing what should be horror topics—not because the book might frighten children of tender years or anything like that. No. I had Crossed the Boundaries of Genre. I had broken the Rules. Oh tut!

Children's fantasy is in a way better off, because it has contrived to maintain within itself all the various Genres. But you have to keep them rigidly separate when you write. Or else. But here again the outer boundaries are being jealously guarded and defined. You so easily acquire the stigma of being “Not Really.” The Rules are growing in number and rigidity again to make sure of that. The Rule that You Must Instruct has been brushed off and refurbished and is now linked to the ecology. You are supposed to go on about trees and ozone and things. Worthy subjects no doubt, but you do think about Hansel and Gretel and their father who was a poor woodcutter busily destroying the rain forests? Are Hansel and Gretel now “Not Really”? Or does their father get excused on the grounds that he never made any money at it? Seriously, the ecology Rule has so far overridden the earlier Rules about instruction and behavior that you could get a book about an otherwise admirable person who chanced to cut down a tree and he would be a baddie. He would have to be, well, not killed anymore—because that's “Not Really” either—but put in prison. Prison is becoming “Not Really” too, so I don't know what you do with the wretch. Anyway, you see the problems. And a further major Rule has recently been invented. This is that you must not tax the mind of any person under sixteen. It has been decided (by someone somewhere somehow for some reason) that people under sixteen can only attend to anything for slightly under five minutes—and less than that if more than one thing is going on at one time. So you can't have your baddie cut down more than one tree or the readers go on overload.

Here's an odd thing. Less than five years ago it was a truth generally acknowledged that anyone who could follow the plot of
Doctor Who
could follow anything. Maybe that was going a bit far the other way, but . . . anyway, most adults professed to like their books simpler than children did.

Well, now they get them that way. The Rules have made sure of that. SF—which used to be spiced with imagination, weird philosophy, fantasy, and horror—is now only supposed to deal with ideas that are scientifically probable. Facts, facts, facts, Mr. Gradgrind
⁴
, and a minimal story to frame them. About the only not-quite-yet proven things the Rules permit are that people can live for at least four hundred years, and people will live with a great deal of gloom. There may be a Rule that gloom is scientific. To be sure, you can flirt with more fantastic notices, even cheerful ones, but then you are in a watertight sub-Genre called Space Opera. And the hatches are sealed between. If you want to do anything else on these general lines—and thank goodness there are some who do—you are “Not Really” and have to call yourself Speculative Fiction (and this shows signs of getting a Genre and Rules of its own too).

As for adult fantasy, the Rules have become so detailed and so firm that there really is the same book being written over and over again. The Rules here state that there are two kinds of fantasy only. Comic fantasy and high fantasy. Comic fantasy hasn't quite got its Rules in order yet, I'm glad to say, except the Rule that states you must not stray over into high. High. Well. Basically you have this large empty map. The Rules state that no fantasy is complete without a map. Your protagonist will then travel to every spot on this map—except, for some reason, most major cities marked—visiting as he/she goes such stock people as the marsh dwellers, the desert nomads, the Anglo-Saxon Cossacks, and so on, frequently collecting magical bric-a-brac on the way and putting in obligatory time as a slave somewhere. At the end of this tour, he/she will either return to the mundane world through a portal or be crowned a monarch, whichever is appropriate. This of course will take three books to happen in.

Again there are notable exceptions, but they are now “Not Really,” naturally, and are showing signs of joining Speculative. Rules may well soon follow.

Now, I ask you, why is everyone doing this to themselves? I really would like to know. You can buy me a drink while you tell me. Some of you may want to tell me that this is not so. But I tell you that from where I stand the whole Rule system exists. It exists and is without reason. Worse—it is stultifying. There is less and less cross-fertilization. There is less and less possibility of anyone thinking of something new to write about. Imagination? Forget it. We have the Rules instead. We have Genre.

