Alma Alexander

We’re going to take a step back this month, harking back to a question left at the feet of the “Eternal Questions 1” essay at the end of March.

In that piece, I wrote:

“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.”

Then a comment asked, “The part that seems tricky, though, is where you talk about providing the “because” while leaving the “why” unstated. Any chance you could talk on that some more?”

So here we are, at the Why Fork, figuring it all out.

When we are very little, “Why?” is the ultimate question. (Oh, come on – you’ve all met the three-year-old who can keep it up for an hour…) And it’s legitimate – we need to know. We’re new on this world. Inexplicable things happen every day, and have to be questioned, and let’s face it, adults are sometimes sadly lacking in the explanation department. “Because I said so” leaves a lot to be desired. It isn’t enough, when we are young, to know that the sky is blue – it’s brand new to us, that sky, and for all we know there IS no real reason why it shouldn’t be burnt orange or lime green, hence “why?”

But that is the beginning of the question, the shallow end of the pool, the very start of the road just before you come to your first Why Fork. It’s explaining the fundamentals, defining the parameters of a world. However, once you’ve taken your first turn down that first fork in the road you discover an interesting thing.

Answering a question may not satisfy you at all.

An answer may merely lead to another question. And another, and another, all the way down. And the deeper you go, the more complex the questions get and the harder it is to understand the answers.

“Why is this so?” is a basic building block of the scaffolding one needs to build a world, any world, because this is an empirical why, and there are usually answers which are cogent and to the point and can be used in a relatively scientific manner. But “why” is a multi-purpose question, and it’s when it dips its toe into the pool of philosophy and human motivation that things get really interesting.

Because – and this is important – there are NO EMPIRICAL ANSWERS when it comes to a human being or that human being’s motivations. There is no such thing as a right answer or a wrong answer. There is just an answer which is appropriate for the context and the timing of a patricular question, and this answer may change in time as the parameters of the question do.

Understanding this is important in building characters in fiction. The character and their story, you might say, are the brick-and-mortar, the stone, the shingle on the roof, the support beams, the great cathedral ceilings, the windows, the passages, the arches, the gates. You are bulding that story, brick by brick, stone by stone, slowly and with care – you are an architect of an edifice of dreams. But what you really have to have in order to build this solid thing… is a scaffolding of glass.

You will ask many questions on your way. Each answer you receive, or find out, or fight for, will provide you with a piece of scaffolding on which you can stand in order to build the next layer of your story. But these answers are not PART of the story. They must not lodge into the brickwork and spoil the patterns you are trying to achieve. They support your edifice while it is being built. Your reader will know when your next brick has been placed properly and with care; they will see that brick being cemented in, THROUGH the glass, and in an act of literary alchemy they will be able to discern the correct motivation for a character’s action because they’re seeing that motivation through a layer of support which is not in the actual story at all.

It’s hinted at, implied, you can feel its presence and you know its sturdy support is what’s holding the whole thing up – but you aren’t thrown out of the story by tripping over its rubble on the floor and stopping to examine each individual piece of the evidence. A great character is partly transparent, so that the reader who encounters that character may see the inner workings of a mind, but not so transparent for every action to be utterly predictable and boring.

The best kind of see-through scaffolding is to portray an event which doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything at all… and then use that event to shape a character in a manner which provides an answer for some action of that character’s some way down the line in your story.

Spoiler for one of my books here – and yes, I have used this example before, but it just FITS here –

I did something like this in “The Secrets of Jin Shei”. In the beginnings of the book, establishing character, I described one of my eight protags (who is still a child here) as someone who is so enamoured of the tenets of honour and courage and a sense of noblesse oblige that she takes on superior numbers and a superior force in defense of something weak and unable to defend itself. She didn’t defend that weak and defenseless object – in this instance, a kitten – because she was particularly attached to the object itself; it was the principle of the thing that mattered.

It is the principle of the thing that explains to that particular character, and the reader, why it is acceptable for her to lay down her own life, much later in the book, in circumstnaces which do not remotely resemble that first scene… until they suddenly, savagely, do. Until that scaffolding falls away at last and you, the reader, realise that you know precisely how and why that character is going to respond to a certain situation – because the scaffolding has built her in a certain way and there is nothing ELSE that she can do and remain herself. You, the reader, have NEVER asked the question “why” at this point. That’s because the scaffolding has already supplied that. What you get, in the story, is the answer, not the question which you never knew that you were really asking.

It’s this art of second-guessing a reader’s questions about a character and then providing the answers to those questions already built into the story itself, giving the reader those answers before they have the chance to be stopped cold by a question which pops up cold at an inconvenient time, that makes a story flow, a character become an intimate acquaintance about whose fate and welfare you as the reader passionately care about and are invested in. In its most fundamental form you will hear people pontificate to new writers: SHOW, DON’T TELL. And that’s part of it. Because you are SHOWING the answers, one little bit at a time, letting the reader piece together themselves what their original questions might have been.

Yes, this is a hard one to grasp, and tougher still to explain. But trust me, if you getit right… you will know it. These are the moments where you stare at your page with a frisson of astonishment and you wonder how on earth your story was clever enough to weave itself into this particular pattern.

But you wove the pattern. With the questions never quite asked. And the pattern is all the answers that your readers need.

The deeper you go, the more complex it gets.

Have a care, heading off the Why Fork. It might lead to deep and dangerous places. But you go there so that your reader does not need to – and if you tread gently, and know how to sidle past the traps and the alligator pits, the road will take reader and writer, both, to a destination that’s nothing short of breathtaking.

There came a day when I ended the new novel – the story arc had done its job, started out and then ramped up the tension and then came to a climax and then began to wind down and then came to an end. All the elements were there. The bones, the skeleton, of a book.

A week after that day, I actually FINISHED the book.

There IS a difference, here.

An imperfect but somewhat helpful analogy would be the baking of a cake. You start out with the ingredients – the flour, the eggs, the butter, the sugar, chocolate, maybe a bit of brandy or candied fruit, whatever it takes – and they are all disparate elements at this point, existing in their own elemental form, the little pile of flour over here, the little pile of sugar over there, the eggs (often separated into the whites and the yolks, for these have different roles in cake-making…) neatly set side someplace else. None of it seems like it particularly wants to go with anything else, and certainly not with EVERYTHING else – but there is something that ties it all together, the overarching vision, the “arc” of the storyline if you will, the recipe in which all these “plot” elements appear and must find a role to play. So you get to work, and you sift the flour, and you melt the butter, and you combine the ingredients in certain ways, and you stir it all together and finally you arrive at a stage where you have “ended” the preparation of the cake – all the ingredients are inside, in proper proportions and properly mixed together – but it should be painfully obvious that there is something else that is still needed. An extra step.

So you put the cake into an oven. And then you close the oven door, and you leave it for a little while for the magic to happen.

In half an hour or an hour, you open up the oven and take out the cake pan. The contents has transformed itself into something that is unrecognisable from the gloopy mess you put into the oven just  a short while ago. Depending on your recipe you have something that’s crusty, or moist, or crunchy… and it smells like heaven, and it tastes even better.

