Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh, Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1982
There was a time when I made a point of reading Hugo Award winners as soon as a given year’s WorldCon results were announced. (Assuming I hadn’t already read that book – which was a rare thing.) That’s a habit I’ve lost over the past twenty or so years, and with a very few exceptions, I haven’t really been keeping up. But in the late 1970s, and all through the 1980s, I picked up copies of Hugo winners as soon as I could after the awards were made.
Award-winning novels did not, of course, make up the bulk of my sci-fi and fantasy reading. I was also, in that time period, beginning to pick up on authors I would follow through the years to come. This was facilitated by a relocation from a small town, with no bookstores in easy reach, to a major metropolitan area that held many such establishments. And so I was better able to indulge my appetite for fiction. Of the authors I discovered as a result of this easier access, few have provided me with as many enjoyable reads as C.J. Cherryh. I read Gate of Ivrel the year DAW Books published it, and in quick succession read Well of Shiuan,Fires of Azeroth, and The Faded Sun Trilogy. The author’s writing style and detailed depictions of exotic civilizations and their peoples had a very strong appeal, and so I was willing to take a chance on a new and longer work by this author when it became available. That’s how I came to read Downbelow Station before it won its Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1982.
Downbelow Station raised my interest in C.J. Cherryh’s work to a new level. The prologue that sets the stage reads like an excellent bit of narrative history – a genre of nonfiction that has always appealed to me. The story launches from those pages with an immediacy that drops the reader straight into the tension-filled plot while introducing the main characters as they each deal with a sudden, and then rapidly worsening, situation. The war between the Earth Company and the colonial worlds and stations of Union – which has raged for many decades – is coming to an end. The fleet of warships loyal to the Earth Company are too few in number to win, and Union is poised for victory. Star stations belonging to the Company are falling to Union, generating a flood of refugees for whom Pell Station (orbiting Pell’s World) is a final, if desperate, last stop. The station, overburdened by this sudden increase in population, is pushed to its limits. To make matters worse, the Company ship that led the refugees in warns of more to come. Each major character is introduced during this massive surge of refugees, their roles and respective subplots established, and the story expands from the event of arrival and the unrest it immediately creates.
The multiple subplots never lose sight of each other, and the pacing is carefully balanced between rapid action and introspection. The characters are believable, and their actions and reactions drive the braid of subplots that combine to create the overall tale. Complications increase as the overall plot pushes the characters into ever more dire situations, creating a conflict that appears irresolvable. And yet, there is a resolution, one that not only makes sense but lays the groundwork for the many novels that have since been set in the Alliance-Union universe for which this author is so well known.
More than most of the Hugo winners I’ve discussed here, rereading this book really took me back to that time when science fiction was more than just escapism for me. It was more of a way of life, and had become the keystone of my social life, associated as I was with fannish groups in the Phoenix metro area. I was even involved, in a small way, with the running of a local sci-fi convention. In 1981, I found myself volunteering to be overnight security for the dealer’s room of this “con.” This involved spending the night in the room housing the various tables and their wares, a task that appealed because I couldn’t afford a room at the hotel. I first read Downbelow Station – almost all of it in the two nights I was needed as a guardian – instead of sleeping on the row of chairs that I was instructed to put in a line just inside the door to block entry. It was assumed that I’d stretch out and sleep there, or at least doze. It was, as I recall, the only way in or out of the room, so any thief would need to fall over me to get in. Sleep? I wasn’t even comfortable enough to doze very often. So I left a light on and read. The book with me was Downbelow Station.
When the event was over, the first thing I did was finish reading that book. Afterward, I recommended it so often I drove a few friends to distraction. (The tables were turned, a couple of years later, when one of these friends discovered Startide Rising by David Brin, and just would not stop talking about it.) Only a few months passed before I read it again, when in 1982, it won the Hugo Award for best novel. I was enormously pleased to see that a book that had hooked me so solidly took top honors that year.
In the decades since, the period during which I was so active as a fan has become a source of (mostly) pleasant memories. Except for participation as an author guest at local Tucson and Phoenix conventions, and a WesterCon held in Tempe a few years ago, I’ve left that part of my life behind. Rereading this particular Hugo Winner brought that time back to life for me, even as I enjoyed rediscovering the book that turned an interest in an author’s work into something more like admiration. Science fiction has seen few authors who have been as prolific, or produced such consistently fine work. And fewer still that I follow to the extent of buying and reading every book, as soon as it’s available. Downbelow Station found in me a reader, and turned me into a fan.
