Like so many things in life, writing doesn't come easy. My own belief is that it's something you're born into; a talent that you develop and nurture from the moment you first open your eyes and gaze upon the world. Writing is not simply about picking up a pen and tapping out random thoughts; it's about feeling, and trying to communicate that feeling. It's the ultimate form of self-expression, and something that not many can do.
It's in this spirit that I offer the following batch of articles. They've all been reprinted without permission from the authors, which makes me feel sort of guilty. But I feel that their message is important enough for me to overcome that guilt, because they express fundamental ideas which need to be discussed. Some of these articles deal directly with the relationship between the world and the artist; others talk primarily about other mediums. But in each, there's at least a grain of truth about the myth of life.
A very poignant article taken from The New Yorker by James Atlas (the May 25, 1998 edition). I read it and - I must confess - the first thing that popped into mind was, is this my fate?
Who made it in life? And what did it mean to 'make it', anyway? I had reached the age when, whether you were conscious of it or not, you were always taking stock - not just the momentary game of who's up and who's down but the long-term evaluation of people's lives in general, your own among them. While in L.A., I was reading a new novel by Brian Morton, "Starting Out in the Evening", in which a thirty-nine-year-old woman in midlife crisis says, "When you're in your twenties, when you're in your early thirties, you can tell yourself a nice story about your life: 'I'm young, I have promise, I have everything going for me'. But when you can't tell yourself that story anymore, what are you?"
I have a weakness for this kind of story - especially the 'false-starts/years of failure' part. I like hearing about Joseph Heller's decade of anonymous toil at various magazines while he was writing "Catch-22", and about E.L. Doctorow's protracted career in book publishing before he hit it big with "Ragtime". I have a note on my bulletin board with a quote from Lionel Trilling: "Freud was thirty-six before he began to do the work that made him famous."
It wasn't as if I hadn't failed before. When I was twenty-four, I had written a hundred pages of a novel about a strange, reclusive writer living in sqwualor on the North Side of Chicago, had sent it off to Ted Solotaroff, the editor of the much admired New American Review, and had got a letter back all but offering me a book contract. Could he just see another chapter or two before he tried to get the go-ahead?... During the next few days, I knocked out the chapter that Solotaroff was eagerly awaiting: it came easily... I dispatched the manuscript and waited for the response, pacing up and down in my apartment like a madman out of Poe as I listened for the mail to drop through the slot each day. Finally, a fat envelope arrived. It contained my manuscript and a letter that read, "I'm sorry to have to write in this way, to deliver a bucket of cold water on a work in progress..." I had somehow gone off in a wrong direction, broken the spell I'd managed to create in my original submission, which captured the drab, wintry Chicago I really knew. I crawled under the dining-room table in my sparsely furnished apartment, curled up on the cold floor, and wept.
I often take down from the shelf one of the most haunting books in my collection: "Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1971 Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report". At a thousand three hundred and five pages, it's also one of the fattest - as wide as my two-volume Proust. Nearly two years after the reunion, I still haven't got to the end of it. What makes this compendious anthology so compelling? I think it's the momentousness of the milestone being commemorated; we're not at the beginning, full of bravado and false hope; we're not at the end, glad that we haven't turned up in the obit column yet. We're just young enough to be uncowed by the prospect of our own imminent mortality yet mature enough to be capable of taking stock... [Frank Rich] writes, "I ended up doing in life exactly what I fantasized about doing when I arrived at Harvard - working for a newspaper and writing about culture and politics," but goes on to acknowledge that the road has, in fact, not been quite smooth: "Still, that simple description of where I am now masks the turmoil, some of it painful, of the years between graduation and today: the agonizing collapse of a first marriage; the violent and premature death of my mother; the grotesquely premature death of friends."
