Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
There are many, many, many paths that go nowhere.  Sometimes, there
are characters who change entirely over the course of the book.  In the
book I'm currently writing, there's one young man who almost got
rewritten as a old woman.  I did a few scenes that way, then decided
that he really was a young man.  But maybe he's retained some of the
characteristics that he picked up while he was an old woman, something
that the reader will never see.  

But it's not like I start again with a character.  It's more like I
move forward, figuring out who they are--and then revise their past to
match once I know who they are.  I could make an argument that we all
do that with our lives, to some extent. Unconsciously, we edit our
memories.  But I digress--for more on that, check out an article I
wrote wearing my science writer persona.  It's at 
http://www.brazenhussies.net/murphy/memory.html

Back on fiction writing.  For me, writing fiction is a process of
exploration.  When I'm done, if I did my work well, you don't see all
the dead ends and false starts.  Sometimes, you'll see the scenic byway
that I just couldn't resist taking, even though there was a shorter
route.  

Some characters are fixed from the start:  Mrs. Selby was always a
sweet, nurturing soul; Jasper Davis was always a bad guy.  But other
characters meander a bit to find themselves.  

Perhaps it was misleading to say that Max wandered out the hills with
his mule and then developed with the story. When Max first wandered out
to the hills, he was a former Chicago policeman.  Then for a while, I
thought he might be a Pinkerton. No, that wasn't it--but I knew he had
something to do with crime.  

I start with an image, it's true.  I also start with a strong sense of
a character's personality and how they fit into the story.  Then I
bumble about for a bit, exploring, in the course of figuring out who
this person really is.  The initial image may not be precisely correct,
but it provides a starting point for the exploration.  
  

    
Why is there a Pat Murphy in each of these books?  How do you develop the
character of a Pat Murphy?
  

    
Why Pat Murphy? Because the author is always in the novel.  I'm just
making it more obvious than usual.  

That's a joke, but it's true as well. One of the things I've found
most unnerving about being a fiction writer is realizing how much I
reveal about myself in every short story and novel I write.  You can
pretend that you're just making all this stuff up, but when you get
right down to the nitty-gritty subtext, you'll find you are revealing
far more about yourself than you care to admit. 

I started to come to this realization when I was compiling stories for
my collection, Points of Departure, a decade or so ago.  I started
seeing the common threads among the characters--so many are people who
don't fit into their family, their society, their circumstances, people
who feel like outsiders in their own worlds. A werewolf in the old
West (Nadya), a chimp with the mind of a teenage girl (Rachel in Love),
an archeologist who sees ghosts of the past (The Falling Woman).  Hmm.
 Childhood angst revealed. (And I seem so well-adjusted.  Ha!  ;-)

A few years ago, a friend pointed out that my stories often feature a
discomfort with science, a conflict on some level between science and
other belief systems--magic, for lack of a better word.  She's
right--there it is in The Falling Woman, in The City, Not Long After,
in my first novel The Shadow Hunter, my novella, Bones.  Hmm.  

I can't think about this sort of stuff when I'm writing, of course, or
it would stop me dead.  (Just as I can't think of my mother reading
the book while I'm writing a sex scene.  Just the thought of thinking
of it sends chills up my spine.)  

Anyway, one way or another, the author is always in the book.  And in
one way or another, all the characters contain aspects of the author. 
When you get down to it all of the characters are all me since I made
them all up.  

In writing There and Back Again, I was very amused to put in Curator
Murphy, a slightly mysterious character who seems to know more about
what's going on than anyone else. Seemed like a perfect analogy for the
author.  In Wild Angel, former Pinkerton detective Patrick Murphy
comes in to help out when I need him the most, another author
surrogate.  

I've had the toughest time with Pat in the last book, Adventures in
Time and Space with Max Merriwell.  But I finally got her pegged. 
She's a magenta-haired grad student working on her dissertation in
quantum physics and proposing a variety of mad theories.  

In the end, putting Pat Murphy in each book seemed like the final bow
in the tangle of jokes about identity.  
  

    
By the way, not only can anyone chime in with a question, but if you're a
non-Well-member reading this on the web, you can e-mail your question to our
fine host, at XXXXXX@well.com, and she'll be happy to post it here.

--So, did you enjoy being a former Pinkerton?  One of the perks of being a
writer is getting to try on so many different characters--I was going to
say, this time you were going in drag, but every character a writer writes
is drag, isn't it?, no matter what gender.  The way that in the documentary
"Paris Is Burning" you see the gay voguers not only portraying women, but
also businessmen, construction workers--people of their physical sex, but
very unlike them.
  

    
Being a former Pinkerton wasn't half bad, but I enjoyed being the
mysterious Curator Murphy more.  