That’s what I mean – the finishing step.

In my case, I had written a wrapping-up sequence of events which tied up the loose ends of the plotline and left the reader with closure. The trouble was, it didn’t. Quite. It was at the gloopy stage, with all the ingredients tucked into the mess but with no real cohesion or meaning to it.

So I stuck it into the metaphorical oven – went back over the book once again, saw where major ingredients were playing an important part, figured out what they meant, figured out what they (as it were) foreshadowed and what still needed to be stirred in and where – and then I looked at it again, and lo! It was now baked, and tasty, and ready to serve.

Many a writer starting out has discovered that ending a book is one of the hardest things that an author is called upon to do. Endings, by virtue of the fact that they are the last thing that your reader sees of your novel, are the last chance you will have to make that reader’s experience a satisfying one. And it’s tough balancing act – you have to provide closure without writing something so impossibly and unbelievably pat that nobody in their right mind would believe for a moment that anything of the sort could possibly have happened (and blam! Goes your willing suspension of disbelief – and once it’s gone it

S GONE and that is all your readers are going to remember – that you couldn’t end the book in a way that left them satisfied and still believing in your world….) You have to balance  a certain amount of cliffhangerism with a certain amount of fatalism – it’s two sides of the same damn coin, and sometimes it feels like the coin is a Moebius coin with only one face and the only way you can provide EITHER of those things is by providing both at once. And that is hard, VERY hard.

There is also the inexactitude of the matter, up to a point, which is why it’s sometimes so hard to step on a story’s tail. Some beginners will cope with this problem by cutting off the story too soon, leaving the reader gasping for air at the end and going, yeah, and THEN what happened…? Others will compensate in the other direction, and will still be telling the yawning reader EXACTLY what had happened, many pages after the story had actually ended.

And there is little in the way of educating yourself on this that you can do, as a writer, other than by doing copious amounts of two things:

1. READING – the more you read the easier it will become for you to learn to recognise the perfect ending in the perfect time frame, or lack of it, and that will percolate into your own work eventually; and
2. WRITING – the more you write the more of a feel you are getting for your own style, for your preferences, for the things that you are GOOD at – and the more stories you tell the easier it becomes to figure out where best they are ended. This may never become an infallible skill – all of us still make mistakes, even years into our publishing careers – but you get better at seeing it, the more practice you put in.

For those of us lucky enough to have them, beta readers are invaluable at this stage. If a reader points to a spot which is a chapter and a half back from where you ended your novel and tells you that the story ends THERE, you’d better pay attention – because that extra padding of a chapter and a half may have muffled that last resonant phrase or event that you wanted your reader to take away with them when they finished the book, rendering those things too distant and too muddled to stay in the memory. Result? Your book’s ending fizzles. The reader puts it down… and forgets it.

Ask someone about last lines. Go look at the concluding paragraphs of your favourite books or stories. As a perfect example of what I am talking about, go and re-read “Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C Clarke for as perfect an ending as you can have in a story. I defy you to forget the words of his last sentence, or the image they are leaving in your mind.

Writing has many suggestions, lots of advice, much of it contradictory or confusing – but there are two very important things that will help carry you through a sagging middle, if you have that problem. The two things are BEGIN WELL and END EVEN BETTER. Those are the things that your readers carry with them when they put your book down. Make them remember your envoi, and they’ll remember the book, and they will remember your name.

The best thing you can ever do, as a writer, is come to a good end.

So. When you end a piece of work, remember that all you’ve done is mixed the proper ingredients together. Remember that there is one last step left before you can call it quits.

It isn’t enough to just END it.

You have to FINISH it.

I don’t know if everyone does it at a certain age in their lives, but sometime way back in the mists of time, when I was too young to know anything about the meaning of the word “impossible”, I wrote down a list of things I wanted to accopmplish in my lifetime.

It’s long since gone, vanished, disappeared – too many house moves, too many upheavals, too many crossroads and choices which were unknown to me at the time the list had been made and which I had to face one at a time as they turned up.

I do remember a couple of things from it.

I seem to recall that one item on it had to do with learning how to ski. Well, I did that. Sort of. At the very least, I stood up on a pair of skis; I knew very well what the first thing that would happen when I did so would be – I would fall over – and that’s precisely what occurred, but I learned to stand up, and then I learned how to move when those great strapping pieces of wood were actually tied onto my feet. I learned how to lean into a turn, and balance, and get up when I fell down, even if it was mid-slope. I learned how to get on and off a ski lift.

I never broke a single bone, and I did ski a couple of intermediate runs (while still a raw beginner) in my time. I remember flying down a slope nearly empty except for me, the wind in my hair and the glitter of snow and frost-etched trees all around me, with my ski-school instructor, a thin, wiry, dark Frenchman from Quebec, leaning down from the ski lift where he was halfway up to the top of the slope and shouting down to me, his hands cupped around his mouth, “Magnifique! Magnifique!!”

Another item had something to do with swimming with dolphins, and I have done that.

Twice.

Seriously, if you EVER have a chance to do this, grab it with both hands and don’t let go, even if they ask your first unborn child as the price. It’s… beyond awesome. It’s meeting an alien species, right here on Earth, and communicating through nothing more than looks and gestures – and trust me, the dolphin communicates, with others of its ilk, with you. There is something transcendental about meeting those bright intelligent eyes which look into yours and say, “I know you. I recognise you. I know what you are, and what I am. I know we are different. I know how very very alike we are.” They’re bigger than one would imagine, and they’re smooth-skinned, and soft, and warm, and they’re so special.

I don’t remember much more of that list in detail, except for one thing, which will surprise nobody who knows me.

I wanted to write a book.

This, too, I have accomplished. This, which has been a dream from childhood, has been given to me, and I am grateful for it beyond belief. I have people writing to me today, in email or in snailmail, who are putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard in order to tell me, someone they don’t know and have never met and probably never will, that they have read my books, and that they loved them, and asking me what my next book is going to be in a gesture of such beautiful and humbling trust and faith that I feel the tears prickling at the back of my eyes.

People ask you, in social situations where they meet you for the first time, “So, what do you do?”

In answer to that question… I can tell you that I am a writer, that I have written books which people have read and liked, that I’ve created a character whose literary demises have caused friends to phone me up at three in the morning to shriek into my ear, “You KILLED her! How could you have killed her?!” – and other characters who have been mentioned in the context of the commenter wanting to “squeeze him by the neck until his eyeballs bugged out”. That I am trusted to tell a story, that I am able to engage thought and emotion in friends and in strangers, is a source of pride and gratitude.

I had a little list, when I was a litle girl and such things meant something – when life was still something huge and mysterious and full of concealing mists and I could write fantasy lists which might never come true because I had yet to learn what was possible and what was dream. But some part of me knew, even back then, even way back then, that there was one dream that transcended lists and wishes.

I am a writer. That came true. That changed everything.

It’s the books – adult or YA – with that little kick of scandal, power to stir, the gift to get tongues wagging, that you remember the longest.

