Still, commercially, they disappointed.
So what is the lesson I took away from all this? It has to do with learning to live with unrealized expectations. Sometimes art and commerce collide in a way that diminishes one or the other. A writer has to realize and accept this truth. You can always write the book you choose, but you can’t always make the readers love it the same way you do. I wish that weren’t so, because I always think readers should love my books in equal measure. But they don’t, and no writer can control that. No more so than a writer can control the sales a book generates. Readers will make the choices that please them, and that determines who sells and how much. When I hear someone gripe about how this or that writer sells so many books and they shouldn’t because they really aren’t very good writers, I want to say—Hey, the readers are the ones who decide! It’s a democracy!
A writer can revel in unexpected successes, but must learn to live with crushed dreams, as well. If you are a professional, you accept both results with equanimity and move on. Another chance for either lies just down the road.
For me, maybe that chance will come in the form of another shot at The Word and The Void. I would like to do three more books in that series. I think the audience is out there waiting for them. I think the new books will be wonderful and will sell like hotcakes. The front money won’t be the same, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept. I’ll earn it back on sales.
On the other hand, those first three books will earn out their advances about the time I turn seventy-five.
Hmmm. Maybe I’ll wait and talk to the publisher about it then.
* * *
Eyes shining, a huge grin on his face, he turned
to me as I huffed up to him, and said,
“Look, Papa! You can see the whole world!”
* * *
* * *
THE WORLD ACCORDING
TO HUNTER, PART TWO
* * *
IN THE FALL of the same year that I was exposed to Hunter’s assessment of my view of the animal world, Judine and I decided to take him with us over the mountains to Spokane where I was scheduled to make an appearance with my latest tome at Auntie’s Bookstore. This wasn’t a journey I particularly wanted to make, because I was in the process of trying to finish the next book and I was behind schedule and struggling. All distractions at this point were major annoyances, and I felt I could ill afford them. Stress is us. But the commitment had been made, so there was no help for it.
The event was scheduled for a Friday night at the end of the third week of September, and I had also agreed to sign at another store on the way back on Saturday afternoon. The drive would be five hours over and five hours back through some pretty extraordinary country, and Judine thought it would be fun to share the experience with our boy.
She always thinks these things, and I always think about the five hours I will spend cooped up with Jack and Annie. Jack and Annie are perfectly reasonable characters in the Mary Pope Osborne Magic Tree House series, a brother and sister who discover a tree house that can travel through time if its occupants simply wish to be somewhere else. Jack and Annie find a book that will allow them to do this and off they go, traveling back in time to visit dinosaurs, pirates, mummies, knights in armor, and others of the same ilk. Hunter loves the Magic Tree House books. Since he doesn’t read, he listens to the audios. Since the audios play throughout the interior of the car, I must listen to them, as well.
Now, I know that Mary Pope Osborne, if she reads this, will understand what I am saying. It isn’t that the audios aren’t well done or interesting—for the first dozen times or so. But after, say, fifty times, I would do anything to make Jack and Annie take their adventures and fly right out of my life.
Hunter, however, cannot get enough of them. And in my house, Hunter rules.
So we packed up and headed out on a beautiful September morning, Jack and Annie at the ready. To my surprise, Hunter opted out of a Magic Tree House experience in favor of Godzilla. Besides listening to the Jack and Annie tapes and assuming the guise of pirates in various forms, playing Godzilla is Hunter’s favorite pastime. It goes like this. We get in the car and start driving, and from the backseat Hunter tells me that Godzilla is chasing us. This is my cue to turn on the navigation system I purchased two years back to save my marriage, so that we can see Godzilla appear on the map as a flashing red dot. Hunter will then tell me that Godzilla is getting closer and I must drive faster. I will tell him I am going as fast as I can. Instead, I try various James Bond devices to throw Godzilla off. Oil spread across the road, for example. Nails. Rockets. Changing the color of the car. Turning invisible. Like that. But nothing ever works for very long, and Hunter always says, “He’s still coming, Papa!”
Well, this is one way to pass the time on a car ride, and on this day we played the Godzilla game until I was ready to return to the Tree House tapes, which is saying something about the extent of my desperation. Eventually, however, Hunter fell asleep, which resulted in a modicum of peace and tranquillity as we crossed over the Cascades.
When we reached the Columbia River across from Vantage, we caught sight of a metal sculpture of a herd of wild horses set at the top of a plateau above a parking lot on the other side. Judine, who would drive miles out of the way to view the world’s second-largest ball of twine, immediately suggested we stop and have a look. I pulled into the parking lot and we climbed out, looking up the bluff face to where the copper-colored sculpture was outlined against a clear blue sky. A few people had climbed up a switchback trail for a closer look and were in the process of coming back down. Hunter instantly charged toward them, yelling for us to follow him.
