Dragonwriter
Page 9
The social structure of the crafts, however, was very rigid and constantly marked by the rank knots that the crafters wore. Competition between individuals was often fierce for coveted positions of higher rank. Piemur is made a target not so much because he is small but because his intelligence quickly put him on the fast track in the drumming heights. Judging by Menolly’s testing to become journeyman harper, the merit advancement protected the craft against its knowledge base eroding, but a great deal of politics went into any promotion. It seems to indicate that walking the tables also controlled who had power within the craft.
(Interestingly, the clubs chose to echo Pern’s political structures. New members often were asked for real-life experience to match up with fictional ability. For example, the beast healers of one club wanted writers who had some veterinary medicine training. In addition to knowledge, the new members were vetted as to how well they played with others in the shared world prior to being able to claim a higher fictional rank. I joined an online role-playing club and applied to be an apprentice beast-herder. The person playing the master beastherder interviewed me to see if I was knowledgeable enough to be an apprentice. Since I’d been raised on a farm, I surpassed even their level of understanding of what herding animals required. I was only allowed to apply to be an apprentice. If I proved myself over time, they would allow me to advance to apprentice and then to journeyman.)
Thus Anne became my teacher in world-building. Looking back, it’s almost like she took my hands, ran them over the bones of her world, showing me the layers so I could do it myself. The key lay in simple complexity. With a handful of sentences scattered through the first book, she set up the basic structure of weyr, holds, and crafts. From the lord holders to the drudges, from F’lar to the lower cavern workers, from Master Robinton to the apprentice harpers—all three branches of Pern society are sketched out to be later filled in.
As a writer of fanfic, what I was doing was filling in at even smaller details. Anne stated that there was a beasthold at the weyr for the animals that the dragons fed on. There are mentions of a lake and the feeding pens. I took my own knowledge of farms, animals, and butchering animals to weave a reality. It made me realize that that was what Anne was doing in every book. In Dragonflight, she created Master Robinton and the concept of harpers. In Dragonsong, she added in the details of the harper hall based on her knowledge of boarding schools and opera.
Step by step, I was learning more and more about writing. After dozens of independent short stories that only occasionally shared plot points, five of the fan club’s writers decided to write one massive joint story about a Threadfall that goes horribly bad. We gathered at my house and created a plot line. We would write the same event from the point of view of our character. Everyone’s first scene would be the morning of the Threadfall as the weyr prepares to fight, and would introduce our character’s individual conflict. A second scene would establish the location of everyone as the dragonriders met the leading edge of the fall. The third scene would detail the cascading disaster that would have dragons falling from the air. A fourth scene depicted all the characters reacting as the enormity of the disaster struck them. The fifth and six scenes showed the struggle to save the day and then deal with the aftermath. The last scene wrapped up each character’s own personal storyline as it had been detoured by the accident. Seven scenes times five characters gave us thirty-five scenes for a total of 50,000 words, which is the technical definition of a novel.
At the time, my character Zac was the journeyman in charge of the beasthold. He’d been recently searched, which meant that someday he would have greater responsibility than just taking care of a couple hundred wherries and a handful of troublesome apprentices. Would he be able to handle the duties of being a dragonrider in a fighting wing? Would he be able to instantly react to protect not only himself and his dragon, but his wing-mates and all of Pern? What if he impressed a bronze and one day became a wingleader? As the wounded came flooding in, he suddenly found himself as the person in charge on the ground. It made him realize that he had what it took to stay collected while making life-and-death decisions.
A whole Christmas tree full of light bulbs went off in my head. For the first time I understood the structure of a novel. It was this simple unit I’d been practicing over and over, just expanded. The four-scene short story was in truth echoing the basic building blocks of a novel: setup, complications, resolution, and wrap-up. Each of these four blocks can be treated as separate subbuilding blocks. For example, the setup itself can be broken down to the character’s discovery of a problem (setup), the elements that complicate that problem (complications), the character coming to terms with—and thus the reader becoming fully aware of—the scope of the problem (resolution in terms of setting up the story arc), and the first plan of action that the character takes to resolve the problem (the wrap-up that leads to the four subblocks of the complication). It all clicks together like fictional Legos. A novel with multiple viewpoint characters would only need a few scenes of each building block to tell each character’s story arc, just like we did for the Pern fanfic novel. A novel with only one viewpoint character would need several problems presented to the character, each problem being given its own story arc to interweave with the others to create a long enough story to qualify it as a novel. If I did this in a world that I created, then I would have something to sell.
And that’s what I did. The hardest part of it was walking away from the rich and heady praise that I was getting from writing fanfic. What made it bearable was that during several failed attempts (and then many successful novels afterward), my first readers have all been members of Anne’s fan club. They were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and read my original work. And because I’d read their fanfic, I knew they were good and creative writers in their own right.
