by Gene Wolfe
The agnostics contend that pain has evolved blindly as a means of causing us to avoid injury. There are two things that might be said about that theory: the first is that a few moments’ thought will produce half a dozen better ways of achieving the same objective (one of them is intelligence, which has also evolved—but the more intelligent the organism, the more pain it is capable of feeling). The second is that by and large it does not work—human beings jump their motorcycles over the fountain at Caesar’s Palace; dogs chase cars.
What pain does do is act as a motivator in all sorts of less than obvious ways. It is responsible for compassion and the hot foot; it makes people who do not believe God would permit it think about God. It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a “humble carpenter” that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a “humble carpenter,” the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip.
And if Christ knew not only the pain of torture but the pain of being a torturer (as it seems certain to me that he did) then the dark figure is also capable of being a heroic and even a holy figure, like the black Christs carved in Africa.
Lastly, I wanted to do a story on the new barbarism. One of the wisest things I have ever heard said was said by Damon Knight concerning the science fiction of the thirties: “We have had their future.”
And so we have. We have had television and space travel and robots and “mechanical brains.” Those ray guns I used to see Flash use every so often (when he wasn’t using his sword) are undergoing frantic development and are probably no more than ten years from being operational. The challenge to science fiction today is not to describe a slightly hyped-up present, but a real future—a time radically unlike the present that is nonetheless derived from it. Clearly, there are more than one of these futures. There is the future in which mankind returns to the sea for new sources of food and raw materials. There is the future of extermination. I decided that the future most in keeping with the dark figure I planned and his journey toward war was what I call the do-nothing future, the one in which humanity clings to its old home, the continents of Earth, and waits for the money to run out.
That takes care of the first of your questions, Mark, as well as I am able to manage it. I had all those ideas or needs or whatever kicking about in my head, and I put together a story from them. The second isn’t quite so complicated. I have a job. In one of his books, Jack Woodford notes that what most people who say they want to write really want is to quit work. I don’t think that situation has changed at all since Woodford wrote, and I have more than a little sympathy for the people who feel that way—an appalling number of jobs absolutely stink; I am extremely fortunate in that I have fallen into one of the few good ones.
Nevertheless, a tolerable job can be an immense advantage for the writer who hopes to produce something better than ordinary commercial yardgoods. Our society often—though not always—pays for quality; but it does so only after the work is done, and generally long after. In the meantime, the writer must have some support for himself and his family (assuming he has one). I didn’t marry money, and I wanted my wife at home to take care of my children. My parents could not and would not have supported me and my family if I had asked them, for which I do not blame them in the least. There are no grants or other philanthropic props for my kind of writer.
My experience at conventions has shown me that fans are somewhat contemptuous, for the most part, of writers who do not support themselves exclusively by writing. Fans can afford that luxury, but I’m not sure writers can. If it means that quality can be measured in dollars, writers ought to reject it out of hand; they must if they hope to remain writers, because it will soon lead them away from writing altogether.
If it means that a writer should produce as much work as he can, and that a writer who does nothing but write should produce more than one who also hoes beans or hawks vacuum cleaners, then I sympathize with it; but it is still fundamentally mistaken. I would be willing to bet that Anthony Trollope, who was an official of the British Post Office, produced more work than any other 19th Century writer of his stature. Many full-time writers have told me that I produce as much or more copy than they do, although I normally write for only an hour or two a day.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a writer who does nothing but write. (Proust, an invalid who could do little else, came close—but only after decades during which he had neither worked nor written.) Dickens lectured; so did Mark Twain. Poe was a working journalist whenever he could get a job. Fitzgerald was an army officer when he wrote his first novel (on Saturday afternoons in the officers’ club) and afterwards made a career of heavy drinking. Hemingway (who also drank heavily) wrote only two pages a day during his most productive periods and took long vacations for travel, hunting, and fishing. Nabokov was primarily a teacher (at one time a boxing teacher!) until Lolita made enough money for him to retire.
Yesterday I had lunch with Algis Budrys, one of the contemporary sf writers I most admire. He had come to Barrington to give a paid lecture. While we ate, he told me some of his experiences from the days when he was a short-order cook on Long Island (often working two shifts for extra money). Since then, he has worked in editing and public relations. Now he no longer has to do those things; he is a full-time writer, who merely does a bit of teaching and a little publishing.
Ursula K. Le Guin (another artist I admire more than I can say) is a full-time writer too. Of course she keeps house and takes care of her children, but then we all know that shopping and cooking and acting as an unpaid teacher and therapist are not really work.
Damon Knight (to whom I owe more than I will ever be able to repay) was an editor almost as soon as he was a writer, and for many years was more editor than writer. Kate Wilhelm, his brilliant wife, is a full-time writer with a cleaning lady, although she puts in a little time now and then with the garden and his children and her children and their child.
