Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us about yourself and Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage.

I taught myself to read practically before I could walk properly; I was raised on sonnets and on poetry and on a love of language, and I was telling stories long before any real understanding on how stories were supposed to be told. I was a language geek before language geeks were fashionable. It was perhaps inevitable that I would end up doing what I am doing, simply because that is so fundamentally what I AM. It’s been described, before, as my having been born with ink in my veins (these days it’s liberally diluted with caffeine. Actual, you know, red blood required for mere survival of the physical body is kind of incidental in this stage – it’s words and coffee that keep me alive.)

Growing up, I experienced a moment or two of aberration where a future studying words – or language – seemed to lead to a career involving the teaching of the same Shakespeare play to a different class of disinterested kids every year – and while I can stretch to teaching adult learners who are eager and anxious to learn something I could not see myself trying to hammer information (especially this kind of subjective information) into unwilling heads and hearts year in and year out. So I opted, as a career choice, for science – and studied Microbiology and Molecular Biology at University, eventually rising as high as an MSc in the subject before realising that going further – hunting the PhD – would involve breathing, dreaming, eating and drinking my doctoral topic for the next decade, and deciding I wasn’t that committed. I segued sideways into first scientific writing and editing, then educational publishing, then freelance journalism, and, finally, back into the place where I had been heading all along. Here. Living as a novelist. Living what, after all, had always been a childhood dream – a life of language, and of telling stories.

“Worldweavers” is only the latest book – my seventh, since 1995 (and I’ve been full-time since about 2000). Before I came to that, I had written a collection of short stories (published by Longman, UK), an autobiography (yes, before I was 40…), a contemporary novel told entirely in e-mail co-authored with the man I subsequently married, a fantasy duology (published in the USA as “The Hidden Queen” and “Changer of Days”) which was originally a single 250 000-word-long doorstop which the publishers took one look at and screamed for that puppy to be split in half before anyone would consider it viable, “The Secrets of Jin Shei” (currently out in 11 languages worldwide) and its follow-up, “Embers of Heaven”).

“Worldweavers” was born in a YA literature panel at World Fantasy Con 2002, where, some ten minutes or so into the panel, someone brought up the subject of Harry Potter. And panelist Jane Yolen sighed and said, “I was wondering how long it would be before that particular elephant walked into the room.” She also said something about not particularly liking the way that the Potter books treated girls. And I didn’t hear a word of the rest of that panel, off in my own little world, in the world of Thea Winthrop and the Last Ditch School for the Incurably Incompetent. The girl who is the anti-Harry, in a way – not the wonderful boy wizard, the Boy Who Lived, but the Girl Who Couldn’t. Until she found out why. And how. Until she found out who she really was, and why that mattered.

We all have a lot to thank Harry Potter for. Those books have revitalised the fantasy genre from the ground up, right where it starts, with the youngest readers – whether those readers will actually continue reading after the Potter Phenomenon comes to a close this summer is still moot, but I for one (speaking both as a writer and as a reader) sincerely hope that they will – and that the world of speculative fiction will be strengthened by that. There is going to be no single replacement for Harry, the PotterPhenom is too huge for that – but in the post-Potter splintering there may be many writers who will be writing stories to assuage the unquenched thirst in the readers’ ranks. The danger, of course, is that what will happen next is what happened to the rest of fantasy after Tolkien – with every new scribe and their offering being hailed as “the new Harry Potter” and a bunch of Potter clones crowding onto the scene.

My Thea is no Harry. The only point of congruence is that they are both young, and that they both have something to do with magic in their blood. I’d like to think that she can hold her own standing beside him.

2. Your main character is one who as the story begins is someone who is expected to be something remarkable, and yet appears to be something less than advertised. What drew you to creating a character who is burdened by great expectations, not of her own making? What do we learn from characters like this?

“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can – it will be enough” – that’s a plaque that was a Christmas gift from my husband a few years ago. It was a quiet message – because I have always been my own worst critic, always raising the bar, always expecting myself to do WELL, flagellating myself far worse than anyone else ever did when I failed to measure up to my own expectations. It isn’t that I was burdened with expectations of performance at school or at life – but it was taken for granted that I’d achieve the things I aimed for, and the reaction at my failures within the family was closer to astonishment than any level of reproof.

With Thea, that got sublimated into the classic angst of things expected of kids and teens – although in her case it wasn’t generic, not just good grades or a 4.0 point average, it was good grades IN A SPECIFIC AREA OF ENDEAVOUR, something apparently not within her power to correct. And although I have never really laboured under another’s expectations, I have laboured long and hard under my own and that disappointment that Thea sees in her father’s eyes when her Ars Magica report card comes up for review is something that I’ve sometimes seen in the mirror if something I reached for has managed to slip from my grasp.