And these are the privileged ones - "Harvards," my grandmother used to call them. What about my friends from high school, many of them talented in one way or another, who flamed out? What happened to the boy I'll call Ben, who would empty a six-pack of Budweiser that he'd bought from a drunk in the parking lot of Howard Liquors, lock the door of his bedroom, and accompany a Roland Kirk album turned up at full blast on his saxophone? I can see him now, eyes tightly shut, a Camel smouldering in the ashtray. He's gone, who knows where. Or the friend who wanted to be a documentary filmmaker and ended up writing ad copy, or the poet who studied Japanese and disappeared into a state mental institution? They, too, had promise. They, too, possessed that radiant nimbus that surrounds the gifted - what a writer I know calls "the Shine". Unfortunately, they were also missing some other necessary quality: stamina, discipline, a tolerance for risk. Maybe they had intractable conflicts with their parents; maybe they were addiction-prone. Maybe they were poor, and didn't have the luxury of failing and starting over. Maybe success just wasn't in the cards.
Extract from Harlan Ellison's introduction to Dan Simmon's Prayers to Broken Stones.
Understand: I do not believe 'anyone can write'. That is to say, anyone can slap together words in some coherent sequence if s/he had done even a modicum of reading, and has at least a bare grasp of how to use language. Which is talent enough for writing letters, or doctoral theses, or amusing oneself with 'creative endeavors.' But to be a writer - not an 'author' like such ongoing tragedies as Judith Krantz, Eric Segal, V.C. Andrews, Sidney Sheldon, and hordes of others I leave to you to name - one must hear the music. I cannot explain it better than that. One need only hear the music. The syntax may be spavined, the spelling dyslectic, the subject matter dyspeptic. But you can tell there has been a writer at work. It fills the page, that music, however halting and rife with improper choices. And only amateurs or the counter-productively soft-hearted think it should be otherwise.
When I am hired to ramrod a workshop, I take it as my bond to be absolutely honest about the work. I may personally feel compassion for someone struggling toward the dream of being a writer, who doesn't hear the music, but if I were to take the easy way out, merely to avoid 'hurting someone's feelings' - not the least of which are my own, because nobody likes to be thought of as an insensitive monster - I would be betraying my craft, as well as my employers. As well as the best interests of the students themselves. Lying to someone who, in my opinion (which can certainly be wrong, even as yours), doesn't have the stuff, is mendacious in the extreme. It is cowardly, not merely dishonest. Flannery O'Connor once said, 'Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.'
Similarly, I take it as my chore to discourage as many 'aspiring authors' as I possibly can.
Because you cannot discourage a real writer. I've said it a hundred times in print. Break a real writer's hands, and s/he will tap out a story with feet or nose.
A powerful look at the first generation of globe-trotters, as delivered by one of our own. Contributed by my good friend Jonathan Brown, and delicately written by Pico Iyer. 'Confessions of a Perpetual Foreigner' is taken from the annals of Prospect, Feb. 1997.
By the time I was 9, I was already used to going to school by plane, to sleeping in airports, to shuttling back and forth, three times a year, between my home in California and my boarding school in England. While I was growing up, I was never within 6,000 miles of the nearest relative - and came, therefore, to learn how to define relations in nonfamilial ways. From the time I was a teenager, I took it for granted that I could take my budget vacations (as I did) in Bolivia and Tibet, China and Morocco. It never seemed strange to me that a girlfriend might be half a world (or 10 hours flying time) away, that my closest friends might be on the other side of a continent or sea. It was only recently that I realized that all these habits of mind and life would scarcely have been imaginable in my parents'youth, that the very facts and facilities that shape my world are all distinctly new developments, and mark me as a modern type.
It was only recently, in fact, that I realized that I am an example, perhaps, of an entirely new breed of people, a transcontinental tribe of wanderers that is multiplying as fast as international telephone lines and frequent flier programs. We are the transit loungers, forever heading to the departure gate. We buy our interests duty-free, we eat our food on plastic plates, we watch the world through borrowed headphones. We pass through countries as through revolving doors, resident aliens of the world, impermanent residents of nowhere. Nothing is strange to us, and nowhere is foreign. We are visitors even in our own homes.
