Children’s fantasy is in a way better off, because it has contrived to maintain within itself all the various Genres. But you have to keep them rigidly separate when you write. Or else. But here again the outer boundaries are being jealously guarded and defined. You so easily acquire the stigma of being “Not Really.” The Rules are growing in number and rigidity again to make sure of that. The Rule that You Must Instruct has been brushed off and refurbished and is now linked to the ecology. You are supposed to go on about trees and ozone and things. Worthy subjects no doubt, but you do think about Hansel and Gretel and their father who was a poor woodcutter busily destroying the rain forests? Are Hansel and Gretel now “Not Really”? Or does their father get excused on the grounds that he never made any money at it? Seriously, the ecology Rule has so far overridden the earlier Rules about instruction and behavior that you could get a book about an otherwise admirable person who chanced to cut down a tree and he would be a baddie. He would have to be, well, not killed anymore—because that’s “Not Really” either—but put in prison. Prison is becoming “Not Really” too, so I don’t know what you do with the wretch. Anyway, you see the problems. And a further major Rule has recently been invented. This is that you must not tax the mind of any person under sixteen. It has been decided (by someone somewhere somehow for some reason) that people under sixteen can only attend to anything for slightly under five minutes—and less than that if more than one thing is going on at one time. So you can’t have your baddie cut down more than one tree or the readers go on overload.
Here’s an odd thing. Less than five years ago it was a truth generally acknowledged that anyone who could follow the plot of Doctor Who could follow anything. Maybe that was going a bit far the other way, but . . . anyway, most adults professed to like their books simpler than children did.
Well, now they get them that way. The Rules have made sure of that. SF—which used to be spiced with imagination, weird philosophy, fantasy, and horror—is now only supposed to deal with ideas that are scientifically probable. Facts, facts, facts, Mr. Gradgrind4, and a minimal story to frame them. About the only not-quite-yet proven things the Rules permit are that people can live for at least four hundred years, and people will live with a great deal of gloom. There may be a Rule that gloom is scientific. To be sure, you can flirt with more fantastic notices, even cheerful ones, but then you are in a watertight sub-Genre called Space Opera. And the hatches are sealed between. If you want to do anything else on these general lines—and thank goodness there are some who do—you are “Not Really” and have to call yourself Speculative Fiction (and this shows signs of getting a Genre and Rules of its own too).
As for adult fantasy, the Rules have become so detailed and so firm that there really is the same book being written over and over again. The Rules here state that there are two kinds of fantasy only. Comic fantasy and high fantasy. Comic fantasy hasn’t quite got its Rules in order yet, I’m glad to say, except the Rule that states you must not stray over into high. High. Well. Basically you have this large empty map. The Rules state that no fantasy is complete without a map. Your protagonist will then travel to every spot on this map—except, for some reason, most major cities marked—visiting as he/she goes such stock people as the marsh dwellers, the desert nomads, the Anglo-Saxon Cossacks, and so on, frequently collecting magical bric-a-brac on the way and putting in obligatory time as a slave somewhere. At the end of this tour, he/she will either return to the mundane world through a portal or be crowned a monarch, whichever is appropriate. This of course will take three books to happen in.
Again there are notable exceptions, but they are now “Not Really,” naturally, and are showing signs of joining Speculative. Rules may well soon follow.
Now, I ask you, why is everyone doing this to themselves? I really would like to know. You can buy me a drink while you tell me. Some of you may want to tell me that this is not so. But I tell you that from where I stand the whole Rule system exists. It exists and is without reason. Worse—it is stultifying. There is less and less cross-fertilization. There is less and less possibility of anyone thinking of something new to write about. Imagination? Forget it. We have the Rules instead. We have Genre.
What, in conclusion, I should like to point out is that the whole thing is back to front. Rules and Genres are not the absolutes they have become. They are humanity’s way of trying to make sense and order of what they see. What you start with is the somewhat confusing scene you see. Then you can (if you are insecure enough) discover or invent Rules that it seems to follow. But what you see is the first thing. And what you see should be a magnificent, whirling, imaginative mess of notions, ideas, wild hypotheses, new insights, strange action, and bizarre adventures. And the frame that holds this mess is the story. You really should only need the story as the Rules that govern this particular mess. The story is the important thing. But we are now back to front, because what people have found in previous stories are being used to govern what should be in future ones. And this is ridiculous.
I would like to leave you with Prometheus’s statement from The Homeward Bounders, which still seems to me to be the truth of this matter. Jamie asks Prometheus what the Rules are, and Prometheus, chained to his rock, gets almost angry for the first time in their conversation. “There are no rules,” he says. “There are no rules, only principles and natural laws.”
Thank you.
