Lillian Stewart Carl: Let's begin as all biographies begin. To paraphrase Bill Cosby—whose 1960s records we almost memorized—you started life as a child.
Lois McMaster Bujold: Yep. I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1949, third child and only daughter of the family. My parents were originally from Pittsburgh; they graduated from high school in 1930 straight into the Depression. My father, through work and scholarships, put himself through night school and, eventually, graduate school at Cal Tech. He ended up teaching welding engineering at Ohio State University. So I grew up in the white-bread suburb of Upper Arlington in the Fifties and Sixties.
My father gave me a model for the writer-at-work; one of his projects during that period was editing the Nondestructive Testing Handbook, a major work in his field that was the world standard for twenty years. He did this largely at home in his upstairs office and in the spare room, where a secretary labored to track and collate the pounds of paper and worldwide correspondence. Memories of my dad center around the clack of his IBM Selectric, the scent of professorial pipe smoke, and the constant strains of classical music (WOSU-FM) from his hi-fi.
Falling Free has an engineer character based loosely upon my father and his work, and was dedicated to him; Lord Auditor Vorthys owes much to his professor-emeritus mode.
LSC: Your father was a remarkably patient man, letting us use his recording equipment and his typewriter for our own projects. Or we'd just sprawl in his chairs and read.
LMB: I fell in love with reading early, but hit my stride in third grade when I discovered that I wasn't limited to the thin "grade level" picture books they laid out for our class during library periods, but could take any book from the shelf. I fell ravenously on Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry (this was my horse-obsessed period), and never looked back. I started reading science fiction when I was nine, because my father read it—he used to buy Analog magazine and the occasional paperback to read on the plane during consulting trips. With that introduction, no one was ever going to fool me into thinking SF was kid stuff!
LSC: Kid stuff?
LMB: Well, one must admit, SF has roots in boys'-own-adventure genres; I dimly remember reading SFnal tales in my older brother's copies of Boy's Life (a Boy Scout magazine) back then. But the term "adolescent" when applied to SF is not necessarily a pejorative, in my later and wider view. The great psychological work of adolescence (in our culture, anyway) is to escape the family, especially the mother but in some families the father, depending on which parent is more intent on enforcing the social norms, in order to create oneself as an autonomous person. This is why, I theorize, so much fantasy and SF is so hell-bent on destroying the protagonist's family, first thing, before anything else. Villages must be pillaged and burned, lost heirs smuggled off to be raised elsewhere, SFnal social structures devised that eliminate family altogether—because before anything at all can happen, you have to escape your parents. It's their job to prevent you having adventures, after all.
When I was a kid, my favorite writers included Poul Anderson and James H. Schmitz—who had great female leads in his tales—the usual Heinlein (the juveniles, not his later work), Asimov, and Clarke, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Mack Reynolds, Eric Frank Russell, Zenna Henderson; toward the end of that period there was Anne McCaffrey, Randall Garrett, Roger Zelazny, Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, and so on. There was a lot less SF on the library shelves in those days; you could read it all up, and I did.
I discovered the SF sections at the public libraries I could occasionally get to. Since we lived on the outer edge of the suburbs, and there was no public transportation, getting to a library involved getting my mother to drive me the ten or twenty miles there, which became easier when I reached age sixteen and could drive myself.
LSC: For a while you were getting around on a bicycle. That's devotion to reading, risking getting run off a narrow black-topped road in order to reach the library. But that was after I entered your life—or you entered mine—thanks to some faceless bureaucrat who put us both into Section 7-2 at Hastings Junior High School in Upper Arlington.
LMB: Dear God, you even remember the section number? Scary . . .
LSC: Do you remember trying out for the school talent show by singing Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"? The silence after we finished could have swallowed a planet.
LMB: I'm so glad we didn't make the cut. . . . The experience of making the attempt was likely good to have, I suppose. Maybe. Actually, I still don't like getting up on stage, come to think.
LSC: It's a good thing we found each other—no one else could have put up with us. (Although I must admit to having been immensely gratified at sitting around a conference recently, singing Lehrer songs with the other writers!)