Let me list the things that a job of some sort does for a writer—that one will do even for one of those would-be writers who are aching to quit work. (Jack Woodford was a banker when he started writing; he wrote in the morning before he went to the bank.)
In the first place, it will get him out of the house. Writing is a dangerously lonely occupation, as well as a dangerously sedentary one. In my own job I often visit industrial plants, and I have often noticed how much more open and unparanoid those in centers of population are apt to be. An author is a manufacturing facility of one, sitting in a silent room, a facility that buys little and sells by mail.
Second, it makes his writing time precious to him. If he has only two hours in which to write, he knows that he must write during those two hours. Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate. One of the troubles with writing is that if there’s nothing else to do, the writer can write 14 hours a day, just as John Jakes did when he was doing all those Kent novels. And because he can and doesn’t want to (who would?) he tends not to start. The writer with only two hours in which to write works hard, in part because he knows that in two hours he will have to stop no matter how much his conscience nags him to finish Chapter III.
Third and last, a job means that the writer can take as much time as he needs for a large project. His job supports him, so he doesn’t have to finish the book to buy groceries and pay the rent. By a paradox G. K. Chesterton (another journalist) would have savored, the job confers freedom. I used the freedom mine gave me to write The B
ook of the New Sun.
Faithfully,
Gene Wolfe
Sun of Nelioscope
You’ve now read two quite different pieces describing the way in which The Book of the New Sun came to be written. I wasn’t lying in either—writing’s a complex process, and if I wanted to I could do a third piece giving quite different explanations. They, also, would be true.
This isn’t it. What I would like to do here is go through “Helioscope,” which was written over a year ago, and dilate a little on various things I said there.
We might begin with the title. A helioscope is an instrument for observing the sun. You know that, of course. The Book of the New Sun is full of all kinds of symbolism. In “The Feast of Saint Catherine” I mentioned the rose symbolism, and Roger Stewart just wrote me from Austin, Texas, mentioning the tree symbolism. But the symbol of the sun is central, primary, as the titles of both The Book of the New Sun itself and The Shadow of the Torturer show. (Indirectly roses and trees are sun symbols too, since neither could live without sunlight. A blown rose is practically a representation of the sun.) Urth is dying as its sun gutters: its people retain a legend that the Conciliator will return and revive the sun, and thus this renascent Conciliator is called the New Sun. A member of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence stands between his victim and the sun in performing an execution, and in so doing symbolically terminates the life prior to actually taking it. (Although the title The Claw of the Conciliator may appear to hold no sun symbolism, the thing itself, the Claw of the Conciliator, is a sun symbol.)
Moving right along, perhaps I should explain that Empire is a magazine circulated to aspiring sf writers; thus “Helioscope” is laden with Uriah Heeps of advice to beginners. The present work is intended for the master class—readers—but with the thought that a few copies may fall into the hands of their slaves, and with the hope of undoing the harm perpetrated by “Helioscope,” I will bend the rule here to say that there are only three pieces of advice for writers worth reading.
Don’t. If you can stop yourself from writing, you are not a writer. (But you may not be a writer even if you cannot stop yourself.)
Read. No matter what you may long to believe, you cannot become a writer without tens of thousands of hours of reading. You cannot please the master until you have been a master and know what is pleasing.
Write. Writers do it. Would-be writers do not. Just as you can’t learn to swim without floundering around in the water a lot, you cannot learn to write without writing. Harlan Ellison tells his would-be writer audiences that they should write a short story every day—three hundred and sixty-five little stories over the next year. Is Harlan grandstanding with a piece of ridiculously exaggerated advice? No.
Along about the time I was beginning to work on what became The Book of the New Sun, I was trying to determine to my own satisfaction just what made a great book great. A couple of days ago, I came across a note from that period. Here it is: “GREATNESS 1. Massive scale—great books are long. 2. Scale—great books deal with great themes. They show entire societies, large landscapes.” That was what I meant in “Helioscope” when I said I had the urge to do something big.
For what it’s worth, I offer the following definitions, which I eventually settled on: A good story is one in which a sympathetic and three-dimensional protagonist has absorbing and unusual adventures against a varied and interesting background. A great story is one a cultivated reader can read with pleasure and later reread with increased pleasure.
Although the biographical detail may interest no one—certainly it no longer interests me—the college I dropped out of was Texas A&M. I left in my Junior year; my grades were very bad.