There is a meme commonly posted in the social media, on Facebook in particular, meant to offer support or comfort to those facing life’s slings and arrows. The messages range from heartfelt to sickly saccharine, but the intentions are always good. The nature of the message varies with the problem being addressed, but they always start with the phrase, “I don’t know who needs to hear this…”
It’s easy to flip past such posts and scroll on. To be honest, I usually do – they are so frequently repeated that they become part of the landscape, in a manner of speaking. And I can see how some people might be tempted to give these harmless messages of general support a cynical roll of the eyes. But if you’re dealing with one of the topics discussed in this sort of post, you might have a different reaction. Those posts dealing with depression usually get a nod from me. It does sometimes help to know you aren’t the only one in the world with one foot on that slippery slope.
Which is why I’m writing this entry for my weblog. A form of depression has been a fact of my life for as long as I can remember, although I was in my early thirties before I knew for certain the nature of the beast. That’s when I became acquainted with a condition known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. (An apt acronym if ever there was one.)
Every year, as the Autumnal Equinox approaches, I unpack a bright light – technically called a “light box” – and rearrange my morning schedule to accommodate Bright Light Therapy (BLT, and yes, that one’s been done to death, believe me.) I do this to counteract, to some degree at least, the effect of ever shorter days on my mood and motivation levels. The BLT sessions last three quarters of an hour, and I pass the time reading and sipping the day’s first cup of coffee. As treatments for mental health problems go, it’s not bad. It certainly beats the Valium they stuffed into my late father when he hit rock bottom, many years ago. And it’s quite effective. Most years, I am largely untroubled by serious symptoms, which in my case manifest as anxiety and depression.
Most years. But not this year. Autumn of 2023 bushwhacked me.
SAD varies in severity from year to year, and I can’t always correlate severity with an external trigger. Oh, when I was working the day job (whichever one you want to point to over the last forty years or so), stress could certainly reduce the effectiveness of BLT. But I live the writing life these days, something long desired. While life has its ups and downs, this form of semi-retirement hasn’t actually challenged me in a big way. And yet a few weeks after the days began to shorten noticeably this year, and I’d settled into the seasonal serving of BLT (couldn’t resist after all), an all-too-familiar sense of anxiety struck me. It came on strong, taking me by surprise, and derailing mood and motivation. There was nothing really to be anxious about, but there it was, that deeply unsettling sense of something being wrong, and threatening to get worse. It was especially noticeable as the afternoons wore on and the shadows stretched across the world. (Cloudy weather can seriously aggravate my condition, especially when light levels fluctuate.) That anxiety becomes a sense of impending doom that has no rational justification, and yet cannot be denied. At its worst, it’s nothing less than debilitating. Motivation dies as I find myself just hunkering down and hanging on, waiting for the awkward episode to pass. The length of time it persists varies from day to day. In the morning, with BLT, hot coffee, and a world gradually brightening outside, I can catch my breath. I can do things. But then the afternoon comes, as it always does. Sunset can be an awkward time of day, and has been for a few weeks.
The current episode of deep anxiety seems to be settling down (not lowering my guard just yet), but cloudy days and sunsets are still not my favorite things right now. I’ll probably never really know what upset the balance this year.
In a conversation with an online acquaintance, I was reminded that I’m not alone in coping with this disorder. As I said before, for some reason knowing this does help. Which is why I don’t roll my eyes at certain memes when they pop up in the newsfeed. Many of us dealing with SAD have sympathetic family and friends. I’m blessed with a wife who understands what’s happening, and why, and knows better than to take at face value some of the things I say when I’m down. She was there when I figured out what was wrong with me – it was a joint discovery. But not everyone is so fortunate; not everyone has the support they need. And so I’m writing for whoever needs to hear this.
If winter gets you down it might not be, as some would say, mere holiday stress or – worse – giving in to a personal failing. You may be dealing with a very real condition, one amenable to treatment. While I’ve managed without seeking much professional help, I know people who have needed a therapist’s assistance to cope. Either way, you can control this condition and keep your head above the high water mark until spring. Ignore anyone who tells you this is pop psychology. It’s a legitimate diagnosis, as you’ll learn officially if you do need to seek professional help.
How can you tell if you need help? Only you can decide, but if there’s even a tiny bit of doubt, talk to a doctor. There are very few physicians out there, these days, who think this is some sort of popular self-diagnosis. A timely referral to a mental health care professional might make all the difference.
In the meantime, if you suspect you have this seasonal problem – and many people do to one degree or another – consider the following up-to-date resource before making any decisions.
Defeating SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder): A Guide to Health and Happiness Through All Seasons by Norman E. Rosenthal M.D.
You should be able to obtain a copy from just about any local bookstore. You can also get it by following the links below, if you prefer.
This book covers symptoms and treatments, discusses the latest research on the condition and its variable nature, and provides guidance on coping with SAD, including the selection of lamps for the application of BLT.
