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OSC Answers
I tell stories about good people trying to do good things, even when the price they have to pay is far too high.

OSC Answers
It is realism that is the recently created subset of literature; prior to the novel, there was no need for storytellers to stay strictly within the boundaries of things that happened in the ordinary, observable world. Gods did great deeds; lesser beings had lesser powers; but strange and magical things were always possible.

Even in so-called "realistic" fiction -- the "novel," as a genre -- the illusion of realism is only skin deep. The reader is still looking for magic. College students are taught by their professors to decode the fiction they read, seeking for the treasures hidden there by authors, and the students grow up to be authors who hide such treasures. Magic is always expected, and always brings awe and delight when it is found. I hope I will be forgiven, however, for thinking that the magics in realistic fiction are often quite small, like the prizes a child gets from a coin-operated game. I prefer more robust strangeness that is displayed plainly for the reader to receive openly. I call it "public" or "open" fiction -- it's the kind I write and the kind I value most, when I find it well written. Nothing is deliberately encoded: It is a plain tale, plainly told. And yet the events of the story itself will transport the reader into new places and inside the minds of interesting people -- that is the proper magic of literature, and it is more available to the writer of science fiction or fantasy, or of historical fiction, or mysteries, than to those with literary pretensions, who are limited only to the limited and overspecialized tools of symbol and metaphor.

OSC Answers
I begin most of my stories with two separate ideas that were independently invented. It is when I decide to combine them (or realize that adding one idea will greatly enrich the other) that I begin to find the tensions out of which character, dilemma, and event will arise.

For instance, in my novel Hart's Hope, I had acquired the idea of a system of magic in which power is obtained from living blood -- from slaying a creature and using its blood to work spells while the creature is still not quite dead. The most terrible and irresistible power came from the blood of your own child -- and so I had the monstrous character Beauty. But I had no world for her to dwell in, nor any reason for her to have become the sort of person who would do such a terrible thing.

Quite separately, I had doodled a map of a medieval walled city, with intriguingly named streets and gates. I thought of the idea that the city you discover within the walls is radically different, depending upon which gate you enter through. One of the gates is permanently closed -- it is the magical gate, and that, I knew, was the one my hero must use.

Only when I thought of combining these two ideas, however, did the story come to life, with the novel Hart's Hope as the result.

(There was a third, also unrelated idea, which I tossed in at first as a whim -- the idea of conjoined twins, sisters who were joined at the face, one with her face turned completely inward, and other with her face partly turned away. So when they were separated, the one had no face -- no eyes, and only a gash for a mouth -- while the other looked quite normal in one profile, and eyeless and deformed in the other. I had tried, and failed, to write a story using just those characters; but when I added them to Hart's Hope as enigmatic gods, the "Sweet Sisters," the fun really began.)

Every novel goes through this process, and most of my stories -- and, I daresay, all of the ones that are most memorable or powerful, with only a couple of exceptions (Dogwalker, Unaccompanied Sonata -- the two stories I wrote "whole" in one sitting).

OSC Answers
All human beings have an intense religious life. Those who think they don't have a religion are simply those so fanatical that they think their beliefs aren't a religion, they're simply The Universal Truth. They are the dangerous ones.

To write characters without religion is to lie about how human beings function in the world.

Do you want to know how to find somebody's religion? Talk with them and tease them about the things they believe; cast doubt upon their opinions. As long as they're still laughing, you haven't found it. When they get angry with you for your skepticism, or for taking their ideas lightly, that is when you've found their religion -- their set of beliefs so deeply held that they can't conceive of a universe in which they are not true.

As for the place of religion in my work: My characters have religious beliefs and a religious life and are usually aware of a community of fellow believers -- whether they call themselves a "church" or not. But none of them have ever had exactly my religion, except inadvertently. That is, I never use my fiction to preach my own consciously held beliefs. That would be a waste of time. What is consciously inserted into a story is always noticeable to any but the most naive reader, and will probably be consciously rejected. Instead, I trust my unconscious choices to reveal what I truly believe -- things that I only discover myself when I reread the book or story many years later. What comes out of my unconscious can be trusted to be what I really believe, and now what I think I ought to believe.

So even though I belong to, and believe in, a definite religion whose tenets were laid down by others, I do not try to write from the "consensus reality" of that religious community. For one thing, every individual within a religious community has a different set of beliefs, however much they might think that all the members believe alike. And, more importantly, I don't think religions can be effectively taught in fiction. It's not what fiction is good for, and when you make the attempt, you have bad fiction and bad preaching. When I want to preach, I write essays. And when my characters preach, they are never giving exactly my beliefs and opinions, except perhaps inadvertently.

In my life, however, I am intensely involved in the lives and activities of my fellow believers in our local congregation, and in the major events in my religious community at large. But that's between them and me.

OSC Answers
I sold the Homecoming series to TOR as a "science fictional retelling of the storyline of the Book of Mormon." The editor knew what she was buying -- in fact, Beth Meacham had earlier, when working for a different publishing company, made an offer for a book that would have consisted of a science fiction version of the Medieval English romance King Horn. The method was simple: Change the ocean to space, and it's sci-fi.

That's what I did with the events depicted in the Book of Mormon. I made no effort to preserve the doctrinal preachings, only the human relationships and the conflicts and struggles among the people. But I changed the setting into a separately developed future, so that more than half the story is stuff I made up. In fact, the second volume covers barely a hundred words of the history in the Book of Mormon itself.

Nobody will be converted to Mormonism by reading the Homecoming series. My hope is that people will be intrigued and entertained by the lives of the people they find there; but that is what I hope for with all my fiction.