The power of controversy was illustrated not that long ago by the book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey (yeah, you reemmber that one, don’t you?) The author, Frey, scored the highest possible publicity coup that an author in America can get today – he landed on Oprah’s show to discuss the book. She lauded it, gave it her stamp of approval… and then the scandal broke when the “memoir” was revealed to be, well, um, not, um, quite, you know, what actually happened. Oprah pointed a trembling finger and breathed, “You LIED!”

Did the book sales drop? No, they jumped. I walked into my local indie bookstore not too long after the Oprah denouncement only to find Frey’s book prominently displayed on the shelves as a big seller.

Oh, but then the furor died down.

So they rekindled it.

Oprah apologised.

Gues what’s going to happen next? Can you hear the cash registers ringing?

Kids’s books aren’t so much banned for lying about things as for telling the kind of truth that some people find acutely uncomfortable.

The winner of the 2007 Newberry Award (that’s like the Nobel Prize for kidlit) was a book called “The Higher Power of Lucky”, by Susan Pantry – a public librarian. The book featured a word which made a slew of public-minded school librarians fly into a tizzy and ban the books from school library shelves. No, the word wasn’t a four-letter word, or swearing, or anything remotely inapporpriate as such. No. The controversy arose about the fact that Pantry’s protagonist happens to note the existence of a dog’s scrotum, and called it by name. Not even because of any salacious intent whatsoever – it happens to be the part of the dog’s anatomy that is relevant to the subject currently under discussion at the time in the book. But oh, the storm in that teacup – an actual word which applied to a part of the human body that we’d like to keep under wraps crept into the text of an award-winning book, and suddenly it did not matter in the least that the award was one given for young readers’ literature – there was the issue of “appropriateness”, and what it was or was not appropriate for our children to know.

The years have passed and so, apparently, has the storm. But I do remember wondering, at the time, whether I should introduce the word “scrotum” into my own YA novel… just to see if I could get a similar rise out there.

Books are banned or challenged in schools and libraries all the time – there is now a Banned Books Week to celebrate these volumes, and you can purchase merchandise that proudly proclaims, “I read banned books!” And why not? Titles banned or challenged in recent years include household names and true classics. Here’s a sampling:

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

Colfer, Eoin. The Supernaturalist.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.

Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass.

Meyer, Stephenie H. Twilight Series.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye.

Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens]. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Baron, T. A. Child of the Dark Prophecy.

Judy Blume, Forever

The reasons given range from “sexual content” – even if teens have seen more sex on TV than could possibly be packed between the covers of a YA book – to “race/gender issues”, to “deals with the occult”. In other words, mostly things that make the PARENTS uncomfortable – it took an adult mind to call Noddy “gay”, and therefore objectionable. And it only takes one parent with a mission for the books to start their journey on the Banned Book path.

But take heart – look at some of those titles, some of those authors. They’re classics, old and new; some of them have been selling for generations, others, newer ones, are going to be doing the same thing as the kids of the kids who were banned from reading them re-discover the “forbidden” literature of their elders.

Some of the most banned and challenged of all YA books, ever, have been the seven books of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. All of them. All of the time. Constantly. Why?

Elizabeth Kennedy, in “Harry Potter – The Censorship Battles”, writes:

“Depending on who you talk to, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are either wonderful fantasy novels with powerful messages for kids, or they are evil books designed to promoted an interest in the occult since Harry is a wizard…. The latest challenge began in Gwinnett County, Georgia, where a parent challenged the Harry Potter books on the grounds that they promoted wichcraft. When school officials ruled against her, she went to the state Board of Education. When the BOE confirmed the right of local school officials to make such decision, she took her battle against the books to court. Although the judge ruled against her in the spring of 2007, she has indicated she might continue her fight against the series.”

Last I looked, Georgia has not been inundated by a gaggle of young witches waving tiny wands and chanting “Wingardium Leviosa!” Very few spells have been cast. Really. But boy, is the torch-burning mob of outraged villagers kindling not the books themselves but the sheer enthusiasm for them! For most young readers of average to superior intelligence and curiosity, a blanket “Thou Shalt Not Read This”, particularly when accompanied by nothing stronger than “Because I said so!”, is tantamount to making the reading of that banned material essential. Nothing attracts like forbidden fruit. I wonder if therre WERE any kid readers of Potter who were actually disappointed that they didn’t turn into a tiny wizard or witch themselves after dutifully reading Rowlings’ increasingly weighty tomes.

But even the witchcraft controversy gets old after a while – there are only so many times you can point to something not happening and try and claim it was because you “pre-emptively” banned the book in question. Something new was needed. And Rowling seems to have an excellent sense of timing for controversy. Just as the Pottermania was beginning to wind down, with no more new Potter books on the horizon, she turned to a packed audience at Carnegie Hall and revealed that DUMBLEDORE WAS GAY. She added, after the revelation, “You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! …Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?”

All new ammunition for the controversy-chasers. Now we had not only witches on the loose, but gay wizards, too, and surely, SURELY that had to be bad for the children’s morals?

Can you hear those cash registers ringing…?

There are other controversies out there, some of them focused on matters potentially far more “real” than a fantasy wizarding world. One of the latest kerfuffles to blow up in the blogosphere is the so-called “mammothfail” discussion concerned with Patricia Wrede’s new book, “The Thirteenth Child”. Pat Wrede wrote a novel which she described at one point as “Frontier Fantasy with Mammoths” – it was a fantasy “Little House on the Prairie” but instead of Native Americans Wrede populated her North American continent with woolly mammoths and other extinct beasties. The Native American tribes who would usually have made that place their home were noticeable by their absence.

The blogosphere exploded with outrage. Wrede had written a book that “denied the existence of an entire race”, and was therefore a Bad Evil writer who had a Hidden Agenda and had written the book in order to apparently erase a subset of the human race from the face of the earth. But the book to which her novel initially alluded, the “Little House of the Prairie” of beloved memory to many, had its own very serious issues – I read a review of it by someone who was descended from one of the Native American tribes from whom, essentially, the Ingalls family stole their homesteading land. In that reality-based story, the Indians were just as “vanished” as in Wrede’s book – because they did not MATTER in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s world. But her book was given to kids to read – and generations of them loved it to bits.

Wrede chose not to take the all-too-real issues of the Native American population – as we know them today – into her what-if fantasy world, and her avoiding the issues seems to be treated as far worse than Ingalls’s whitewashing of them.

I suspect that Wrede didn’t go that route not because she wanted to hurt anybody at all but because the issues that would otherwise have had to be addressed would have probably been beyond the scope of a YA novel of the ilk that she was writing – and if she had tried to address them in an appropriate manner there would have been somebody who would have objected on the grounds that she was being too graphic, or that she was stereotyping her Native American characters, or that she was making every Native American character a “magic Negro” shaman who could come along and wave a hand and make everything all better. Wrede’s “pioneer” family came from a magic-wielding world, where everybody wielded magic. Her choices, had she included the Native American population, would have been one worse than the next – she could have had that segment of the population have no magic at all compared to the settlers (raising the question, why not them if everyone else?), or she could have had them possess different magic to the settlers (which, if the settlers’s magic defeated it in a game of magical rock-paper-scissors context, would have begged the question as to why the Native magic was inherently weaker than the settlers’ magic – and if it was not weaker, then how come the settlers won…?) The issues are many, and complex, and there probably isn’t a right answer other than not to write anything at all – but also, here, there is a shot of story with a chaser of controversy. A lot more people have now heard of “The Thirteenth Child” than might have done had Wrede courted no controversy at all, whether consciously or accidentally. One wonders if the Potter Effect will step in and take the matter to an obvious conclusion.