The anxiety and depression caused by short days in autumn and winter are not figments of your imagination. The condition is real, and can cause all manner of problems as it interferes with day-to-day living. But you aren’t alone in this, and SAD can be treated, and treated effectively. Just thought I’d throw this out there, for anyone who needs to hear.
You’ve decided to try your hand at writing fiction, and have committed words to paper – or to a computer file. But after weeks or months of work, you’re getting absolutely nowhere. The material you’ve produced doesn’t inspire confidence, and as a result, it’s hard to stay motivated. What’s going on here? Why isn’t it working? It certainly didn’t look this hard, to judge from the books you’ve read.
You seek advice from other writers, such as the ideas I presented here. None of it works, and your frustration grows while the story sits there, untouched. Writing a story sounded like a thing worth doing, and you do know how to write, but it just isn’t working according to expectations. Why?
Maybe it’s time to examine what motivated you to write that novel or short story. What made this seem a good idea in the first place?
When I ask this question of people I meet, in and out of the virtual realm, the answers fall into two general categories: a love of reading fiction inspired the idea of telling a tale; or it sounded like an easy side hustle – definitely better than driving for Uber or Lyft. Whichever I hear, there’s a common mistaken assumption, that writing fiction is a relatively easy thing to do. That it might be anything but easy comes as a shock to many would-be writers.
Although telling stories is a thing that comes naturally to most people, no one is born a writer. We all tell stories of one kind or another. You spend a day at work, or at school, and then come home to tell your family about the events of your day. You share memories of past events with friends. That’s basic storytelling. For some of us, however, the itch to be creative wakes up the imagination, and stories come into being that are not of day-to-day events in real life. Fiction, in other words. That creative impulse can amplify this very human thing called storytelling (I’m tempted to say hijack it), and with enough such amplification, the urge to tell that story takes hold. And there you sit, a literate human being who has done plenty of reading, deciding to write this one down and see how it flies.
That bit about writing it down is the hard part. Writing readable fiction takes time and practice. For most of us, it takes a lot of time and practice. There are exceptions to this rule, but it’s those exceptions that define the rule, after all. That exceptions exist is no guarantee you will be one of them. And so it’s more than likely that the first attempt feels awkward, or just outright botched. When you find yourself floundering, you have two choices. You can keep at it, and practice the art until you are good enough to publish your work with some confidence. If you can accept the reality that the only way to become adept at writing fiction is to first write some lousy fiction, there’s hope for you. Go on and give it another try.
The second choice is, of course, to quit. You can give it up and be content with reading fiction. I’ll come back to that choice a little later.
But what about those seeking a side hustle?
To be blunt, if you started stringing words together because you thought it might be an easy way to make money, you’ve embarked upon a fool’s errand. The chances of making even a modest living by writing are very slim. The fact that a few people do so, and in fewer cases make a lot of money, comes back to exceptions defining the rule. And the rule is that making a living as a writer is incredibly difficult. I’ve never managed it, and I’m doing better than many indie authors. In my case, the sales of my existing books easily cover the expenses involved with the publication of new books: editing, cover art, promotion, etc. I consider this a success – but it’s a success more than a decade in the making. I’m comfortable with this. I’m a storyteller, not an entrepreneur wannabe. But if I had to pay the bills from that income, well…
So, if you’re into this for the money, make sure you have a day job that provides a good financial fallback. Unless you turn out to be one of those rare exceptions (best of luck with that) you’re probably going to need it.
However, it does seem to me that most people who try their hand at writing fiction these days are those who have always wondered if they could make it work. They’ve been inspired by the fiction they love to read. “I wonder if I can?” is a good reason to give anything an honest attempt. But perhaps your inability to finish that story is the answer to the question. It just may be that you can’t. That you are not, by your nature, creative in the literary sense. You are a reader and not a writer, not a teller of fanciful tales after all. It may not be a desirable answer, but it may be the truth.
How can you be sure, one way or the other? One way to make that call involves answering the question with another question. Can you stop? Now that you’ve had at least a little experience in trying to write fiction, and have let your imagination come out to play, can you give that up? If you realize you haven’t at least tried to get any writing done for a month or more, and you shrug this off without a qualm, it may be time to reconsider the idea of writing. If letting it go turns out to be easier said than done, if you find yourself being distracted by thoughts of that unfinished tale – or by new ideas for stories – you need to keep trying. There’s a good chance you really are a writer. So do a little each day, even if all you manage is an idea scribbled down or a new paragraph that helps a story inch forward. Keep at it. It will all add up, in the end, even if the increments are small.