Answers to Some Questions
Diana originally titled this piece “The Profession of Science Fiction.” It was first published in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, No. 70, Summer 1997. Foundation is the journal of the UK-based Science Fiction Foundation.
Anyone who writes fantasy tends to be asked why they do it. Anyone who does it for children is liable to be asked all sorts of other things in addition, everything in fact from how much money you earn to “When did you write your first book?” I thought I would use this opportunity to answer some of the questions I am most commonly asked and, I hope, in the course of it, the question I have never been asked and which strikes me as the really important one. This is: “What do you think you’re trying to do?” That is a question I ask myself quite often and find very hard to answer.
The most frequent question of all is almost as hard to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” It is almost unfailingly asked by unfortunate people of ten to thirteen years old whose teacher has made them do a project. My very favorite form of it was asked by a twelve-year-old: “Where do you get your ideas, or do you think of them for yourself?”
Very shrewdly put, because some part of an idea, if it is going to start a book developing, has to relate to something outside me, even if I don’t exactly get it from this outside thing. It has to be a creative mix of interior and exterior notions. The best ideas conflate three or more things, rather in the way dreams do, or the minds of very small children. A very good example is a baroque muddle of my own when, at the age of five, I was evacuated to the Lake District early in the Second World War. I was told I was there because the Germans were about to invade. Almost in the same breath, I was warned not to drink the water from the washbasin because it came from the lake and was full of typhoid germs. I assumed that “germs” was short for “Germans.” Looking warily at the washbasin, I saw it was considerately labeled “Twyford,”1 clearly warning people against germ warfare. Night after night, I had a half-waking nightmare in which Germans (who had fair, floating hair and were clad in sort of cheesecloth Anglo-Saxon tunics) came racing across the surface of the lake to come up through the plug hole of this washbasin and give us all Twyford.
This has all the elements of something needed to start a book off, the magical prohibition, the supernatural villains, the beleaguered good people, and for good measure, the quite incommunicable fears children have. I prefer my ideas to have this last element if possible. All children have these inexpressible fears and believe also that they are the only one who does. It is very hard for any other medium but a b
ook to handle these fears, but a book can do it easily, since it is by its nature a private matter, like the fears are. And I suppose it is my good fortune that the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old and imprinted the memory of this (and other) muddles on my mind. When I consider how the ideas for most of my books came to me, I see they came as versions of this kind of conflation. All this one lacked was for me, as writer, to go on and say “What if this were true?” and then try to compose the story that conquers the fears in their own terms—which is something you have to be an adult to do. As a child, I knew it was true but could do nothing about it.
Another common question which naturally follows on from here is “Do you plan your book out before you start it?” and my answer is always unequivocally, “No, that kills it dead.” This always shocks teachers, who are accustomed to telling their pupils that you can’t write that way. But I am afraid I do, because I have to, for the sake of the book itself. A book, for me, is ready to be written when all the conflated elements of the initial idea come together to produce three things. First, and most important, is the taste, quality, character—there are no words for it—nature of the book itself, a sort of flavor that has to start on the first page and will dictate the tone and style and the words used, as well as the sort of action to take place. This flavor, quality, is something I have painfully discovered you have to be utterly true to. Any attempt to coax it to be different, as planning in detail might, is a sort of taxidermy, when what you need is the living animal.
The second factor acts as counterweight or control. I know how the story begins and how it ends, and I also know, in great detail, at least two scenes from somewhere in the middle. When I say great detail, I probably mean precise, total detail. Colors, speech, actions, and exactly where the furniture or outdoor scenery are and what they look like, are all with me vividly and ineradicably. Often I am quite mystified as to how you get from the beginning to one of these scenes, or from one of them to the end. Part of the joy of writing is finding out. And I deliberately do not ask more when I start to write, so that the book has room to keep its flavor and pursue its own logic. In fact, I suspect that some of the ideas that people doing projects are asking about are things that have happened because the story is pursuing its own logic. I know I have many times been surprised—and frequently surprised into laughing out loud and, on one occasion, laughing so hard I fell off the sofa where I was writing.
The third factor is impossible to describe in any other way than that a book (often not the one I thought I was about to write) shouts to me that it is ready and needs to be written NOW. Then I have to find paper—and there are never any pens—and do it at once. I write longhand for the first draft, because I find that easiest to forget. I do not, at this stage, wish to be interrupted by self-conscious notions of myself writing a book.
The planning stage, in a Looking-Glass way, comes next. I do a very meticulous second draft that sometimes involves rearranging and recasting, in which I examine every word and its relation to other words, then every sentence and every paragraph, and then all of these in relation to the whole book. I want a clear and harmonious whole. And I want people reading it to be in no doubt of what is happening. It is probably most important to be clear if the things happening are funny.
