As far back as the 1950s, my husband remembers seeing a quote from somebody saying that within 20 years all land on this planet will be *owned by somebody*. There is no reason to suppose the person who said was far wrong. I am sure it came to pass.

All OWNED by somebody.

No more wild places.

I would like to take a moment and think about what this means to us, the human race, as a species, as storytelling beings.

We began telling stories about the things that surrounded us and for which we had no explanation – and which thus had to occur through the agency of something beyond and outside of us, something divine, something wild. We created gods who lived in inaccessible places – sometimes odd and made up ones, fanciful and wonderful (but of necessity based on things that we knew – for instance, Valhalla) or real ones which were hard or impossible to get to by ordinary human agency and therefore gained an air of mystery and mysticism, like the top of Mount Olympus – and gave into their hands the power of the thunderbolt.

As human culture and civilization grew and our knowledge and insight increased, our stories grew and changed. The things that we knew in the present moment quickly slipped into yesterday, and yesterday slipped into history, and history slipped into legend, and legend turned into myth – and it was all born of that wilderness that existed outside of ourselves, the things that were NOT of Man but were greater or weirder or stranger or more worthy of awe or veneration.

The stories we told our children – all the fairytales ever told, all the fables, everything – were rooted in the wilderness. In the Wild Woods, where ancient and gnarled trees which were maybe a thousand years old grew in the gloom of spreading boughs, never before seen by human eyes. In the empty open places of the deserts. Atop great craggy mountains wreathed in cloud.

But that was BEFORE. Before that “every inch of this planet is owned by somebody” days. That was in the days where the gods and the creatures who inhabited our myths and our legends and our fairytales had room to live and thrive. Centaurs and dryads and rusalki and Koschei the deathless and the firebird and Quetzalcoatl and talking golden carp and the little mermaid and ifrit and djinni and flying horses and dragons and elves and witches and wizards and evil gnomes named Rumpelstiltskin who knew how to spin straw into gold. All of these, and more. They lived in those wild places where humans dared not go, and they loomed huge in the imaginations of generations of children.

No longer.

The wild places are going, or gone. There are no more tracts of forests into which no human has ever penetrated. There are no deserts where no human has ever been. There are no mountains which no human has ever climbed. We have gone to all of our wild places, and explored them, and mapped them, and conquered them, and… and tamed them. We own them now. If you don’t realize what that means think of the difference between a wild stallion and a working gelding pulling a cart on a farm. Think of the difference between the Minotaur and the domestic ox. Think, for that matter, of the startling differences between wild turkeys and the empty-headed domestic variety whose only redeeming feature is that they have lots of white meat to serve at the Christmas or Thanksgiving table. Think of Aslan (“he was not a TAME lion”) and that toothless mangy old beast in the back of the cage at the zoo.

We have gone to all the places where the wild things were. And they can hide in those places no longer.

Revealed, they are… diminished. There is less reason to fear something you can classify, and sort, and put into textbooks, together with means by which it can be combatted or defeated.  We own our planet, but we no longer have a place where our minds and imaginations have a chance to escape, to play, to invent, to learn.

Perhaps the explosion of fiction of the ilk that is now known as “urban fantasy” owes something to this phenomenon. The creatures who used to be the wild ones have been driven out of their refuges and hiding places – and they have evolved to suit their new niches, the dirty back alleys of cities, the glass and steel metropolises. Our werewolves are no longer the shaggy feral creatures who came howling out of the scary night to frighten our ancestors – they now prowl the underground of our cities. Our vampires no longer live in distant castles behind high walls with creaking wrought iron gates – they are among us, and some of them (God help us) even sparkle. Even the Fae have found their way into the city lights. Everything is changing.

What does it mean to the Wild Things when the ownership of all the places which they once thought belonged to them is now claimed by us? If a human being signs the purchase papers for a stand of enchanted trees, does that human being now also own the dryads whose trees those are? Do they have to pay rent now? Does the human being who purchases a mountain and the mineral rights to everything within it also own the dragon’s hoard in the caves deep inside?

How are these bargains to be enforced on the creatures of our imagination, the creatures of the Wild? Are they really to be considered something that we can own? Has slavery returned to haunt humanity? Will the creatures we are buying and selling – in the end – rise up and fight for their rights? (Heh. Occupy The Wilderness…?) Do we have any right to fight back? What, after all, would WE do if the tables were truly turned and they came to us and told us that THEY owned the land, and therefore US?…

There are still stories here. But they are very different stories to the ones we have traditionally told. And they are getting harder and harder to hunt and find. It’s a little like those staged hunts now, where the so-called “hunters” are taken to a place from which they can safely and with 100% certainty shoot into an enclosure and bag their trophy of a lion or tiger or bear. Our wild stories have been increasingly corralled. There are still those which are loose, to be sure, but they’re more sophisticated than we knew them of yore, and harder to catch and kill and skin and display.

We’ve put the stamp of ownership on all of our wildernesses, and somehow we have thus closed the fences around ourselves. We are milling around inside those fences, thinking ourselves free, thinking ourselves mighty, while all the time the wonder and the glory of the wilderness is leaching away from us, leaving our memories, leaving us helpless and disarmed should something come up for which we no longer have the dark places of our world or our spirits to search for antidotes in.

Perhaps there is only one way left to go – up. Into the sky. Into the last wilderness of stars and space.

It is a tragedy that this last great journey of mankind will probably be undertaken with a single driving urge – to find out how we can stake our claim on these, too, and “own” them just like we now “own” every inch of planet Earth.