The learning curve can be steep, but the view from the top is worth the climb. Work it bit-by-bit, if necessary, until you’ve finally told a tale to the end. Don’t worry along the way about whether or not it’s good enough to publish. It probably won’t be – yet. That’s what the revision process is all about. That rough draft might take some time, and your first efforts may be flat-out embarrassing. (Mine certainly were.) Be patient with yourself; you can only learn to write fiction by writing fiction. You may be stuck fast today, but if you persist, where might you be tomorrow?
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I was often criticized, as a youngster, for my reading habits. This was especially true when I was in my early to mid-teens. The truth is, outside of assigned reading for classes, about all I read was escapist fiction, science fiction in particular. I read some nonfiction on my own, of course, on matters to do with natural history and astronomy, but when you think about it, those interests – which were anything but mainstream in my small home town – were a sort of escape in their way. But when it came to reading fiction, science fiction (available fantasy having been limited to Tolkien’s work at that time) was literally all I read. And reread – books of my own being hard to come by, lacking any real income of my own. The town library was hardly well endowed with such fiction, and one of the librarians was among those who expressed “concerns” over my steady diet of escapism.
Pick a dearly held habit by any teenager, and a rationalization for it will be supplied – by that teenager. Or by the person that teenager grew up to be. It won’t always be simply self-serving, much less flat-out wrong. I had mine, being in general a misfit. Those less-than-mainstream interests cited above were shared by very few of my classmates (in the case of astronomy, by none at all), and in a small, conservative town, my corresponding lack of interest in sports and automobiles was viewed with suspicion. The things that interested me set me apart. Lacking much of a social life, as a result, I read books. The stories offered an escape from the often painful awkwardness of not fitting in, and at first, that was all that I needed. But they also fired my imagination, and awareness of the power of storytelling slowly grew. Looking back, it now seem inevitable that I would try to tell stories of my own.
And in the fullness of time, I did. It took a lot of time and practice (and life experience) to take me to the point of telling tales with any degree of ability, but I got there. And with the advent of modern self-publishing, I now have something of a readership. I still read a fair amount of fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but without the feeling that I need to dive undercover and pull the lid over the top. (The recent exception to this being the so-called “Pandemic Year” of 2020, when I indulged heavily in “comfort reads.”) But where I most often find an escape from the real world these days is in the writing I do.
It’s every bit as possible to escape into an imaginary world of your own creation as a storyteller, as it is to become so involved with the tales of others that the real world fades away. To nonwriters, this sort of escape may seem to verge on the pathological, but if you’re a writer of fiction, you know to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you back home. (And hope there are no mice following behind, of course.) I often get so wrapped up in my work that I lose track of time, and frequently walk around the house thinking out loud on some aspect of a current work in progress. When the work is done and published, it then has the potential to become an escape for anyone who comes along and reads what I’ve created. That’s an interesting feeling, and a pleasant one, to think that I might be giving some stressed-out soul, somewhere out there, a few hours of respite from whatever troubles them. It’s a motive to keep writing, all by itself. And why not? We’re all in this together. Every now and then we should get away from it all, and do so in good company.
I honestly can’t recall what aspect of my childhood instilled in me such a fascination with telling stories. Before I could write effectively, I told all sorts of windy tales to anyone who would listen. That so many of the adults around me seemed entertained by my childish flights of fancy kept me at it, completely oblivious to how they were humoring me. At some point I went from talking to writing things down. I have vague memories of turning scratch pads and scrap paper into “books.” That I was so serious about these efforts surely amused them all.
That I was encouraged from the very beginning to embrace literacy, both reading and writing, as things wonderful to do for their own sake, surely set the foundation for these habits. That a career as a writer was not what the adults were trying to set in motion only became obvious many years later.
Just before I finished high school, I sold a short magazine article to an aquarium hobby publication, about how to keep crayfish alive in a fish tank. I sent it with the idea of sharing ideas, not of getting paid, so imagine my surprise when the publishers thanked me for my contribution by sending a twenty-five-dollar check. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that my father had to co-sign the publishing agreement. I was all of seventeen years old.
That check put a dangerous idea into my head. Dangerous, that is, from the parental point of view. The idea was that you could make money doing something teachers and parents alike told me I was pretty good at. (I honestly thought they would approve.) At about that same time I read Isaac Asimov’s combined memoir and short story collection that chronicled his earliest career efforts as a writer of science fiction: The Early Asimov, or Eleven Years of Trying. Writing and selling fiction suddenly seemed doable. The idea became considerably more hazardous when I decided to write fiction; it became a goal, and one that started out much further ahead of me than I could possibly have imagined.
For the next thirty years or so, I made sporadic efforts to pursue this goal. I say sporadic because a succession of life changes and other distractions kept me from being as focused, or as disciplined, as I now know I needed to be. Still, in the late 1970s and through the mid-1980s, I made some money flipping the nonfiction side of the authorial coin. This didn’t last, as toward the end of that time the sort of publications that bought what I wrote were either merging with other publishing concerns, or dying outright. My markets slowly dwindled, and each year that passed saw me more reliant on the proverbial day job. I didn’t stop writing, though, and focused my efforts more on fiction, of which I sold not a word.
