Read Online The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers - Free Book Online
Authors: Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers
Tags: Science-Fiction
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(This leaves aside the little point that no one but you can possibly know when you are mentally ready to sit down and write.) And most other breadwinners are given sympathy and credit for having to go off to work; work is not regarded as a privilege for which they must beg and negotiate time. But a writer's family may suspect (rightly, as it happens) that she's really secretly having fun, and tend to treat the demand for respect as well as some sort of attempt at double-dipping.
LSC: Writer Ardath Mayhar talks about writing an entire novel while one of her sons banged on the typewriter with a spoon.
LMB: I know another who typed her second novel one-handed while nursing her baby. (It was probably her best chance to sit down uninterrupted.) It actually may be less confusing for the kids to have a parent who makes a clean break and leaves the house to work, than to have one who's there, but not paying attention. One of the problems of being a writer is in identifying "time off." If the book is always running in your head, niggling at your brain, you're never quite altogether present to the people you're with. I suspect this can become frustrating after a time, but the people you really need to ask about the effect of this absentmindedness are writers' family members themselves.
But all that said, on the whole the experience of being a parent, watching real kids grow, has given me back human content for my work a hundred times the value of the time it's taken away.
LSC: If your family has given you content for your stories, so has your reading—and not just fiction but lots of nonfiction as well.
LMB: A nearly universal trait among writers—if we didn't love to read, why else would we want to make more books? I pick up a lot of ideas from historical reading—to paraphrase, history is not only stranger than we imagine, it is frequently stranger than we can imagine. Real life provides jumping-off points for my fictional ideas, but they are frequently turned inside out or upside down before they land on the page, re-visioned, revised. Reading, observation, music and songs, experiences people tell me about, my own life and emotions—it all goes into the stew. But inspiration isn't just knocking into an idea—everyone does that all day long. It's hitting the idea, or more often cross-connection of ideas, that sets off some strong resonance inside one's own spirit, that hot pressure in the solar plexus that says, Yeah, this is it; this matters!
Sometimes inspiration falls freely from the heavens; sometimes you have to hunt it down and kill it yourself. Then there is reverse-inspiration, that restless discomfort that says an idea is just wrong for a story. Over time I've come to regard that sort of warning writer's block as almost equally valuable.
Not everything I read triggers an idea-rush. Or does so right away. My reading falls roughly into two categories. The first is general cultural filter-feeding, where I just sop up whatever randomly catches my eye, which then goes into the mental compost, sometimes never to be seen again. It's a sort of Drunkard's Walk through whatever aspects of my world impinge on me. Later, when a set of ideas is beginning to form up into a potential book, I'll do much more directed reading.
LSC: I've said that history is like gossip, or like real-life soap operas.
LMB: The fundamental question of history is "What were these people thinking ?" The chains of disasters that real people have visited upon each other can scarcely be equaled by anything one could imagine—in fiction things have to make sense. I must be eternally grateful to you for turning me on to history as reading matter, back in junior high.
It's all in the footnotes, all in the details: the diaries and the stuff that gets down to the way people actually lived, not general economic theories of faceless forces at work. In building a world, you want those telling details that hold more than they appear to hold. Every object you
LSC: Writer Ardath Mayhar talks about writing an entire novel while one of her sons banged on the typewriter with a spoon.
LMB: I know another who typed her second novel one-handed while nursing her baby. (It was probably her best chance to sit down uninterrupted.) It actually may be less confusing for the kids to have a parent who makes a clean break and leaves the house to work, than to have one who's there, but not paying attention. One of the problems of being a writer is in identifying "time off." If the book is always running in your head, niggling at your brain, you're never quite altogether present to the people you're with. I suspect this can become frustrating after a time, but the people you really need to ask about the effect of this absentmindedness are writers' family members themselves.
But all that said, on the whole the experience of being a parent, watching real kids grow, has given me back human content for my work a hundred times the value of the time it's taken away.
LSC: If your family has given you content for your stories, so has your reading—and not just fiction but lots of nonfiction as well.
LMB: A nearly universal trait among writers—if we didn't love to read, why else would we want to make more books? I pick up a lot of ideas from historical reading—to paraphrase, history is not only stranger than we imagine, it is frequently stranger than we can imagine. Real life provides jumping-off points for my fictional ideas, but they are frequently turned inside out or upside down before they land on the page, re-visioned, revised. Reading, observation, music and songs, experiences people tell me about, my own life and emotions—it all goes into the stew. But inspiration isn't just knocking into an idea—everyone does that all day long. It's hitting the idea, or more often cross-connection of ideas, that sets off some strong resonance inside one's own spirit, that hot pressure in the solar plexus that says, Yeah, this is it; this matters!
Sometimes inspiration falls freely from the heavens; sometimes you have to hunt it down and kill it yourself. Then there is reverse-inspiration, that restless discomfort that says an idea is just wrong for a story. Over time I've come to regard that sort of warning writer's block as almost equally valuable.
Not everything I read triggers an idea-rush. Or does so right away. My reading falls roughly into two categories. The first is general cultural filter-feeding, where I just sop up whatever randomly catches my eye, which then goes into the mental compost, sometimes never to be seen again. It's a sort of Drunkard's Walk through whatever aspects of my world impinge on me. Later, when a set of ideas is beginning to form up into a potential book, I'll do much more directed reading.
LSC: I've said that history is like gossip, or like real-life soap operas.
LMB: The fundamental question of history is "What were these people thinking ?" The chains of disasters that real people have visited upon each other can scarcely be equaled by anything one could imagine—in fiction things have to make sense. I must be eternally grateful to you for turning me on to history as reading matter, back in junior high.
It's all in the footnotes, all in the details: the diaries and the stuff that gets down to the way people actually lived, not general economic theories of faceless forces at work. In building a world, you want those telling details that hold more than they appear to hold. Every object you
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