And maybe the last and best hope of humanity lies in the possibility that we will finally fail, and accept that we can only end with what we began – the wild places which we do not understand, and whose creatures we can invoke to frighten us into becoming bigger and better than we thought we could be.

Aaaaand here we are again. In just over 24 hours human beings will usher in yet another year, the fireworks will go off (or whatever method of celebration is locally pursued), people will laugh and scream and kiss and shout “Happy New Year”. The next day dumpsters will be full of empty champagne bottles, spent streamers, clumped confetti, old calendars. And we will have a new date to put on our checks, on our correspondence… on our lives.

It’s a time for looking back as much as for looking ahead.

That pic, up there? That’s a park in the city where I was born. Those are the earliest memories I have of Decembers, the crisp days on sun and snow, the sparkle and glow of snow under haloes of street lights and strings of holiday lights out where the sellers of cards and tinsel had their tables on the sidewals of the old city, standing behind them while their breath steamed from their lips and while they hopped up and down from one foot to the other clapping mittened hands together for warmth, the way snow crunched underfoot when I walked upon it with my small hand in that of a parent or a grandparent, hurrying hither and yon on end-of-year errands of one sort of another. Those were the days I had a bedtime, and staying up to midnight was an adventure, and New Year’s Eve was something big and magical that I was allowed to stay up for and await even when my eyelids were at half mast and I was yawning mightily – but it was NEW YEAR, and I was part of the family which had gathered together to greet it.

I lost a couple of decades of my life to living in the “wrong” hemisphere, where December was full summer, where New Year parties were barbeques on the beach, and I NEVER accepted that – some part of me, deep inside, rebelled at the wrongness of it all, because if you look at almost ANY remotely “traditional” Christmas card (yes, even those sent in Australia or South Africa) it will show you the snow and the cold legacy of my own childhood. Yes, I realise how Eurocentric this all makes me sound – but sue me, I grew up there, and to me that was the right and proper way, and I could never ever shake that. The first “Real” winter I spent back in the proper hemisphere, dressed in a manner I deemed fit for the season (sweaters and gloves and boots and scarves and woolly hats) and looking at the bare branches of winter outside, watching the first fat flakes of snow falling, I cried. I was somehow deeply, viscerally, HAPPY and all was right with the world once again.

I need these long cold nights at the turning of the year, when I lay my head on my pillow and watch the winter moon rise into the sky through my bedroom window. I need them to recharge, to think, to remember, to gather the strength for the things to come which will be sent to try me (and some will. Some always come. That is the way of the world, and ever has been).

Tomorrow night, I will rip the last leaf out of the old calendar, and we will start again. Anew. Clean slate. Fresh new January 1.

Come in, 2012. The house is warm. There will be mulled cider. There will be quiet plans made by and beside the people I love most in the world.

May the New Year come gently to all of you out there, and may it treat you well

Why on earth do we write fiction?

Why do we read it?

One of my husband’s favourite “writer” stories concerns a Southern writer with a very Southern mother, whom he called up to tell her that his novel was being published. After a pause, the mother asked, a little desperately, “But do they KNOW it’s a LIE?” The writer admitted to this, whereupon the mother sighed and said, “Well, I will NEVER understand it.”

That’s what the rest of labour under – coming up with stories that you and I and those who pay us money to publish us and to read us KNOW are absolute filthy lies, made up to a word, sometimes literally impossible or unimaginable given the known rules of physics and biology in the world as we know it – genre is particularly guilty of this, because we lie egregiously about the possibility of interstellar travel in times that make it possible to set a story in such a Universe (as opposed to a thousand years to get from one star to the next) or the existence of vampires, werewolves, angels or fairies at the bottom of your garden.

And you, the reader, know that we are making it up as we go along. And you are willing to follow us on that journey. Few readers who read a fairy tale about brownies in the home will then go on to start leaving milk and cookies on the hearth from then on (even if they did have a hearth, which many modern homes don’t) or wander off to the bottom of that garden with a flashlight and a magnifying glass to look for those fairies we – the writers- stated must be there. Instead, you close the book with a happy sigh, and you go on with your own mundane everyday existence, secure in the knowledge that no brownie will wash the dinner dishes and that you must do so yourself if you want clean plates to eat off of the next day.

And then you come back, and you pick up another book. Of fiction. Of lies.

Yes, we all read non-fiction too. We read news; we read non-fiction on subjects that interest us (like a travel guide to a place we want to go and visit, or a history book about a period that fascinates us, or a science book about the real universe which doesn’t (yet) include faster-than-light travel, or even just a celebrity gossip magazine); we read instruction manuals that help us put together things or make other things work properly; we read contracts, and nutritional data on the back of food packaging materials, and textbooks for school, and political manifestos. But when it comes to many of these things we are already armoured with a set of opinions and attitudes, and reading items which challenge those opinions and attitudes are generally greeted with skepticism if not outright hostility – because how DARE those other people (whom we believe, according to our own lights, to be so egregiously wrong) try to shove their silly, ludicrous, ridiculous, astonishing, and dammit downright dangerous ideas down our throats?! How dares an atheist challenge an evangelist’s conviction about the Rapture (even when it demonstrably doesn’t happen…)? How dares a liberal politician challenge a conservative politician’s stance on things? How dares a feminist challenge a representative of the reigning patriarchy? HOW DARE THESE PEOPLE?

But here’s the thing.