For those who have never attended a science fiction convention, masquerades are features of most of the larger ones. Awards are presented for best costume, most beautiful costume, most humorous costume, most naked lady, and so on. Carol Resnick and her husband, Mike, are famous masquers—but I know Mike wasn’t on the panel because he was running the slide projector and blowing cigarette smoke in my face. I think that the best costume I have ever seen was Sandra Miesel’s for “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” a Poul Anderson story.
Theological arguments are nearly always two-edged. I won’t go into it here, but it is fairly easy to argue that the existence of God can be demonstrated by reason only if He does not exist. Happily, that does not prevent the rest of us from having fun. For years I read that Thomas Aquinas had originated all the proofs of God’s existence; but Jorge Luis Borges offers an original one, the Argumentum Ornithologicum in Dream Tigers.
The slight criticism of evolution I offer should not be taken as evidence that I do not believe in evolution; I do. Let’s not blame God for everything. I also believe in Lamarckism, as it was put forward by Lamarck. (The Lamarckism presented in standard textbooks is actually Lysenkoism, a straw man set up by the opponents of Lamarckism, palpably false and easily disproved.) There is no paradox in that: Lamarckism and Darwinism are not mutually exclusive, except politically.
This whole book has already acquired a much more religious tone than I had planned; but I cannot resist adding a bit more here by noting that most Christians know next to nothing about the life and teachings of Christ and are afraid to learn, sensing that the knowledge will upset their preconceptions.
Knight’s remark to the effect that we have already experienced the future envisioned by the science fiction of the ’30s is the key to understanding a great deal that puzzles observers—particularly what may be called outside observers—of the present sf scene. These observers “know” that sf consists of stories about space ships, ray guns, and robots; and they find it impossible to understand why most sf writers show so little interest in writing about those things. When Jules Verne wrote about what we would call an atomic submarine, his book caused a well-deserved sensation. (It was treasured by boys of my father’s generation to a degree that is almost unimaginable now; to hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, it was a door to a new world.) But no contemporary writer would write a book that was primarily about an improved submarine’s voyages under the oceans of Earth. In the same way, few writers are much interested in an improved space shuttle, an improved laser, or an improved Unimate.
The sad thing is that when a writer really does break new ground, he is certain to be accused of writing a future that is “like the past.” Of course, the future is always “like the past” in many respects—that’s what we mean when we say that history repeats itself. In some respects, the British Empire was very like the Roman Empire. In some respects, the Japanese Empire was very like the British Empire. A modern craft union is much like a medieval guild, and for that matter, I am a member of a contemporary organization called the Author’s Guild. But even when writers come up with things that are entirely new, they are accused of devising a future that is “like the past,” unless they throw in a great many space ships, ray guns, and robots. Recently George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle have been doing a series of stories about people on a low-gravity world who glide from island to island using artificial wings. A review in the Chicago Tribune lumped one of their books (Windhaven) with Janet Morris’s Dream Dancer and The Shadow of the Torturer and summed up all three by saying: “The plots are essentially similar; we have met the Future, and it is the Past.”
Of course the reviewer does not mean plot; he means theme. (He doesn’t really want that semicolon either—what he needs is a colon.) But what he should be saying is that all three books suppose that the future will be quite different from the leading edge of technology in the present. (It’s interesting to note that just about all the students of science fiction either agree with Brian Aldiss in saying that it began with Frankenstein or feel, as I do myself, that it began with The Time Machine. Neither of these books is about space ships, ray guns, or robots.)
No doubt there are a few benighted souls who have yet to discover that superb curmudgeon, Jack Woodford. Woodford was not a very good writer,
and he was often wrong; but he remains the best writer on writing and the writing life who ever set pen to paper. Every Woodford fan has his or her favorite book, and mine is How to Write for Money. Here’s a quote from Chapter Eleven, “How to Press a Duck”:
“I started with formulas. Alas! I can take the same recipe as La Maze and, after working out on it, achieve something I have to give to the dogs. They eat it and vomit.
“After satisfying myself that a cook book is about as much use as a book on writing to a would-be writer I threw out the cook book and started from scratch, retaining the itch in a very modified form to this day. It’s far easier to make money telling someone else how to do it than doing it yourself.”
Need I say that Woodford’s wisdom applies to more than cooking and writing? If you can’t scrape up old Woodford in a used book store—which I think is still the best way to get into the man—you might write Woodford Memorial Editions Inc., POB 55085, Seattle WA 98155.
Now that I have, in my left-handed way, already recommended a book on writing, let me tell you about another: Creating Short Fiction, by Damon Knight. It’s available from Writer’s Digest Books, 9933 Alliance Rd., Cincinnati OH 45242. But I warn you, don’t give it to friends who are not compulsive writers anyway. (See Wolfe’s First Rule at the beginning of this essay.) It will make them start writing, and they’ll get into a lot of trouble.