A Slip of the Keyboard Read online

  Actually, I do. Lots of adults who read me don’t always let on. It’s like those surveys you see in the literary papers at the end of the year—the celebs are asked what books they’ve enjoyed this year, and everyone knows they’ve been reading Joanna Trollope and Jilly Cooper and Tom Clancy, but they all go waxy faced and gabble the first five “serious” titles they can remember.

  A statistically significant number of correspondents write to say they met someone else reading one of my books on a remote Greek island. It may of course always be the same person.

  Many of them have this in common, though: they express doubts that the author will read the letter, let alone answer it. The letter is an act of faith. It’s as though they’ve put a message in a bottle and tossed it into the sea. But …

  … well, when I was young, I wrote a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, just as he was becoming extravagantly famous. I think the book that impressed me was Smith of Wootton Major. Mine must have been among hundreds or thousands of letters he received every week. I got a reply. It might have been dictated. For all I know, it might have been typed to a format. But it was signed.

  He must have had a sackful of letters from every commune and university in the world, written by people whose children are now grown-up and trying to make a normal life while being named Galadriel or Moonchild. It wasn’t as if I’d said a lot. There were no numbered questions. I just said I’d enjoyed the book very much. And he said thank you.

  For a moment, it achieved the most basic and treasured of human communications: you are real, and therefore so am I.

  After thinking about that, I’ve tried to persuade myself that the mail isn’t a distraction from writing but some kind of necessary echo of it. It’s part of the whole process. A kind of after-sales service. There is, admittedly, the terminally weird letter, although these are rare. And sometimes the handwriting defeats us. And readers who want to continue a lengthy correspondence sometimes have to be gently let down, because of God’s lack of foresight in putting only twenty-four hours in one day. But apart from those rarities, they all get answered sooner or later … I hope. It’s part of the whole thing, if ever I manage to work out what the whole thing is.

  WYRD IDEAS

  The Author, Autumn 1999

  … these days, of course, there are as many e-mails as letters.

  “Hey U R 1 kewl dood, can U give Me some Tips about Writing?” You may be familiar with e-mails like this, if you’re known to be an author with an Internet address. On the Internet, no one cares how you spell. Dyslexia is imitated, not as an affliction but as a badge of coolth. Some of the younger users regard as suspicious any suggestion that vaguely competent English has a part to play. I suggested to one correspondent that, if he wished to be a writer, he should allow grammar, spelling, and punctuation to enter his life; he bridled, on the basis that “publishers have people to do that’!

  Ahem …

  My e-mail address is public, and easily tracked down. I am a popular author. I no longer count the e-mails I get every day. I answer as many as I can.

  Fairly early on, I learned that a filter on my mailbox was essential to electronic survival; that decision was made, in fact, in the days when I still used a 2,400 baud modem and someone decided to e-mail me their illustrated manuscript—all three megabytes of it (the ethos of the Internet was evolved by people who did not have to pay their own phone bills). Besides, a filter also helps cut out all that spam addressed to “friend.” No stranger who is up to any good calls you “friend.”

  That was just irksome. Now I’ve hit what I think is a real problem.

  One of the traditions of the fantasy and science fiction genre is communication; fans like to be in touch with lots of other fans and they embraced the Internet with amazing speed as an alternative to the mimeograph machine or computer printer. And another tradition has been “fan fiction.”

  Plenty of other genres have their fans, but “fanfic” is unique to F&SF, as far as I know. People, out of the love of doing it, write further stories set in some professional author’s universe and using established characters and background, and publish them on an amateur basis for the pleasure of their friends.

  Traditionally, since in many cases they themselves were once fans (it’s hard to imagine becoming a science fiction writer without having a liking for science fiction) the genre authors have turned a benign or blind eye to this legally dubious activity. Be happy that you have fans has been the consensus, and if you have fans they will be … fannish. It’s not a bad training ground for writers. It’s just part of the whole thing.

  Authors who write a popular series find that readers are not passive receivers: they take the view that the author writes the script but the movie is played out in the reader’s own head, and therefore the enterprise is in some ways a collaboration or interactive one in which the reader has rights, if only the right to an opinion. This sort of thing has gone on for years in a private kind of way (“Dear Miss Austen, I think it would be really cool if one of your heroines were to fall in love with Napoleon …”). It’s probably healthy. The trouble is that the Net is not private and it magnifies everything, good and bad.

  I used to read the two newsgroups devoted to me and my work. It is fun to see one’s books publicly deconstructed by an Oxford don on the same newsgroup as they are deconstructed by someone who thinks Star Wars is a really old movie. But I recently stopped reading them, after seven years.

