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To listen to "Chasing Goodbye" and "G is for Gargoyle" read out loud on Kooteney Coop Radio:
For Links on Rita Moir
http://www.abcbookworld.com/?state=view_author&author_id=2552
http://www.coteaubooks.com/moir.htm
Re Caroine woodward
http://www.abcbookworld.com/?state=view_author&author_id=4475
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My Aurora-eligible stories are: "Chasing Goodbye," On Spec, vol. 15, no. 2, Summer 2003 "No Life Like It," On Spec, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 2003 "Skin to Skin," The Fed Anthology, ed. Susan Musgraves, (Vancouver, Anvil Press, 2003) |
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Writing Speculative Literature
Instructors: Steven Mills and Holly Phillips Fri.-Sun, Nov. 19-21, 2004 Nelson Fine Art Centre, Nelson, BC Exercise your curiosity or indulge your passion! This course explores the field of speculative literature, from science fiction and fantasy to magic realism to those unclassifiable stories that don't seem to belong anywhere. Through the use of examples, in-class exercises, handouts and lectures, we will build a critical understanding of the field, develop new writing skills, and answer questions about publishing. For more information, or to register, go to Nelson Fine Art Centre or call (250) 352-6322
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Voluntary service Can literature change the world? Or should it be above the concerns of society? Philip Pullman argues that while writers have wider duties, they must be faithful servants of their stories Saturday December 28, 2002 The Guardian What is the relationship between art and society? Can art do anything to make the world better, or is it quite useless? This is an old puzzle, and no one has solved it yet. At one end of the range of possible answers lies the Soviet idea that the writer is the engineer of human souls, that art has a social function and should produce what the state needs, and at the other end is the declaration of Oscar Wilde, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; books are well written or badly written, that is all. However, he wasn't consistent about this: elsewhere, in "The Critic as Artist", he wrote "All art is immoral"; and it's notable that The Picture of Dorian Gray itself is one of the most firmly moral stories ever written. I hesitate to disagree with Saint Oscar, whatever he said, but I've been telling stories for many years now, and in the course of that experience I've come to see a few things more clearly than I used to. I take it that art, literature, children's literature, does not exist in a special realm apart from society. I take it that storytellers are inextricably part of the whole world, and that one way of thinking about the relationship between art and society is to approach it by considering the responsibilities that follow from this. First, whether or not responsibility begins at home, it feels as if it does. Our first responsibilities are financial: the need to look after our families and those who depend on us. What this means is that we should sell our work for as much as we can decently get for it, and we shouldn't be embarrassed to say so. Some tender and sentimental people, especially young people, are rather shocked when I tell them that I write books to make money. They like the idea of the artist starving in the garret so much that they think poverty must be a necessary condition in which to make art. But worry - constant, unremitting anxiety about bank statements and mortgages and bills - is not a good state of mind to write in. It drains your energy, it weakens your concentration. If we decide to try and make a living by telling stories we have the responsibility - the responsibility to our families, and those we look after - of doing it as well and as profitably as we can. Then there is our responsibility to the medium in which we work. You can tell a story in mime, or in pictures, or in music; but language is the medium for most of us, and once we become conscious of the way language works, we can't pretend to be innocent about it. We can't maintain that it's something over which we have no influence. If human beings can affect the climate, we can certainly affect the language, and those of us who use it professionally are responsible for looking after it. This is the sort of taking-care-of-the-tools that any good worker tries to instil in an apprentice: keeping the blades sharp, oiling the bearings, cleaning the filters. That means, for example, making sure of the meaning of words by looking them up in a good dictionary. And not only that: words have a history, a flavour of their origin, as well as a contemporary meaning. We should acquire as many dictionaries as we have space for, out-of-date ones as well as new ones, and make a habit of using them. Taking care of the tools also means developing the faculty of sensing when we're not sure about a point of grammar. We don't have to know infallibly how to get it right so much as to sense infallibly that we might have got it wrong, because then we can look it up and get it to work properly. Sometimes we're told that this sort of thing doesn't matter very much. If only a few readers recognise and object to unattached participles, for example, and most readers don't notice and sort of get the sense anyway, why bother? I discovered a very good answer to that, and it goes like this: if people don't notice when we get it wrong, they won't mind if we get it right. And if we do get it right, we'll please the few who do know and care about these things, so everyone will be happy. When it comes to imaginative language, to rich and inventive imagery, those of us whose readers include children have to beware. But what we have to beware of is too much caution. We must never say to ourselves "That's a good image - very clever - too clever for this book, though - save it up for something important." Someone who never did that, someone who put the best of his imagination into everything he wrote, was the great Leon Garfield. Here's a passage from one of my favourites among his books, The Pleasure Garden: "Mrs Bray was the proprietress of the Mulberry Garden ... Although a widow for seven years, she still wore black, which lent her bulk a certain mystery; sometimes it was hard to see where she ended and the night began. Dr Dormann, standing beside her, looked thinner than ever, really no more than a mere slice of a man who might have come off Mrs Bray in a carelessly slammed door." There's fast-food language, and there's caviar language; one of the things adults need to do for children is to introduce them to the pleasures of the subtle and the complex. A good way to do that, of course, is to let them see us enjoying it, and then forbid them to touch it, on the grounds that their minds aren't ready to cope with it, it's too strong, it'll drive them mad with strange and uncontrollable desires. If that doesn't make them want to try it, nothing will. The aim must always be clarity. It's tempting to feel that if a passage
of writing is obscure, it must be very deep. But if the water is murky,
the bottom might be only an inch below the surface - you just can't tell.
