The Vorkosigan Companion

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  During that same period you'd had your kids and began writing again, and made your first short story sales. I'm half-willing to swear that there's something about completing one's family that frees up women's energy, as though we're subconsciously holding something in reserve till then. Stuck in a small town with two preschool children and no job (or rather, no money—don't get me started on how our society devalues "women's work," or I'll still be ranting come sunset), I was inspired by your example. It seemed to me this might be a way to make some money but still get to stay home with my kids. Which eventually proved to be true, but it took a good long time getting to that point.

  LSC: How did you get started?

  LMB: I count the beginning of this effort as Thanksgiving Day, 1982, when, visiting my parents, I wrote a paragraph or two on my dad's new Kaypro II to try out the toy. I dimly recall that the fragment of description actually had its genesis from a writing exercise done for a couple of visits to a local Marion writer's group. They were mostly middle-aged and elderly women who met in a church basement and wrote domestic and religious poetry; after a hiatus, I found them again the following year when they'd moved to a bank basement, and inflicted much early SF on them. They were a very patient, if wildly inappropriate, audience. The fragment generated, the following month, my first story, a novelette eventually titled "Dreamweaver's Dilemma," although the actual paragraphs were cut from the final version.

  Later, I found a much more useful (and younger) group of aspiring writers further away in Columbus, including some SF, fantasy, and mainstream people. Another influence that certainly deserves mention is Dee Redding, the wife of the minister of my parents' church. She used to let me come and read to her from my scrawled penciled first drafts while she darned socks, and say encouraging things. Lots of people were willing to tell me things. Dee was one of the few who was willing to listen.

  Even though I never did formal workshops or took a degree in literature, I still found the honest and competent feedback I needed to test and hone my skills. Which was fortunate, because no editor then or now has time to be a writing teacher.

  LSC: Meanwhile, at the 1982 Chicago Worldcon, I met another new fantasy writer, Patricia C. Wrede, who lived in Minneapolis. Her first novel had just been published; I had at that time sold only short stories. She said she'd be glad to critique my work, and anyone else's I happened to know—she's teased since then that your manuscript arrived in her mailbox at approximately the speed of light.

  LMB: The three of us fell into a sort of writer's workshop by mail, sending chapters of our assorted novels back and forth to each other for critique. With your and Pat's help and encouragement, I finished my first novel and started on my second, The Warrior's Apprentice.

  Somewhere about the middle of Chapter 5 of Apprentice, in the late fall of '83, I stopped to pop out the short story "Barter." It was a side effect of reading Garrison Keillor, partly. It took only two or three writing sessions, no more than ten hours. I'd jotted the opening line in a notebook earlier that summer, based on personal observation at assorted breakfasts, without anything to attach it to at the time. "Her pancakes were all running together in the center of the griddle, like conjugating amoebas . . ."

  It was easy work. The setting of "Putnam, Ohio" had been developed in seed form for an earlier tale, "Garage Sale." (Marion was a Revolutionary War general, so was Putnam, hence the transference.) The cats, the kids, the house, the Smurfs, the desperation, and the Christopher Parkening record, if not the peanut butter on it, thank God, were all lifted nearly verbatim from my life at the time.

  The news of the sale came on a little teeny personally typed Twilight Zone Magazine letterhead postcard, almost lost in the bottom of my mailbox, which I still have. I was ecstatic. The meager money was soon spent, but the morale boost was critical to power me through the following year and third novel until my final vindication, when I sold the three completed manuscripts to Baen Books.

  LSC: In tribute to your first professional sale, I appropriated your Putnam as the setting of my romantic suspense novel, Ashes to Ashes. I suspect the secondary character of Jan was based on "Barter" as well, in the backhanded sort of way these things develop.

  LMB: Speaking of conjugating amoebas. The sales saga of "Barter" had a sequel, a success story—not to mention a cautionary tale—in miniature. The story was seen by a producer from the TV series Tales from the Darkside, who threw me into total confusion, in my pre-agent days, by calling and offering to buy the story rights for scripting for the show. The episode that resulted bore almost no relation to the original. Their scripter not only eliminated almost every element I'd invented and reversed the outcome, but used it as a hook to hang an I Love Lucy pastiche upon, a sitcom I'd loathed utterly even back in the Fifties when I'd first seen it. Since Tales from the Darkside didn't play in my viewing area, I've never seen the episode broadcast, a non-event I do not regret. But I was very grateful for the money.