More life changes took place, including getting married and then deciding to finish the degree I’d left hanging when I moved from Illinois to Arizona. I did very little writing at all while working on the degree, except, of course, what was required for the classes I took. After graduation, I wrote yet another novel that I couldn’t sell. As I’ve told the tale elsewhere (in The Process), the market-based reason the book didn’t sell, combined with other unrelated problems, shut me down for several years. I just couldn’t see putting all that work into something that was apparently going nowhere.
Ebooks, print-on-demand, and being able to publish directly to the public changed all of this. Talk about a life changer! I took that novel the editors said they couldn’t find a market for, and self-published it. That last sentence covers a lot of details, and many intermediate steps before publication occurred, but suffice to say it was quite the learning curve. I climbed it, and on June 7th, 2012,The Luck of Han’angabecame available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Ten years have passed since that day. The War of the Second Iteration turned out to be a five-book series, not a trilogy. A story about a multiverse that contains science so advanced it might as well be magic unfolded in my mind, and I wrote a story about gryphons that were anything but mythical (The Gryphon Stone). A character from the Second Iteration series decided he had another tale to tell, and I obliged by writing All That Bedevils Us. And then there’s the one about the dog who needs a ride home, Toby. Most recently, I gave writing a love story a try, one with a fantastical twist, and so Variation on a Theme came into existence. These and others add up to ten books in that ten-year span. I’m immensely pleased with that output, but even happier with the receptions they have received.
Yes, the books sell, and that’s a thing that can only be gratifying. Some of them sell quite well, in fact, and this indie thing is easily paying its own way. But – far more important to me – people like what I write. There are readers out there urging me to write more, to get another book out – which I’m more than happy to do. I’ve even heard from a few readers who said something I wrote helped them get through dark times, by allowing them to escape for a while and come back to reality refreshed and better able to cope. Toby has led to a few dogs (and cats) finding forever homes. If there’s a better way to describe success as a writer, I can’t imagine it.
And now, about the next ten years…
(At the time of this essay, in celebration of a decade of successful indie publishing, all of my full-length novels in ebook format are marked down to just 99¢. Prices will return to normal June 30th, 2022.)
In a previous essay, I told of a friend who asked how I was coping with the sense of isolation experienced by so many, while trying to stay safe from the Covid-19 virus. My flippant response at the time was to remind her that I’m a writer. Isolation is just part of the job. It was said in jest, but this is a case where the thing is funny because it’s true.
The idea that isolation is just part of my job description reflects a fundamental truth of my profession. Writing is a thing generally done alone. The focus required to turn ideas and, sometimes, dream images into strings of words can be pretty intense. It’s no small thing to arrange words in such a way that they convey not only mental images and information, but also feelings. Sometimes powerful emotions, indeed. Interruptions are not in the writer’s best interest. For most of us, such focus can only be achieved in isolation – although in my case that isolation merely involves listening to epic music through a pair of headphones. Necessary as isolation may be for most writers, it can be costly in terms of mental stamina, and mental health. That stamina will at times need restoration; the mental health must, of course, be preserved.
How? By not writing.
In December of 2021, just days after releasing my most recent novel –Variation on a Theme – I found myself entirely lacking in motivation for writing. Variation on a Theme had been a challenging project, one that wore me out, and the last thing I wanted to do was launch into the next story I had in mind. Although this is the first time in ten years it happened with writing, I’ve experienced such a loss of motivation in other contexts in the past, and recognized that I needed a break if I wanted to avoid full-blown burnout. So I shifted my attention for a time to other things, activities for which isolation is not required.
There are plenty of ways to spend time away from writing, and any writer will tell you that one of the challenges we face is to keep these things from feeding the natural tendency to procrastinate that bedevils many storytellers. As dominant as the need to create is, I’ve always known that I need a diversity of interests to properly feed that creativity. And so, when it came time to take a break, I was anything but at a loss for things to do.
In general, when I’m not writing, I’m gardening, reading, studying natural history, stargazing, or cooking, to name a few prominent uses of my time. Of these, gardening filled the most time during this mini-vacation in which I indulged. Over the ten years during which I’ve pursued the indie publishing option, few activities have kept me more firmly connected to the real world. Grounded, in other words. And yes, there’s the possibility here for a lame pun, but I’m going to exercise uncharacteristic restraint and leave it to your imagination.
