Congratulations on your anniversary. Twenty years is some kind of record in this age of planned obsolescence and instant gratification.
Will you ever consider writing anything besides sf?
Anonymous
Thanks very much for your good wishes, and your patience waiting for this response. I’ve been trying to answer your question, only to find that it’s a very slippery one indeed… so here we go down the slide.
I call my published work speculative fiction: I need a broad category, because the stories wander in the spaces between science fiction and fantasy and horror. I’ve had people over my career question (sometimes heatedly) that what I write is sf of any kind, at all. And I never identify myself as an “sf writer” — I call myself a writer, and when people ask What do you write?, I tell them that I write fiction and screenplays, as opposed to saying I write science fiction…
Am I trying to repudiate speculative fiction? Absolutely not. I’m proud of my work and proud to be in a field that so many extraordinary writers call home. But is it my home? I dunno, I think I’m with Nicola and William Gibson on this one. I come from sf, but am I really sf? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s only that I don’t like being categorized, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s about my concerns as a writer.
To me, sf writers have sf-nal concerns. For science fiction writers, creating alternate realities or new technology or building worlds is part of the point, part of the jazz. For me, it’s just part of the work, and I do it only as much as I need to in service of the characters and the story that wants to be told. Speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, what have you) is a wonderful shortcut — I can create whatever paradigm I want in order to turn the characters loose. I can be extreme. I can create a character whose sexuality is tied into violence (“Eye of the Storm”) without having to explain it in terms of twenty-first century psychological models; I can make a whole city fall down just because it’s right for the story (“City Life”).
But really, when I take a closer look, my work is grounded in the real, in the now — music, martial arts, how the el trains work — and, most importantly for me, in real-world human feelings and experiences. That’s where I always start and end as a writer. That’s my jazz.
I have written non-sf. I just haven’t published any. After Solitaire came out, I began work on two different mainstream novels. I wrote 17,000 words of one and 45,000 words of the other — finished words, proposal-to-my-publisher quality. I wrote detailed outlines. And I was pleased with them both.
I showed them to Nicola. She thought they were pretty good, but slow. In-dwelling, she said. Not enough narrative drive. I showed them to my agent. She thought one was pretty good and hated the other. Practically spit on it. Said my protagonist was “whiny and pathetic,” which I suspected was her version of “in-dwelling.”
I sent the non-spat-upon proposal package to my editor at HarperCollins, who liked it but thought it needed work. And she was right. And I tried to work on it, but I didn’t at that time have the absolute burning passion that I do now for work, and I had no internal compass to tell me what was wrong or where to go from there. I lost my way, and I lost my heart for both novels.
It’s been years since I put them away. And for a long time after that, in terms of writing, I just kicked a metaphorical tin can up and down the sidewalk, until I told Nicola one day that I thought maybe I wasn’t really meant to be a writer after all.
But you know what? I was wrong about that. How I reconnected with my writing soul is another topic for another day, but I am definitely a writer.
But am I definitely an sf writer? (Hah, bet you thought I’d completely lost the thread…) Nope. I’m a writer. I’ll write whatever I write, and I’m making no plans about whether that should or will be speculative fiction or not.
And so the answer to your question is not just I don’t know, it’s I don’t need to know. It’s a huge fucking triumph for me to be a writer. And I’m very clear now on what kind of writer I want to be — as I said in the recent interview at Enter the Octopus:
What are your longterm career goals?
To write fiction and screenplays and essays that make me and you feel bigger inside, that make us dream and burn and bring us closer to ourselves. The rest â the big money, the glam, the pretty prizes â either comes or it doesnât. I canât control who buys my books or my scripts, but I am totally in charge of what I write and how I feel about myself as a writer. Thatâs the career I want.
And if this screenwriting thing works out, I might even be a consistently-earning writer, which would be pretty cool too.
And — thinking about your question has made me look at those novels again. The one that went to my editor, nah, I think that’s a goner. It just doesn’t speak to me anymore. But the one my agent hated, well, there’s something there. Not in its current form, but… I read it and I can see the people in my head, hear them, feel their connections and their longings. If Jane feels whiny, well, that’s because I haven’t given her enough to do yet. But there’s something there that makes me sit up and pay attention, and I just might have to go find out what it is one of these days.
In the meantime, if you’d like to judge for yourself, take a look.
If I do ever take it up again, the funny thing is that at least one path could be a ghost story, in which case I would still be writing sf after all. And here I go again, with answers that only expand the questions. Ah, that’s life.
If you’d like to ask a question or start a conversation, please do what this person did — use the talk to me link (also on the sidebar) anytime.