So – some books are controversial because of manufactured drama, some because of any number of genuine issues that arise from them (to paraphrase a statement about greatness which seems to apply, some books are born controversial, and some have controversy thrust upon them…)

How do YOU feel about controversy in books, particularly in books for yournger readers? What really matters to you in books like these? What would be the thing that would make YOU draw the line if you were choosing a book for a young reader of your own?

What sins are unforgivable? And what kind of storm in a teacup is simply a stir-up to gather interest and reader passion, and let the wind blow where it will…?

Selected Bibliography:

James Frey, “A Million Little Pieces”

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1897924,00.html

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Pantry

http://www.readersread.com/cgi-bin/bookblog.pl?bblog=220071

http://ecochildsplay.blogspot.com/2007/02/newberry-controversy.html

Banned Books, Children’s Literature

http://childrensbooks.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=childrensbooks&cdn=parenting&tm=29&f=10&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.1.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.ila.org/pub/banned.htm

http://childrensbooks.about.com/od/censorship/tp/bannedbooks.htm

Harry Potter

http://childrensbooks.about.com/cs/censorship/a/banharry.htm

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/10/20/j-k-rowling-at-carnegie-hall-reveals-dumbledore-is-gay-neville-marries-hannah-abbott-and-scores-more

The Thirteenth Child

http://ilya1.livejournal.com/143228.html

http://elynross.livejournal.com/435519.html

http://www.reasoninmadness.com/?p=661

Did you ever see the moment when individual people poured into a city street, channelled by houses and parked cars and city intersections, tributaries flowing in from side streets, fallling into step with other people and joining in, then suddenly changing, re-forming, giving voice to something that has a thousand hearts but no conscious mind, the metamorphosis of a handful of people into a crowd… and then into a mob?

I have. It’s frightening. Human beings who lose their humanity and turn into a multi-headed hydra monster capable of most anything, with human conscience silenced and hidden away and even the memory of things done under such hypnotic mass action often blurred and changed and twisted and buried afterwards. People who turn into nothing more than a voice, a roar, a fury, a release of chaos and a desire to burn and destroy and find something, somebody, to be a target for their anger.

Mobs – the blurred beast of many faces, the roar of a thousand throats that changes from a human voice, a human shout, to the thunder of a wounded lion-god about to exact its vengeance for its spilled blood.

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Did you ever find yourself at a crowded picnic on, say, the Fourth of July, or a packed crowd on New Year’s Eve somewhere like Times Square or Trafalgar Square, or part of a jubilant heaving mass of people at a victory parade throwing confetti at heroes and ready to kiss a stranger walking by out of sheer overflow of joy? At Obama’s election night rally in Chicago?

The kind of gathering where two people who do not know one another might catch each other’s eye and nod and smile, and hug for no reason, and squeal with joy and sheer enjoyment at some spectacle or at the prospect of some person’s advancement or victory, and share something that is a visceral happiness, something wordless and yet utterly and instantly communicated by a quick grin, or a thumbs-up, or the waving of a flag?

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Did you ever watch a realistic movie depiction of a battlefield? The kind where people scream and clash and fall and are trampled in the mud and the blood – the ring of steel on steel, the stench of powder and the smell of human sweat, human blood, human fear? The utter chaos of the melee, or the complete waste of charging from trenches into the mouth of enemy machine guns? The scream of dying horses? The hiss of arrows, or the whine of bullets flying past? The panicked rout of the side which is losing?

I’ve looked at crowds that way.

Have you ever looked at a crowd through the eyes of a single character in a story – sometimes not seeing the crowd at all, just seeing the reaction on a single person’s face to something that he is watching? Can anyone remember the expression on the face of Dr Zhivago as he watches the slaughter of the protesters in the square from his balcony, appalled, helpless, unable to do anything at all but bear witness…?

Because that is what you are, as the writer. The one who bears witness.

It was Stalin who said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. This is true, and there is no way that you as a writer can adequately convey the magnitude of a massacre, or of a genocide. But somewhere in those million deaths which are a statistic there are a handful of characters whose deaths are your tragedy, and they exemplify your statistic, they make your statistic horrible in a way that you could never do if you simply tried to go global in your description.

We are individuals. We connect to individuals. Newbie actors or public speakers are often told that to combat stage fright they should find a single friendly face in an audience and speak as though addressing that person alone. We seek out other individuals whose stories we can share – stories that are part of some greater whole, but which are easier to grasp, to understand, to hear, to mourn, to condemn or to reward. The key to writing a main protagonist’s interaction with any kind of crowd is picking a few key players in that crowd and making the entire crowd matter because THESE people matter.

It’s the trick of concentrating on some of the people, all of the time – when you aren’t talking about all of the people some of the time.

Even that mob of which I spoke, the single-minded avatar of destruction which flows like lava and is just as unstoppable – even that has individual components. Your protagonist might be caught up in the mob or watching them from the safety of a second-floor window but even while understanding the immensity of this new monster which is many-people-at-once there will be a face here, a rolling eye there, a raised fist somewhere else, that will catch the eye – that will exemplify, bring into clarity and focus, the things that the mob stands for, has gathered for.

Often it’s a few exchanged words that will help. Not necessarily with a full-fledged or even named secondary character. Just somebody – somebody in a crowd, someone whose voice, for just a moment, is heard saying something individual and focused, something that the protagonist might hear, be listening for, or may nearly miss because of all the other things going on but which is utterly important anyway.

If it were possible to take a photo with both a fish-eye lens and a telephoto lens at once, this might be what you are aiming for with a protagonist interacting with groups or crowds. You take a fish-eye photo, giving the big picture, giving the global overview, giving a sense of numbers and of mood and of the chaos inherent in any gathering of human beings – and yet you are also looking straight through that wide angle shot and seeing an individual face here and there, focusing on a twist of the lip, a gleam in the eye, a gesture of the hand, the way the light falls on an upturned face, the sound of a single word.

Have you ever looked at the crowds that surround your protagonist? They are many. They are one. It doesn’t matter whose the single voice is when you need one from out of the mutltitude. Just make sure there IS one.

Watch out for the POV. You cannot know the thoughts of a thousand people. Your protagonist can never quite completely comprehend the things that swirl around him or her out in the world. Part of the story you are telling consists of the misapprehensions and misunderstandings between human beings – and the more of them there are, the more misunderstandings are possible, even probable. But you cannot speak with a thousand voices at once – because then you pass from misunderstanding to incoherence.

