by Gene Wolfe
Rooks go straight forward: from here to there. Often beginning writers seem to be trying to make their characters talk in the same way their friends do, and their friends are boring. Two may spend an hour or more arguing about whether a goldfish is a carp, but we do not want to overhear every word of it. Remember, in a dramatic scene, the characters do something that is important to them. If one of those guys needs money desperately, and he bets a thousand credits he has not got with the head of Highhome’s Assassins Guild, then the conversation gets more interesting—but only in so far as it is directed toward important points: how the bet will be settled, what the head assassin will do if the hero loses and cannot pay, and so on. Those words can be dramatic.
Knights twist their way into the center of things. If the thoughts the author gives us are no more than what we could have guessed ourselves from the circumstances, there is no center and no point in giving them. A genius like Virginia Woolf could make a whole book from thoughts alone, an army of knights. She could do that because she knew how to freight thoughts with emotional content. For most of us, thoughts need help from action and speech—which is really a species of action, just as the rook can be seen as a queen with some capabilities stripped away.
Now comes the hard part, because if that were all there was to it everybody could do it and nobody could make a dime out of it. You have to do all of these things I have been telling you about mostly all at once. Remember, too, that the reader must believe in your characters and care about them. That means that most thoughts, words, and actions must build characterization. They should also deepen the reality of the setting (gracefully, please); and they must, of course, tend toward the accomplishment of something that is important to the characters and the story—“advance the plot” as the textbooks say. When Jad Fenris reaches for the launch stud, his thoughts, and what he says as he does it, and the way he does it, should tell us what kind of man he is and what it is like to command the flagship and the whole DeepStar Fleet, and why Highhome is important.
Hell’s bells, there are a billion Terra-type worlds out there. So why does this one bring the almost imperceptible tremor to Jad’s hand? A battle-scarred old whorehorse like him?
The Writer’s Tool Kit
I have read a great many articles about writing equipment. They have told me things I would never have guessed about this business, such as that I would require pencils, paper, and a dictionary. But it has always seemed to me that none has gone far enough. Once a real writer sits down on his dictionary to write a story, he discovers that he needs a great deal more—things that no one has told him about.
The first and most urgently required of these is a wastebasket. It should be sturdy enough to sit on while looking for the right word in the dictionary; those little tin wastebaskets they sell at Woolco, with pictures of ships or Madonna on the sides, won’t hold up in the face of sustained writing effort, particularly after lunch.
A real writer’s wastebasket should also be big. To test a new one, stand it upright, step inside, and skootch down. If the top of your head is still above the top of the wastebasket, the wastebasket is too small. Perhaps the best plan is to buy a plastic garbage can and decorate it with a tasteful decoupage of rejection slips. This can be done easily by lining the can with chewing gum and turning it inside out after a few days.
An ashtray is useful, too, even for writers like me who do not smoke. It will hold fruit pips and paper-clips, and it can be filled with water for soaking off uncanceled stamps. The best sort has a little statue of a person of one’s own sex labeled “World’s Greatest Writer.”
Nonsmokers will also require a cigarette lighter. (Smokers will already have one.) The lighter is for burning letters of rejection from editors before dropping them (the letters, unfortunately) into the wastebasket. Disposable butane lighters are inexpensive and reliable; writers who hope to follow in the footsteps of Norman Mailer and James Jones will want a Zippo, however, preferably one decorated with a regimental crest; romance writers will desire a gold, or at least gilt, Florentine design, while writers of fantasy and encyclopedias of fairies should employ flint and steel or a small dragon.
A fire extinguisher is another useful item. Fire extinguishers put out ninety percent of the fires on which they are used. (With a little padding you might make a good article out of that.) However, if your wastebasket catches fire and you have neglected to provide an extinguisher, you might try dousing the flames with the water from the ashtray; remember to take out all those damp little postal refunds first.