LMB: Well, we didn't know fandom existed till after high school. In junior high we shared our love of books, watched favorite television shows and fell in love with their heroes together (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.! Star Trek! The short-lived TV version of The Wackiest Ship in the Army!), and became each other's first readers for the (mostly highly derivative) stories, scripts, and poetry that boiled up in both our heads—we were inspired to write because we loved to read, and because stories poured through our heads, welling up uninvited from wherever these thoughts come.
I introduced you to SF and fantasy, and you introduced me to history and archaeology. This was the early 1960s, and American television was filled with World War II shows. It was all around in the culture. We shared books like Escape from Colditz, which was about WWII prisoner of war camp escapes in Germany by American soldiers. I think it is because we were trapped in high school and the idea of breaking out of the prison camp was a very captivating idea. "Maybe if we dig a tunnel we could get out of the classroom. . . ."
LSC: One of our history teachers was a big fan of the movie Stalag 17, so I suppose the thought of breaking out wasn't exclusive to the students. I well remember writing a brief piece where I was magically transported from the crowded halls of the high school to the Pelennor Fields, hearing the horns of Rohan in the dawn.
LMB: My Tolkienesque epic, embarked upon at age fifteen and never finished, at least has the dubious distinction of having been written in Spenserian verse, the result of having read The Lord of the Rings and The Faerie Queene twice that year.
LSC: It was you who introduced me to Tolkien, something for which I'm profoundly grateful.
LMB: I bought an Ace pirated edition of The Fellowship of the Ring on a family vacation to Italy, and found the ending to be a huge disappointment; it just sort of trailed off. Oh, lord, I thought, it's one of those darn dismal British writers. . . . There was nothing on the cover, spine, blurb, nor after the last page that indicated there was more, except for a brief reference buried at the end of the "about the author" paragraph to it being a heroic romance published in three parts. Marketing was more primitive in those days, I suppose.
Half a year later, it was with overwhelming joy, still remembered vividly, that I found its two sequels. I don't remember the names of most of my high school teachers, mind you, but I can still remember where I was sitting when I first opened up The Two Towers and read, with a pounding heart, "Aragorn sped on up the hill . . ." My father's home office, the air faintly acrid with the scent of his pipe tobacco, in the big black chair under the window, yellow late-afternoon winter light shining in through the shredding silver-gray clouds beyond the chill bare Ohio woods to the west. Now, that's imprinting.
The chair, the room, the man, the world are all gone now. I still have the book. It has stitched itself like a thread through my life from that day to this, read variously, with different perceptions at different ages; today, my overtrained eye even proofreads as it travels over the lines, and sometimes stops to rearrange a sentence or quibble with a word choice. Is it a perfect book? No, doubtless not. No human thing is. Is it a great book? It is in my heart; it binds time for me, and binds the wounds of time.
"And he sang to them . . . until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness" is no bad epitaph for a writer. I could crawl on my knees through broken glass for the gift of words that pierce like those.
LSC: It grieves me to hear someone say, "I don't have to read The Lord of the Rings, I've seen the movies"—even though the movies are amazing accomplishments. And had the side effect of allowing us to get back in touch with our inner fan-girls.
LMB: It all comes back around, doesn't it? I tried sporadically to write through early college, but then got sidetracked—although there was a period during college when several of the members of the local SF club I'd discovered (in Columbus, Ohio) met at the house of a graduate student in English Literature who was himself trying to become a novelist, and who eventually succeeded, too. He went on in academia—I ran into him again a few years back at a con.
LSC: Then my family had moved to Texas. We didn't see each other for five years, during which time real life overwhelmed the murmurs of our muses.
LMB: Ray Bradbury, in a speech he gave at a Nebula banquet in the late eighties, told a tale of having one day decided he needed to "grow up"; endeavoring to put away childish things, he burned his comic book collection. About a month later, he woke up to himself and said, more or less, "What have I done?!" I was a slow learner; it took me about a decade to find that lost real self again. I married, worked for several years as a drug administration technician at the Ohio State University Hospitals, and finally had my two children.
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 my 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 science, 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.