So we did. Remember, in our house, Hunter rules. We climbed this twisting, gravel-strewn, dusty trail that at times was so steep I had to resort to leaning forward on my hands for support. The day had grown hot and dry, and I was thirsty and sweating right off the bat. The climb was much longer than it looked, and much harder. I was wondering all too quickly why I was doing this. After all, I could see the sculpture already. I could see what it looked like quite clearly. I knew when I got up there that all I was going to see was more of the same, if a bit more ragged and rusted, from a slightly closer position.
But I soldiered on, because that is what you do when your grandson is calling to you to hurry up. We passed a boy and his mother coming down. They looked relieved to be descending. At least, she did. She gave me a tight, pitying smile as we passed on the trail. She knew what I was going through.
Ahead, Hunter was carrying on a conversation with some imaginary person, juking left and right like a running back, playing at something or other. I glanced back at Judine in disgust, and she gave me one of those dazzling smiles that made me want to marry her in the first place.
Near the top, with Hunter still a dozen yards ahead, a rattlesnake slithered across the trail. I yelled at Hunter, who stopped and watched as the snake disappeared beneath a cluster of rocks, and then charged ahead once more. Now I was genuinely worried, picturing an entire family of rattlesnakes lying in wait somewhere just ahead.
I put on a burst of speed—not easy at this point—to catch up with Hunter just as he reached the summit of the climb. He stood in front of the sculpture, which from close up looks huge, and stared not at the metal horses, but out across the Columbia River to the sweep of the land beyond.
Eyes shining, a huge grin on his face, he turned to me as I huffed up to him, and said, “Look, Papa! You can see the whole world!”
It was such a magical moment that I forgot all about the snakes and the climb and saw only the look on his five-year-old face, shining with excitement and joy.
Later, I thought about that moment. It seemed to me there was an important lesson to be learned from it, but I couldn’t decide at first what it was. Of course, I always think Hunter has important lessons to offer. Hunter is a kid, after all, and kids are always teaching adults something about life, even if they don’t realize or even intend
it. (Now that Robert Fulghum doesn’t appear to be imparting any further wisdom on how everything he needed to know he learned in kindergarten, I’m thinking about writing a book on how everything I needed to know I learned from my grandson.)
In any case, after returning home to face anew the specter of my still unfinished tome, it occurred to me that writing a book was like climbing that hill to the wild horse sculpture. When you start out, you sort of know where you are going and what you will find at the end, but not exactly what the journey will entail. Certainly, there are long, dusty stretches in which you think you will never get to the top. Certainly, there are places along the way where you can trip and fall on your face if you are not paying attention. Rattlesnakes represent writer’s block and various other forms of interruption that can throw you off your rhythm or bring you to a complete halt. But both tasks, if you persevere, are likely to culminate in euphoria when you finally arrive at your destination and are able to shout, “Look! I can see the whole world!”
I liked the analogy, but I didn’t think that was what I was looking for. The real lesson lay somewhere else.
It came to me when I started to think about Hunter’s reliance on and use of imagination when making that climb.
I watched him charge on ahead of me. He wasn’t just making a climb up a hill, trying to get from the bottom to the top so he could see that sculpture. No, indeed. Hunter was on an adventure. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, he is always on an adventure. I can hear it in those imaginary conversations and see it in the look on his face. He is living outside the moment. Like all kids, he is experimenting with life’s possibilities, pretending at what might be happening beyond what really is. He is on a journey of discovery, and to the extent that he can manage it, he is making it up as he goes.
When I write a book, I do the same thing. I make it up as I go, a journey of discovery, an adventure in progress. The difference is that I have made the journey so many times before that I tend to be jaded about what I will find. I know all the zigs and zags I will encounter along the way. I know about the hot, dusty stretches and the rattlesnakes. I even know what I will find at the end, because as a professional writer I am supposed to be in control of my material so that I don’t end up with a raggedy mess of unresolved plotlines.
What I tend to forget—what Hunter had reminded me of, even without realizing it—is that a large portion of what makes writing so wonderful comes from encountering the unexpected. To fall back on an old cliché, it isn’t the destination that matters, it is the journey. It is what I discover along the way that I wasn’t looking for. Sometimes a character will become more important than I envisioned. Sometimes a plot segment I hadn’t even thought about will surface midway through. Sometimes the subtext of what seems an ordinary tale will reveal itself in such a way that I will be stunned and elated. The point is, even if I think I know the route, having traveled it so often before, there always exists the possibility of being surprised by something new. The joy of writing comes from that possibility, and the joy of writing is what keeps me making that same journey over and over without ever becoming bored by it.
A child doesn’t need to remember such things. Or even to understand them. A jaded writer of fifty-odd years does. All adults do. A child’s imagination, a willingness to look for the possibilities, is what makes life worthwhile.
At least, that was what Hunter taught me.
* * *
What strikes me as odd is that very few of those who choose to draw comparisons between Tolkien and
myself mention the one that I think is the clearest.