People WILL read about those “other” ideas in fiction – sugarcoated as they are in the “lie”. It seems to be less threatening, somehow, to accept an idea which – if presented to you unadulterated as straight fact and therefore non-fiction – would instantly make you go into frothing attack mode. People who are adamantly against the idea of gay marriage might not respond too well to such a concept in a fiction book, to be sure, but they will respond to it in a different way than they do when faced with it in their own physical reality. Kids who are being bullied or otherwise mistreated because they are different in whatever way from their tormentors – because they are gay, or black, or Jewish, or [insert quality of choice here] – might take heart from a novel which tells of a teen who is being bullied because he is a blue-skinned singleton on a planet full of orange-skinned people and looks DIFFERENT – and somehow overcomes this in the story.

Yes, we all know it’s all a lie – but I believe it was Tolkien who once described fiction as a lie breathed through silver. But fiction is an incredibly important medium for getting the truth out there – even when you pretend that it only happens to other people, or to people who cannot exist or will never be real. A generation of readers breathlessly followed the growing up and the growing wise of a young wizard named Harry Potter without EVER doing a single magic spell themselves (whatever the idiots who insisted that the books taught our children “witchcraft” had to say about it). A girl called Scout learned about discrimination and courage in a NOVEL and a different generation of readers learned about those things with her. The list goes on.

Yes, there are books which are PURE entertainment. Yes, people do read them – and then happily leave them behind in the seat pockets of airplanes because these books have no re-reading value whatever and have served their purpose – which was to while away several long boring hours cooped up in close confinement with a couple of hundred of other bored and cooped up people with whom you do not wish to carry on a scintillating social conversation. And yes, there are certainly books that go too far in the other direction and their message, their “lesson”, is so thinly wrapped in that silver tissue of lies that they are barely fiction at all.

But the best books, the ones that we instinctively keep, the ones we go back to again and again – they succeed as entertainment, yes, and they can be as riveting as anything – but they leave you knowing more and feeling more deeply than you had been capable of before you read that book. They leave you empowered. They might have lied to you about the context and the circumstances – but the truth that lies within those false parameters is nonetheless the real truth and some part of you knows this, recognises it, values it. People say about certain books, “This book changed my life”. SOmetimes, they even mean it.

And that’s the power of fiction.

THAT is what it’s all for.

I recently tripped over a blog entry, here:

http://community.penguin.com/_Talisman-Books-by-Alison-Goodman/blog/3471740/150186.html

And here’s the definition she uses: “By talisman book I mean one of those novels that you read over and over again, a book that seems to resonate through you, that wards off the disappointments and insecurities of everyday life.”

If you are asking me what three books I will run and get from out of a burning building, there are probably three.

1) My dogeared paperback copy of Lord of the Rings – yes, I know the book is replaceable easily enough, it isn’t as if it’s out of print or anything like that, and anyway I could probably quote you the entire damned book chapter and verse if you asked.  But sometimes it isn’t JUST THE BOOK. It really is the talisman. And this book – broken-spined, tattered, beloved – this book was probably one of the first thing that made me kneel at the altar of fantasy and begin SERIOUS worship there. Tolkien made me realise that the big epic dreams that crowded my imagination were FOR REAL, and were valuable. This book is the physical embodiment of that realisation for me. It’s a talisman not just because of its identity but because of what it represents, the kind of hugeness and wonder and awe and the way it made me cognisant of my place in this world.

2) I’d like to say “Tigana” by Guy Gavriel Kay, because as I keep telling everyone it’s one of the best BOOKS I’ve ever read, genre quite aside, the writing and the story make this amazing for me and so does the visceral emotional connection I feel to the underlying themes of the book; I’d like to say “Nine Princes in Amber”, the now out-of-print paperback edition that made Roger Zelazny lift his eyebrows in utter astonishment when I gave it to him to sign and ask me where on earth I’d got that copy because it had been out of print for YEARS – because of the legacy that Zelazny left me during the writing workshop which he presided over and which I had the privilege to attend (in the year that he died); I might, in fact, say all too many names and hesitate before my bookshelf too long and burn up with my beloved books before I could decide which of the novels on the shelf would be worth the saving (and in the end I’d probably grab at random anyway). But I might also reach for a volume of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, because all stories live inside that book, and I could read them and dream up the rest of a lost world by his tropes.

3) – because it’s irreplaceable – a really disreputable ancient and ill-favoured old-fashioned hardcover book with dull gray covers which give nothing away and which have been chipped away at the corners and on the spine – a broken down book, loved well long before I had my hands on it, with scribbled commentary in the margins and on the bottom of the pages. You’d think it was a worthless old thing if you set eyes on it; you would pay ten cents for it at a yard sale. You probably wouldn’t take it if it was pressed into your hands for nothing at all. You’d think it had no value beyond being something to start a bonfire with. You’d be wrong. This is the book that lived beside my grandfather’s bed, the book that he read and re-read and re-read, the scribbles in the margins are his thoughts, and in his hand. He’s been gone these twenty years. He’ll never speak to me again except through this book, and I WOULD go through fire to get it.

But those are talisman books in the purest and most glittering sense of the word. There are many many books that I love, and have adored over the years.

There were the books which drew my tears – “Les Miserables”, Howard Spring’s “My Son, My Son”, Karl May’s “Winnetou” (although it took me YEARS to unlearn all the “facts” I though I knew about the American Indian culture in general and the Apache in particular after I finished reading his work), Jack London’s “Call of the Wild”, almost ANYTHING by Ursula le Guin, a book not many people reading this will have heard of but whose title translates as “The Time of Death” by a writer of my own tongue and tribe by the name of Dobrica Cosic and another book by one of my own, Ivo Andric’s “Bridge on the Drina”.