I use a sort of rolling-outline technique, largely as a memory aid, and work forward a small section at a time, because that's all my brain will hold, up to what I call "the event horizon," which is how far I can see to write till I have to stop and make up some more. This is usually a chapter or three. I'll get a mental picture of what scenes should go in the next chapter, and push them around till they slot into sequence. I then pull out the next scene and outline it closely, almost a messy sort of first draft. I choreograph dialogue especially carefully.
Then I take these notes to my computer and type up the actual scene, refining as I go. Lather, rinse, repeat till I get to the end of the chapter and, my brain now purged and with room to hold more, I pop back up to the next level to outline again. Every scene I write has the potential of changing what comes next, either by a character doing something unexpected or by my clearer look at the material as it's finally pinned to the page, so I re-outline constantly.
Making up the story and writing down the story are, for me, two separate activities calling for two different states of mind.
LSC: Whereas for me, they're virtually the same thing—the writing generates the creation. But everyone's muse has his or her own idiosyncrasies.
LMB: Yep. For me, creation needs relaxation; composition is intensely focused. I do the making up part away from the computer, either while taking my walks or otherwise busying myself, or, when I get to the note-making or outlining stage, in another room. I do not compose at the computer, although I do edit on the fly, and the odd better ideas for a bit of dialogue or description do often pop out while I'm typing. Sometimes, they're sufficiently strong that they derail what I'd planned and I have to stop typing and go away and re-outline; sometimes they're just a bonus, an unexpected Good Bit, and slot right in.
I do most of my writing either in the late morning, or the late evening. Late afternoon tends to be a physiological downtime for me.
LSC: I know from hard experience that some books come out a lot faster than others.
LMB: For me, it's varied from nine to sixteen months. The amount of time I've taken between books has varied from six weeks to six months. In the absence of distractions I write at a fairly steady rate—about two chapters a month, on average—but then there are the major life-interruptions, which pick their own times. Convention travel, much as I enjoy it, also takes a big bite of time each year. I lose one to two weeks of writing time/attention/energy for each three-day convention I attend.
My writing schedule, too, has varied over the years. In the beginning I wrote during my kids' naps and after they were in bed, but then they stopped taking naps and started staying up later. The younger one hit school as I was starting my fifth novel, Brothers in Arms, and then I began writing in the mornings and early afternoons, school hours, though I am not by nature a morning person. Since I have at last moved to a house with my own office, I sometimes get in an evening or late-night session. But my prime time is still school-hours.
If I have the ideas marshaled, I can write in much less than ideal circumstances. If my inner vision is a blank, it doesn't matter how much peace and quiet I have, nothing comes out. During the sticky bits of a novel, I've sometimes found it useful to fool myself with the "five hundred words a day" trick. Five hundred words is not very much, just a couple of paragraphs. A few days of lowering the bar, and I'll get past the bad bit, and it flows again. Other times the blank stays blank, and a good thing too.
LSC: And then there are the several stages of editing, combined with the hair-pulling and head-desk-banging.
LMB: Structural editing almost all takes place at the outline stage, for me, as I shove the scene sequences around and at last into place. Very seldom do I add or delete whole scenes after the first draft. When I complete a day's work I usually print it out and take the pages away to read in the new format (in a different room and chair, which my body desperately needs by that point), and mark it up with line-edit and copy-edit stuff—fixing syntax, improving word choice, adding some forgotten bit or cutting something excess that impedes the flow. At the end of the chapter, it goes out (by e-mail, now) to my inner circle of test readers; those who are syntax-and-grammar sensitive and/or rhythm-and-word-choice sensitive are pearls beyond price. They help me identify a lot of problem spots on the sentence level.
When I agree with their critiques, I enter changes and print out the chapter that goes into the accumulating three-ring binder. I look back over this material fairly frequently as I continue to write, and mark up any problems that catch my eye. At the end of the book comes the vast appalling task of going back over the whole thing, and making all necessary changes on all levels. I enter all these, print it out again, read it again, make any other changes that seem required (by this time I'm cross-eyed and thoroughly sick of it all), and produce the first submission draft, which goes to the editor. She returns her comments, I make what responses I'm going to, and back it goes to the publisher. After that there will be the copy edit to read and approve or fix, and finally, the galleys.
LSC: After all these years, does it come any easier?