It's much better to write in such a way that the readers can see all the
way down; but that's not the end of it, because you then have to provide
interesting things down there for them to look at. Telling a story
involves thinking of some interesting events, putting them in the best
order to bring out the connections between them, and telling about them as
clearly as we can; and if we get the last part right, we won't be able to
disguise any failure with the first - which is actually the most
difficult, and the most important.
Next in my list of responsibilities comes honesty, emotional honesty.
We should never try to draw on emotional credit to which our story is not
entitled. A few years ago, I read a novel - a pretty undistinguished
family story - which, in an attempt to wring tears from the reader, quite
gratuitously introduced a Holocaust theme. The theme had nothing to do
with the story: it was there for one purpose only, which was to force a
particular response and then graft it on to the book. It's possible -
difficult, but possible - to write an honest story about the Holocaust, or
about slavery, or about any of the other terrible things that human beings
have done to one another, but that was a dishonest one. An emotional
response from the reader is a precious thing. Stories should earn their
own tears and not pilfer them from elsewhere.
When it comes to the craft of saying what happened, the
responsibilities become technical, and more and more fascinating. The
playwright David Mamet said something very interesting about this. He said
that the basic story-telling question for a film director is "Where
do I put the camera?" I've found that a very rich metaphor for the
first big problem you have to solve when you start to tell a story: where
am I seeing this from? Whose voice is telling this? To judge from their
work, it seems that the great directors, the great storytellers, know
immediately and without thinking where the best place is to put the
camera. They seem to see it as clearly as we can see that leaves are
green. A good director will choose one of several goodish positions. A bad
director won't know, and will move the camera about, fidgeting with the
angles, trying all sorts of tricky shots or fancy ways of telling the
story, and forgetting that the function of the camera is not to draw
attention to itself, but to show something else - the subject - with as
much clarity as it can manage.
But the truth is that great directors only seem to know the best place
at once. The notebooks of great writers and composers are full of
hesitations and mistakes and crossings-out; perhaps the real difference is
that they keep on trying till they've found the best place to put the
camera. The responsibility of those of us who are neither very good nor
very bad is to imitate the best, to look closely at what they do and try
to emulate it, to take the greatest as our models.
Next, I think that we should keep a check on our self-importance. We
who tell stories should be modest about the job, and not assume that just
because we've thought of an interesting story, we're interesting
ourselves. A storyteller should be invisible, as far as I'm concerned; and
the best way to be sure of that is to make the story itself so interesting
that the teller just disappears. When I was in the business of helping
students to become teachers, I used to urge them to tell stories in the
classroom - not read them from a book, but stand up and tell them, face to
face, with nothing to hide behind. The students were very nervous until
they tried it; they thought that under the pressure of all those wide-open
eyes, they'd melt into a puddle of self-consciousness. But some of them
tried, and they always came back next week and reported with amazement
that it worked, they could do it. What was happening was that the children
were gazing, not at the storyteller, but at the story she was telling. The
teller had become invisible, and the story worked much more effectively as
a result.
Of course, you have to find a good story in the first place, but we can
do that. I've said before that the great collections of British
folk-tales, by writers such as Alan Garner, Kevin Crossley-Holland, and
Neil Philip, should be treated in two ways: first, they should be bound in
gold and brought out on ceremonial occasions as national treasures; and
second, they should be printed in editions of hundreds of thousands, at
the public expense, and given away free to every young teacher and every
new parent.
And stories make themselves at home anywhere. Nowadays a storyteller in
Ireland can learn Australian stories, an African storyteller can tell
Indonesian stories, a storyteller in Poland can pass on Inuit stories.