The modern world seems increasingly made for people like me. I can plop myself down anywhere and find myself in the same relation of familiarity and strangeness: Lusaka is scarcely more strange to me than the England in which I was born, the America where I am registered as an "alien,"and the almost unvisited India that people tell me is my home. All have Holiday Inns, direct-dial phones, CNN, and DHL. All have sushi, Thai restaurants, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
This kind of life offers an unprecedented sense of freedom and mobility: Tied down nowhere, we can pick and choose among locations. Ours is the first generation that can go off to visit Tibet for a week, or meet Tibetans down the street; ours is the first generation to be able to go to Nigeria for a holidayTo find our roots or to find that they are not there. At a superficial level, this new internationalism means that I can meet, in the Hilton coffee shop, an Indonesian businessman who is as conversant as I am with Magic Johnson and Madonna. At a deeper level, it means that I need never feel estranged. If all the world is alien to us, all the world is home.
And yet I sometimes think that this mobile way of life is as disquietingly novel as high-rises, or as the video monitors that are rewiring our consciousness. Even as we fret about the changes our progress wreaks in the air and on the airwaves, in forests and on streets, we hardly worry about the change it is working in ourselves, the new kind of soul that is being born out of a new kind of life. Yet this could be the most dangerous development of all, and the least examined.
For us in the transit lounge, disorientation is as alien as affiliation. We become professional observers, able to see the merits and deficiencies of anywhere, to balance our parents'viewpoints with their enemies'position. Yes, we say, of course it's terrible, but look at the situation from Saddam's point of view. I understand how you feel, but the Chinese had their own cultural reasons for Tienanmen Square. Fervor comes to seem to us the most foreign place of all.
Seasoned experts at dispassion, we are less good at involvement, or suspension of disbelief; at, in fact, the abolition of distance. We are masters of the aerial perspective, but touching down becomes more difficult. Unable to get stirred by the raising of a flag, we are sometimes unable to see how anyone could be stirred. I sometimes think that this is how Salman Rushdie, the great analyst of this condition, somehow became its victim. He had juggled homes for so long, so adroitly, that he forgot how the world looks to someone who is rooted - in country or in belief. He had chosen to live so far from affiliation that he could no longer see why people choose affiliation in the first place. Besides, being part of no society means one is accountable to no one, and need respect no laws outside one's own. If single-nation people can be fanatical as terrorists, we can end up ineffectual as peacekeepers.
We become, in fact, strangers to belief itself, unable to comprehend many of the rages and dogmas that animate (and unite) people. I could not begin to fathom why some Muslims would think of murder after hearing about The Satanic Verses; yet sometimes I force myself to recall that it is we, in our floating skepticism, who are the exceptions, that in China or Iran, in Korea or Peru, it is not so strange to give up one's life for a cause.
We end up, then, a little like nonaligned nations, confirming our reservations at every step. We tell ourselves, self-servingly, that nationalism breeds monsters, and choose to ignore the fact that internationalism breeds them too. Ours is the culpability not of the assassin, but of the bystander who takes a snapshot of the murder. Or, when the revolution catches fire, hops on the next plane out.
I wonder, sometimes, if this new kind of nonaffiliation may not be alien to something fundamental in the human state. Refugees at least harbor passionate feeling about the world they have left - and generally seek to return there. The exile at least is propelled by some kind of strong emotion away from the old country and toward the new; indifference is not an exile emotion. But what does the transit lounger feel? What are the issues that we would die for? What are the passions that we would live for?
Airports are among the only sites in public life where emotions are hugely sanctioned. We see people weep, shout, kiss in airports; we see them at the furthest edges of excitement and exhaustion. Airports are privileged spaces where we can see the primal states writ large - fear, recognition, hope. But there are some of us, perhaps, sitting at the departure gate, boarding passes in hand, who feel neither the pain of separation nor the exultation of wonder; who alight with the same emotions with which we embarked; who go down to the baggage carousel and watch our lives circling, circling, circling, waiting to be claimed.
Extract from Dan Simmon's introduction to his own short story, 'Remembering Siri'.
I'm interested in how few writers cross the osmotic boundaries between science fiction and horror, between genre and what those in genre call mainstream. Or, rather, I should say that I'm fascinated with how many cross and do not return.