LMB: Well, I'm more skilled at the mechanics of everything. I'm not intimidated or bewildered by the business anymore. There are things I haven't tried yet, so I haven't developed the chops. I've never written anything in omniscient viewpoint. I've never written anything in first person, so those are challenges yet to be met. A whole novel is this very complex pattern which would really have been too vast for my feeble logical mind to have figured out in advance, but something in my back-brain assembles it. I've learned to trust this aspect of myself as a writer.
This doesn't mean I don't whine about my book in progress. In fact, I whine my way from beginning to end. First I whine that I can't get any good ideas, then after an initial rush I whine my way through the whole middle, which can run from Chapter 2 to Chapter 22 of a twenty-three-chapter book. And then my whining rises to a crescendo during revisions, which I hate above all other parts of the process. And when it's all over, I dither about how people will like it. The outside observer mustn't mistake normal creative whining for dislike of the work. To test this, see what happens if you try to take the book away from its author while she's whining about it. Trying to take a baby bear from its mama would be much less dangerous.
LSC: The shelves in your home are lined by copies of your books translated into—how many languages is it now?
LMB: Let's see if I can come up with the whole list: Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Chinese traditional-characters, Chinese simplified-characters, and I'm still missing a couple somewhere. British is a foreign sale but not—quite—a foreign language.
Some of these are very tiny markets, mind. Our old fanzine had a bigger print run than some of them.
LSC: Have you any explanation for your universal appeal?
LMB: Miles does seem to survive translation well, much as he survives everything else thrown at him. A lot of other SF authors are also translated into other languages, though, so I'm just a part of the picture. I have noted with bemusement that some countries and cultures seem to be "science-fiction-friendly," and others less so. The most avid overseas markets for SF and fantasy at present seem to be Japan and Russia, then Australia and New Zealand, Europe and Eastern Europe, and a very little in South America. There does not appear to be as much SF activity in the rest of Southeast Asia (although I once received e-mail from a fan from Vietnam, he read in the original English), India, Africa apart from South Africa, or the Islamic countries, but that may be changing.
Part of the problem, I think, is that SF has been so America-centic and Britain-centric (with a nod to Jules Verne, here). If people look at a type of literature and don't see anyone like themselves represented in it, they tend to put it back on the shelf, thinking it isn't addressed to them. This has posed a problem for SF in our own country in the past with respect to women readers and black readers, whose selves and concerns seemed excluded from earlier works in the genre. In all the places where SF is popular, the cultures and countries in question seem to have taken up the genre and made it theirs, with the local writers assimilating the foreign model, but then taking off with it in their own directions with their own voices.
LSC: Your work has been packaged as military SF. I don't recall this ever being your intention, though.
LMB: At the time I wrote my first books, I don't think the sub-genre had split out yet; I certainly was not aware of it as a thing separate from adventure tales in general. Properly speaking, milSF as a label should be applied to works whose central concern is an exploration of the military in action, doing its job (well or badly, depending). My Miles-centric books, really, are explorations of the psychology of a fellow from a deeply conservative culture who starts out as an army-mad youngster, and grows out of it (well, partially), and along the way encounters other people who occasionally have to deal with the military as a human cultural artifact in the course of a larger story. The military adventures are sometimes occasions for my tales, but they are seldom the point of my tales, which are more usually about what's going on inside people's heads, and in their wider lives. "What are these people thinking?," again.
LSC: The Vorkosigan series covers a lot of genres, and was doing so before genre-blending became marketable.
LMB: I don't stick to one mode, which confuses people who think series books should be cut to standard shapes like cookies. Genre conventions—which I see as another term for reader expectations—are fun. There're so many things you can do with them—twist them, invert or subvert them, bounce things off them, ignore them, or even play them straight. Like the form of a sonnet, genre forms don't really constrain content, emotion, or meaning—you can write a sonnet about anything from love and death to HO-gauge model railroading, although I'm not sure anyone has done the latter, yet. Surprise, for example, is a literary effect that almost depends on the readers having expectations shaped by prior reads.
My personal definition of a genre is, "Any group of works in close conversation with each other." As readers, we tend to encounter only the polished result of that uproar, as the book alone appears in our hand and the context drops away. Classics are particularly at risk of seeming to have been hung in air, having escaped the death of their original surround. But the reading context matters, since the ground changes the figure.