Lest you should think that I spent my entire reading life weeping, there are books that drew my laughter – Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat”, T. H. White’s “Once and Future King”.

And there are the comfort books I return to because I have loved them and  because I know them and because if I am sick or tired or ailing I know I can go back to them and find solace there – “Song of Arbonne”, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”, Mary Stewart’s Merlin books, “Shadow of the Moon” by M. M. Kaye or any fat historical novel by Sharon Penman (but particularly “Here Be Dragons”), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Poisonwood Bible”, lots of stuff by Pearl Buck, books by Henryk Sienkiewicz, John Galsworthy, Boris Pasternak, Nikos Kazantzakis, Daphne du Maurier. Of more recent vintage, Catherynne Valente whose poetic vision enthralls me or Neil Gaiman whose dark and sardonically twisted tales and characters draw me in and China Mieville whose surgical command of the English language leaves me breathless and humbled.

I am a certified bookworm, rarely without a book halfway through somewhere in the house, often several in different parts of the house. And if I’m not reading them, I’m writing them…

…would you forgive me if I added #4 to my Talisman Book list, above? One of my own, a hardcover edition of “Secrets of Jin Shei”, the book to remind me what I am,  what the culmination is of all the gifts that all my other books have poured like gems into my waiting spirit. The truth is that I haven’t actually re-read the whole thing, not once, since it was first published. Possibly I am too afraid to, afraid of what I will find within those pages whose origins lie so deep within myself, afraid of all the things I will possibly – no, probably – find in there that I would have done differently, or would change even now if I could. But even if I never read those words that I wrote again in their entirety I’ll take a copy with me. And show it to people, after, if I lose the power of speech and they ask me who or what I am. Because that is what I am. Will always be. I am the creator of THIS THING, this book, this collection of words, this story… this talisman.

I am someone who loves books. Someone who loves reading them, who grew up to live and breathe writing them. A once-and-future writer – with hands and spirit overflowing with the talismans of language, of words. Someone who was lucky enough to have had poetry poured into my soul when I was just a child, and who was allowed to wander through the wild wood of story unfettered and free to taste of whatever fruit or stream I could find. I grew up in an  Eden of Word – and I still live there today.

With all my talismans safe beside me.

So – what are YOUR talisman books…?

I”ve always been in love with them. When I was younger it was hardcover notebooks, often A4 in size, in which I would hand-write ENTIRE NOVELS (I know I did. I have a few of those books still. With ENTIRE NOVELS written in them. In HANDWRITING. Often in pencil.) Later, especially when I graduated to the computer as a primary writing tool, they became smaller things I toted around in various purses and handbags and scribbled quotes and half-finished poetry and ideas into, for later transference into the computer where they could be further developed into full-fledged stories. Some were set aside as dedicated “Research journals” for particular projects, and are filled with scrawled notes culled from various research books read along the way, thoughts and ideas on applying facts discovered during research, often with hand-cut tabs which allow me to separate out stuff into distinctive sections so that I will at least know where to LOOK for them later. Frequently, as it gets closer to the writing of the actual story in question, these notebooks will blossom into a colourful and chaotic proliferation of multi-hued post-it tabs which guide me as to which bits belong in which chapter or section of the actual story I’m trying to write.

I currently have a stash of these notebooks, bound in interesting textured covers, sitting in a small pile on a side table and waiting for their turn at glory. They don’t know yet what they are going to be, what they are going to build. There’s the usual crop of idea-notebooks in every handbag I own, every suitcase, every travel-minded container (just in case I ABSOLUTELY NEED ONE right there and then and can’t be bothered to go hunting through a different bag).

In a sense, this defines a writer. Scratch through a writer’s pockets or bags and you’ll always find these things, full of chicken scratches of half formed and barely coherent ideas, sometimes in shorthand which even the writer is hard-pressed to recognise a week or a month or a year after they had scritched it down for remembrance.  If not a notebook, you’ll find old envelopes with scribbles on the back, napkins from fast-food restaurants with ditto (avoiding the occasional ketchup smudge), till slips from stores which went out of business six months before but whose ghost haunts the bottom of someone’s handbag because the back of a bill contains the first inklings of a deathless idea.

I take my notebooks everywhere. I take them travelling, and write down the things I see and hear and experience and taste and the things that leave me gaping in awe and the things that make me laugh and the things that make me annoyed. I take them out to restaurants with friends, and scribble furtively in them when I happen to notice a strange character sitting at a table a little way away and am suddenly mugged by that person’s life story (or my version of it, anyway) which I just have to jot down and preserve because some day I might need a character JUST LIKE THAT for a story not yet born. I leave them lying by my bed when I go to sleep at night because who knows what dreams may come (and need to be nailed down in ink on paper before they vanish like the ephemera that they are.

If people want to buy me presents and have no idea what to get me, a nice blank journal is always welcome. Yes, even though I already own more than I think I could possibly need.

Blank journals represent something to me.  A restless, exciting state of possibility and of Things To Come. They tremble with the yet-unborn spirits of stories still to be told. They whisper to me out of that inviting emptiness calling to me to come  and fulfill them, to help them find their destinies, and along the way, pursue my own.

They are physical links to that place that lies Between, where the stories live and fly.