Think of it in terms of the song (paraphrased):

“I’ve looked at crowds from both sides now

from pain and joy

and still somehow

it’s crowds’ individuals I recall

I really don’t know why

At all…”

One of the proudest moments of my writing life occurred when a friend from Florida phoned my new home in the Pacific Northwest of the USA at midnight my time (3 AM hers) and screamed, “You KILLED HER! How could you kill her? How could you do that?”

She was talking about a main protagonist, and I would have hoped for a reaction like this for the demise of a character of that ilk, fully fleshed out and lovingly helped along the way to becoming as “real” as any flesh-and-blood creature ever encountered by the reader. More real, in fact, because this character was someone who, over the course of a novel, became an intimate, a friend, someone whom the reader cares about deeply – with far more passion than they would care about the identity, fate, or motivations of an arbitrary commuter with whom they might briefly share a few moments on the bus and then probably never see again. The degree of realness is not a variable of physicality. Novels depend on their success, to a huge extent, on how “real” their characters are to their readers.

But those are protagonists, the carriers of plot and story, and if the reader does not respond to them (or responds to them in the wrong way) the entire novel is at risk of imploding. There is nothing worse for a novel than the application of the Eight Deadly Words by the reader: “I Don’t Care What Happens to These People”. The readers have to care. They have to care with a degree of passion. Otherwise… it’s all just wind turning pages.

There are other characters who inhabit a story, however. On a recent convention panel, this kind of character was referred to in a cavalier manner as “The Third Spear Carrier On The Left” (or TTSCOTL for short); those who have a certain background might know some of them as Red Shirts; for the rest of the readers they might get lumped into a general corral which is labelled “secondary characters”.

Well, but that isn’t quite there, either. A true Red Shirt is a throwaway, possibly a character with no lines at all, somebody who plays the role of a witness in the crowd or a piece of cannon fodder, depending on circumstances. But a true secondary character has a little more weight than that – more engagement with the reader, despite being on stage for a very limited time in an extremely limited role.

And apparently I’m remarkably good at engaging heartstrings for a non-major-protag character only to have them shuffle off the mortal coil and out of the novel just because I’m, like, totally heartless and without feeling – at least according to an Australian friend, a devoted reader of my work, who has a perennial quibble about me and such characters. She and I have occasionally discussed what these secondary characters owe their creator, the story in which they appear, and the readers who encounter them in those stories.

I said that sometimes what such a character owes the story and the reader is… perhaps unfairly… a poignant demise, a manner of death which drives a story forward and builds the character of the protagonist in some way.

I look at that concept – “a poignant demise” – and kind of feel like a bloodthirsty Aztec deity waiting, slavering, for the human sacrifice which will ensure my power (or my survival). But there’s more to it than that, as always.

Secondary characters can sometimes be utterly essential, even pivotal, with an entire storyline turning on a word or a deed which was uttered or performed by a character who NEVER had center stage, nor wanted it. They can make things easier, or make things harder. But the most important thing about them is… that they have their OWN stories. Those stories are just not the story being told right here, right now.

There are a couple of secondary characters in my “Changer of Days” books who exemplify this idea, and they fall neatly into two convenient sub-categories – the under-hero(ine), and the under-villain. If you have not read the books and wish to, and don’t particularly want spoilers, now’s the time to look away…

Okay.

The one character whom my Australian friend has never quite forgiven me for is Queen Senena from “Changer of Days”. Senena enters as someone who is almost a non-entity – she is the replacement for a barren first wife, for an usurper-king who desperately needs an heir and a bride to produce it.

All he sees in Senena is a barely-budded, biddable child, old enough to bear him the needed heir, young enough to be cowed and bullied into being a compliant companion when wanted and relegated into seen-and-not-heard when the King had better things to do. And a lesser creature, an ordinary woman, a throwaway child-bride character, would have done just that, and faded away into the background. But Senena is made of sterner stuff, and she has a mind of her own, and a spine. When she finds out the unspeakable things that her husband has done she does not crumple on the floor and whimper – she steps up to the problem and grasps its thorny vine with both delicate hands, defies her husband, countermands his orders in his absence.

When the cruel King returns she will inevitably pay for all this – but at the same time she is finally pregnant and at the very least the punishment will have to be delayed, and his temper might cool with time. So she takes her chances, the little Queen, showing unexpected strength and moral convictions and taking control of something that she ought never to have even had any knowledge about – and yes, she pays for this dearly. She commands the release of an important prisoner – the novel’s protagonist – from the King’s dungeons, in order that said prisoner might have a walk under the free and open sky. The friends of the prisoner – the character whose name has been mine ever since I entered the cyberworld, Anghara, the rightful heir of the throne which the King has stolen – know this is their only chance to free her from the King’s clutches. They take it. There are inevitable casualties. One of them… is the little Queen who made it all possible.

Senena is a light in that novel. When that light is extinguished, the darkness is, for a moment, overwhelming. But she will ALWAYS be a light. Her memory will remain a light. Her spirit will shine like a star in the night, guiding others to try and aspire to be like her. For a secondary character, she has achieved a great deal.

The second secondary character of note is a young man by the name of Ansen. Heir to his father’s estate, a young aristocrat with a severe sense of entitlement, he sees it as his absolute right to take what he wants because it is due him. When one such act results in appalling consequences – he loses the sight of one eye – he becomes deeply embittered, and focused on only one thing: what he sees as his rightful revenge.

This takes the form of betraying his cousin, the same Anghara whose escape from the King’s dungeons caused Senena to meet her death, to the King who has long been seeking her – knowing that the King seeks Anghara for no pleasant purpose and that only her own demise might finally clear his own claim to the throne.

Ansen goes seeking the King, thinking only of how his news of Anghara and her whereabouts might impact on his own future – how the King, whom he idolises, will be grateful for the information that Ansen is bringing, how his reward will be status and power and a place at the court. Unfortunately, he reaches the King in the aftermath of a choice which, once made, has irrevocably scarred the King’s own soul. The King is not interested in Ansen, or in his news. He makes an instant and arbitrary decision and sentences Ansen himself to a traitor’s death – he is to be hanged at dawn.

Unaware of this – locked up by himself in a room overnight but expecting to be able to see the King in the morning – Ansen is happy, excited, to see the King’s minion in the morning, and asks for a comb, for a washcloth, so that he can make himself presentable to the King. Slowly the reality of it all sinks in, though, and the last we see of him is a frightened child – which, after all, is very much what he still is – being led off to his execution.

The King glances at the procession through his window, and looks away – and Ansen never knew that he had had even that much of the King’s attention.

“Who was that?” one of the King’s companions asks curiously as the King turns away from the window.

“Nobody,” the King says, and forgets.

Outside, a young man’s wasted life, filled with slaking an aristocrat’s appetites and the simmering resentment and fury when that ability was taken away, is over as a new day breaks. It seems that he had done nothing, achieved nothing, that even in his death he had no more status than being called a nobody by the King whom it had been his desire to serve.