Failure need not be permanent or fatal. And sometimes it isn’t even failure. Often what we think of as a disaster is the very thing needed to steer us into the very place where we needed to be. We learn from all that happens to us, and there are times that the lessons sting – and the things that we learn may not be the things we thought we would learn. People find out startling things about themselves every day. But one of the greatest lessons there is – learned under expectations that are your own or someone else’s – is what constitutes your self, your own identity, that which defines you as being YOU and nobody else. It never quite ends, that lesson, or rather, when it ends, you die – but while you live, you learn.

I like writing about characters who are flawed, because they are capable of changing – it is that flaw that makes them interesting, that gives them a vulnerability, that is a chink in their armour no mater how well it is camouflaged or protected or covered up. It’s a way of getting to the real person, and it’s that real person who interests me in terms of the story to be told. Everyone has their own problems and burdens and failings but in some ways they are like literature – much like the basic synopses of many novels, they distil down into a few primary elements which are recognisable to any reader, and this is why the reader will identify with such characters. This is precisely why superheroes have to be given an Achilles heel, because the hero without a vulnerability is supremely uninteresting. Sometimes it is necessary to lose in order to win, and if characters like Thea can figure out for us how to do that and survive it then we figure that there’s always hope for the rest of us.

3. Your father worked in international aid and during your childhood you lived in various countries through Africa. Talk about how that experience shaped you as a writer – and now that you’re writing YA, how does your experience growing up come through in your work?

I learned early to put down roots that were wide but shallow. I learned many things just by being the “outsider” looking in – it’s amazing how much you can see within a culture by simply shutting up and keeping your eyes open. I lived through some of the worst times in the history of South Africa, with the psychoses and fears of political upheaval and the physical violence of bombs planted in pubs to which, as a student at the University of Cape Town, I had been no stranger in my own early postgrad days – and I saw the way that those events affected the people from both sides of the fence. I learned about nature, and its dramas, and its heartbreaking beauty; I learned about different beliefs, and the mysticism and mythology of different peoples.

And that didn’t stop – I moved from Africa to New Zealand as an adult, and it was a whole new set of mysteries to learn and conquer, from the African jungles and savannahs straight into the coral reefs and tropical islands and volcanoes and different legends of how the world came to be as seen and told by the Polynesians, the Maori, the Australian Aboriginal peoples. And then I came to America, and I’m still learning.

I grew up everywhere, and I draw on all my experiences in my work – and because I’ve lived in exotic cultures it is commensurately easier for me to steep myself in cultures which I’ve never lived in but can conjure up in magical living colour and sensurround sound just by reading about it (such as the China that inspired my jin-shei books, and the Native American element in Worldweavers). In the YA books I am twisting a story rope which has strands of ancient Native American lore, modern cybermythology which is in the process of being created, and (in the later books) aspects of my own Eastern European heritage – one thing I did learn, as an “international brat”, is how to combine what often looked to be incompatible elements into a coherent story whole. We are so much a sum of our own life experiences, and while as that long-ago kid I was less than happy to be dragged from one secure cocoon to another all my childhood as an adult I have learned to more than appreciate the chances that a childhood like that has given me.

What I do miss, and a lot of this planet’s people take so much for granted, is stability in the sense of being able to go back to a 25-anniversary school reunion and meet people with whom one spent one’s entire growing-up years. Lifelong best friends that lasted from kindergarten were denied me; I do have friendships dating back thirty, thirty five years but there’s a handful of them, and those friends are scattered across the globe, and if it weren’t for the miracles of the internet keeping in touch with some of them would have been hard if not impossible. There’s a little of that in Thea, that sense of isolation from her peers, except for her it has different roots than mine did – no matter, the flower of the thing is the same, the sense of being lonely in a crowd. I learned to bloom where I was planted, and my characters either have to learn that themselves the hard way or they come to me with that lesson already in their bones.

4. Share a piece of advice you were given about writing.

Never think for a moment that you have reached a place where you have “stopped learning”. You learn something new with every new story that comes to you. Often you learn new things about your existing stories, simply by talking to a reader who has seen something in your book that you had no conscious intent – or even a memory – of having put there. Living each day with the potential of learning something new – about yourself, your craft – is one of the joys of this life.

5. Before you were published in the United States, you were published elsewhere in the English-speaking world, notably New Zealand. Does being published elsewhere first give you a unique perspective on the US market? Americans are often and notoriously incurious of what goes on beyond our borders; what are we missing out on?