Part of it, I think, is the vast difference in states of mind between dreaming the dark dreams of horror and constructing the rational structures of SF, or between tripping the literary light fantastic and being shackled by the gravity of 'serious' fiction. It is hard to do both - painful to the psyche to allow one hemisphere to become dominant while bludgeoning the other into submission. Perhaps that's why readership of SF and horror, genre and New Yorker fiction overlap less than one would think.
Whatever the reason, it's a pity that more writers feel constrained - sometimes by limitations of talent or interest but more frequently by market considerations and the simple fact that they can find success in one field - to stay in one genre.
Of course, the exceptions are always interesting. George R.R. Martin moves easily between genres and expectations, rarely repeating, always surprising. Dean Koontz left SF just as he was becoming a star there - possibly because he sensed his destiny lay in becoming a supernova elsewhere. Edward Bryant took a 'sabbatical' from SF a few years ago and has been producing world-class horror ever since. Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula K. LeGuin 'graduated' from SF to mainstream acceptance. (To Vonnegut's credit for honesty if nothing else, he allows as to how he gets nostalgic every once in a while, opens the lowest desk drawer where he keeps his old pulp SF efforts, and then urinates into it.) Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and others write their most memorable fiction in SF, but they deny any association with the field. Neither lady mentions urinating into desk drawers, but one suspects that they would feel a certain pressure on their respective bladders if forced to accept a Hugo or Nebula.
Harlan Ellison simply refused ever to be nailed down to a genre - even while he revolutionized them. We all have heard the stories where Ellison suffers the ten-millionth reporter or critic or TV personality who is demanding to know what descriptive word comes before 'writer' in his case. Sci-fi? Fantasy? Horror?
'What's wrong with just... writer?' Ellison says softly in his most cordial cobra hiss.
Well, what's wrong with it is that the semiliterate have feeble but tidy little minds filled with tidy little boxes, and no matter how much one struggles, the newspaper article (or review, or radio intro, or TV superimposed title) will read something akin to - 'SCI-FI GUY SAYS HIS SCI-FI STUFF NOT SCI-FI'.
And the next step is for someone to stand up at a convention (sorry, a Con), grab the microphone, and shout - 'How come you're always saying in interviews and stuff that you're not just a science fiction writer? I'm proud to be associated with science fiction!' (Or horror. Or fantasy. Or... fill in the blank.)
The crowd roars, righteousness fills the air, hostility lies just under the surface as if you're a black at a Huey Newton rally who's been caught 'passing' - revealed as an Orea, or a Jew in the Warsaw ghetto who's been caught helping the Nazis with the railroad timetables, or - worse yet, a Dead Head at a Grateful D. concent who's been found listening to Mozart on his Walkman.
I mean, you are at this guy's convention. (Sorry, 'Con'.)
How do you explain to the guy gripping the mike that there are a thousand pressures forcing a writer down narrower and narrower alleys - agents trying to make you marketable and pulling their hair out because you insist on staying a jump ahead of a readership, publishers trying to shape you into a commodity, editors trying to get you to Chrissakes be consistent for once, booksellers complaining because your new SF novel just came out and it looks silly racked with your World Fantasy Award-winning novel (which is really about Calcutta and has no fantasy in it), which in turn, is next to your Sci-Fi opus and your fat horror novel (it is horror, isn't it? There wasn't any blood or holograms or demon-eyed kids on the cover...) and now... NOW!... this new book has come out... this thing... and it looks, oh sweet Christ, it looks... MAINSTREAM!
How do you explain that every modifier before writer becomes another nail in the coffin of your hopes of writing what you want? What you care about?
So you look at the guy with the mike and you stare down the irate booksellers and you put your editor on hold, and you think - I can explain. I can tell them that the one wonderful thing about being a writer is the freedom to explore all venues, the luxury... no, the responsibility... to work with the dreams the Muse sends you, to shape them to the best of your ability and to send them along whether a guaranteed readership is waiting or not; I can explain the compulsion to write a good book whether the cover artist knows what to do with it or not, explain the honor involved in trying new things despite the fact that the manager at the local B. Dalton's has racked your most recent novel in OCCULT NON-FICTION and asked... no, ordered the distributor not to send any more books written by this obvious schizophrenic. I can explain all that. I can take every single reader, every defensive SF chauvinist and horror fan and snooty New York reviewer and sparrowfart reader of 'serious fiction', and show them what being a writer means!