I've long imagined the sort of SF critics who claim "We want to see writers stretch the boundaries of the genre!" taking one look at my work and crying, "No, but not like that!" (I suspect they really want to see SF link upward to genres of higher status, like mainstream, and not, say, sideways to mystery, or worse, downward to romance.) Within the Vorkosigan series, I've played with romance, coming-of-age, mystery, military fiction, Golden Age engineering, thriller, and satire, for starters—SF is a very malleable genre, rather like whichever blood type is the universal receiver (AB, if I remember correctly), able to accept transfusions from all sources. How many genres can I fit in one series? Well, let's see . . .
LSC: Ah yes, romance. Girl stuff. When we were kids we'd knit little sweaters for our Barbie dolls and also build spaceships for them to pilot. I don't think many little boys knitted sweaters for their G.I. Joe action figures.
LMB: Poor deprived tykes, missing out on all that small muscle development and pattern-recognition practice. . . . I have noticed, over time, the allergy of many SF readers—male and female, mark you well—to romance; not just lack of interest, an "I don't care for that" response, the way I feel about horror as a genre, but genuine, almost hysterical hostility, which I shorthand as, "Girl germs! Girl germs! Run away!" In my view, nobody gets that heated up over a mere book. They get that heated up because, on some level, their identity or status seems threatened. Why should a reading choice do that?
And then there's the parallel reaction to SF by many romance and mainstream readers. "Ick!" would probably be the politest shorthand. Whatever underlying identity thing is going on, it runs both ways. Why do these women (and men) reject (in an almost medical-organ-transplant sense) SF?
Status-based arguments about ejecting the abject would seem to fall down, here—except that these women don't see SF readers and writers as having status. They see us as geeky dweebs stuck in permanent adolescence. At a book fair once, I talked to one such woman about this perception thing—to her, it was as though SF were some sort of disease vector for social dweebishness, and if you read that stuff, you'd turn into one of them, spontaneously sprouting rubber Spock ears and Nintendo thumbs through some sort of Lamarckian devolution. This is a war with two sides. And SF doesn't actually have any manifest destiny to win it. Indeed, in many—most—cases, in an SF story, the woman's traditional agenda is either totally ignored, or clearly loses, which may be something else that's putting off all those women readers.
LSC: So why is there a literary gender/genre war? What does this systematic put-down of the romance genre really mean?
LMB: You'd think males would line up to applaud a genre that works so hard to interest women in men—after all, wouldn't the relentless celebration of heterosexual relationships seem to increase their chances of getting laid? And yet, it is not so. . . .
In my view, the key to the romance/women's fiction genre is, the woman's agenda wins. Her situation, her personal responsibilities, her life, her needs, and above all her emotions, are made central to the reader's attention. (And if there is anything in the world more thoroughly diminutized and dismissed than women's emotions, I can't think of it right now.) In the end, she gets what she wants, or needs—a committed guy who will stick around to help raise children. In short, in the course of the plot the hero, however much a rake he is initially presented, is transformed into a guy who will do the chores, personally or by the proxy of servants. No wonder adolescent males—and some females, too—of all ages run screaming. . . .
To heck with sex, women, squishy stuff, and liquidity. The real phobia at the bottom of all this gender/genre allergy is to chores, I'm absolutely convinced.
LSC: It's another status thing. Whoever cleans up is the abject. Your mother used to collect your Analog from the mailbox and hide it until you'd cleaned your room.
LMB: This whole dialectic presents particular problems for women, and especially for women SF writers. Women in our culture are given the duty and responsibility (though not the power, of course) of "molding" our kids; we're drafted willy-nilly into the Cultural Gestapo, and woe betide us if our kids "don't turn out right." How can we become mothers, yet not become our mothers? We are SF writers in the first place only because, like our brothers, we resisted being assigned many of the chores of womanhood, handed out from our culture via, usually, our moms. Instead we went off and read disapproved books. And then, by damn, we even started writing them. (I can still hear my mother's voice, echoing from my own adolescence—"If you don't stop reading those silly science fiction books and get out of bed, you'll never get anywhere!" Now I sit in bed writing silly science fiction books, and my career has given me the world. Ha!) So, which side shall I be on? Must I choose, and lose half my possibilities thereby whichever choice I make?