  LSC: I saw the episode. You didn't miss a thing. In fact, I had to call you and ask you if it was indeed based on your story!

  LMB: Only on its title, apparently. Anyway, in the fall of 1984, I finished my second novel and started on the third, in the meanwhile sending the first two off to New York publishers, where they languished on assorted editors' desks for what seemed to me very long times. It was a difficult period, financially and otherwise, and as a get-rich-quick scheme writing did not seem to be paying off. But in the summer of '85, my second novel, The Warrior's Apprentice, had returned rejected. You suggested I send it next to the senior editor at Baen Books, Betsy Mitchell. Tell again where you met?

  LSC: Standing in line for the bar at the 1983 Baltimore Worldcon. Although it was at the Austin NASFiC in 1985 that I suggested to her she might enjoy your work.

  LMB: Your Worldcon attendances have proved awfully useful for my career, I think. So I followed your advice. That October, Jim Baen called and made an offer on all three finished manuscripts.

  LSC: And you immediately called me, asking me to use my resources as a SFWA member to determine just who these people were and if they were legit! Admirable caution, considering you were tap-dancing on the ceiling at the time.

  LMB: Baen Books actually started at nearly the same moment I first set pencil to paper on my first novel, and were still new in 1985, so I may perhaps be forgiven for having barely heard of them. I had no idea how long or if the company would last, but hey, they wanted my books. Through a succession of phone conversations—me bewildered and slightly paranoid, Jim very patient—I gradually learned the ins and outs of how editing was done, how royalty reports were done, how books were marketed, how cover art happened, and a host of other professional skills.

  I first met Jim face-to-face in an elevator crush in the lobby of the Atlanta Marriott at the '86 Worldcon. I rather hastily introduced myself, and as he was borne away into the elevator with the fannish mob he called back something like, "If you can write three books a year for seven years, I can put you on the map!" To which my plaintive reply was—and I can't now remember if I voiced it or not—"Can't I write one book a year for twenty-one years?" I don't know if he ever knew how much he alarmed me with that.

  LSC: I knew. You spent that whole convention looking like a deer in the headlights. Although it was quite obvious to me, as my friends asked me to introduce them to you, and assorted strangers elbowed past, that you were already on a map of sorts.

  LMB: I was frantically trying to figure out this whole pro-writer thing. On the fly, terrified of putting some fatal foot wrong.

  LSC: Which may be one reason it took you a while to realize you needed an agent.

  LMB: I was figuring it out by then. I had contracted my first seven books before I acquired an agent. This was bad in the short term, in that I was really ignorant about contracts, and also had no way to reach foreign markets. But it was good in the long run, because when I did finally go shopping for an agent, I was able to make a more informed choice—and I was able to get m
y first pick, the estimable Eleanor Wood.

  One of the things I discovered through this was that one's early mistakes need not be permanent. As new books came up, we were able to trade back to Baen for rights I had foolishly given away; in other words, we used new contracts to fix the old ones. Although this only works if one is selling to the same house, I suppose; there are also other ways early errors can be rectified by a good agent acquired later.

  LSC: We've mentioned starting our families. The thing about starting them, is that then you have to live with them for years on end. It's no accident that the Vorkosigan books give a lot of importance to the role of family.

  LMB: Family is a strong influence for everyone, one way or another. Either your experience of family has been good, and you recognize and relate to the emotions, or it has been bad, and you long for something better even if just in the pages of fiction. It's one of those fundamental needs built into human biology, as universal as "boy meets girl." Which also, of course, connects with family.

  LSC: Many readers make the assumption that you have to sacrifice family for your art, or vice versa.

  LMB: This gives me an inner vision of a writer with her family staked out on an altar at midnight, their bodies covered with cabalistic symbols, her knife raised to dispatch them in exchange for All Worldly Success. Would that it were so simple. The run on black candles would clean out the shops.