And then you look out at the guy with the mike, and you think - Nahhh. And you say, 'My next book'll be SF.'
The next story is SF. I loved writing it. I loved returning to this universe when I finally used 'Remembering Siri' as a starting point to write the 1,500 or so pages of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion.
Oh, and the seed crystal for this tale was the thought one night, while dozing off, What if Romeo and Juliet had lived?
You know - Romeo and Juliet? By that sci-fi/fantasy/horror hack who wrote sit-coms and historical soap operas in his spare time?
Watch for the allusions. And the illusions.
Excerpt from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. A critical look at my environmental beliefs.
Our planet is four and a half billion years old. There has been life on this planet for nearly that long. Three point eight billion years. The first bacteria. And later, the first multicellular animals, then the first complex creatures, in the sea, on the land. Then the great sweeping ages of animals - the amphibians, the dinosaurs, the mammals, each lasting millions upon millions of years. Great dynasties of creatures arising, flourishing, dying away. All this happened against a background of continuous and violent upheaval, mountain ranges thrust up and eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving... Endless constant and violent change... Even today, the greatest geographical feature on the planet comes from two great continents colliding, buckling to make the Himalayan mountain range over millions of years. The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us - suppose there was a [radiation accident]... Let's say we had a bad one and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere - under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. And of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly. Only we think it wouldn't... My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines... It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
Preface by Joe Haldeman, for None So Blind.
Our culture and other cultures have a romantic image of the writer as a man or woman of experience - Jack London slogging through the snow or fighting the high seas. Hemingway jumping into the ring with bulls or prizefighters, Joan Didion going to El Salvador, Norman Mailer daring to wear a white fur coat in Manhattan - but most of us know that what they actually do with their time is stare at a blank space and try desperately to come up with the next sentence. In action, a writer looks pretty much like a clerk. Romantics would rather think of them as 'walking point' for us - going out and living life to the fullest: doing, feeling, thinking, and eventually becoming so full of life that they have to sit down at the writing table to try to make sense of it all, for themselves and for their waiting readers.
Writers don't work very hard to dispel this illusion. Many of us use our profession as an excuse to do things that are dangerous or expensive or morally reprehensible - or all three. Every now and then, if you hang around writers, you come across one or two who you suspect write fiction only because it gives them an excuse to say outrageous things, have sex with a variety of odd people, and drink before lunchtime.
The title of this collection was originally Feedback, from the first story, one of my favorites. But 'None So Blind' won a bunch of awards, including the Hugo for Best Science Fiction Short Story of the Year, and my editor beseeched me to change the title to that. Not only was it marginally more famous, but it was less abstract, and thus less of a headache for the art director. I was generously allowed to keep this introduction, though, and the organization of the book, which tied into the original title.
Some writerly behavior, and misbehavior, can be seen in terms of feedback. Feedback is what happens when part of the output of a system is fed back into the system to regulate it. The screech you get from a microphone is 'positive' feedback; it reinforces the output. Negative feedback is more benign, like the governor on a truck's engine or a pressure cooker's regulator. Writers such as Hemingway and Byron, who feel compelled to model their lives after their made-up heroes, are evincing a kind of positive feedback. I suppose there may be negative-feedback writers, too, who are repelled by the excesses of their characters, and so live quiet, normal lives - but of course we only hear about the other kind!
A justification of the more flamboyant behavior is a corollary to a rule that I think is a pernicious lie: Write what you know. Teachers from the fourth grade through graduate school keep telling their students to write what they know, and it's a principle that seems so self-evident that neither students nor teachers question it. (It's also why there are so many novels about college professors committing adultery with their students, or at least fantasizing about it.)
I'm a science-fiction writer, and I would certainly be paralyzed if I were restricted to writing about what I, or anybody else, actually knew from experience. Nobody has ever talked to a Martian, or used mental telepathy to control others, or travelled through time. (There are people, somewhat reality-impaired, who do think they have done these things, and one of the bonuses of being a science-fiction writer is that you get to correspond with them and sometimes even meet them in the flesh.)