At this time – let’s see – I have something like ten pristine journals waiting for their turn to shine. That’s at least ten stories which I still have to write. My life is full already, and all I have to show for it so far… are these empty pages.

Want to keep a writer busy, keep a writer dreaming? Give them journals. Give them beautiful things to put their pen to paper into. And watch their imagination spread their wings, and take flight.

So there I was, driving down the same road I have driven down ever since I moved to my current house – it’s the only road connecting us to town and to civlization, and EVERY time we go out (to buy groceries, to go to the library, to go out for a meal or to a movie…) we drive down this road. I must have driven down it thousands of times by now.

And yet… and yet… EVERY TIME I DRIVE DOWN IT, I SEE SOMETHING THAT I HAVE NEVER NOTICED BEFORE.

Yesterday, it was a house, NOT a new one, which has this absolutely fantastic weird deck, half of it under an extended roof from the house itself giving it an oddly unbalanced look. It’s just into one of the side roads, but fully visible from the main drag, and like I said, I must have driven past it many a time this year alone. Never saw it before.

Or it could be something as simple as a paint job – there’s one house which I had been peripherally aware of for some time as being – well – a werid shade of plum, really, but was it THAT weird a shade, or did somebody just do a new and enthusiastic, but extremely ill-advised, paint job? On other occasions before that I had suddenly noticed a house painted a bright Hello Kitty pink, or totally painted (no accents, no other colour, just this massive BLOTCH) a certain kind of pukey teal blue-green shade which would give me a massive headache within hours if I had to look at it for any extended period of time, or suddenly changing from a gingerbread-house-type paint job which was full of whimsey and joie de vivre into this bland beige blah THING with no character whatsoever.

Or there would be a tree broken, after a storm.

Or there would be a lilac hedge which was not in bloom one day, and then, suddenly, explosively, magnificently, was in bloom the very next morning.

Or the way light falls in early fall or late spring, or high summer, or a cool grey winter’s day. Or a side street that suddenly seems to turn too sharply, vanishing behind the turn into somewhere that you cannot see, leading to heaven alone knows where.

Or the fact that there is only ONE streetlight sitting there at a specific intersection, and whole swathes of road just before and after it are dark (I keep expecting snow to start falling, and trees to sprout up all around, and Mr Tumnus, bearing Christmas presents, to pick his way delicately into the circle of light).

Or the single passenger waiting patiently at a bus stop without a shelter, in the rain, with water sluicing down his glasses (to the point that you have to wonder whether he’d actually SEE the bus if it turned up, before it ran him over…)

Or the pair of deer trotting down the sidewalk, like a couple of girlfriends out for shopping and lunch – or the buck I saw stalking down the side of the street once, with all of him nicely off the road and out of danger of being hit by a car – all of him, that is, except his huge and imposing antlers, the left-hand one of which stuck out well into the lane and made drivers giggle and swerve around it while the buck ignored them with a great deal of dignity.

Or the posse of kids with dripping hair and wet towels wrapped around them, crossing the street, but going TOWARDS the lake and not AWAY from it which immediately makes me wonder where they had in fact been swimming, then…

Or the way smoke comes curling out of a chimney on a house behind a screen of trees, on the first cool day of autumn, when the first fire gets lit in the hearth.

Or the way light spills from windows in the twilight, some bare of curtain or covering, letting you glimpse the alien worlds within where other people live and live and dream and work and play.

Or the guy who waves at you from his bike as you pass him, and you wave back, instinctively, but are perfectly sure that you don’t know each other at all and you just gave a cheery greeting to a complete stranger – which, to be sure, was not so unusual not so very long ago (…but try transplanting that scene into New York City).

Or the skunk that crossed the street once, with my car and another car from the other direction stopping a respectable way back and leaving him plenty of room to maneuver.

Or the way the wind turns the leaves of the quaking aspens and makes them a wash of silvery light.

Or the way the clouds are sitting on top of Mount Baker today.

Or the peace sign in the window of a rather dilapidated house needing a coat of paint and some TLC but with its heart in the right place.

What is it that makes you suddenly narrow your eyes and go, hey, I never noticed that before, but LOOK…?

It’s like you suddenly get a sprinkling of pixie dust into the corner of your eye, and things that were invisible become perfectly clear, perhaps just this once and you’ll never see them again, perhaps you’ll never unsee them once they have been brought to your attention. It’s faery play, if you listen you’ll hear echoes of silvery laughter and a rustle of diaphanous wings. Was that thing that just flitted across your windshield a butterfly or a real to goodness fluttering sprite?… Are you SURE…?

What kind of things have you noticed lately that you could swear had never been there before… in places you could have sworn you knew like the back of your hand…?

1. There are times that I have sat and watched words which *I am typing* appear on the screen in front of my eyes… and not recognised them. That’s how much my characters – or sometimes just my story – take over when I’m in “writer mode”. I sometimes think it’s a mild form of possession.

2. There are characters I have created that I actively dislike (no, I’m not telling which). There are times that it’s HARD to be fair to those characters. I like to think I generally come out on the side of the angels, but I don’t know…

3. In my stories, people *die*. Sometimes they do so for a really really good reason, or a good cause. Sometimes they do it willingly, in the hopes of achieving something with that death. Other times their death may appear meaningless or wholly arbitrary. But see, this is the way things work in the real world, too, and I don’t think that my fictional realms should be any the less “real” for being created by my mind.