Should we storytellers make sure we pass on the experience of our own
culture? Yes, of course. It's one of our prime duties. But should we only
tell stories that reflect our own background? Should we self-righteously
refrain from telling stories that originated elsewhere, on the grounds
that we don't have the right to annex the experience of others? Absolutely
not. A culture that never encounters any others becomes first
inward-looking, and then stagnant, and then rotten. We are responsible -
there's that word again - for bringing fresh streams of story into our own
cultures from all over the world.
High on any list of the storyteller's responsibilities must come a
responsibility to the audience. Those of us whose books are read by
children are not in danger of forgetting it, actually. Some commentators -
not very well-informed ones, but they have loud voices - say that
children's books shouldn't deal with matters such as sex and drugs, or
violence, or homosexuality, or abortion, or child abuse. Taboos change
over time: only a couple of generations ago, it was rare to find a
children's book that confronted divorce. Against the keep-them-safe
argument, I've heard it said that young readers should be able to find in
a children's book anything they might realistically encounter in life.
Children do know about these things; they talk about them, they ask
questions about them, they meet some of them, sometimes, at home;
shouldn't they be able to read about them in stories?
My feeling is that whatever we depict in our stories, we should show
that actions have consequences. A couple of years ago, Melvin Burgess's
Carnegie Medal-winning novel Junk created a storm among the professional
fusspots, because it dealt among other things with the life of young drug
addicts. But Burgess was showing exactly the sort of responsibility I'm
talking about. It's a profoundly moral story, because it shows that
temptation is truly tempting, and that actions have consequences, and that
when people make a mess of their lives, they have to deal with the
results.
Some writers of children's books feel that they shouldn't take too
bleak a view of the world; that however dark and gloomy the story they're
telling, they should always leave the reader with a glimpse of hope. I
think that has something to be said for it, but children can deal with the
fact that tragedy is uplifting, too, if it shows the human spirit at its
finest. "The true aim of writing," said Samuel Johnson, "is
to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."
Children need both those kinds of help, just as grown-ups do.
What's true about depicting life in general is true of our
responsibility when it comes to depicting people. There's a sentence I saw
not long ago from Walter Savage Landor which is the best definition of
this sort of responsibility I've ever seen: "We must not indulge in
unfavourable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe
that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are
good in vain." Easy cynicism is no more truthful than easy optimism,
though it seems to be so to the young. In depicting characters who
struggle to do good or be brave, and succeed, or who are tempted to be
weak or greedy, but refrain, we the storytellers are providing our readers
with friends whose own good behaviour, and whose high valuation of the
courtesy or steadfastness or generosity of others, provides an image of
how to behave well; and thus, we hope, we leave the world at least no
worse than we found it.
Almost the last in my list of responsibilities is this: we have to pay
attention to what our imagination feels comfortable doing. In my own case,
for reasons too deeply buried to be dug up, I have long felt that realism
is a higher mode than fantasy; but when I try to write realistically, I
move in boots of lead. However, as soon as the idea comes to me, for
example, of little people with poison spurs who ride on dragonflies, the
lead boots fall away, and I feel wings at my heels. For many reasons
(which, as I say, are beyond the reach of disinterment) I may regret this
tendency of my imagination, but I can't deny it. Sometimes our nature
speaks more wisely than our convictions, and we'll only work well if we
listen to what it says.
But now I come to the last responsibility, which is one that trumps
every other, and before which our duty to the audience, to the language,
to our family, to society as a whole has to bow gracefully and retreat;
and that is the storyteller's responsibility to the story itself. I first
became conscious of this when I noticed that I'd developed the habit of
hunching my shoulders to protect my work from prying eyes. There are
various equivalents of the hunched shoulder and the encircling arm: if
we're working on the computer, for example, we tend to keep a lot of empty
space at the foot of the piece, so that if anyone comes into the room we
can immediately press that key that takes us to the end of the file, and
show nothing but a blank screen. There's something fragile there,
something fugitive, which reveals itself only to us, because it trusts us
to maintain it in this half-resolved, half-unformed condition without
exposing it to the harsh light of someone else's scrutiny. A stranger's
gaze would either make it flee altogether or fix it in a state that might
not be what it wanted to become.
It feels as if the story, before it's even taken the form of words,
before it has any characters or any incidents clearly revealed, when it's
just a thought, just the most evanescent little wisp of a thing - as if
it's come to us and knocked at our door, or just been left on our
doorstep. Of course we have to look after it. What else could we do? We
have to protect it while it becomes sure of itself and settles on the form
it wants.
Because it knows very firmly what it wants to be, even though it isn't
very articulate yet. It'll go easily in this direction and very firmly
resist going in that, but I won't know why; I just have to shrug and say
"OK - you're the boss." And this is the point where
responsibility takes the form of service. Not servitude; not shameful toil
mercilessly exacted; but service, freely and fairly entered into. This
service is a voluntary and honourable thing: when I say I am the servant
of the story, I say it with pride.