LSC: But since you write "guy stuff," too, you're respected. By the earnest young (male) fan, for example, who told you that you "write like a man."
LMB: To which I should have replied (but didn't, because I don't think fast on my feet—that's why I'm a writer, the pencil waits) "Oh, really? Which one?"
I'm still trying to work out whether or not it came to a compliment. In all, since I write most of my adventure books from deep inside the point of view of a male character, Miles Vorkosigan, I've decided it's all right; if I'm mimicking a male worldview well enough that even the opposition can't tell for sure, I'm accomplishing my heart's goal of writing true character. The comment worried me for a long time, though. A trip through the essays of Ursula Le Guin also shook my self-confidence. Was I doing something wrong? But then I wrote Barrayar, returning at last to the full range of a female character's point of view, and I haven't been troubled by such comments since.
LSC: What does it mean to "write like a woman"?
LMB: Not one damned identifiable thing, as far as I can tell. As any competent statistician can testify, from a general statement about any group of people (such as a gender), nothing reliable can be predicted about the next individual to walk through the door.
I once ran a selection of my work through a supposed "gender-identifier" algorithm-machine found on the Net. All of the scenes written from the point of view of female characters came out as "written by a woman." All the scenes written from the point of view of male characters came out as "written by a man." I concluded that I wrote like a writer.
I see plenty enough female SF writers not to feel unusual. When I start naming them, it adds up pretty quickly—Willis, Cherryh, Asaro, Moon, McCaffrey, Turzillo, Czerneda, Zettel, Kagan, Kress, Le Guin for heaven's sakes, and dozens more. I don't know why journalists and critics and commentators keep mentally erasing us; perhaps we mess up their pretty theory. I'm less sure about foreign markets, but in the American midlist, SF seems a pretty level playing field between men and women writers. There are lots of women editors in the genre, as well.
But even in fantasy, the very top best-sellers do seem to be disproportionately male. I've heard it theorized that it's because more women will buy and read books by male writers with male protagonists, but fewer men will buy and read books by women writers with female protagonists. Women writers with male protagonists seem to get a partial free pass.
I get to meet my own fan-base at conventions and book signings and on-line. They seem to be pretty evenly divided between men and women, and with ages ranging all over the map, from eleven to eighty and sometimes up, with a diverse array of views on practically everything. A lot of folks report reading my books in families, passing them between siblings and generations both. They're a flatteringly bright bunch, on the whole. This seems to suggest my books don't exclude readers by gender.
LSC: This same question crops up among mystery readers—can a woman write believably from a man's viewpoint? The reverse seems to be less of an issue.
LMB: Ditto for romance. The reverse is often an issue in SF, though. I think the real answer is, "Some writers can, some can't." Men and women aren't that different from each other, in most areas of life. I think the proper question is, how on earth do writers avoid insight into the opposite gender? Guys are all around us, all the time. We live with them—I had a father, grandfathers, brothers, a husband, a son, male colleagues, bosses, fellow students—we read books written by and about them . . . Nowadays, we read on-line posts by them, in perhaps more startling variety than one's immediate family might offer, or so I would hope. Swapped around, the same is true for male observers. I think some people must screen out this data, as if knowing, or at least, admitting to knowing, was somehow a violation of their own gender identity. I was on a convention panel once with a male writer who was complaining—actually, covertly bragging—that he couldn't write female characters very well, the not-so-hidden subtext being that he was so ineluctably masculine, the terrible effort at getting his mind around this alien female viewpoint was just beyond him. (As though it were a subject impossible to research!) I didn't think he was ineluctably masculine. I just thought he was a lazy writer.
LSC: And you're a good writer. At least you've won lots of awards—which doesn't, however, mean the same thing.
LMB: Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never, therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind. The real reason discussions of the quality of literature get emotionally hot very rapidly is that they inescapably entail a covert judgment being passed on the private and invisible mind of another human being. You can get into trouble by mistaking your reading experience for the reading experience, as though anyone who ran their eyes over the same words brought the same mind to it.