He might be a villain… but in the end he is pitiful, and his despairing death manages to pull at a reader’s heartstrings even while they’re satisfied that he has finally got his comeuppance. And he does not die entirely in vain. His life, after all, might be taken… as a lesson to others.

That’s what secondary characters do, that’s why they’re there – good secondary characters DO have entire lives of their own, lives hinted at in the narrative where they are not the primary plot carriers but lives which could nevertheless fill their own books if they were to focus on such individuals.

In other words, the way I write, the way I see a story, there really are no “secondary” characters, no character who is unimportant, who does not matter at all. Lives touch in unexpected ways – and a “secondary” character in one novel is no more than a protagonist of their own story who happened to wander into the current tale just long enough to make their presence felt. It is important, to my mind, to have such characters exist because they are the eyes and the souls through which a protagonist measures him or herself; they are the history through which the protagonist’s own story is woven.

Guy Gavriel Kay uses this concept to wonderful effect in “Last Light of the Sun”, where he weaves in the histories of people you meet only briefly and in passing – who barely touch the lives of his protagonists, if at all – but whose presence in the book enriches and deepens the narrative, gives it a context, gives it soul, gives it a sense of not being “just a novel” but instead being a window into real lives and real troubles and real joys, something that happens in a real world, a world full of “other” people whose effect on the POV characters can sometimes be only that they exist, and that by their existence they prove that there is a true world in that novel, a world whose boundaries are not defined by the covers of a given book, and which lures the reader further in and deeper in and invites the total immersion which defines a sense of wonder and a willing suspension of disbelief as they step into a world created by a mind different than their own.

Protagonists – primary characters – carry a story on their shoulders.

Secondary characters make the story possible, believable, real. Yes, sometimes they die. But sometimes… their very death within the story makes them immortal.

Senena still has a hold on my Australian friend, years after she has finished and laid down the book in which the little Queen made her appearance. Senena was not, never tried to be, a protagonist – but in her own way she caused just as much drama when she died as the main protag whose own demise caused my Florida reader to call me at three in the morning in outraged disbelief.

And in some ways… Senena’s may be the greater achievement

It has a life cycle, the ‘otherness’.

It slumbers, dormant, wrapped in the silken threads of a pupa – and then the silk shreds, and the thing inside surges out with beating wings – and some see a butterfly there, and some see a vampire bat ready to suck the life out of whatever target it’s aimed at (be it pretension, prejudice or just passion). And then it dies down again for a while, and the idea pupates again and hangs there, waiting, for the next trigger to help it along.

The idea of Writing the Other, of Cultural Appropriation, of breaking the cardinal rule of writing – “Write what you know”.

This time there were several independent triggers which then coalesced into a blogosphere carnival of comment and countercomment – a selection of the current crop of discussions on the matter has been gahtered <a href=”http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-cultural-appropriation-debate-of.html”>here</a> – and you can go back and re-read it all if you wish. I shall focus on a few independent throughts, rather than trying to respond to any individual or any particular concept.

A few obvious caveats at the start –

1. I am a white woman, a middle-class princess who didn’t grow up pampered but definitely grew up sheltered, and I freely admit that this position in life has shaped who and what I have become.

1. I am unusual in one respect. I have lived and studied and worked – or even just travelled – on every continent of this planet excepting South America and the Antarctic. I attended schools and colleges in at least four countries, and my best friends during those years were from China, Sweden, Malawi, Wales, Canada, Serbia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Greece; they were atheist, Catholic, Jewish, pagan. I am not a monocultural monolith. I have interacted, spoken with, laughed with, cried with, been outraged with, shared joy with, squabbled with, sang with, been exasperated with and loved many different kinds of human being. There have been plenty of differences between them. Sharing some small part of your childhood and youth with somebody who is not like you doesn’t immediately grant you magical comprehension and insight into that other person’s thoughts and feelings. It does, however, give you a grounding in a lot of different ways of looking at things. I may not have walked many miles in the shoes of otherness, but I have taken a first step or two into it here and there, enough to realise that I was in a country that might look familiar but was in fact subtly and fascinatingly not my own back yard at all. I am not approaching this from the point of view of expecting everyone to conform to the same stupid boring template; I believe our world is the richer for all the things that are in it.

Let me back into this by taking up that calcified old chestnut of ‘write what you know’ – with which aspiring authors are gifted as soon as they string two words together – and smash it into a thousand pieces.

Read more…

“Here there be dragons”. Words written on maps in ancient times, to indicate places where no humans had been, which were unknown, unexplored, dangerous, magical. The places where real magic might really dwell.

“Here there be dragons”. I’ve chosen the fantasy genre because of that very thing. It’s freeing to me to know that even if I don’t, personally, know the lay of the land in the places where the dragons lurk – well – neither does anyone else, and therefore I am free to create my own geography, my own history, my own world.

I’ve always loved the worldbuilding aspect of the fantasy genre, the part where I get to go wading out into the dark unknown with nothing but a tiny flashlight in my hand and it is by that light alone, MY light, the light that I choose to shine and the spot I choose to illumine, that determines what anybody else who might be following me is likely to see, understand, remember.

All the worlds are a blank page before a writer’s eyes fall upon them.

But I cannot seem to get that dictum to stick with stuff that is supposed to take place in the “real” world, our world, the mundane everyday days that we all inhabit routinely. For some reason I can write lush, rich, penetrating prose about characters who can never exist – who live only inside my own head, who cope with dragons or their equivalent on a daily basis – but present me with a cast of characters who are living realistic, mundane lives in the common shared reality with the potential reader, and I freeze.

Read more…

When first you decide to take up the life of the pen, you set foot upon a magic road. Somewhere on that road, eventually, you come up on a crossroads, and the signposts point you deeper into the writing life, or away.

You’d think that if you had already made your decision, the choice would be simple. But no – it is not as straightforward as it seems. If you turn away, we have nothing further to talk about. But if you choose the Writer’s Path, you have to realise one thing. This is not a straight road. This is not a “tame lion”.

So. You choose the road to writerhood.

Or you THINK you do.

But several odd things happen once you veer in that direction. The thing you love – the thing you thought you could do so well and so easily – the thing that you hold to be the most precious gift of your life – uh – yeah – that. The thing about writing is that it has to be a choice that cuts both ways. You choose writing, but unless it chooses you back there is nowhere to go from here.

A friend recently took a sabbatical from his working life, one year to see if this writing lark was something that he could do. Not too long ago he wrote,

One of my goals with this sabbatical is to determine whether writing is the passion I’m supposed to be following. I didn’t expect the answer to come within two months of my time off.

Looks like writing isn’t for me.

I’ve found that I struggle far too hard against myself to get the words out on the screen. There’s something inside me that fights and resists the whole process. It’s that clenched, horrible feeling that what I’m doing just isn’t right — not in an editorial sense, but in a spiritually-exhausting sense. For now (because I can always take another go) I think I’m not meant to be writing.

My response to him was to give it a little more time, not to give up on something that he loves and that he thought would give him pleasure and reward. But there’s the choosing, right there. Here is someone who CHOSE writing – and who thinks, rightly or wrongly at this point, that writing did not choose him back. It was just not something that he enjoyed any more. At the point where a joy becomes a chore, it’s just too damned hard to keep going.