For me, creating characters (and living through them) is one of the
great joys of being a writer.  I particularly love writing and
rewriting dialog.  You know those conversations where you always think
about what you should have said after it's too late.  There's some
French phrase for it:  wit of the staircase, I think.  (Does anyone
know it in French?) Anyway as a writer, I can rewite conversations as
many times as I like, so that they end up going the way I think they
should.    
  

    
Who doesn't want to be brilliant and mysterious?
  

    

Not me!!

Let me just clarify one point - if you are reading the conversation and
you are not on the WELL, you want to e-mail your comments and suggestions
to inkwell-hosts@well.com.  That way it will go to all the hosts - not
just me - and whoever sees it first, posts it.

We hope to hear from you with questions for Pat Murphy.
  

    
Whoops, sorry, castle!

Send your cogent questions or snippy quips or pleasant remarks to the fine
people at inkwell-hosts@well.com.
  

    
Hey, I wonder if we might talk a little about There and Back Again. As
I mentioned before, it's Max Merriwell's recasting of The Hobbit as a
space opera. If anyone wants to read the first chapter, it's on my web
site.  I've also got some good reviews of the book (including a review
that made my heart sing from the New York Times) posted there.  And in
the interests of stirring up some discussion, I'll tell you about a
scathing review of the book by John Clute at:
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue137/excess.html
He critiques everything from the author photo to the premise of the
book. He is clearly mortally offended that I would dare to do anything
with Tolkien's material.  It's rare that a dreadful review doesn't
hurt, but this one was so over the top that I had a hard time taking it
seriously. 

Any one want to talk about There and Back Again and/or the Hobbit? 
  

    
I'd love to.  I enjoyed the book, and enjoyed your transplantation of hobbit
types to people who live cozily in big hollowed-out rocks in the cozy little
asteroid belt--haven't read the Clute review.
  

    

i still remember from years ago that for a lot of the New Worlds crowd, any
favorable acknowledgment of Tolkein was the same as saying "hitler wasn't
all that bad. he was vegetarian." at least in their writing, Tolkein was the
worst thing to happene to western literature ever. it doens't suprise me
that he'd reflexively trash anything that grew out of a TOlkein work.
  

    
Fr. Clute might not have appreciated the Havard Lampoon version of the
Hobbit from years ago, either. I don't recall the name but the lead
characters were Frito, Dildo and Goodgulf the Gray.
  

    

Well, Clute's tack is expressly pro-Tolkien even as it's anti-Murphy.

I haven't read THERE AND BACK AGAIN, but I did read the first chapter, and
what I saw struck me as an interesting exercise (Pat seems to reproduce much
of Tolkien's style, jokes, and asides, in addition to using the plot). But I
was unclear (based on the little I read) as to how it could be anything more
than an exercise. In short, I wondered what Murphy was aiming for.
  

    
Nothing like throwing in a bad review to get people posting.  ;-)

The Harvard Lampoon book that sd mentioned was "Bored of the Rings." 
I think I was in high school when it came out.  I had read Lord of the
Rings half a dozen times and I loved it madly.  So I was mortally
offended when my father gave me a copy of Bored of the Rings for
Christmas.  How dare they, I thought.  Then I read the book.  

I loved it.  I laughed and laughed--and I can still recite some of the
doggerel:  "Say it now and say it loud/I'm a cow and I'm proud."  God
help me, I can also recite "Sing hey for the bath at the close of
day...." and "The road goes ever on."  Obviously, I don't see loving
Tolkien and loving Bored of the Rings to be mutually exclusive.  

As for what I was doing when I was writing There and Back Again:  I
was playing.  

That is, by the way, what I'm doing in this entire convoluted project.
 I'm playing--with words, with ideas, with identities.   

I thought the New York Times reviewer described There and Back Again
perfectly from his point of view:  "the fun ...is to see what Murphy
has taken from Tolkien's original..., what she has ignored, and how she
has transformed her borrowings. ....Murphy knows when to pay homage to
her inspiration and when to leave it alone."  

From my point of view, I was having exactly the same sort of fun from
the other side--deciding what new form the elements of the tale could
take.  I was taking a classic and reimagining it in a different
form--just as I have taken several fairy tales and rewritten them in
new form for Ellen Datlow's anthologies.  I was thinking--"Here's the
way the tale has been told.  Now what if...."

Numerous fantasy writers (starting with Terry Brooks) have adopted the
trappings of Tolkien's tale--the wizards, the elves, the magic
talismans. (I even ran across a book the other day with "talking tree
men.") That doesn't interest me.  What is powerful for me in Tolkien's
tale is an ordinary man swept away by extraordinary forces.  I wanted
to see what that would look like in science fiction form. 

In the first chapter of There and Back Again, I needed to clearly
establish the link between this tale and The Hobbit.  For mnemonic's
taste, that was clearly too close.  As Bailey blasts across the galaxy,
the parallels grow weaker--but they are still there for the
knowledgeable reader.  