4. I don’t work from outlines or write-by-scenes (which is the literary equivalent of paint-by-numbers, I guess) or to rigid pattern. My stories are as organic as they come. I stick a story seed into the ground, water it copiously, and it sometimes astonishes even me when something weirdly exotic comes up out of the good earth. Having said that, I do have to admit to one amendment to this – for the kind of complicated stuff that I write, keeping a timeline is kind of… essential. All of these characters exist and live and work and play and plan independently, and it sometimes matters that one of them has to be a certain age before another meets them – it really will not DO to have a wonderful romantic relationship happen, and then discover that in your original timeline one of the two lovers has to be three years old…

5. There is a time, after the completion of every single one of my books, usually after it’s “safely” out of the house and in the hands of someone who has influence on its future (such as an editor), that I wander around the house chewing my nails and driving my poor husband nuts with the generic whine of “Nobody wants my book!” He usually counters, once some sort of positive reaction has come in, by putting on his “I told you so” face. But for a while, there, things get sticky. They do. I go through phases of absolutely believing that every sane reader out there simply HAS to hate this thing I have just completed.

6. I flinch at bad reviews, despite trying to train myself into the mode of understanding, on an intellectual level, that there are bound to be people out there whose cup of tea my work ISN’T. Silence, however, is far worse than even the worst of bad reviews. At least a bad review means that someone has READ the book, even though they hated it. Resounding silence makes an author wonder if the book actually does exist, or if the previous couple of months of frenetic editorial activity and galleys and copyedits and proforeading have all been just a figment of one’s imagination. (All this means, usually, is that the reviews arrive in a clump six months later, having been collected by someone in the publicity department and then gathered dust in their inbox for a while before they got sent out. But tell yourself that when you are sitting in your bubble and waiting for something, ANYTHING, to happen…)

7. There is something frankly terrifying the first time you see your book in the hands of a complete stranger.

8. You never stop learning in this game. Even when you start teaching, you learn from the people who call themselves your students. That’s because writing is as individual as people – it’s almost like a mental fingerprint, people have pet words, pet phrases, a way of painting an image or an emotion, and people will ask the damndest questions in a workshop or classroom scenario, questions which sometimes make the *teacher* stretch in order to answer them. That’s absoltuely wonderful.

9. There are times that it’s a royal pain in the ass, being a writer. You learn to THINK like one. You sit down to watch a TV show, or go to a movie, and the rest of the people watching the same thing will sit rapt for an hour or two and then drop their jaws in utter astonishment at some twist ending… which you worked out halfway through the story and were waiting with increasing impatience to be vindicated. And you usually are. You learn fast not to open your mouth when other people are watching anything with you, because objects get thrown at you otherwise.

10. It never gets old. Okay? It just never gets old. Every time a new book arrives, it’s like the first time. A flutter of the heart, a burying of the authorial nose into the pages to inhale that fresh new book smell, a strange and silly smile that won’t leave your face for the next forty eight hours. Every book is a little piece of a dream come true. It’s a little bit like sitting outside on the porch just as the clouds break on a gray day and the sun streams through, and everything that was monochrome is suddenly part of a bright and vivid world, and you understand perfectly just why you were born – simply to be the one to see those colours come to life before your eyes.

I am a book collector.

My husband is another one.

When we got married, he already had a considerable collection of books under way; when we moved from Florida to Washington state he decided to cull it down to a manageable pile.

We got a friend to help us out; hubby presided over the whole thing, sitting at a kitchen table, while I brought double handfuls of books – from the shelves and cupboards in the entrance hallway, from the long and tightly packed shelves in the office, from the tall bookshelf in the spare bedroom. I would pour these out before him and he would triage them into three teetering piles – To Go, To Keep, and For The Friend (the ones the helper wanted to sequester for himself out of that loot). We ended up with fully two thirds of our moving boxes being stuffed with books. Probably 1,500 books, at that point.

Because I knew that we would be moving and there seemed little point in moving my own books TWICE, I had yet to bring my own collection from New Zealand into the fold. When my own moving boxes finally arrived once we started nesting here in Washington, there were at least thirty book boxes out of some fifty packages delivered by the movers (and these included some hefty bits of furniture). We unpacked and sorted THOSE, and lo, there was another 1,500 or so, or damn close.

We have now been together for a decade. In those ten years, we have not ceased to gather up books. We are capable of walking into a bookshop on a random weekend and plopping down $150 on (new and used) books.

We now have a house which has a library off the office, an entire room filled with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three of the four walls. One wall sports a sliding secret door that, when closed, hides the library.

From the office side, the door is, of course, disguised as a bookcase.

The floor-to-ceiling bookcase from hubby’s house in Florida is now in the office and stuffed with enough reference material – on things as diverse as a dictionary of poisons and antidotes, histories of medieval women, a manual on screenplay writing and a Chinese-English dictionary – to make it groan under the weight.

Another room has built-in shelves most of which are triple-stacked with paperbacks, and that room has other shelves where larger hardcovers roost. There’s a book case in the bedroom downstairs. There’s a book case in the second bedroom upstairs – a double one, from floor to ceiling. We built in another shelf into a wall in the corridor. There’s a shelf of large coffee-table books (on Antarctica, on China, on bonsai, on castles in Scotland and trees in South Africa…) tucked under what in normal houses would be a breakfast counter off of our open-plan kitchen.

There are books stacked on the piano, next to my armchair in the living room, which I am currently reading. There are books stacked next to my husband’s armchair. There are piles on the coffee table. There are random books scattered on the dining room table, next to my bed, in the car.