But who said it was easy? Who said it was supposed to be?

I have lived by the Word, by the Pen, for a decade now. There were times that the stories flowed, bubbled, flooded out of me – things that had to be written, had to be said, things that told themselves. Things that took me by the throat and bullied me fiercely until I gave them shape and form. And then there were the other things – the ones that stalled, that stared back at me from the computer screen, the ones that left me teetering on brinks of cliffs with no visible way down or over. The things I hung on to with grim determination, the things I had to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. I know exactly what my friend means when he said what he said –

I’ve found that I struggle far too hard against myself to get the words out on the screen. There’s something inside me that fights and resists the whole process. It’s that clenched, horrible feeling that what I’m doing just isn’t right — not in an editorial sense, but in a spiritually-exhausting sense.

I’ve been there. I’ve fought that inner monster. There are battlefields still bloody within me that testify to those wars.

And then I picked myself up, washed off the blood, stared wryly at new scars, and staggered back onto the road again.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a personal thing. Something that makes my friend look at the writing life and choose the other road at the crossroads might be the very same thing that makes me stubbornly determined to go on, no matter what – it’s a personal thing, a personal choice, and only you can decide which voices clamouring for your attention you are willing to listen to, Because… well… this is not the last time you will come to this crossroads.

The Writer’s Path is a loop, you see. It comes back to the crossroads again and again. It might switch nature or direction as you choose it over and over, it might well take you to places that you never expected to be – but it’s still a road that somehow manages to return to the crossroads, bring you back here, and then shimmer invitingly before you once more with a whisper – Are you sure? This time, are you sure? Do you have the strength? Do you have the faith?

Because that is the only thing that will let you travel this road.

Faith.

The belief that somehow, somewhere, there IS a final destination.

The road is deceptive, and without faith it’s easy to flounder and fail. There are times that a writer plodding along will look up and see mountains. And beyond them, there is nothing but more mountains. And after a while the most deathless of devotions, the most heartfelt adoration, the most obstinate determination, they all flounder against that final rock wall that doesn’t seem to have a path around it and you are just too tired to climb. So you fall to your knees in front of it, exhausted, and you whisper, “Enough.” And somehow… it melts away. And you’re back at the crossroads. And you look at the signs again, and sigh, and turn away from the Writer’s Path and take the other road – the road that doesn’t loop or meander, that leads straight out of here – into a whole other set of traps and fancies, to be sure, but they are no longer the Writer’s Path or its problems. And you can do this. Many people have.

You can, if you aren’t completely defeated, try and look for a road around and struggle with the circumstances at the base of the cliff for a while. Often this will seem to give you an option, an “out”, but it frequently detours into marshes or into deserts or into the cold inhospitable vacuum of interstellar space. You are always free to say “Enough”, and you’re back at the crossroads again – but it depends on how much punishment you’re willing to endure.

Or… you still have a bit of grit left. You reach up, dig your fingers into invisible hand holds, fit your body against unforgiving stone, and you climb – because it is the only thing that you can do. And one of three things can happen here. You are unequal to the task, and you fail, and you fall, and you’re back at the crossroads and you bow your head and surrender. Or you prevail and climb to the top, but once you get there all you can see is more mountains to climb, more cliffs, more high peaks, more snows on Caradhras to drive you into Moria – and you can surrender here, and turn back and yes, you’re back at the crossroads again,

Or you get to the top and pause to catch your breath… and you see the Writer’s Path unwinding in front of you, leading down into a pleasant valley, and the name of the valley is Hope, and the name of the village you step into is Strength, and the name of the drink they offer you at the door of the inn is called Joy.

Even though you quickly realise that – although you now know this place is here and you can return to it any time you choose, even if only in memory or dream – the Writer’s Path does not end here. It goes on, beyond, somewhere ELSE, somewhere new. Perhaps there are more cliffs to be climbed, ahead. Perhaps you’ll find yourself back at the crossroads, yet again.

But the secret of the strength to choose the Path over and over, against all odds, is simply this. Through the shadows, through the agony, through the blood and sweat and tears and the pain, you must keep the faith. When all other voices fall silent there is that one, the last, the quiet one which will not be denied.

I am a writer. My blood flows through a writer’s veins. My mind is full of a writer’s dreams. My heart beats for the word and for the things that it means. My joy is the elixir of having written. I am a writer. I believe.

And after that… trust the faith to take you home.

I stepped out of my house the other day on my way to an appointment, and fumbled for a moment to ferret out the key that belonged to my own front door so I could lock up behind me. Getting into my car, I had to drop that key and get another – the one that fit into the ignition, turned it on, enabled me to move the vehicle – and myself in it – so that I could go to the place where I needed to be. On the way there, I stopped at the mail facility and shuffled my key ring searching for yet another key – that of the mail box.

I have the keys to two homes on my keyring, the keys to two separate post office boxes, the car key – and several other things.

There is a small powerful flashlight; a USB drive that does duty as a MedicAlert bracelet warning those who need to know of my medical allergies in case something should happen to me; a bunch of discount store cards for various food stores, a pet store, a general store based in my state – things I routinely tender to cashiers at those places and which get me a few bucks off my purchases. There are a couple of separate keyrings hanging on my main ring, commemorating events or places important to me, reaching back to my cultural heritage and ethnic background, things that would instantly identify me as who and what I am should someone in the know discover me incapacitated or unable to speak but with the key ring on me.

That’s my life there, all gathered together in one bunch of keys and accessories. My keyring serves as a better window into my lifestyle, personality, history and responsibilities than any government-issue ID.

And it struck me that my keyring is a potent symbol of my coming of age, of being an adult human being living in a society that is at a certain level of civilization – because only adults get to have keys that open real locks, that open doors into levels of responsibility and duty that you just don’t have when you’re six and you’re happily waving around a fake keyring containing three or four brightly coloured rubber keys the size of your forearm which are merely a promise of things to come – you get REAL keys when you “grow up”. It is no accident that when you turn 21 – come “of age” – you are handed… a key.

My thoughts turned to writing, as they always do.

What do keys mean in the coming-of-age of a writer? What would the keys of my keyring symbolise in terms of my own writerly identity?

Well, let’s list them.

- Common-or-garden house keys. I own a home. I have an interest in another household whose keys I am entitled to carry. I am a responsible adult who has a life writ in brick and mortar and wood and rooftile and bookshelves and plumbing and utilities bills that get sent to this address, and an Internet connection. All of these things live behind a front door which I can close against the world, and am entitled to lock as a protection against invasion by uninvited strangers. Writerly translation – I live in many worlds, and those worlds need to be constructed in a manner that makes them self-consistent and ‘real’ in the minds of someone else, someone just visiting, the reader who gets to know these worlds cursorily and in passing. I am, in effect, creating a secondary world to which I carry a key – and I am responsible for that world and all that lives in it – and I am also responsible for handing out pass-keys to those who wish to visit, the readers whom I am inviting in. Behind a locked door whereof I am guardian live characters and places which exist nowhere else except in my own mind. One definitely has to grow into this responsibility – the worlds that we create while our writerly training wheels are still on often have doors that do not lock, because we are yet to be trusted with the keys to our kingdoms – and what lies behind these “training” doors are universes where things have not yet shaken down to a safe and consistent level of interaction, and, well, you don’t want people accidentally locking themselves out. Or in. You have to reach a certain level of profficiency and professionalism in order to be trusted with a key. You have to “grow up” as a writer.