What, in conclusion, I should like to point out is that the whole thing is back to front. Rules and Genres are not the absolutes they have become. They are humanity's way of trying to make sense and order of what they see. What you start with is the somewhat confusing scene you see. Then you can (if you are insecure enough) discover or invent Rules that it seems to follow. But what you see is the first thing. And what you see should be a magnificent, whirling, imaginative mess of notions, ideas, wild hypotheses, new insights, strange action, and bizarre adventures. And the frame that holds this mess is the story. You really should only need the story as the Rules that govern this particular mess. The story is the important thing. But we are now back to front, because what people have found in previous stories are being used to govern what should be in future ones. And this is ridiculous.

I would like to leave you with Prometheus's statement from
The Homeward Bounders
, which still seems to me to be the truth of this matter. Jamie asks Prometheus what the Rules are, and Prometheus, chained to his rock, gets almost angry for the first time in their conversation. “There are no rules,” he says. “There are no rules, only principles and natural laws.”

Thank you.

Answers to Some Questions

 

Diana originally titled this piece “The Profession of Science Fiction.” It was first published in
Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction
, No. 70, Summer 1997.
Foundation
is the journal of the UK-based Science Fiction Foundation.

 

 

A
nyone who writes fantasy tends to be asked why they do it. Anyone who does it for children is liable to be asked all sorts of other things in addition, everything in fact from how much money you earn to “When did you write your first book?” I thought I would use this opportunity to answer some of the questions I am most commonly asked and, I hope, in the course of it, the question I have never been asked and which strikes me as the really important one. This is: “What do you think you're trying to do?” That is a question I ask myself quite often and find very hard to answer.

The most frequent question of all is almost as hard to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” It is almost unfailingly asked by unfortunate people of ten to thirteen years old whose teacher has made them do a project. My very favorite form of it was asked by a twelve-year-old: “Where do you get your ideas, or do you think of them for yourself?”

Very shrewdly put, because some part of an idea, if it is going to start a book developing, has to relate to something outside me, even if I don't exactly
get it
from this outside thing. It has to be a creative mix of interior and exterior notions. The best ideas conflate three or more things, rather in the way dreams do, or the minds of very small children. A very good example is a baroque muddle of my own when, at the age of five, I was evacuated to the Lake District early in the Second World War. I was told I was there because the Germans were about to invade. Almost in the same breath, I was warned not to drink the water from the washbasin because it came from the lake and was full of typhoid germs. I assumed that “germs” was short for “Germans.” Looking warily at the washbasin, I saw it was considerately labeled “Twyford,”
¹
clearly warning people against germ warfare. Night after night, I had a half-waking nightmare in which Germans (who had fair, floating hair and were clad in sort of cheesecloth Anglo-Saxon tunics) came racing across the surface of the lake to come up through the plug hole of this washbasin and give us all Twyford.

This has all the elements of something needed to start a book off, the magical prohibition, the supernatural villains, the beleaguered good people, and for good measure, the quite incommunicable fears children have. I prefer my ideas to have this last element if possible. All children have these inexpressible fears and believe also that they are the only one who does. It is very hard for any other medium but a book to handle these fears, but a book can do it easily, since it is by its nature a private matter, like the fears are. And I suppose it is my good fortune that the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old and imprinted the memory of this (and other) muddles on my mind. When I consider how the ideas for most of my books came to me, I see they came as versions of this kind of conflation. All this one lacked was for me, as writer, to go on and say “What if this were true?” and then try to compose the story that conquers the fears in their own terms—which is something you have to be an adult to do. As a child, I
knew
it was true but could do nothing about it.

Another common question which naturally follows on from here is “Do you plan your book out before you start it?” and my answer is always unequivocally, “No, that kills it dead.” This always shocks teachers, who are accustomed to telling their pupils that you can't write that way. But I am afraid I do, because I have to, for the sake of the book itself. A book, for me, is ready to be written when all the conflated elements of the initial idea come together to produce three things. First, and most important, is the taste, quality, character—there are no words for it—nature of the book itself, a sort of flavor that has to start on the first page and will dictate the tone and style and the words used, as well as the sort of action to take place. This flavor, quality, is something I have painfully discovered you have to be utterly true to. Any attempt to coax it to be different, as planning in detail might, is a sort of taxidermy, when what you need is the living animal.