A lot of these books – his, mine and ours – have been read, and many are re-read favourites which have been read many times (I have a fat paperback copy of Lord of the Rings which is literally falling apart from being loved too much…)

But you will have done the math already and figured out a simple truth: we have not lived so long, even combining our lifetimes, to have read every book in this house.

There are unread books on our shelves.

They are not abandoned. Essayist Gabriel Zaid once wrote, “The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.” In a response to this, British writer Nick Hornby said, “With each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.”

Recently I came across another essay on the subject, Kirsty Logan’s “Confined by Pages: the Joy of Unread Books”**

Kirsty says, “An unread book exists only in the primordial soup of your imagination, and there it can evolve into any story you like. An unread book—any unread book—could change your life.”

She freely admits to having almost a thousand unread books on her shelves. She has not read these books not because she is afraid that they will not live up to her expectations – but because having an unexplored world out there right at your fingertips is a totally exhilarating idea. It’s an unopened map, full of places for you to go, and you can open it up to any page according to your mood and surrender to writers as different as Maxine Hong Kingsley, Samuel Delany, Norman Mailer, Mervyn Peake, Susannah Clarke, Michael Chabon, Lousa May Alcott, Louis de Bernieres, or some writer whose name you’ve never heard of but whose book you bought on impulse because you took a look at the back blurb and got intrigued (I’ve found many gems that way). It depends on your mood – Kafka or Scheherezade – and it’s ALL THERE, still waiting for you, still unread. Some of it might stay unread as newer recruits come into the fold and claim your attention. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re there, and every one of the books on your shelves is part of you, of who you are, of who you were, of who you are becoming.

There is a very good reason I gravitate to the bookshelves of every new house I step into. Those books will tell me more about the inhabitants of that house in five minutes of browsing than in twenty four hours of intense conversation. I have learned to Read the Books, not the innards, but their meaning in people’s lives.

Anyone coming into our house would no doubt be similarly enlightened about us.
Who am I? What am I interested in? What are my husband’s interests? Where do we meet and converge, and where do we each go our own way? Which one of is interested in ancient mysteries and crop circles, and which one in the histories of Byzantium and the Crusades? Which one reads John D. McDonald, and which one reads China Mieville? Do we both read Robert Sawyer? Are we both eyeing the same book on the crowded coffee table, like the last piece of pie on a plate, and wondering which one of us is going to make the first successful grab at it?

Yes, there are books in this house which haven’t been read.

They are waiting for their own rainy day, for their moment, for their hour. Or they are folded over the secrets which they hoard, and may never give those up. Schrodinger’s books, both read and unread at once, unknowable until they are picked up by a human hand.

We LIKE it that way. We will never be caught in the unthinkable situation of having “nothing to do”. All we ever have to do to keep from feeling bored and at a loose end, even for just an instant, is walk to a bookshelf and run our fingers across the spines of the books that live there, and choosing one we have not yet been introduced to, and settling in to become better acquaintances.

Our house is full of unread books, of dreams yet to be dreamed, of roads yet to be travelled down. It is a place of magic. Walk in through our front door, and you will hear stories whispering in our walls.

And what about you? Do you have unread books on your own shelves? Are you ashemed of them, or do they fill you with joyful anticipation…?

** http://www.themillions.com/2010/05/confined-by-pages-the-joy-of-unread-books.html

The WHO AND WHAT questions were character-centric – but the WHY question is a bridge which leads to more than one destination. It’s the motivational link which informs a character’s growth, to be sure – but it is also another kind of bridge, from character into plot and from thence into the setting and the framework of the story, all of which are more closely informed by the rest of the Eternal Questions.

Nothing takes place in a vacuum. Every single story has to happen somewhere in space, somewhen in time. For this, you will need details and continuity.

You need the questions of WHEN and WHERE.

It may be stating the obvious – but your story will be very different if it is set in the Stone Age, if it is set in Italy during the Renaissance, if it is set in China during the Cultural Revolution, if it is set in the American South during the height of the Civil Rights movement, if it’s set in 21^st Century New York, or if it’s set on a 25^th Century starship hurtling through space. All of these things require setting up, meticulously.

You may need to do research. You may need to do quite a lot of research. Some of the research may be difficult to the point of being impossible. If you are setting a story in an invented world of your own making but which is based on some particular historical time or place you may have a little more leeway with your details – but anything that’s remotely realistic has to be backed up with the best facts that you can come up with because it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you get some tiny detail wrong you WILL get the kind of reader who will notice and who will lose no time in gleefully pointing out your mistakes. Often loudly. In public.

For instance – do not have clockwork in eras where clockwork had yet to be invented (and this runs deeper than you think. You might inadvertently slip and  have a character whom you intend to comment on something going smoothly saying flippantly that things are as precise as clockwork… when that character would have trouble recognising clockwork if it came and smacked him on the nose. Hard.) Do not have pieces of clothing turn up centuries before they were supposed to have been invented, or centuries after they were supposed to be obsolete.

Tiny details can matter, and can sometimes be quite enough to establish your time and place – elaborate deconstructions are often neither necessary nor wanted – all you have to do is be aware, for instance, that in a culture that measures time with hour-candles and hourglass clocks filled with sand and sundials the phrase “a few minutes” may have no practical meaning at all.

Continuity comes into play as you keep all of this straight, and you don’t suddenly introduce an anachronism simply because you forgot where or when you were.