Aspirin is a must, as well as a large and continuing expense. Aspirin is to writing what food is to raising a family, and it’s wise to know all the ins and outs of saving a dollar here and a dime there at the checkout counter. Aspirin is not all alike, as anybody who’s paid for as much as Daddy has can tell you. It comes in three varieties: Brand Name, Generic (or House Brand), and Industrial Strength. As a writer, you need not worry about brand-name aspirin. It is intended for editors. Each editor keeps a bottle in the desk drawer to pop while discussing the budget with his publisher; and it has to be brand name, or the publisher would not know what it was.
Generic aspirin is cheap, and is the stuff for your everyday use. The big bottles are less expensive (on a per-tablet basis) than those cute little ones half full of cotton. Before you leave for the drugstore, just throw a matched pair of two-by-fours into the back of your station wagon. When you’re ready to load your generic aspirin, put one end of each two-by-four on the tailgate and the other on the asphalt. The bagboy from the supermarket next door will help you roll the bottle up them. Give him a tip, such as, “Write about what you know.”
Industrial-strength aspirin is another matter. A purist might say that it isn’t aspirin at all, even though it actually contains more aspirin than real aspirin does. It also contains miracle “added ingredients,” mostly caffeine. Buy a bottle and put it in the medicine cabinet nearest your desk. Next to the iodine, you’ll find an old package of razor blades; lay them flat on the shelf and set the industrial-strength aspirin on top of them. At some point in your writing career (for me this point arrives every Thursday) you’ll decide to avenge yourself on an editor by taking your own life. When you run to the medicine cabinet to drink the iodine or slash your wrists, you’ll discover the industrial-strength aspirin instead.
One additional type of aspirin might be mentioned: Children’s. It is of no interest to those writers whose homes are not, or are no longer, Size XL playpens; but for the rest of us it is essential. Children’s aspirin comes only in little bottles, but you should buy the largest you can find, in some attractive flavor such as chocolate chip. When you get home, make a survey of your house to determine the point farthest from your desk. Put the children’s aspirin there. Show (not Tell, they aren’t listening) all the children where you put it. The ideal location is one that is hard to reach, but not too hard. A shelf that every child in the family can get to by standing on a chair is perfect. (Helpful hint: put a medium-heavy chair at the other end of the room.) Now whenever a child comes within reach of your desk, touch him gently alongside the head with a paperweight. (To prevent his borrowing your own chair to stand on—particularly while you are rushing off to slit your wrists—it may be wise not to have one. Sit on a dictionary instead.)
Paperweights are not really necessary, but they’re nice to have and often come in handy. (See above.) There are two types: glass balls in which it snows and all others. The second kind is better. However, buying a paperweight is bad luck; a good paperweight is something you already have, something that is given to you, or something you found in the desert. (Do not confuse this last with something you found on the beach; that is an ashtray.) Paperweights can be used to iron down the paste when you’re pasting better sentences over great ones. For a welcome snack at work, merely place a pecan on your disk drive (you will require a computer for this, as well as a bag of nuts) and strike it (the pecan) sharply with a paperweight. (Do not give that child a
ny of the nutmeat. You know what to do.)
Scissors are nearly as useful as paperweights—in fact, they can be used as paperweights in case of dire need. Their most common use, however, is in quarreling with editors. (In fact now that I think about it, scissors are more useful than paperweights, and certainly more useful than editors. The humble pair of scissors contributes much to the happiness of human kind.)
Suppose, for example, that an editor has sabotaged one of your verbs because he thinks that some noun you intended as singular is plural. For example you may have written, “A dieresis of fly specks warns us of double dealing.” The editor, that lout, has of course revised your sentence to read, “A dieresis of flyspecks warn …” Understandably, you are tempted to pull a knife on him, but that is useless. The plural of knife is knives, which your editor thinks is another word altogether; you are bound to get into long, futile arguments about Charlemagne’s turning the ƒ into a v to correct the Julian calendar. No, the word you require is good old scissors, and you can drive home your point very nicely by opening your own, laying it (not them) on a sheet of paper, and tracing the outline in black crayon. You will need paper for this, of course, as well as the box of crayons, and while you have some, with the pencils, nuts, dictionary, wastebasket, and all your other stuff, why not try a short story? Come to think of it you’ll have to, to get in that line about dieresis.