The second factor acts as counterweight or control. I know how the story begins and how it ends, and I also know, in great detail, at least two scenes from somewhere in the middle. When I say great detail, I probably mean precise, total detail. Colors, speech, actions, and exactly where the furniture or outdoor scenery are and what they look like, are all with me vividly and ineradicably. Often I am quite mystified as to how you get from the beginning to one of these scenes, or from one of them to the end. Part of the joy of writing is finding out. And I deliberately do not ask more when I start to write, so that the book has room to keep its flavor and pursue its own logic. In fact, I suspect that some of the
ideas
that people doing projects are asking about are things that have happened because the story is pursuing its own logic. I know I have many times been surprised—and frequently surprised into laughing out loud and, on one occasion, laughing so hard I fell off the sofa where I was writing.

The third factor is impossible to describe in any other way than that a book (often not the one I thought I was about to write) shouts to me that it is ready and needs to be written NOW. Then I have to find paper—and there are never any pens—and do it at once. I write longhand for the first draft, because I find that easiest to forget. I do not, at this stage, wish to be interrupted by self-conscious notions of myself writing a book.

The planning stage, in a
Looking-Glass
way, comes next. I do a very meticulous second draft that sometimes involves rearranging and recasting, in which I examine every word and its relation to other words, then every sentence and every paragraph, and then all of these in relation to the whole book. I want a clear and harmonious whole. And I want people reading it to be in no doubt of what is happening. It is probably most important to be clear if the things happening are funny.

If this gives the idea that I am an inspirational writer, that is true. But inspiration is only about half the story. For a start, it took me ten or more years to learn how to tap that inspirational level of mind. How to do this is certainly different for everyone. For me, it was when I began understanding that I had at least to start with a dreamlike conflation—like that of Germans giving you Twyford—and that I could trust some level of my brain to do this. I have to spend a lot of time sitting waiting for it to happen. Often I have the makings of a book sitting in my head maturing for eight or more years, and when I am considering that collection of notions I am aware of exercising a great deal of conscious control, trying the parts of it round in different ways, attempting to crunch another whole set of notions in with it to see if that makes it work, and so on. But I do not feel in total control, doing this. It is more as if I am moving the pieces of idea around until they reach a configuration from which I, personally, can learn. Practically every book I have written has been an experiment of some kind from which I have learned. It does not seem to me that I have the right to foist a story on people, most of whom are children who should be learning all the time, unless I am learning from it too.

“But why do you write for children?” is the usual adult response to this—as if, finding I have gone to all this trouble, they think I go on to waste it on people who are immature. That is a question requiring several layers of answer. Some of them I am going to postpone to the end. For now I will say that I was not at first aiming to write only for children and have never considered what I write exclusively for them. Indeed, one of the reasons for my doing things the way I do was the spectacle of my husband falling asleep whenever he attempted to read aloud from almost any children's book available in the late sixties. It seemed to me that he and other adults deserved to have something to interest them if they were prepared to read a bedtime story, and that people of all ages were more likely to be interested in something I myself found vividly interesting. My eldest son was continually and wistfully asking for books that were funny. For myself, I was bored writing anything else but fantasy and, when I started to write in earnest, there were simply no other openings for fantasy except with a children's publisher. And there seemed to be something in the air, pushing people to write for children. When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis's children's books by saying “It's his Christianity, you know,” as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on Hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles. Neither of them ever lectured on their secret hobbies. And yet somehow not only I but numerous others such as Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh, and Penelope Farmer, to name just a few—and none of us knew one another there—all went away and produced books for children. Strange of us, really.

“Then what made you want to be a writer?” is the next question and much easier to answer. It was not a case of wanting. In the middle of one afternoon, at the age of eight, I knew I was going to be a writer—as if the future had tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out quite calmly what I was going to be doing for the next fifty years. Since I was wildly dyslexic, my parents roared with laughter, and even I realized that I needed training. At the age of ten I remember sitting sadly, thinking that there was something wrong with my imagination. I just could not see the scenery and actions in the few books I had anything like as vividly as their writers obviously had. My mind's eye was all blurred. But despite this, I wrote my first book about two years later and discovered that if you were writing a thing, it came clear. It had to. In order to write about any event, you had to make the event clear to yourself.