OSC Answers
It's always different to write when you have to use someone else's words. Especially someone else's dialogue! I took on The Abyss because, even though the money was lower than I usually got (there's lots of money in movies, but they don't give any of it to the writer of the novelization!) the script was so good that I couldn't pass up the chance to try my hand at it. James Cameron, the screenwriter and director, gave me an extraordinary amount of support, and the publisher gave me a very late deadline. Thus I was able to wait to write the book until the rough cut of the film was available -- so I didn't have to guess how the character would say something, or what his or her actions would look like -- I could hear the actor speak and see how the action unfolded.

At the same time, Cameron gave me permission to write three chapters that took place before the beginning of the movie, giving a backstory of the characters that I invented. He also (reluctantly at first) allowed me to fully invent the alien society, once I convinced him that what can be mysterious in movies must be explained in written sci fi.

The result was a book I'm proud of. But I don't want to novelize another movie. Just like collaboration, it's twice the work for half the pay.

OSC Answers
I put them in tough situations and think of what they might do and why they might do it -- and when I think of an action or a motive that fascinates me or that feels exactly right, that's the one I use. In other words, I trust my unconscious mind to decide among the alternatives I consciously think up. If the character fascinates me, I can only hope that the character will also fascinate at least some readers.

OSC Answers
Society is people, as they order themselves according to rules and then decide whether to keep or break those rules. Every choice that characters make defines their relationships with the people around them.

But it goes even deeper than that. We exist as human beings only in relation to other people, as individuals and as groups. Our identity is self-defined and other-defined in terms of the groups we belong to and the ones we most definitely do not belong to, and according to our relationships with other individuals. We become a different person with each relationship that we create, so that to fully understand the mother of six children, for instance, we would have to see who she is with each child, and with each grouping of children, not to mention with her husband -- and with each child and her husband. It's extraordinarily complex ... and that's just the relationships within the family. When we see her with her mother and her father, we begin to understand to what degree they have defined for her what she is and what she definitely intends not to be, and what she expects her husband to be and profoundly insists that he never be. It is impossible to know a human being in isolation. And it is only in fiction that the reader can come to know another person without the relationship between the reader and the other person intruding into the understanding. In other words, fiction allows us to observe humans without transforming them into something else because they know us.

OSC Answers
I think that's a meaningless statement, and probably is used as a pejorative by people who think "conservative" is a bad word. Like all name-calling, it is meant to cause harm, not shed light. What in the world would a political designation mean in a literary community? Or if "conservative" is used in the sense of "resistant to change," then it would apply to the authors who write fantasies that stay firmly within the lines of existing traditions, and would not apply to authors who strike out beyond the boundaries and find their own way. Since fantasy includes both kinds of writers, and writers who are one thing at one moment, and the other at another, how can an intelligent statement be made about the conservatism or non-conservatism of "the genre." Silly stuff. Let no one call himself an intellectual who tosses out labels and is not prepared to explain what he actually means.

OSC Answers
The Alvin stories are set in an alternative America, in which I play games with American history in order to clarify important issues and to allow room for folk magic beliefs to be real. The story is about human beings, but along the way it is also about America -- its good possibilities and its risks and dangers and evils as well. But whether you care about America or not, I hope that the primary value of the story is because you care about Alvin and the people around him.

As for the Valois stories -- the "Worthing Saga" in English -- I am unaware of any particular historical connection, except that in some of the early stories I link the series with our own near future (though clearly I guessed wrong about what that future would be). So I can't comment on what the "historical background" might be, since I invented all but the tiniest shred of it.

OSC Answers
Since I have devoted many books and stories (Pastwatch, the Alvin series, Folk of the Fringe, and many others) to exploring exactly those subjects, one can only conclude that if I could answer that question briefly enough to include it here, then I certainly wasted everyone's time writing all those thousands and thousands of words of fiction....

OSC Answers
It's a good thing that I'm not attached to it! Awards come in the season when you are new and other people can receive some cachet from discovering you and excitedly telling other people about you. That's when they give you awards. Then, after you've got a few, you're old hat and they look for someone else to be excited about.

If you're lucky, another generation discovers you again and you get another rush of adulation.

But if you write in order to receive such adulation, you cheat yourself and your readers, because adulation is bestowed by fad, not by merit. I'm glad that I have had the benefit of some awards along the way, but they rarely come for the artist's best work; nor do they come when the author might benefit most from receiving them. So what? Gratefully receive what is given, and expect nothing the rest of the time. Any other path leads to frustration and misery.

Besides, the pleasures of praise are fleeting. Anyone who shapes his life so as to receive praise is selling all that he has for something that is cheap to give and which evaporates in the moment of receiving it.

OSC Answers
I'm working on Rachel and Leah (the next book about the Women of Genesis), a book of poetry (which should appear around Christmastime), a story collection, a new contemporary fantasy novel (in the tradition of Enchantment, Lost Boys, Homebody, and Treasure Box), and the next Shadow novel, called Shadow of the Giant.

OSC Answers
There are trillions of questions I have never been asked, such as "Why is rain pink?" and "Can ducks be emphatic?" and I have no interest in answering them or listing them here. Questions are only interesting when they come from the genuine curiosity of another person. Any question I made up myself would be nothing more than an essay, and not a "question" at all. When I think of an essay, I write it and usually (depending on the subject matter) post it at www.hatrack.com or at www.ornery.org.

http://www.hatrack.com/research/interviews/2003-french-interview.shtml