If this gives the idea that I am an inspirational writer, that is true. But inspiration is only about half the story. For a start, it took me ten or more years to learn how to tap that inspirational level of mind. How to do this is certainly different for everyone. For me, it was when I began understanding that I had at least to start with a dreamlike conflation—like that of Germans giving you Twyford—and that I could trust some level of my brain to do this. I have to spend a lot of time sitting waiting for it to happen. Often I have the makings of a book sitting in my head maturing for eight or more years, and when I am considering that collection of notions I am aware of exercising a great deal of conscious control, trying the parts of it round in different ways, attempting to crunch another whole set of notions in with it to see if that makes it work, and so on. But I do not feel in total control, doing this. It is more as if I am moving the pieces of idea around until they reach a configuration from which I, personally, can learn. Practically every book I have written has been an experiment of some kind from which I have learned. It does not seem to me that I have the right to foist a story on people, most of whom are children who should be learning all the time, unless I am learning from it too.
“But why do you write for children?” is the usual adult response to this—as if, finding I have gone to all this trouble, they think I go on to waste it on people who are immature. That is a question requiring several layers of answer. Some of them I am going to postpone to the end. For now I will say that I was not at first aiming to write only for children and have never considered what I write exclusively for them. Indeed, one of the reasons for my doing things the way I do was the spectacle of my husband falling asleep whenever he attempted to read aloud from almost any children’s book available in the late sixties. It seemed to me that he and other adults deserved to have something to interest them if they were prepared to read a bedtime story, and that people of all ages were more likely to be interested in something I myself found vividly interesting. My eldest son was continually and wistfully asking for books that were funny. For myself, I was bored writing anything else but fantasy and, when I started to write in earnest, there were simply no other openings for fantasy except with a children’s publisher. And there seemed to be something in the air, pushing people to write for children. When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying “It’s his Christianity, you know,” as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on Hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles. Neither of them ever lectured on their secret hobbies. And yet somehow not only I but numerous others such as Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh, and Penelope Farmer, to name just a few—and none of us knew one another there—all went away and produced books for children. Strange of us, really.
“Then what made you want to be a writer?” is the next question and much easier to answer. It was not a case of wanting. In the middle of one afternoon, at the age of eight, I knew I was going to be a writer—as if the future had tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out quite calmly what I was going to be doing for the next fifty years. Since I was wildly dyslexic, my parents roared with laughter, and even I realized that I needed training. At the age of ten I remember sitting sadly, thinking that there was something wrong with my imagination. I just could not see the scenery and actions in the few books I had anything like as vividly as their writers obviously had. My mind’s eye was all blurred. But despite this, I wrote my first book about two years later and discovered that if you were writing a thing, it came clear. It had to. In order to write about any event, you had to make the event clear to yourself.
I wrote this book because my sisters and I had barely any books. The obvious explanation was the war and the shortage of paper, but it was not the real reason. Mostly it was my father’s intense meanness with money. He had been a schoolteacher, so he did admit that children ought to have books, and he salved his conscience by buying the entire works of Arthur Ransome, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed to us, one between the three of us, every Christmas. I was at university by the time we got Great Northern? The third reason was censorship by my mother. She had been trained as a child to believe that fantasy was bad for you and that you should only read a book if it was literature. Luckily for us, the Alice books, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, and Puck of Pook’s Hill qualified, but nearly everything else did not (Puck of Pook’s Hill saddened me, much as I enjoyed it. There seemed no point in the children in it learning all these wonderful things if they were m
ade to forget once they had). In addition, I was allowed Greek myths, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the original language and a massive book called Epics and Romances of the Middle Ages which my grandmother had won as a Sunday school prize. I also read most of Conrad, which I thought of as verbose adventure stories, and conceived a hearty dislike of the narrator Marlow—the prig would keep describing things instead of getting on with the story. My sisters, who did not like literature in this form so much, were much worse off. My first full-length book was written to read out to them in their book starvation. It was very bad, but they clamored so much for the next episode that I went on writing and thus found I could finish writing a whole ten-exercise-book-long narrative. I suppose I should be grateful to my parents both for causing me to get writing and for the fact that I came to most other children’s classics as a delighted adult, when my own children read them, but obstinately, I am not. Not one whit.
“Do you put much of your childhood in your books?” No, very rarely, for two reasons. First because it would be what I always derisively call “a loving re-creation of childhood”—an adult exercise in nostalgia—where children are entirely forward looking. It does not interest most children in the least what their parents or grandparents did as children—most of them would be surprised to find that the adults they know ever were that young. They have no historical sense and can’t wait to grow up. I think it is this futureward orientation that I find most congenial about children’s minds; but a lot of substandard didactic writers do nevertheless insist on writing books about “growing up.” When I meet these kind of books, or those of the “loving re-creation” school, I must confess that I reach for my gun. This is absolutely not the right approach.