I wrote this book because my sisters and I had barely any books. The obvious explanation was the war and the shortage of paper, but it was not the real reason. Mostly it was my father's intense meanness with money. He had been a schoolteacher, so he did admit that children ought to have books, and he salved his conscience by buying the entire works of Arthur Ransome, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed to us, one between the three of us, every Christmas. I was at university by the time we got
Great Northern?
The third reason was censorship by my mother. She had been trained as a child to believe that fantasy was bad for you and that you should only read a book if it was literature. Luckily for us, the Alice books,
Winnie-the-Pooh
,
The Wind in the Willows
, and
Puck of Pook's Hill
qualified, but nearly everything else did not (
Puck of Pook's Hill
saddened me, much as I enjoyed it. There seemed no point in the children in it learning all these wonderful things if they were made to forget once they had). In addition, I was allowed Greek myths, Malory's
Morte d'Arthur
in the original language and a massive book called
Epics and Romances of the Middle Ages
which my grandmother had won as a Sunday school prize. I also read most of Conrad, which I thought of as verbose adventure stories, and conceived a hearty dislike of the narrator Marlow—the prig would keep describing things instead of getting on with the story. My sisters, who did not like literature in this form so much, were much worse off. My first full-length book was written to read out to them in their book starvation. It was very bad, but they clamored so much for the next episode that I went on writing and thus found I could finish writing a whole ten-exercise-book-long narrative. I suppose I should be grateful to my parents both for causing me to get writing and for the fact that I came to most other children's classics as a delighted adult, when my own children read them, but obstinately, I am not. Not one whit.

“Do you put much of your childhood in your books?” No, very rarely, for two reasons. First because it would be what I always derisively call “a loving re-creation of childhood”—an adult exercise in nostalgia—where children are entirely forward looking. It does not interest most children in the least what their parents or grandparents did as children—most of them would be surprised to find that the adults they know ever
were
that young. They have no historical sense and can't wait to grow up. I think it is this futureward orientation that I find most congenial about children's minds; but a lot of substandard didactic writers do nevertheless insist on writing books about “growing up.” When I meet these kind of books, or those of the “loving re-creation” school, I must confess that I reach for my gun. This is absolutely not the right approach.

The second reason I do not put my own childhood into things I write is that it was mostly too bizarre to use directly. In addition to the general madness of wartime and the eccentricity of my parents (my father's meanness, for instance, caused him at one point to obtain me three lessons in Greek in exchange for my sisters' much-loved doll's house), there was the village where I spent the years from nine to adulthood.
Everyone
there was peculiar in some way, singly and interactively. Some people behaved like witches, other people frankly admitted that they were. A man sat in the church porch who said he went mad at full moon. The vicar preached Communism from the pulpit and people came in hobnailed boots from Great Dunmow specially to walk out in the sermon. There were passionate folklorists, hand weavers, adherents of William Morris, persons who were hippies long before hippies existed, and the girls were always getting pregnant. Someone made life-size working models of elephants. Everyone danced in the streets. German prisoners of war mingled with Polish displaced persons and London evacuees to cause a profusion of eccentricity, shortly augmented by the American airbase nearby. Also nearby was a colony of painters, one of whom did antivivisection naive art, and there were strange folk in outlying farmhouses either getting into debt or keeping boa constrictors and dragon lizards in their attics. The as-it-were conference center which my parents ran added to the general peculiarity, both by importing mad musicians and insane actors and causing myself and my sisters to have to live, as one of the guests described it, “in the margins of a dirty postcard,” and by employing a succession of local eccentrics. The gardener there had had a vision on the road to a nearby village, Sampford, in which an angel descended to him and told him always to go to chapel and never to join a trade union.