The global accretion of publishing houses into just a handful of giant corporations that control the publishing world has meant that the attitudes of big publishers everywhere have hardened into very similar bottom-line driven attitudes. That may change, with the advent of the so-called “small presses”, some of which aren’t so small any more, which are rejuvenating the marketplace, particularly within the genre that I (despite having at least one majorly successful book published and promoted as more “mainstream”) still see as home. But America can be hidebound in quite different ways – witness the scrotum-gate scandal with a recent award-winning children’s book.

In some ways non-American publishers ARE freer to explore issues which, in America, are increasingly likely to scupper a book if certain vociferous groups get their teeth into it. It was, as far as I know, only in America that Harry Potter was denounced as a demonology primer and a manual for witchcraft (not even modern Wicca, but the horrible old-fashioned evil cackling kind whom they cheerfully used to burn at stakes during the worst of the witch-hunts). I don’t think it’s a problem – yet – in that Americans also have a vociferous readership of genre, a fan base which is not shy to voice its concerns and opinions and not easily silenced.

It is no accident, perhaps, that Disney was an American – and that the Disneyfication of the original European fairy tales began to be the accepted norm of things. Our children apparently suddenly need to be “protected” from the kind of thing that our own generation read without ill effect. We all grew up happily with murder and mayhem in cartoons, and very few of us ever tried to run the lawnmower over the family cat to see what would happen. I think kids have a far greater capacity to distinguish between the real and the not-real than they are given credit for, and that these days they grow up even faster than they did before, and that protecting them from things they will find out anyway in ways that are not within parental control is probably not the wisest thing a parent can do. The point of a fairy tale is not necessarily a happy ending. It’s that the world has a structure and that all things have a place in it and that everything has a price and that magic is never free. America tends to “sanitize” kids’ fare – and the end result is rather like the situation with alcohol. In continental Europe, kids are allowed to observe their elders consuming alcohol and are often even given watered down wine at a young age; as a consequence, they don’t fall on alcohol with the glee of finally getting their hands on something forbidden when the legal drinking age comes around, and overdose on it.

Part of the American “incuriousness” comes from the sheer size of the country, of course. In Europe, if you throw a stone from your back door you’re likely to hit a foreign country – with a different language, different culture, different history, different stories. America is huge and even though are great differences – think Appalachia and Los Angeles – wherever you go, it’s still the same country. Since it’s continent-sized, it’s easy to withdraw behind its borders and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist or, at the least, is not very important. Its size makes all the difference. If America was like a duchy in Old Europe, it would be impossible – and dangerous – to live in such isolation.

6. In addition to writing, you’ve taught writing with your husband, Robert A. (“Deck”) Deckert, novelist and newspaperman. So, honestly, now: Can writing be taught? Or at the end of the day do you have something there that can’t be taught, too?

What CAN be taught is the craft of writing. The nuts and bolts of it. Anything from the basic grammar to the elements of pacing and plotting – that is, after all, no more than a dissection of specimens already in existence, and you do those dissections in much the same way that young doctors learn anatomy. Often you learn as much from what does NOT work for you as from what does. It is entirely possible to learn to write perfect and scintillating prose…

...which can be completely empty of meaning.

THAT, you can’t teach. You either have something to say, and are driven to say it, or you don’t – and nobody can give you that, not the best writing teacher in the world. It is entirely possible for a piece of prose to be riddled with misspellings, with grammatical errors, with infelicities of expression – but with a story so luminous that you are willing to forget the flaws because you can see the gem that lies within.

That raw gemstone is the key. It’s possible to cut and polish a raw gemstone and get a diamond when you’re done. If the diamond wasn’t there in the first place you have nothing to work with – it might scintillate, to be sure, but the heart-fire of a true gem is not there and all you get is a pretty Swarowski crystal which (to be sure) can be valuable as and off itself but is hardly ever called a jewel.

I have seen people from all sides of this divide, and some understand it, and some don’t. I’ve been in the position where I’ve sat on the opposite side of eager writers who pitched their projects to me in order to get writerly advice, in the course of at least one writing conference – and they’ve run the gamut of people who are rehashing tired old plots simply because they desperately want to “be writers” to people who obviously don’t know quite what they are doing but in whose muddled and sometimes deeply flawed work lurked a spark of such fiery talent that I would have had no compunction about sending them on to my own editors with a letter of recommendation. I’ve seen people ask for advice, and I’ve seen people both take it and reject it. That’s where you approach the limit of what people are capable of “learning”.

But in the end the only way you can truly “learn” writing is by writing – and I am myself still learning, will always be learning, my own craft. Language is a living thing, and the writer exists with it in symbiosis – it isn’t a slave to be owned or a servant to be ordered about. You work together, the writer and the story. Without that cooperation, you’re nowhere. And the idea of it can be taught, planted in your head – but the practice of it, that you have to learn the hard way. By DOING.