In 1989, the club pooled resources and rented a van and drove down to Atlanta to see Anne at Dragon*Con. We had taken a big banner that I had made for our Gathers, and we hung it from our hotel room’s balcony, where you could see it from the atrium, announcing to the entire con that Anne’s most rabid fans were there. I had a hardcover copy of Dragon’s Dawn, and I stood in line to get it signed. Not to me, but to my Pern character, bronze rider Z’del, because through him, Anne had totally changed my life.
Just like my first attempts at short stories, it took me several tries to produce a publishable novel. Thanks to my experience with writing fanfic, though, I was confident that I would succeed; I just needed to keep trying. When I received personal rejection letters, I was actually delighted because it meant I had nearly succeeded and that obviously next project I’d reach my goal. In 2001, my first novel, Alien Taste, was published. To my ultimate fangirl joy and delight, I learned that Anne had read my novel and loved it. I grinned all day and called everyone I knew to let them know. No other review or award that I’ve received has meant as much to me as Anne’s praise.
WEN SPENCER won the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2003. She has written ten novels, several of which have been translated into German, Japanese, and Russian. She lives in Hawaii near a volcano with a massive caldera much like the weyrs described in the Pern novels, only lava is spewing out of hers. She now considers Anne’s famous short bio as a coded warning to new writers that they will have to write endless bios about themselves.
Anne McCaffrey was first introduced to Bill Fawcett back in 1984 when he was working with Mayfair Games. The folks at Mayfair were science fiction fans and wanted to make a Dragonriders of Pern board game.
As I was big into board games, Mum made me point on the project, and I found myself proposing names for all the minor holds and designing their colors and liveries. It was while we were working on the board game that Bill suggested that I write a piece to put inside the advanced rules booklet. This piece became “Threadfighting Tactics on Pern.” (That same piece later went into The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern as “Training and Fighting Dragons.”)
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nbsp; Shortly after that, Bill met this really nice lady, and at some point while they were dating, she took a very small dinner on which Bill remarked diplomatically. The lady—Jody Lynn Nye—said, with a twinkle in her eye as she punned, “Well, a waist is a terrible thing to mind.”
When Bill reported this to me later, he added, “And that’s when I knew that I had to marry her!”
Bill and Jody have been family ever since. Their connection with Pern fandom grew not just from the board game and The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern but also from two choose-your-own-adventure books that Jody penned in the Pern universe, Dragonfire and Dragonharper. During the past several years, Bill and Jody have been found regularly at Dragon*Con, often at the dedicated Weyrfest track.
The McCaffrey Effect
JODY LYNN NYE AND BILL FAWCETT
SCIENCE FICTION FANS are a passionate group. They come together, either at conventions or online, for the love of a shared vision of the future. The books or movies they love are, for them, a momentary escape from mundane life. While most fans restrict their involvement to reading or viewing their favorites, some devote themselves more deeply, perhaps wearing costumes, learning invented languages, and forming hierarchies as depicted in their favorite stories. Few, though, have formed a community as cohesive, widespread, or ongoing as those who have read Anne McCaffrey, and particularly those who love the Dragonriders of Pern series. As not only devotees of Anne’s body of work but also creators therein,1 we have had the rare chance to experience this phenomenon firsthand, to sit down and get to know those who are deeply affected by it: Anne’s fans. We asked a number of longtime fans for the reasons they are so devoted to Anne’s work. They shared their thoughts and feelings about being part of the community that has grown up in the last few decades, which we’ve pulled together with our own, in hopes of sharing a sense of that community with you.
Welcome to Pern
One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the way Anne’s stories give the ordinary person a chance to become great. Most fiction focuses only on heroes with extraordinary talents. Among the legion of science fiction readers are scientists, computer programmers, test pilots and astronauts, environmentalists and biologists, yet the great majority are ordinary people—usually more intelligent than the average, but not the geniuses or heroes that are the usual protagonists of novels and movies. On Pern, however, there is a chance for the ordinary man or woman to step forward and be great—anyone can impress a dragon. To do so is also to acquire a lifelong companion who hears only your thoughts and is utterly devoted to you. In this simple relationship, Anne shows an understanding of two longings experienced by many readers: the desire to belong to someone (or something) who will give unconditional acceptance and the desire to be given power and responsibility (the care and riding of a dragon) that is at the same time manageable. Anne’s words express thrillingly what it feels like to form that relationship with a dragon, unshakable and unbreakable unto death.
Not only has the ordinary man or woman gained a devoted and powerful friend, but he or she then becomes a member of a support group that cares for dragons and risks their lives with them. We see unconditional acceptance by the community, as well, and they want to be a part of it. Science fiction fans in particular, by virtue of their intelligence and awareness of the isolation that often provokes, long for that inclusion. In Anne’s books, they see a special group to which they can belong. That is an attractive quality that draws those readers back again and again.
