Giving Testimony
By Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
Janet is buried hip deep in a deadline that she’s having trouble with thanks to the wonders of doctors deciding to “adjust” medication levels that were working. So, she asked her long-time friends Melanie and Steve Tem to fill in this month. In March, Wizards of the Coast Discoveries will be releasing the novel-length reimagining of their multi-award-winning novella “The Man On The Ceiling.” Publisher’s Weekly has already praised as “This visceral, psychological view of the horrors that occur in an average person’s life will draw in readers with delicate, exquisitely detailed and almost hypnotic language.” In honor of that, Steve and Melanie offer a back-and-forth on why writers write what they write, whatever you want to call it.
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Steve: I remember that very early on I had this idea that it was an important part of the writer’s mission to give testimony, to say ‘This is the way it was for me during my time on the planet.’ But how do you do that as a fiction writer? Your job isn’t to write speeches, or to preach. And how do you risk embarrassing yourself? I know when I started out I wanted to be at least a little cool, to present an air of professionalism, to show that I was in control of my materials.
Melanie: It seems to me that often, in writing as in “real life,” giving testimony or bearing witness is all we can do–giving testimony to “here’s what it’s like for me right here and right now,” and bearing witness to what it’s like for other people as we imagine it and embody it through our characters and plots and through our willingness to take in other people’s stories.
And that’s no small thing.
Steve: That is no small thing, but it seems to me there are many forces which seduce us away from this basic mission. When you’re starting out, you want to sell stories, you want to build your resume, so you study the markets and you attempt to write what editor A appears to be buying. Or maybe you respond to a theme anthology invitation even though you don’t feel particularly driven to write on that theme. Nothing wrong with either of those approaches, but if you take that road enough times I think you forget there are other roads you can take.
If I may stretch the metaphor, I think writing about what really compels you is often an “off road” approach. You don’t have a particular market in mind, and the weight of emotion that often comes with this kind of writing often means that finding the right characters and structure to carry that weight becomes a difficult technical task. Sometimes it’s like relearning how to write with each new story.
Melanie: At the same time, though, I often enjoy writing to “prompts”–which, in the case of markets, can be theme anthologies or market guidelines. For me, there are so many stories to be told that sometimes it’s a matter of sort of letting the line, with a creative magnet on the end of it, down into the teeming mass of possible stories and seeing what sticks to it.
Which is definitely a stretched simile.
Steve: That’s a good point. Sometimes, rather than trying to “say” something, you get better results by setting up an intriguing situation–a “prompt” or god-forbid a “market requirement”–and then see what comes out of that writing process. Better writers than I have suggested that “if you want to communicate, use a telephone,” the idea being that if you set up your situation properly, it will trigger all that stuff in the back of your mind, the stuff that really obsesses you, and that will come out on the page.
One of the things that was scariest, and most exciting, about working on the new “novel” version of The Man On The Ceiling was that some chapters just started out as writing prompts–”Naming Names” or “A Sense of Place” or something weird like “Reality Puddles.” One of us would start writing, and all this material would come pouring out–memories, dreams, reflections–things that were really essential to us, coming out onto the page and (with judicious editing of course) finding a structure.
Melanie: TMOC was quite a ride! I found myself dredging up all sorts of “prompts.” “Reality puddles” was a phrase given to me many years ago by a schizophrenic teen who preferred to honor and explore the unique perspective rather than medicating it; in the midst of all the crazy imagery, this young adventurer told me, “every once in a while reality puddles, and I can rest.” That stayed with me.
“Asymptote,” “Hitting the Quarter Mark,” “A Sense of Place”–all those phrases, chapter headings in TMOC, were things someone said to me or I picked up in conversation and stored away in my subconscious. Later, when I needed them–when I sort of sent out the message to my subconscious–there they were, like found objects.
You better be careful what you say to a writer….
Steve: So it’s an exploration, not just into your own passions and the realities you observe, but into the invisible worlds behind those realities, into imagination and into deep metaphor, worlds which inform what you feel and the realities you observe. You go there, and you report back. You testify. For me, this is what fantasy writing is all about.
This kind of testimony concerning “what it was like” has been traditionally, I believe, reserved for “serious” writers writing in the realistic tradition. The likes of Charles Dickens, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos, Frank Norris, Don DeLillo–wildly different in their approaches, certainly, but all seeming to report on the events and the psychology of their times. Reporters and witnesses. Fantasy writers are almost invariably excluded. Critics and readers generally don’t expect fantasy to provide information as to what it was like. They tend to expect fantasy to report on “this is where we escaped to.” And of course a lot of fantasy writers buy into this. Readers/the critics/the writers tend to see fantasy as something separate from the writings that provide us with testimony. They see fantasy in terms of entertainment values alone.
I like to think that fantasy can do both. I think that even as a young reader I thought of fantasy in terms of testimony, providing information about what couldn’t be seen, what couldn’t be touched, and yet which had a very real and concrete affect on my life.
Melanie: My goal is to accept as few labels as I can get away with. I eschew those personality tests, for instance, like Meyers-Briggs, that make me choose which I would rather do, go to a party or take a walk alone in the mountains, and won’t let me give my real choice, which is “both.” I think the “types” that are said to come out of those inventories are reductionist. We should be striving for greater diversity, broader experience, deeper truth–not trying to make things simple.
So I have trouble with labels like “fantasy,” “horror,” “serious literature.” All of the above, I say–and more!