Science fiction is an interesting perspective for investigating this writing-and-experience business from two different angles. One is the rejection of experience completely: the value of imagining events to write about rather than remembering them. And the other is the creative interplay between imagination and experience: I've never fired a ray gun, but I have fired a pistol. I think in both cases you use both hands to steady the weapon; you spend an extra fraction of a second getting a good sight picture; you squeeze the trigger rather than jerk it, and so forth. Knowing the real world makes your imaginary world more believable.
What's more important than those mechanical details, of course, is how well you can know or imagine the emotional state of the person who's holding that ray gun and about to fire. If you do that honestly, you're inventing truth. You're not being dishonest by making up things that haven't happened to you; by and large that's what a fiction writer does - and if you write science fiction, fantasy, or horror most of the things you write about have never happened to anybody.
A couple of hobgoblins can't be ignored, though. You ought to shy away from writing directly about a very commonplace experience that you have never experienced. I'd either be a fool or have to consider myself a genius, for instance, to write about how it feels to go through pregnancy and have a baby. The science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr., revealed to some readers that she was actually female when she tried to write a description of male masturbation in zero gravity.
But it's worth thinking about what actually constitutes universal experience. I see an awful lot of tiresome nonsense written about combat, which rings false to me because I did experience a half year of combat in Vietnam. But most of a writer's audience nowadays wouldn't have experienced combat, either; it's a fairly rare experience even among men of my generation. So very few readers are going to catch you, for instance, if you write about a M-16 rifle firing twenty rounds at a clip. (Reference books will tell you the weapon held twenty rounds; they probably won't tell you that if you loaded more than eighteen, you risked the thing jamming.)
There's a famous example of just making it all up: According to most critics, the best novel about the American Civil War is The Red Badge of Courage, written by Stephen Crane many years after the war. Crane was born six years after the conflict ended and had not had any experience of combat anywhere. He interviewed a lot of veterans for specific information, but the main thing is that he could describe very well the interior of his own heart, and he had one hell of an imagination. (An old soldier who reviewed the book in London admired its accuracy but wondered how the writer managed to get the sound of the bullets wrong.)
All experience is, of course, memory by the time you sit down to write about it, unless all you write about is typing. So another thing that writers ought to be aware of is that the barrier between memory and imagination can be a very thin membrane indeed. All of us constantly rewrite our own pasts, not just to make ourselves look better, but to try to make sense out of our lives and out of capital L Life in general.
An exercise I give to my writing students at MIT is to have everyone write for five or ten minutes about the earliest childhood memory they can recall. I ask them to try to remember an actual incident rather than just a 'sense of place', which is what most people come up with. There must be some reason they remember this incident rather than some other one, something important to them in later life, so it's a logical springboard for a story. But it's also part of a demonstration about the value of experience in writing fiction.
After I collect their papers, I tell them this anecdote about 'first memories': The great child psychologist Jean Piaget thought for years that his earliest memory was the dramatic one of having been kidnapped from his stroller. He even remembered that his nurse chased after the man and caught him; her face was scratched up in the struggle. Years later though, the nurse came back to visit the family and confessed that she had made the whole thing up - she'd gotten the scratches making love with her boyfriend in the bushes! Piaget had heard the story so many times that the details had impressed themselves upon his memory as true data, remembered.
This is not irrelevant to fiction: the actual truth or falsity of the incident was immaterial to its effect on Piaget's personality as he grew from child to adult. The 'memory' of the nurse's selfless behavior must have given him a higher opinion of human nature than he otherwise would have had. The incident might even have had some effect on his choice of career.
When we read a piece of fiction, unless it's an obvious roman a clef like The Sun Also Rises or Unanswered Prayers, we don't have any idea whether the author ever experienced anything like the incidents in the story. It shouldn't make a particle of difference, either - but of course it does. We wonder about the literal authority of the author. We are also snoops and voyeurs.