  I started to get nervous when people began posting, on the public newsgroups, plot suggestions for future books and speculation about how characters would develop. The Net is still new, and it is big and it is public, and has brought with it new perceptions and problems. (One minor one is that people are out driving their language on a worldwide highway without passing a test. Take the word plagiarize. I know what it means. You know what it means. Lawyers certainly know what it means. But I have seen it repeatedly used as a synonym for research, parody, and reference, as in “Wyrd Sisters was plagiarized from Shakespeare.” That was a book of mine and, yes, well, it certainly does add to the enjoyment if you’ve heard of a certain Scottish play and … er … where do I start?)

  Now add to this the growth of strange ideas about copyright. At one end of the spectrum I get nervous letters asking “Will it be all right if I name my cat after one of your characters?” At the other are the e-mails like: “I enjoyed the story so much that I’ve scanned it in and put it on my Web page … hope you don’t mind.” Copyright is either thought to exist in every single word, or not at all.

  In short, I began to worry, in this overheated atmosphere, about what would happen if I used a story line that a fan had already posted on the Net or on some fan-fiction Web page.

  I’ve already had a few e-mails on the lines of “I see you have used that idea of mine, then,” when the idea in question was “Why doesn’t Terry Pratchett write a book about Australia/pirates/football?” (I once had one—and I’m sure I’ve not been the first—which quite frankly said, “I’ve got a great idea that will make us both a lot of money if you write the book, but obviously I can’t tell you about it until we’ve signed a contract.…”)

  We all soon become aware that to many otherwise intelligent people “the Idea” is the heart, soul, and centre of a novel, and all that stuff about plot, point, character, dialogue, and 100,000 written words is a clerical detail. Get the Idea, and all you need then is someone to “write it down.”

  I may be worrying too much, but there is something to worry about. It isn’t the law that worries me. Come to that, it isn’t 99.99 percent of fans on the Net. It’s simply that in every crowd there’s a twerp. All any twerp needs to do is protest loud and long, and he or she will get attention from other twerps who’ll go along for the ride—after all, if such people didn’t exist, the Ricki Lake Show wouldn’t have an audience. And then you just need a journalist who thinks it’d make a good story on the lines of “Famous Author Stole My Idea, Says Disappointed Fan,” and if you don�
�t think a journalist would run something like this, you haven’t been reading the papers. Even the participation of a journalist isn’t necessary. The Net itself is, as a publicity device, available to all.

  Unfortunately, very little imagination is needed for this scenario. There have already been hints of it in the United States where, as we know, people sue as automatically as they breathe, and there’s soon to be a class action against God for making an imperfect world. It has certainly been enough, rumour says, to cause other authors to shun “their” newsgroups.

  It’s a shame, but I think I’ve very publicly got to log off, too. I’ve got lots of ideas. Now, if only people would let me have some Time.

  NOTES FROM A SUCCESSFUL FANTASY AUTHOR: KEEP IT REAL

  Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, 2007

  I’m always labelled as a fantasy author, but I’ve been heard to say that I’m mainstream, because the books that people read are surely the mainstream. The books in shops are mainstream. And now that includes fantasy. “Real” writers have been stealthy. They’ve taken the tropes of fantasy or science fiction and twisted them—but those books don’t get called science fiction or fantasy, because the people writing them don’t think of them like that.

  Since a lot of fiction is in some way fantasy, can we narrow it down to “fiction that transcends the rules of the known world”? And it might help to add “and includes elements commonly classed as magical.” There are said to be about five subgenres, from contemporary to mythic, but they mix and merge and if the result is good, who cares?

  If you want to write it, you’ve probably read a lot of it—in which case, stop (see below). If you haven’t read any, go and read lots. Genres are harsh on those who don’t know the history, don’t know the rules. Once you know them, you’ll know where they can be broken.

  Genres are also—fantasy perhaps most of all—a big bulging pantry of plots, conceits, races, character types, myths, devices, and directions, most of them hallowed by history. You’re allowed to borrow, as many will have done before you; if this were not the case there would only ever have been one book about a time machine. To stay with the cookery metaphor, they’re all just ingredients. What matters is how you bake the cake; every decent author should have their own recipe, and the best find new things to add to the mix.

  World building is an integral part of a lot of fantasy, and this applies even in a world that is superficially our own—apart from the fact that Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar consisted of hydrogen-filled airships. It is said that, during the fantasy boom in the late eighties, publishers would maybe get a box containing two or three runic alphabets, four maps of the major areas covered by the sweep of the narrative, a pronunciation guide to the names of the main characters and, at the bottom of the box, the manuscript. Please … there is no need to go that far.