In terms of day-to-day activities, cooking comes in at a solid second place to gardening. Talk about a creative activity! (It helps that I’m pretty good at it, or so says my ever-supportive wife.) While cooking is about as real-world as it gets, gardening still beats it as a means to stand completely in the real world, while feeling rested and relaxed. Mentally relaxed, at any rate. Gardening does often involve hard work, but that’s something that I find actually enhances the restorative power of the garden. The experience of gardening produces such a powerful here-and-now state of mind for me that the stories in my head – very few of which involve the here-and-now – leave me in peace, without being lost entirely.
In December of 2021, I set those stories aside for a good three weeks. I worked in the garden. There were other things done, of course, but it was mostly the garden. By the time the New Year was at hand, I was back at the keyboard and ready to work. The garden was, and still is, out there when I need it, a need I know from experience to be inevitable.
When I decided to self-publish fiction a little over nine years ago, I started with a space opera that turned into the five book series War of the Second Iteration. Science fiction was already my default setting, so I led off with the sort of fiction I know best. This was followed by The Gryphon Stone, a story that blends science fiction and fantasy. From the very beginning, I knew I would not limit myself to space opera style sci-fi. How far from this default setting I might stray wasn’t clear even to me until I published Toby, a story that has nothing of fantasy or science fiction in it at all. That project made it very clear to me that I should stop referring to myself as a science fiction writer and simply think of myself as a storyteller, one not overly concerned with genre constraints. It’s a more comfortable and, I believe, more honest assessment.
My newest book clearly reflects that decision. It’s not science fiction by any stretch, although two of the main characters are serious fans of that genre. Variation on a Theme is a fantasy, one set in the real world of the late 1970s. The fantasy element has nothing to do with any epic themes. There are no sword-swinging heroes, axe-wielding dwarves, or ancient wizards. It’s more of a metaphysical fantasy, one built around a very old idea. What would you do differently, given the chance to relive part of your life? What would you be willing to give up, to take that chance?
An old theme to be sure, and here is yet another variation on it.
One aspect of this writing business always seems to take newly published authors by surprise. For some it’s a matter of “I never thought of that” puzzlement; for many others, it’s a serious shock to their creative impulses. What I’m talking about is this: the realization that, once you’ve published something – be it a short essay or a full-length novel – in a certain sense, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. To be very clear, I’m not talking about copyrights. I’m talking about the story and the reader’s experience of it. It’s your story when you write it, but it becomes their story as they read it. You no longer control the development of the story as it comes to life for readers, and how they react to the story as they read, interpret, and internalize the experience is entirely up to them.
Far more often than not, and assuming you’ve told the story at all well, readers will be on the same page with you, page after page. This is especially true of readers who already know your work. But there will be a few – and there will always be a few, for anything you publish – who have responses to the work that will puzzle you, or perhaps even shock you. “What,” you may well wonder, “brought that on?”
It’s a good question.
Reading and writing are flip sides of the literary coin. Heads you write, tails you read – which does rather strain a metaphor, but you get the idea. The coin itself consists of a lifetime of experiences, all the good and the bad; of being there and doing that, and having the essence of who and what you are shaped by these things. Reader or writer, you are that which exceeds the sum of those parts. Heads or tails, you bring all of that with you when you write and when you read. It will inform what you write, or your reactions to what you read. For some of us, meaning writers, it works both ways. Either way, it can’t be helped.
So, consider just the reader, for a moment, as seen by the writer of something that has invoked in that reader something of a negative reaction, be it distress or offense. What, indeed, brought that on? Nothing less than the sum of all those parts; those experiences that shaped the who, what, and why of the reader holding your book – or throwing it at the wall. A reader may like your work, and merely interpret it in an unexpected – or even embarrassing – way. But from time to time a scene or character touches a sore spot and triggers a stronger reaction than you intended, anything from emotional discomfort to actual anger or outrage. As a result, you might find yourself the recipient of a one-star rating and an angry rant for a review. You might even endure a public attack on your personal character. In a worst-case scenario, you might find yourself dealing with a snowball effect in the social media, as people sympathetic to that reader’s sensitivity respond to that person’s outrage by piling on, without bothering to read for themselves whatever it was you published. Suddenly, your work is getting all the wrong sorts of attention. And yes, I know a famous person once declared that there was no such thing as “bad publicity,” but there was no internet back then. Need I say more?
Anything you write and publish runs the risk of such a reaction, and if you want the general public to read what you’ve written, you really have no choice but to accept that risk. This isn’t to say you can’t be somewhat proactive when you write. Being slow to offend and slower still to take offense is always a fine policy. Deliberately writing something with the intent to cause hurt feelings or invoke anger in someone is difficult to excuse, and not a thing I’ve ever done. There’s rarely an excuse for trolling in any venue. But the possibility of giving offense exists nonetheless, regardless of your intentions.