A Few Points About Knife Throwing
(1983)
The Falklands War continues to fascinate me. What a conflict! What an unlikely pair of antagonists! The British have always fought, to be sure. No nation on Earth can be taken seriously in historical circles unless it has had at least one war with the British; it’s like not having an American Express card. And yet the very idea of Britain in a contemporary war is a shock. Britain, one feels, fights in history books and not on TV.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the whole affair was that Prince Andrew went over (or rather, down) and from what I hear did well enough. (There has been a bit of criticism of Andrew lately by those who say he wasn’t a “real” hero at all. All he did was flutter around in a chopper, dodging missiles and thinking about Koo Stark, they say. So it always is after a war—Tommy this and Tommy that, and chuck him out, the brute. In my opinion, however, any prince who has managed to keep his mind on Koo—where it belongs, let’s have no argument about that—while actually caught up in “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” is a real American. Well, you know what I mean.)
And Argentina! I bow to no one in my respect for Borges, but it seems to me to be typical of his nation that it made him Chicken Inspector. As it turns out, the Argentine Army had been drilled by Firpo, but their air force was commanded by that firebrand, Fanne Foxe.
Anyhow, I was doing a bit of Falklands followup the other day, and I discovered that as soon as the last shot had been fired and it had been decided to prolong the war indefinitely, Mrs. Thatcher sent over an expert to help the Falklanders rebuild their shattered economy. This man is Andrew (no relation) Bedingham, and if he gets a knighthood for his work, as I expect he will, he will be a philatelic knight, perhaps the first.
You may laugh, but this news engendered strong emotional reaction, both positive and the other one, in my breast. I was happy for the poor Falklanders, of course. Any country in which the sale of postage stamps is a major source of revenue must be full of writers—my kinda guys. On the other hand, I am a book collector, and the mere mention of stamp collection stirs dark fears in the innermost chambers of my subconscious and makes me itch.
Is book collecting really as silly an occupation as stamp collecting? On sleepless nights, between the hours of midnight and three A.M. it almost seems so. Books contain the entirety of human wisdom and (what is more important) human fun and foolishness. Stamps are tiny pictures showing us the kinds of things politicians consider lovely, backed with glue. And yet, and yet …
There is a worse aspect still, and to tell the truth it’s this one that has nearly driven me mad. Book collectors are forever being told about the acid in modern paper. Any number of articles (themselves printed on modern paper, I am happy to say) have assured me that all contemporary books will self-destruct in fifty years. Now it so happens that some of my books are more than fifty years old, and they seem to be in pretty good shape except for the place where I spilled the ginger ale. The acid experts deny, however, that these are contemporary books, a contemporary book being by their definition one that is less than fifty years old.
(Ancient books were absolutely indestructible, except for wine stains and Vikings, because they were made from rags. I ask you.)
But what’s even worse, I have a good many books that are almost fifty years old. My copy of The Royal Wastebasket of Oz (the posthumously published writings of L. Frank Baum) bears the inscription: To Gene at Xmas 1941. “Eight years left,” I say to myself somewhat smugly. “Wonder if I’ll ever get around to reading it?” Then I realize that it was not a new book when my parents bought it. The copyright date is 1934! The book is ready to crumble to dust at any moment, spilling adverbs, punctuation, and Nomes all over the carpet. I back away gently so as not to shake it.
Do the acid experts’ prophecies of doom never render stamp collectors neurotic too? Are stamps printed on acid-free paper? I seriously doubt it, and yet the future Sir Andrew and his chums maintain the most marvelous sans Freud.