One reason writers' biographies are interesting is the opportunity to search through them for sources of the fictions. It occurred to me that that would be a useful way to tie together the stories in this book; using hindsight to recall, or try to figure out, which parts of each story are made up and which parts came from so-called real life. I put in those mullings as afterwords, in a different typeface, so that those who just want to read fiction can easily skip over them. But those people aren't reading this either...
Excerpt from an email I wrote. It's a bit long to put on the updates page.
I'd have to say, yes, I do believe in free will. (I'm assuming here that you mean 'free will' in a religious context). To delve a little further into the question, let's have a look at human nature first.
In my book, the single greatest word to describe our achievements - in any form - would have to be 'creationism'. Not 'creationism', in the sense that we are God's children and thus a pale reflection of his almighty power, but rather, 'creationism' in the sense that we are creatures of free will, free to create whatever we want. In both of these views, we are dealing with a Creator and a Created; but the difference is that in the second case, which I would argue for, God - rather than human beings themselves - is the pale reflection. God, according to the second principle, is the result of human free will.
To vent emotion, to communicate critical thought, to express oneself in the arts and sciences... these are all forms of producing meaning and structure, of infusing just a tiniest bit of ourselves into the fabric of history and civilization. If you take a look through history, the greatest men and women of society have managed to create something that has outlived even their own corporeal selves.
There is something wondrous about the human spirit that is highlighted by evolutionist theory (as opposed to religious theory) - because, by acknowledging we evolved from ooze to Man through the process of our own skills, it lauds the fact that we are able to achieve greatness ourselves. Everything - faith, love, strength - comes from us. As opposed to that, a belief in a higher God would mean that we had someone to guide us - something benevolent and yet out of our reach, that we constantly seek to understand. It undermines the beauty of human independence, I think, to presuppose that we are merely the worms dangling on the end of the fisherman's hook (an unfair metaphor, I know, but you get the point). Besides, it wouldn't be feasible to believe in a transcendent, omniscient, omnipresent being when we could just as easily believe everything that is good in the world has come from inside ourselves. That's the principle of Occam's Razor, by the way: all things being equal, the simplest explanation is always right. To believe in oneself - in that ultimate independence - is also to have hope; hope that we might still be able to reach past our inherent ugliness - our cruelties, our wars, our hatred -and find something new for the future.
If we were truly autonomous, there would be no 'religious leaders [taking] advantage of the simple minds of the common people'. Because we would be able to rise above that on our own. We just need time. I'd rather believe that, than in a God who must push us to excel. That, for me at least, would be the ultimate betrayal of the human conscience - and of the human free will.
A very modified passage - pages 165 to 167 - from Mark Fabi's Wyrm novel. And before you start thinking he's some crackpot off the street, he's actually a psychiatrist (and this is a fiction book). Most of the changes I've made have been to remove character references.
In terms of natural selection, a virus that kills its host is at a disadvantage, especially if it does so quickly. It's like moving into a house and then burning it down. But there are many types of 'mind viruses': popular fads, jokes, rumors, cults, chain letters, that sort of thing... [commonly referred to as] 'meme plagues'... It's like the mental equivalent of a gene - a piece of encoded memory. In a sense, the message is the virus, only instead of infecting the computer, it infects the user; he believes it, then spreads it himself.
One of the best examples is religion, possibly the most successful form of human-information virus - or if you prefer, meme plague. Take Judaism. For thousands of years it was transmitted from generation to generation. All in the family, so to speak... But about two thousand years ago Judaism underwent a mutation, giving rise to Christianity. From an epidemiologic point of view, the most important difference is that Christianity spreads outside the family or tribal group. It's evangelical, which is analogous to a biovirus that spreads by casual contact.
Then there's the question of susceptibility. A virus is like a key that fits a particular lock. The virus-host interaction depends on specific factors in the host that the virus is designed to exploit... In this case, designed by the forces of natural selection. In the case of religions, susceptibility consists of a number of different factors: a yearning for mysticism or spirituality of some kind, a need for certainty, a sense of guilt, a tendency towards obsessionality... Why obsessionality? Because religions are by nature ritualistic. Freud considered them to be highly elaborated obsessional systems. If you have a tendency towards that sort of thing in the first place, religion is going to get under your skin.
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