So for my own part, I don’t seek the sort of reactions from readers that amount to being poked in the head with a sharp stick. And yet, for any sort of writing to be worth a damn, the reader absolutely must react to some degree to that arrangement of words. Where’s the point of balance to be found? Aside from not deliberately making that sharp stick and poking people, I’m not sure there really is one. You write with the best of intentions and hope readers see that this is the case. And you accept the possibility that not everyone will do so, as a sort of occupational hazard.
When I write, I’m guided by the belief that the story must be told honestly, and to the best of my current ability. That means that whatever the story requires to succeed, I’ll put into the most readable arrangement of words I can produce. There are lines I will not cross. For example, I won’t set down a graphic account of sexual violence. What if the story requires it? No story I ever write will require anything like that; I just don’t have that sort of imagination. For me to attempt such a scene would violate my principle of writing honestly; I would be faking it, writing something that simply does not come naturally to me. I might place such an event in the background of a character, to explain why that character behaves as he or she does. And I might hint or insinuate that a character is that sort of bastard, capable of such abuse, but you won’t witness any of his or her acts. To those who insist that such grim realities are a part of the real world from which we all must draw our inspiration and material, I like to point out that the same is true of bowel movements. But by all means feel free to define your own storytelling honesty – so long as you’re willing to accept the consequences without complaint.
There are a few other things I won’t include in a story. I won’t use the notorious “N word”, and I do my best to avoid obvious stereotypes regarding gender and race. However, as I write, I don’t work at being endlessly mindful that there are people out there who flinch easily at, for example, the use of profanity, or descriptions of characters enjoying alcoholic beverages. There is no way I could possibly write readable fiction while trying to keep my eyes open for every conceivable offense or objection that could be raised. It wouldn’t help if I did. Remember all those readers with all those wildly varying life experiences? I don’t know any of them personally. How can I possibly know about everything I should avoid for their sakes?
Whatever I write, there is almost certain to be someone who reads it and finds something objectionable. More often than not, I’ll never know about it, but I get just enough feedback of that sort to know it’s happening. So I write as well and honestly as I can, and I work within the assumption that a minority of readers will flinch at something, meaning the smaller number of readers, and not those who happen to belong to a group considered a minority.
You might take exception to something I write. Your life experiences may well leave you sensitive to one thing or another, and I just happened to put something in that story that touched the sore spot. It came too close to home, and something unpleasant was triggered. As you react, be assured it was never my intention to do so. Stories that are true to life will sometimes hold unpleasant things, for someone, whatever limits an author might embrace.
It’s like juggling eggs. No matter how good I manage to become at this writing thing, for some readers, I’m going to drop an egg or two. I didn’t mean to make that mess, but there it is.
My wife and I just spent another desert spring morning digging up garden soil, getting seriously dirty and sweaty in the process. Birds were singing as we worked. The local covey of Gambel’s quail lurked in the bushes looking for the bird seed we set out, and really wished we would go back indoors and out of sight. Flowers elsewhere in the garden bloomed bright and fragrant, attracting a variety of butterflies and bees. A gentle, fitful breeze cooled us, and white clouds drifted through a high blue sky. Our project involved restoring a long-neglected garden bed that had lost its raised-bed frame and become seriously weed-infested. Hard work, but gratifying in the end. The soil from it needs to be lifted and sifted to remove Bermuda grass roots – a seriously invasive weed – and piled nearby. In due time a new raised-bed frame will be set in place, the soil returned and properly amended, and tomatoes will grow there. Growing plants being the point of a garden, of course. We can buy tomatoes suitable for our cooking needs, but those we grow always taste better, and in any case, watching plants grow and thrive under your care does wonderful things for stress reduction and the improvement of general morale.
There’s a moment early in the expanded film version of The Fellowship of the Ring that shows the look on the face of a certain hobbit gardener as he works with a flowering potted plant. As the narration extols the hobbitish love of things that grow, you see the face of someone following his bliss. I know that feeling well, and it’s a good one. Gardening really can do that for you, if you let it. And don’t mind sometimes getting seriously dirty and sweaty.
I would have no trouble living a hobbitish lifestyle. Some would say I’m doing so now, and I wouldn’t argue. Gardening and cooking (and eating) are among the things that serve to keep me thoroughly grounded while I spin flights of fancy and set them down in words. That process of writing, by its nature, keeps me pretty close to home, and to be honest I’m perfectly fine with that. Well, within reason. The occasional adventure can be beneficial, especially if one manages to avoid interactions with dragons. But for all that there are some trips I’d like to take – more than a few actually – true wanderlust is a thing I rarely feel, and it’s easily satisfied without any need to travel to the ends of the Earth. A need to see mountains again? I have some practically next door, so no problem there. I just go outside and look either north or east.