Now lest people take it amiss that I say I was playing, let me say
that I take playing very seriously.  To clarify, let me quote
pataphysician Gyro Renacus in conversation with Bailey in There and
Back Again:  
 
"I've heard people say that pataphysicians think everything's a kind
of a joke."
Gyro shook his head.  "Now that's not true at all.  In fact, only a
pataphysician is capable of complete seriousness. You see, we take
everything seriously. Absolutely everything."  He sipped his whiskey.
"According to the Principle of Universal Equivalence, everything is
just as serious as everything else. A battle to the death with
Resurrectionists, a game of Scrabble, a love affair—all are equally
serious."
"But people say...."
"People don't always understand," Gyro said gently. "You see people
confuse playing with not being serious. We are very serious about our
play."
Bailey frowned. "I guess I see. You play--but you take it seriously so
that you can win, and...."
"Oh, no. Playing to win--that's not it at all.  When you are playing
to win, you are in a finite game, a game with boundaries.  I was
speaking of the infinite game, where one plays simply in order to
continue to play."
"So you don't take winning seriously?"
"We take it just as seriously as we take everything else." 

I take this project very seriously and I'm playing. For me, the best
work happens when I'm doing both these things.  I had a rollicking good
time writing the book, and it's been gratifying that many folks seem
to have had the same sort of fun reading it.  

For those who didn't have fun--just put the book down.  Put your hands
in the air and step away from the book.  That way, no one will get
hurt.  ;-) 

By the way, everyone, no need to be formal.  Please just call me Pat. 
  

    

Thanks, Pat -- as you can see, my own posting shifted from Pat to
Murphy, so it's nice to be able to standardize on Pat.
  

    
Were there parts of The Hobbit you'd wanted to incorporate, but had to give
up as impossible?
  

    
A quick answer before I dash off the Exploratorium to write up
mathematical card tricks.  

Well, there was one character I thought I had left out: Beorn, the
bear-man.   I couldn't find a good analog for him and I figured I could
do without him.  Then, when There and Back Again came out, a reviewer
mentioned that I had turned Beorn into Fluffy, a human/cat cyborg
fighting ship. The reviewer was right--the parallel was there.  I
hadn't consciously put it there, but there it was.  Now I'm waiting for
other people to point out other parallels I missed.  

As Martha commented earlier, There and Back Again has a preponderance
of female characters: Gitana (the woman space pirate who involves
Bailey on this adventure), the Farrs (the clone family who are Bailey's
traveling companions), Curator Murphy (a woman knowledgeable about the
alien artifacts that the Farrs seek).  Since finishing the book, I've
had people ask why I didn't make Bailey female as well.  I didn't
figure that out until recently.  

Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit is always longing to be back home in his
comfortable hobbit hole. He's into cooking and housekeeping.  He is
distressed when the dwarves sing about breaking the bottles and
chipping the plates.  As one Tolkien expert put it to me, "Bilbo really
is a fussy little queen."  If I had put those personality traits into
a female character, I would have been very uncomfortable with the
result!  

Gotta run. America's middle school students need card tricks.  
  

    
Even if they're queens, Bilbo, and Bailey, seem rather sexless.  They're
lifelong male bachelors you can't really imagine dating a man or a woman.
Is that something you took from the Tolkein?
  

    
        Till she gets back, let me jump up and say that the first book works
well even if you [or I, in this case] haven't read Tolkien at all
[something that can't be said for the Harvard Lampoon parody, which
palled big time after about forty pages].
  

    
I agree with you, Martha--I can't imagine Bailey (or Bilbo) out on a
hot date.  All Tolkien's characters in the Hobbit are pretty sexless,
it seems to me.  If there are any dwarf women, I figure that they are
kept in seclusion; they certainly don't show up on the pages of the
book.  Hobbits marry and have little hobbits, but they all seem
comfortably married, rather than madly in love. I don't know if wizards
have sex, but if they do, Gandalf didn't seem to be getting any during
the Hobbit (unless he was visiting an intimate friend during his time
off stage).  When you get right down to it, sex just doesn't seem to be
the motivator for Tolkien's characters.  So I made a conscious
decision to adopt this approach when I wrote There and Back Again. 

Thanks, Angus! I really wanted to write a book that worked
independently of Tolkien, and I'm glad you think I succeeded.  The
other challenge has been to make each book work independently of all
the others.  I think that's so for There and Back Again and Wild Angel.
 I hope it's so for the last book, which I'm still struggling with.
  

    <scribbled by castle Tue 17 Oct 00 23:04>
  

    

Response <71> was a double-posting.
  

    
Oops.  Sorry about that.  
  

    

so, you;re saying that TOlkein's characters are really Smurfs?
  

    
> When you get right down to it, sex just doesn't seem to be
> the motivator for Tolkien's characters.  So I made a conscious
> decision to adopt this approach when I wrote There and Back Again. 

        The other thing, though, is that it may have been an unconscious
choice when Merriwell wrote it; that's your call.