And as the servant, I have to do what a good servant should. I have to
be ready to attend to my work at a regular time each day. I have to
anticipate where the story wants to go, and find out what can make the
progress easier -by doing research, that is to say: by spending time in
libraries, by going to talk to people, by finding things out. I have to be
unobtrusive, and not push myself and my own opinions in front of the
story's attention. I have to keep myself sober during working hours; I
have to stay in good health. I have to avoid taking on too many other
engagements: no man can serve two masters. I have to keep the story's
counsel: there are secrets between us, and it would be the grossest breach
of confidence to give them away.
And I have to be prepared for a certain wilfulness and eccentricity in
my employer. All the classic master-and-servant stories, after all, depict
the master as the crazy one who's blown here and there by the winds of
impulse or passion, and the servant as the matter-of-fact anchor of common
sense; and I have too much regard for the classic stories to go against a
pattern as successful as that. So, as I say, I have to expect a degree of
craziness in the story. No matter how foolish it seems, the story knows
best.
And finally, as the faithful servant, I have to know when to let the
story out of my hands. I suppose our last and most responsible act as the
servant of the story is to know when we can do no more, and when it's time
to admit that someone else's eyes might see it more clearly. To become so
grand that we refuse to let our work be edited is to be a bad servant, not
a good one. I have always been lucky in my editors - or rather, since I'm
talking about responsibility here, my stories have been fortunate that
they've had me to choose their editors so carefully.
And now I see that I haven't even begun to answer the question I opened
with. I know no more now about the relationship between art and society
than I ever did. But I do know that there is a joy in responsibility, in
the knowledge that what we're doing on earth, while we live, is being done
to the best of our ability, and in the light of everything we know about
what is good and true. If we do it well, we might be able to bring our
work to the condition of that mysterious music described by Caliban, the
sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not; and there's
something to be said for doing that. Maybe that's all we can say.
© Philip Pullman
· This article originated in a lecture, the May Hill Arbuthnot
Honor Lecture, given in New York in April 2002. Northern Lights, The
Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman are published by
Scholastic in paperback at £6.99 each. A hardback containing all three
titles, His Dark Materials, is published by Scholastic at £25. robably the biggest misconception that new writers burden themselves with is the notion that ideas are rare and difficult to come by.... Yet, as any experienced writer knows, ideas are the easiest part of the job. The air is filled with ideas. Most professional writers have more ideas than time or energy to write about them. So where do all these story ideas come from? Look around you. All the people you know are living with conflict, hope ambition, love, jealousy, fear--the material for a thousand stories is at your fingertips. Look within yourself. You have hopes and hatreds, goal and passions. Every human life is a walking library of stories. |
Ben Bova, The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells, Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books, 1994, pp. 203-206. |
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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow (2003) I haven't read an SF novel this good since Peter Watts' Maelstrom. Chindi is what the best SF is all about: that ineffable sense of wonder, the indomitable human spirit, and our deep-seated need, it seems, to see what's over the next hill. The main character, Priscilla ("Hutch") Hutchins , the captain of a superluminal starship, is ordinary and believable--my favorite kind of protagonist--and is used to leading a rather quiet life, transporting goods and people between routine destinations. When Hutch is contracted to take members of the Contact Society to a neutron star to track down a signal believed to be of extraterrestrial origin, the journey leads to a handful of previously unknown worlds, and finally, to an immense object that may contain the answers to the puzzle they have been trying to solve. The writing is sharp; the story is riveting. I rarely get pulled into a book like I used to when I was fourteen, when the world I knew would disappear and I'd live the story. Chindi is that kind of read!
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Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (2002?) I haven't read an SF novel this good since Peter Watts' Maelstrom. Chindi is what the best SF is all about: that ineffable sense of wonder, the indomitable human spirit, and our deep-seated need, it seems, to see what's over the next hill. The main character, Priscilla ("Hutch") Hutchins , the captain of a superluminal starship, is ordinary and believable--my favorite kind of protagonist--and is used to leading a rather quiet life, transporting goods and people between routine destinations. When Hutch is contracted to take members of the Contact Society to a neutron star to track down a signal believed to be of extraterrestrial origin, the journey leads to a handful of previously unknown worlds, and finally, to an immense object that may contain the answers to the puzzle they have been trying to solve. The writing is sharp; the story is riveting. I rarely get pulled into a book like I used to when I was fourteen, when the world I knew would disappear and I'd live the story. Chindi is that kind of read!
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