  There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly “bad” races, magic that works like electricity, and horses that work like cars. It’s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can’t tell it apart from all the other EFP.

  Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock making or the mail coach system. Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.

  Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works.

  I can’t stress that last point enough. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously (it can also become a lot funnier, but that’s another story). Taking it seriously means that there must be rules. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local birdlife and the need for people in heavily overflown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all times. Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.

  Somehow, we’re trained in childhood not to ask questions of fantasy, like: How come only one foot in an entire kingdom fits the glass slipper? But look at the world with a questioning eye and inspiration will come. A vampire is repulsed by a crucifix? Then surely it can’t dare open its eyes, because everywhere it looks, in a world full of chairs, window frames, railings, and fences, it will see something holy. If werewolves as Hollywood presents them were real, how would they make certain that when they turned back into human shape they had a pair of pants to wear? And in Elidor, Alan Garner, a master at running a fantasy world alongside and entwined with our own, memorably asked the right questions and reminded us that a unicorn, whatever else it may be, is also a big and very dangerous horse. From simple questions, innocently asked, new characters arise and new twists are put on an old tale.

  G. K. Chesterton summed up fantasy as the art of taking that which is humdrum and everyday (and therefore unseen) and picking it up and showing it to us from an unfamiliar direction, so that we see it anew, with fresh eyes. The eyes could be the eyes of a tiny race of humans, to whom a flight of stairs is the Himalayas, or creatures so slow that they don’t see fast-moving humanity at all. The eyes could even be the nose of our werewolf, building up an inner picture of a room by an acute sense of smell, seeing not just who is there now but who was there yesterday.

  What else? Oh yes. Steer clear of “thee” and “thou” and “waxing wroth” unless you are a genius, and use adjectives as if they cost you a toenail. For some reason adjectives cluster around some works of fantasy. Be ruthless.

  And finally: the fact that it is a fantasy does not absolve you from all the basic responsibilities. It doesn’t mean that characters needn’t be rounded, the dialogue believable, the background properly established, the plots properly tuned. The genre offers all the palettes of the other genres, and new colours besides. They should be used with care. It only takes a tweak to make the whole world new.

  WHOSE FANTASY ARE YOU?

  Bookcase (W. H. Smith), 17 September 1991

  They wanted about 400–500 words “on fantasy.” Imagine the start of this being uttered in the same tone of voice Dr. Eleanor Arroway uses to the recalcitrant grants committee in the movie Contact.

  Besides, it’s true.

  You want fantasy? Here’s one.… There’s this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that’d suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there’s nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.

  And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life. In a universe where it’s known that whole galaxies can explode, they think there’s things like “natural justice” and “destiny.” Some of them even believe in democracy.…

  I’m a fantasy writer, and even I find it all a bit hard to believe.

  Me? I write about people who live on the Discworld, a world that’s flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle. Readers think the books are funny—I can prove it, I get letters—because in this weird world, people live normal lives. They worry about the sort of things we worry about, like death, taxes, and not falling off. The Discworld is funny because everyone on it believes that they’re in real life. (They might be—the last I heard, physicists have discovered all these extra dimensions around the place which we can’t see because they’re rolled up small; and you don’t believe in giant world-carrying turtles?) There are no
magic swords or mighty quests. There are just people like us, give or take the odd pointy hat, trying to make sense of it all. Just like us.

  We like to build these little worlds where everything gets sorted out and makes sense and, if possible, the good guys win. No one would call Agatha Christie a fantasy writer, but look at the books she’s most typically associated with—they’re about tiny isolated little worlds, usually a country house, or an island, or a train, where a very careful plot is worked out. No mad axman for Agatha, no unsolved crimes. Hercule Poirot always finds the clues.

  And look at Westerns. The famous Code of the West largely consisted of finding somewhere where you could safely shoot the other guy in the back, but we don’t really want to know that. We’d rather believe in Clint Eastwood.

  I would, anyway. Almost all writers are fantasy writers, but some of us are more honest about it than others.

  And everyone reads fantasy … one way … or another …

  WHY GANDALF NEVER MARRIED

  Speech given at Novacon, 1985

  This was written while Equal Rites and its female wizard heroine, Esk, were taking shape. Shortly after that, similar ideas about women seemed to turn up in the zeitgeist. I still enjoy writing for the witches: Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, Tiffany, and all the others. Even the pig witch, Petulia—I really liked writing her.