- Mail box keys. Communication with the outside world – this is where everything comes to me, letters from friends or fans, bills, junk mail, catalogues, petitions, voting ballots, mysterious packages. You do not get bills unless you are at least theoretically able to be responsible for paying them – it’s another dimension of that “adulthood” thing. Writerly translation – I communicate with readers, both indirectly (the story itself) and directly (when readers write to me with questions or comments). This interaction is not possible unless you share your words with others. You can write for yourself and hide your secret diaries under your mattress where nobody will see them until they come for your cold, dead body – and that is fine, and if you count the definition of “writer” as “one who writes” you may count yourself as one, but if you do this then you are not a public writer, you have not “come of age” as a writer. It is certainly permissible to never want another human eye to light on something you’ve put down on paper, for whatever good and solid reason you might have for that – but if all you’re writing for is catharsis you might as well write the stuff and then go out back to the barbeque and burn it when you’re done. If you write to be read then you need to learn to communicate. If ONE reader tells you that something you have written is unclear or obtuse or confusing, you are permitted to regard that as one person’s opinion and basically ignore it if you so choose. If THREE people tell you these things, you might do well to consider the fact that you are failing at communicating something to other people, and that the fault may well lie within yourself, and take a cold hard look at what you’ve written. And see how you can make it clearer, cleaner, more comprehensible. This is also a sign of writerly maturity, of “coming of age”, and there are some writers who never get here, some writers who declare that everything that they have written is a “work of art” and therefore not to be messed with and if you don’t get it then it’s you who’s the fool, not them, not ever them. If you don’t get past this, if you never gain the ability to receive constructive criticism and to take relevant and considered action on what you’ve been told, you’ll never quite get the key to that mailbox. People aren’t going to communicate with you if you aren’t commuincating with them.

- Car Keys. These turn on your wheels. Without these, you aren’t going anywhere except on foot, or by bicycle, or by bus. On foot is lovely when you’re taking a walk but not so pleasant when you’re struggling home with bags full of groceries. By bicycle is great when you’re taking a pleasure ride but not so much when you have to be somewhere by a certain time and it’s raining and the cars on the road whiz past you and soak you with dirty puddle water or drive you off the road, or a dog chases you down a street, and you arrive where you need to be in an unlovely irritable mood, hot and sweaty, and with a bad case of helmet hair. By bus is terrific and very environmentally responsible – but bus lines don’t run everywhere, you have to work to other people’s timetables, you often need to add that “on foot” phase at either end of the bus ride to get to where you REALLY want to go, and often you have to spend frustrating, dull, unproductive and uncomfortable hours waiting for those buses in bus shelters without a roof in the drizzle. Writerly translation – you aren’t allowed to get an official driver’s licence until you are so many years old. Any younger, andyou can’t reach the pedals properly, or you need to have a learner’s permit and someone else who knows what they’re doing accompanying you when you wish to drive someplace. You are also convinced that you are immortal, and are more likely to take stupid risks with what is essentially a large and massive missile which can HURT people. In other words, you have to be THIS TALL to ride – you have to grow up, become responsible, learn about the craft of driving, know how to get out of a skid or how to drive in a storm. In like wise, you get handed the keys to your own career as a writer when you learn to “drive” by yourself – when you make responsible decisions, when you have a good idea about where you’re going and have a notion about how to get there, when you know the limits on speed or the kind of road that you’re geared to travel on writing-wise. You’re also in a position to appreciate the writing maxim that E.L Doctorow put into the lexicon of writerly quotations – he said that writing is like driving cross-country at night. You can only see a tiny bit of the road that’s revealed by your headlights, and the rest of it is in darkness and you cannot see it at all – but you can make the entire journey that way, simply by trusting what you can see right in front of you, illuminated by your writerly headlights. You need to have a writerly car key, for that.

- Store discount cards. I have four on my keyring. One is to a generic supermarket, one to an organic food place, one to a pet store, one is a general purpose store which sells everything from books to luggage to frozen pizza to bras. Together, they paint a certain picture of the person who carries them. I shop in a generic supermarket when I have to, in the organic place when I can; I am owned by pets; I occasionally have a need to go into a place that sells EVERYTHING and trust to serendipity. Writerly translation – what “stores” does your imagination shop at? The “cards” that you carry define you as a writer. They will define the things that will go into your stories. They will sketch out in your own mind, without your having written one word, what KIND of words you are going to write. Do you carry a fantasy store card (elves, fairies, dragons, wings…)? Or a science fiction store card (spaceships, FTL, aliens, other worlds turning around strange suns…)? Or a mystery store card (private investigators, murders, whodunnits, weapons, scams, rainy nights in unfamiliar streets of strange cities…)? Or a romance store card (roses, champagne, sunset rendez-vous on a seaside balcony, walks on the beach in the moonlight, kisses, the pain of unrequired love…)? Or a mainstream lit store card (angst, dysfunctional families or troubled marriages, juggling everyday living and career…)? Or… what’s on YOUR card…?

- Small flashlight. Same principle as the car headlights, here – I have to see where I’m going, or where the keyhole is when I’m trying to fumble house keys in the dark. Writerly translation – should be obvious. There are times you need to shine a focused light on something, Make sure your batteries are working.

- Medic Alert attachment. I am deathly allergic to at least one kind of drug, mildly allergic to others. I have info on my USB stick about who my doctor is, what my allergies are, what kind of well-meaning medical intervention I may not survive. Writerly translation – what are the sins that you cannot survive as a writer? Do you have a crutch phrase or a soap-box idea neither of which you can let go of but which are beginning to define you? What drives you nuts with OTHER writers? What are the unforgivable writerly sins in YOUR “medic alert” file?

- Sundry attachments. I have two. Two keyrings that dangle from my main keyring which are medallion-like objects bearing writing in a language which my current country of residence will not understand – but which those from the land where I was born would understand instantly. One is a commemoration of an ancient battle iconic to my tribe, to my people. The other is a memento of a special place, a monastery where an aunt of mine made a pilgrimage and sent me a keyring to keep close so that I too might receive a blessing from it. Other people have danglies that are different – a rabbit foot for luck, a silver charm, a Darwin fish, something their child made for them – you just start paying attention to people’s keys and you’ll see all sorts of things there. Writerly translation – who are you? Who WERE you? What changed you? What is it that you bring to the writer’s table – what are the things that are meaningful to you, that ONLY you could bring to that table and do justice to? What defines you – as a person, as a writer?

So. I’m all growed up now. I get my own keys, my own keyring, a whole life to live, a whole writer’s world to play in.

What’s on YOUR keyring…?