I think it was my own lack of it that caused me to take up knife throwing again. Knives, one feels, are forever—after all, they get ancient knives from ancient Egyptian tombs, still nicked where the ancient Egyptian housewives used them to cut wire. But one cannot merely collect knives, because they can’t be read. (Actually, they can be, but you tend to slice your thumb turning the pages.) I decided to throw them. A knife merchant assured me that it was a healthy, outdoor sport, and my physician assured me that I needed one. Besides, what better preparation for writing heroic fantasy? I saw my future hero swinging from the rigging of a half-rigged ship and throwing knives with his teeth, rather like the demon cat in The Master and Margarita.
And there is something to it—there really is. The soft chunk of the handle striking the target carrying with perfect clarity through the crisp evening air, the walking to the target and bending over to grope for the knife in the grass, the walking back to proper throwing distance, the repeating the whole business. It is in the hope of interesting you, dear reader, in this healthful activity, that I have jotted down these pointers.
1. Never throw a sharp, double-edged knife by the blade. I saw a knife-throwing friend of mine do that once, and his right index finger hit the target before the knife did. Furthermore, his finger stuck.
2. Never throw a sharp knife at all. Remember that you will have to feel around in the grass for it, and the garter snakes and those little red ants are bad enough.
3. If you are throwing by the point, keep the blade horizontal. This ensures that if it should by some accident arrive point first, it will snap off properly.
4. If you are throwing by the handle, keep the blade vertical. This ensures that the cross-guard will be battered out of shape when the knife slams broadside into the target.
5. Remember that there are three kinds of knives for throwing purposes. Those in which the blade is heavier than the handle must be thrown by the handle if you want them to stick. Those in which the handle is heavier than the blade must be thrown by the blade if you want them to stick. Balanced throwing knives, in which the blade and the handle are of equal weight, will not stick at all.
6. Bear in mind that the best way to get any knife to stick may appear to be sharpening the handle, but it seldom works. The Greek phalanxial spear had a sharp grounding iron nearly as big as the spearhead. Historians are generally of the opinion that this spear was never thrown, the grounding-iron being used to poke out the eyes of the rear ranks. Knife throwers know better: The grounding iron must have originally been added in the hope of making the spear stick when thrown, then
retained when it was discovered that its weight facilitated the knocking of an opposing hoplite’s helmet over his eyes when he was beaned by the shaft. (The Persians wore heavy gilded-bronze apples on the butts of their spears for the same reason. They used apples instead of grounding-irons so that they might serve as emergency rations in the field, and made them metal so that the troops wouldn’t eat them too soon.)
7. Never throw a knife at a neighborhood dog or cat when it is moving—there is a grave danger that the animal may wander into the path of the knife and be injured. It is best to “do the job,” as we say, when the animal is sitting down or, better, sleeping. One throwing-knife manufacturer offers a knife with little holes drilled up and down the blade so that it will whistle when thrown. These are advantageous when throwing at a well-trained dog, who may be persuaded by them to bring the knife back to you.
8. Never forget that a thrown knife strikes harder than one merely jabbed in with the hand. I learned this from a magician I met in the Rochester, New York, airport, and it is true. I once threw the handle of a knife two inches into a stout cardboard box stuffed with folded newspapers. I could never have done that by merely pushing the thing in blade first. On a similar occasion, I contrived to throw a rather large knife over the target, over the fence behind it, and through a closed window. (It pinned the hat worn by an innocent table lamp to the wall.) I couldn’t have done that with my hand either.
9. Never tell people you “learned” to throw knives as a kid, just by slamming ice picks into the garage door. Knife-throwing should be romantic, and they will think less of you. I always tell them I was taught by an outlaw in the Serranias del Burro, or Jackass Hills. For some reason they believe it.
10. Never try to slice through a cigarette held between your daughter’s lips. Young people should not smoke—it’s dangerous.