Few authors offer a viable social model for the common human being. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders books appeal to a particularly devoted readership partly because of the way these books portray people living on Pern. Though their lives might be lived under harsh, even primitive conditions, the characters are able to survive, thrive, and create. The cultures are so rich in detail that it is possible to reconstruct a semblance of life in Hold, Hall, or Weyr—in ruling and administration, craft guilds, or dragon husbandry, respectively. Life on Pern is hard; characters are always fearing what may fall next from the skies. Yet, those characters live and love, sing, distill wine and spirits, and tell stories, gathering together in groups for mutual support and pleasure, enjoying the homey touches missing from more technology-oriented future sagas.
Like J. R. R. Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings saga, Anne scattered songs and poems throughout her books. Music and storytelling run a close second in fans’ hearts to the dragons themselves. From the beginning, the Harper Hall has been the favorite guild, and its longtime guild leader, Masterharper Robinton, a favorite character (especially Jody’s). All of these elements add texture, depth, and color that we drink in along with the adventures and romances. You might exist in the worlds created in some series; you could live on Pern.
Especially when they were first written, Anne’s literature also might have been the first that young women—and men, too—had found in which strong, interesting female protagonists have adventures of their own and are in charge of their own fate. That was a welcome change from most SF of the time, when female characters often seemed to be helpless and stupid, or were depicted as less-effective men with breasts. Not only that, but the cultures from which Anne’s characters spring are cooperative and interactive, values usually associated with women. Anne’s heroes and heroines do not seek solo glory. They know themselves to be part of a greater whole in which every person has his or her role. As Charlotte Moore, longtime track head of the Worlds of Anne McCaffrey at Dragon*Con (and author of another essay in this collection), said, “the consistent theme in all of [Anne’s] work is the importance of connecting to someone else—human or otherwise—as a means to find one’s self.”
Reading about these compelling relationships, we readers crave to be part of something like that as well. It seems natural for fans to begin to emulate the communities they read about. The first Weyrgroups began to arise in the 1980s from a core of fans who loved the books and wanted to touch that sense of community within themselves. But a community, or any organization, takes its cues from the people at the top, or in this case, one person: Anne McCaffrey herself.
Meet the Weyrwoman
For many fans, it was not just Anne’s work that attracted them and earned their loyalty, but her personality as well. Back in the 1970s or ’80s, the followings or readerships of other authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien may have been more vast, but they did not have the benefit of the author participating directly in their activities. Anne enjoyed interacting with her fans. She was friendly and open with people, never making them feel as if they were wasting her time (not to say that she suffered fools or self-aggrandizers). She always listened patiently to nervous young fans who stood in line to get her autograph, focusing on them and making them feel that what they had to say was important. That isn’t so extraordinary in the science fiction/fantasy field, which boasts a goodly share of nice people who write books, but Anne went beyond the usual. In the days before the internet, when social media was primitive and computers were slow and difficult to manage, Anne answered all her letters herself and participated in online discussions. Unlike many writers, she was an extrovert who was comfortable reaching out to others. Her assertive personality broke down the reserve of many a shy fan, winning their lifelong devotion. Because she was inclusive and fearless by nature, she formed friendships with her readers. She dined with them, visited with them when she traveled, and invited them to drop in on her at her home in Ireland. She made them feel comfortable in her company and in that of her other fans.
Having the privilege of knowing Anne McCaffrey over the years, it is easy to see how Anne’s personality was an inspiration for her fandom. Her inherent faith in people and their goodness came through in the plots and characters. She honestly believed in people, giving them the benefit of a doubt, and often her trust, until proven wrong. Anne also cared, cared deeply, for many people. She often opened her home to someone in need. A few of those she took in literally continued to live as part of the Dragonhold
household for months or years. As a part of her general faith in people, Anne was amazingly nonjudgmental. Whatever your faith, or lack thereof, your beliefs, orientation, or personal quirks, you were welcome in her world.
This same worldview can be seen in her books as well. Many years before gay men and women found acceptance in larger society, Anne made them an integral part of weyr life.2 In no way do Pernese discriminate against others because their skin is a different color or because of their sexual orientation. For those readers who belong to often-targeted minority groups, Anne’s books provide literature in which, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hoped for the greater society, people are judged by the content of their character. Her characters don’t always act perfectly; they’re very human. But in general, everyone strives together for the common good.
Anne never preached or even asked you to agree with her views, but she lived them. In her books she brought to life characters that shared her tolerance, optimism, and kindness. Because she was sincere about being inclusive, fans who did not feel welcome in other groups often found their way to hers.
ANNA LEE SMITH:
“And the books taught important values that I didn’t see, or feel, being taught anymore: honor, integrity, morals, acceptance, openness, courage . . . Not just the Pern novels, but all of them. They were the common thread through all of her books. She imbued her characters with these characteristics and that’s what drew me to them all.”