* * *
* * *
ON THE TRAIL
OF TOLKIEN
* * *
IT MAY COME as a surprise to you to learn that I did not set out to write fantasy. What I wanted to write, almost from the moment I was old enough to make the attempt, were adventure stories. But it took me a long time to find the right form for doing so. Deciding what to write, it turns out, isn’t quite as easy as it seems.
I am often asked these days if I have ever considered writing anything besides fantasy. A mystery, maybe. A legal thriller. My questioner will point out that I was a lawyer once upon a time—as if I needed reminding—so I must have some stories to tell about the legal profession. My response? If I had known how well John Grisham was going to do, maybe I would have written legal thrillers instead of fantasy and be retired by now.
Of course, that isn’t the way writing fiction works. A writer doesn’t just sit down and write whatever type of book will sell the most copies in the current market. I know of only one writer who has written successfully to what he perceived to be the needs of the marketplace, and he did so only after years of experimenting with other forms. Most writers can write only one kind of story well enough to make a living at it. A few can write more than one. A still rarer few can write almost anything and expect it to sell, but you can count the number on two hands.
I have a theory about how writers work. There is a tendency to categorize writers of fiction as either literary or commercial. The implication is that either a writer chooses to write for the masses or the discerning few, for money or critical acclaim, for the here and now or the ages. There isn’t always a clear delineation between the one and the other, and sometimes a book will achieve recognition both as commercial and literary fiction, but mostly not. Basically, this is how fiction writers are grouped.
But I don’t believe writers choose their material based on how they think it is going to be received. I don’t even believe that they make a conscious decision to write in a certain fashion. Rather, I think that writers just try to do the best they can with what skills they possess. I think they are imbued with a desire to write about certain subjects, and mostly that is what they do. It isn’t a matter of sitting down and saying, “Okay, I think I’ll write the next Stephen King thriller and get on all the best-seller lists and make millions.” Writing requires passion and commitment in order to come alive. Writers write about what intrigues and compels them, what speaks to them in the same way it will speak to their readers once they find the right way to set it all down.
I cannot speak definitively for other writers on this matter, but I can certainly speak for myself. Perhaps you have heard the old saw that in order to be successful as a writer, you must first find your voice. Think about that for a moment. Does it mean that you have to find the right way of speaking through your stories? Or that you need to locate the narrative style within you? Or that you have to discover a form of storytelling that doesn’t sound false? The answer to all three questions is yes. But mostly, finding your voice means that you have to discover what it is that you can write and write well. You have to discover that one type of fiction, that one area of storytelling that allows your passion and talent to provide the reader with a reason to believe that you both understand and love what you are writing about.
I came to my discovery of that elusive voice in the same way most writers do—through trial and error. I wrote many hundreds of thousands of words and the beginnings of many still unfinished stories to get to a point where I realized what it was that would work for me. I began my search by reading everything that interested me, because reading was my road map to the possible. Between the ages of twelve and twenty-two, my reading interests changed so rapidly that I could barely keep up with them. From Ray Bradbury to William Faulkner, from Jules Verne to Thomas Hardy, I read every writer whose books I could get my hands on. Then I tried to write like they did, experimenting with their styles and types of stories. Because that’s what young writers in search of an identity do—they try on the clothing of successful writers to see if anything fits. Mostly, nothing does. But it is necessary to go through the process of trying everything on to find this out. This is what happened to me. I would read an author whose writing I loved. I would try to write like that author had written. I would lose interest. I would move on. Tales of science fiction, westerns, mysteries, family sagas, coming-of-a
ge stories, and thrillers—each gave way to the next and none of them led anywhere.
All the while, I was searching for a format in which to set an adventure story on the order of the ones written by Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Arthur Conan Doyle. I wanted to write Ivanhoe or The White Company or Treasure Island or The Three Musketeers. Or all of them. But I didn’t want to set my story in a historical context, and I kept thinking that using a different format—a mystery or a space opera, for instance—would reveal to me the setting I was looking for.
Then, in 1965, I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and I thought that maybe I had found what I was looking for. I would set my adventure story in an imaginary world, a vast, sprawling, mythical world like that of Tolkien, filled with magic that had replaced science and races that had evolved from Man. But I was not Tolkien and did not share his background in academia or his interest in cultural study. So I would eliminate the poetry and songs, the digressions on the ways and habits of types of characters, and the appendices of language and backstory that characterized and informed Tolkien’s work. I would write the sort of straightforward adventure story that barreled ahead, picking up speed as it went, compelling a turning of pages until there were no more pages to be turned.
It was an ambitious goal, one that I did not immediately undertake to achieve. Mired in college studies, I set it aside for later. It took another three years for me to pick up again, and then only after I became so bored with law school that I felt I had to do something to break the monotony and so went back into writing fiction as a diversion. Incorporating an unlikely mix of Tolkien and Faulkner to construct a framework and relying on characters and storylines similar to those of the European adventure story writers I so admired, I spent seven years developing the book that would eventually become The Sword of Shannara.