  More seriously, I don't see that being a writer is all that more demanding of sacrifice from one's family than any other career or job, and in some ways less. I started writing when my kids were ages one and four. I had more time, and much more flexible time, with my kids by working at home what amounts to part-time, than I would have had putting in eight to ten hours a day at some office, factory, or hospital. I never had to negotiate with the boss for time off when a kid was sick; I was always there when they got home from school, no need for latchkeys or complicated child-care arrangements; vacation and holiday schedules were variable at will. Yes, I had to call on help from relatives or sitters now and then, particularly when running out to do publicity things like conventions, but the total of time taken was still much less. And for whatever the experience has been worth to them, as they grew older I was able to take the kids along on a lot of travel opportunities. They met a wide variety of creative and interesting people.

  On the minus side, writers have no backup, in the form of a boss or organization, to lend them credibility or clout in defending their working time. With an outside job, the boss, safely absent, gets to be the bad guy who is blamed for taking you away. If you work at home, you have to be your own bad guy. No one will give you working time; you have to learn to take it. (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 put into a story tells you something about the background, potentially. If you have a character wearing a nylon jacket, it's implied that you have a petrochemical industry around there somewhere. You can't use any metaphors from a technology that doesn't exist in that world, and so on. But that kind of thoughtful attention to what all your details imply can allow you to get more bang for your buck, more information than appears on the page.

  Effects must have causes. That's deeply inculcated into the modern mind and so we want to see these causes, these costs. That's what storytelling is all about. For all the physical action, eventually it always comes down to someone making a choice somewhere, to do one thing and not another, and those choices are the turning points, if you like, of history. Historians tend to fall into two camps. You have the people in the Impersonal Historical Forces camp, who want to say that all history is these great movements—vast things happen but no people ever do anything. And on the opposite pole are the Great Man theorists, who want all of history to be the effects of certain individual acts by a rather limited cast. I think the actual truth lies somewhere in between. It's far more chaotic. Small causes can have enormous effects and it's very fractal, really.

  LSC: For the want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, and so forth.

  LMB: What if—and there's the beginning of many a story—what if at certain key critical junctures, certain things had happened differently; might some of the horrors of history have been averted or healed? In real life, we can't know. In books, healing becomes possible.

  LSC: Healing is one of your themes. Do you do much research into the s
cience, medical and otherwise, in your science fiction?

  LMB: Sometimes; sometimes I draw on what I already have in my bag. And I've several times had real doctor-readers review both my fantasy and SF manuscripts for medical accuracy. But foregrounding the characters, necessarily, entails backgrounding the technological speculation, however much those new technologies are in fact affecting characters, settings, and plots all three. Because the tech is mostly in the background, some readers don't seem to notice how much is actually there, mostly in biology and medicine.

  But I'm interested in the impact of technology on the characters' lives, the new moral choices and dilemmas it presents them with. Sometimes the details are important. When I was writing from an engineer's viewpoint, and he was facing an engineering problem in Falling Free, I had to provide enough to give some sense of how the problem-solving was going on inside of his head. But the reader doesn't usually retain all that anyway, so why clutter the page? The stuff should work, and the implications should be displayed, ideally. I don't do this across the board—some of my technologies are complete hand waving, such as the faster-than-light travel. Other technologies, like the design of the uterine replicator as described in Ethan of Athos, are very carefully thought out, and would actually work, more or less, as described.

  So it depends on the focus of the story. If the plot turns on the tech, or the viewpoint character thinks in detail about it, then one needs to give it more attention.

  LSC: Paying attention to the plot. And the characters, and all the rest of the package.

  LMB: All at once, all the time, yep.

  LSC: But the words have to go down in a row. What's your particular method of developing the story and getting it down?

  LMB: I will start to work up ideas for a story from all sorts of sources—other reading, history, film, television, my own life experiences, my prior books, debates with friends about ideas or other books. When my eyes or brain burn out on reading, I'm quite fond of all the nonfiction DVDs I can get from the local library or, now, Netflix, science and travel and history. At some point, all this will spark or clot into notions for a character or characters, their world, and the opening situation, and sometimes but not always a dim idea of the ending. I will start jotting notes in pencil in a loose-leaf binder. By the time I have about forty or fifty pages of these, I will start to see how the story should begin.