These are also the questions that inform the HOW of your story. Murder weapons have to be consistent with your era and with the class or race of the people who are using them. You have to be aware of what your context is, of what your McGuffins can or cannot do under your circumstances, and have your characters behave accordingly. If they know things they will have to have come by that knowledge in a manner consistent with the story – no knowledge is spontaneously generated, and if not given freely then it has to be obtained covertly by scheming or spying or theft or lies or eavesdropping or – well – pick  a method, but you have to have a method. You cannot simply have your protagonist reach into thin air and know something JUSTLIKETHAT, or know how to use something they’ve never seen before simply by setting eyes on it. This is particularly annoying when you have people transported from OUR flabby under-exercised world into a space where swords are the weapons of choice… and said people can use said swords without a smidge of training, without ever being so much as out of breath, and without a single bruise or slash added to their anatomy while learning to use the implement in a manner in which it is meant to be wielded.

Most stories can be deconstructed into those six arenas – and it’s sometimes helpful to pose these questions to your story or your characters if they have become mired. They’re interview questions which were supposed to procure the facts for a news story – so USE them, in the manner in which they were intended, to “interview” your story or your characters and find out where they’re at and what they intend to do next. Sometimes just writing down six lists can be helpful – under WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHEN, HOW headings – and the lists can be as disjointed and disorganized as you want, nobody else ever has to see them, they’re stream-of-consciousness things where you write the first things that come into your head when you ask that question with your particular story or character in mind. You can keep ‘em or you can toss ‘em, their value lies in unlocking your mind, not in their intrinsic content.

Happy interrogations.

Questions are the building blocks of writing. The answers to the questions that you ask are what builds your story.

When it comes to non-fiction writing – journalism in particular – there are the famous 5 Ws which need to be answered in any given news story: Who, What, Where, When, Why. And then, sometimes, it is instructive to add an H – How.

In fiction it is not THAT different. These are the fundamental questions which you need answers to in order to create a story.

And the most basic questions are the three which, put together, define Character.

On the face of it, the first two questions – Who and What – might seem to be dangerously similar. Ask somebody WHO he is and WHAT he is, and watch that person struggle with those concepts. I come to it from the point of view that is almost Nature vs Nurture – WHO a person is depends on the stuff that’s inborn, inside, instinctive; WHAT he is depends on the circumstances that have shaped that particular human being.

For instance, WHO I am is a writer – because that is what I do, it’s an instinct and a vocation, it’s something that I have to do and which drives me, and it’s something that I seem to have a certain amount of talent for. WHAT I am is an author, which is a PUBLISHED writer, and for that I have had to learn my craft, and practice it, and work with others in order to make it happen.

It doesn’t have to mean that the “who” is the personality trait and the “what” is the linked profession, at least not directly –  perhaps if you answer the “who” question with “I am somebody who likes people” it might merely lead to something like “…and therefore I am a philanthropist”.  Some things can mean both – there are people to whom the phrase “I am an aristocrat” covers both WHO and WHAT they are, and in some specific cases the WHAT informs the WHO rather than vice versa – for instance, “I am the Queen of Ruritania” might mean both WHO and WHAT but if treated as the “who” part of the equation, if that is something that you were born to and therefore which has shaped you all your life you might add the “what” along the lines of, “…and therefore I am the person on whom the responsibility for her people’s well-being ultimately rests” (please note that it’s the title, or the profession, that now builds the personality trait…)

You can have fun with this when you are building characters in a novel, in either direction. Most will do it in a forward direction, like the rest of us do, living their changes, starting with a WHO AM I set of characteristics and then developing those into a WHAT AM I personality as it accretes the trappings of their world. But sometimes it’s instructive doing it in reverse – a character who starts out as an evil wizard (technically a WHAT) can be deconstructed backwards to the roots of that, until you reach the bedrock of WHO that wizard was before he turned evil and wizardly. J K Rowling did something of the sort with the flashbacks about the early Voldemort.

One way or another, the WHO/WHAT dynamic in a character is very much about a character’s growth and changes while that character is engaged in a central problem which is the raison d’etre of a piece of fiction. But there is one other crucial piece of evidence that’s missing from the picture at this point, because none of this happens in a vacuum of intent: characters in fiction – like real people – must have a reason for doing something, for changing something; the bridge, if you will, between the WHO and the WHAT. And that bridge – it’s called “motivation” – is the WHY.

This character had a lousy childhood (WHO) and turned into a serial killer (WHAT) because they were paying back old debts from their salad days (WHY). That character is an orphan girl hated by her widowed stepmother (WHO) but who grows up to marry a prince and become a princess (WHAT) because she had a fairy godmother (WHY) (hey, I never said the reasons had to be completely rational…)  It’s an equation. It kind of balances out in the end. Characters are supposed to grow and change within the frame of their own story, flipping between their WHAT and their WHO – but the reasons for that change keep them grounded, and make those changes relevant and believable.

It’s the WHY that centers them. And it’s a WHY that has to remain overtly silent – because if the reader is putting the book down and asking, frustrated, “But WHY did he do that?” you’ve lost the battle for that reader’s willing suspension of disbelief and the fabric of your story falls apart. The trick to the WHY is to supply the BECAUSE which your reader never realised they were asking for, or thought they needed to ask. A good writer poses the WHY question in the form of the BECAUSE answer, and the reader is given all the building blocks of that necessary bridge within the narrative framework itself.

This is hard to even write about never mind do it, or do it well. Characters who change believably within a motivational framework are the characters who are most remembered, though. It’s worth the struggle. The prize is a great one.

Next time we will discuss the When, Where, and How.