I can honestly say that if, as life unfolds, I find myself spending the majority of my time in this house writing, and out in the yard around it working a garden and watching things grow, I’ll be okay. I’m enough like a hobbit that such a fate would feel like the right way to live, and not like a set of constraints. The value of home is a thing you never need to explain to a hobbit, and I can certainly relate.
A few more nights out under dark and star-filled skies would be nice, but such a need for starlight is also quite in keeping with being hobbitish. After all, some well-known members of the halfling race were rather fond of night walks with folk of an elvish nature. I suppose such would be considered adventures of a quiet sort, and certainly free of dragons, unless you count a certain arrangement of stars in the northern sky.
Of course, no matter how I live, I’m a little tall to pass for a hobbit. But then, growing up, I had a fondness for forests and trees. Growing up in Illinois, I spent much of my childhood wandering the nearby woodland. Perhaps an Ent crossed my path one day and shared a bit of Ent draught. My parents did seem, for a time, taken aback by how quickly I grew.
The phrase “outside the box” may rate as one of the most over-used (if not actually abused) metaphors of our time. It’s all too often a glib admonition issued by a person passing the proverbial buck and expecting someone else to solve an intractable problem for them. If you’ve ever worked for a living in any capacity at all, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve heard it and heard the smug sarcasm that goes with it.
Used correctly, when faced with a situation in which others have failed to arrive at a solution to a problem, or when a creative person wants to pursue a new and innovative form of self-expression, the mental habit labeled “think outside the box” can be a powerful tool. It becomes a way to focus skills and imagination in a way that has the potential to create something new. I certainly have no problem hearing the phrase used in this context, being a fan of, and a participant in, the creative world myself. There’s definitely a place in the world for those who think outside the box. Or, more specifically, those who write outside the box.
Although the bulk of my writing has been in the science fiction genre, I haven’t exactly felt constrained by that single genre. Or even to the writing of fiction; my first book was the amateur astronomy-related memoir, Mr. Olcott’s Skies. I’ve also written short fiction of a darkly fantastical nature that might play well on a remake of The Twilight Zone, some of which can be found in 179 Degrees From Now. But I’m not sure any of this could honestly be referred to as writing outside the box. Rather, it’s more an indication that the box I’m sitting in has plenty of room in which to move around. After all, science fiction, fantasy, and astronomy are all, in their own ways, out there.
But I have now, beyond any realistic doubt, written outside that roomy box. Reached so far over the lid the damned thing tipped right over.
My most recent book, Toby, is neither sci-fi nor fantasy, and for sure has nothing to do with amateur astronomy. It’s a tale of a boy and his dog. Okay, so the main character has a few too many years on him to wear the label “boy” easily. And it isn’t his dog. Therein lies the tale. Or the tail, as the case may be. Like all the fiction I write, Toby started out as a handful of unrelated daydreams: images and scenes that just sort of coalesced in my imagination. Happens all the time, these daydreams. I’ve been an unrepentant woolgatherer all my life. Just ask any of my middle school teachers. In this most recent case, however, the usual elements of science fiction never materialized. This time it started with an ordinary guy confronting a large, growling dog, who it turns out isn’t growling at the guy. There’s this bear, you see. From that point, things get complicated.
Anyway, as sometimes happens, the daydream started to roll like a short film in my head, and all that stuff that builds up inside your brain due to life happening started mixing in. The guy was there for a reason, and so was the dog. The reason, once I puzzled it out, became the vague suggestion of a story. Closer examination led to questions about who they were, and why they were in that situation. Ideas rose into view. Some lent themselves well to the trail I needed to blaze, and others were best left to one side and forgotten. The meeting between man and dog turned into a journey, and once they were on the road, I quickly developed a clear sense of direction. To put it another way, the story developed a life of its own, an internal logic that directed its development. In other words, it told itself. I just worked the keyboard.
Okay, that doesn’t really happen, but that’s the way it feels, when it works just so.
All the way through the process of writing this short novel (or novella, depending on which definition based on word counts you prefer) I felt a growing sense of surprise and delight. Where was this all coming from? How was it that I was to be this tale’s author? It was, for me, a very different writing experience; fresh and new and exciting, writing of a sort I’d never even considered in the past. It was also a revelation of sorts, that I could write this way, that I could write outside of my comfortable and familiar box. There was a sense of greater possibilities than I’d considered before. I’ve written in the past of my writing process being something like exploring new lands and cutting trails through them for others to follow. Writing Toby was like traveling to a different continent and starting the process there.
The box is tipped over on its side now, and I’m sitting out on one of the flaps, quite comfortable and very pleased by how this all turned out. I wonder what else is outside the box, waiting for me? Well, while I ponder that one, meet Toby, a very good dog.
Under Desert Stars 