I'm not one of those control-freak writers who feel that everybody has to read the book precisely as I intended. I know perfectly well they're going to take this text and turn it into something in their heads that is at most fifty percent my contribution. When I do get feedback, it's kind of interesting to see the different things they'll do with it. They startle me sometimes.
Broadly, there seem to be to be two kinds of great books, and a lot of linguistic confusion engendered because people keep trying to conflate the two categories: books which are great because they are greatly loved, by many readers over time or perhaps only by a few, but no less passionately for that; and books that are historically important because they change the way other books are written. Not infrequently, a book may be both (Don Quixote, anyone?), but students of literature tend to concentrate on the second sort, and I think they are right to do so.
In general, it takes a deal of time to see if a book or writer will have the latter sort of impact. And sometimes books that pass the test with flying colors, such as the works of Arthur Conan Doyle or Georgette Heyer, still get excluded from consideration, but in that case one suspects that the excluders are merely, shall we say politely, inadequately informed, and may be disregarded.
Therefore, due to the inherently subjective nature of reading, awards are not won by the writer, as in a race—they are given, as gifts, by other people to the writer. To attempt to control something one cannot, in fact, ever control—the actions of others—is a short route to madness. Writers can control what they write. Full stop. Everything that happens after is some class of unintended consequence or chaotic emergent property.
That said, the validation of winning awards is enormously gratifying. Winning one's first major award does a lot to make a new writer more visible (wasted if one does not then produce a follow-up book in short order), and winning the second helps prove that the first wasn't a fluke. After that it becomes a matter of diminishing returns, in terms of the practical consequences or, as it were, economic utility of the things. These are not as magnificent as the average fan imagines; an award is good for generating a few thousand more domestic paperback sales and for garnering foreign sales if one isn't getting such already; but the foreign SF markets are tiny. (Which they make up partly in numbers, if you can collect the whole set.) Over time, awards help but do not guarantee works to stay in print or get reprinted.
I discovered when I won my first Nebula back in the late Eighties that while I might put blank pages under that classy paperweight at night, there would be no words magically appearing on them in the morning. Writing the next book is the same slog, only now with heightened expectations. "Each one better than all the others" seems to be the demand.
LSC: Was there any one award which meant more to you than any other?
LMB: Probably the most important was the first, the Nebula for Falling Free, which made folks sit up and take notice. I was very pleased when Barrayar won its Hugo, because I didn't think it could win back-to-back with The Vor Game like that, and it was the book closer to my heart. The Hugo for Paladin of Souls was great, first, because I am hugely fond of its heroine Ista, and second because it finally stopped people driving me crazy by saying brightly, "Just one more and you'll match Heinlein!" It's not a race, drat it.
I have no idea why some of my books draw awards and other don't, except that the ones I spent the least time worrying about other people's response to—that I wrote for myself—seem to do the best of all.
LSC: Why are some books closer to your heart?
LMB: Whenever a writer who has produced more than one volume is asked to name their favorite, it is almost the routine to respond with some mumble about choosing among your books being like choosing among one's children, each has its strengths and weaknesses, you really can't say. This is actually a lie. Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.
Some books reach higher, dig deeper, take more terrifying chances. And you know it, when you've done it; you can't do something like that and not know it. You then spend the next two years sweating through the publication process, those first reviews, the first sales figures, waiting and hoping that you haven't deluded yourself—because you most certainly can delude yourself—waiting for that validation and biting your tongue against any words you might be compelled to eat later.
LSC: Speaking of validation, on the "photos" section of the Dendarii site, you are captured with your amazing necklace of award tie tacks. You mention looking at them in the box and thinking "thirteen tie tacks and no neckties. Deconstruct the subtext of this one, grrls."
LMB: Mike Resnick has a wonderful sort of "South American Colonel" look when valiantly wearing all his rocket pins at Worldcons, but that's just not in my style. I tried sticking them all on my name badge, which worked for a while, but I was running out of room. So I took my box of award nomination pins to Elise Matthesen, a Twin Cities crafter of art jewelry and a good reader, who understands both her art and my audience, with some vague notion of a charm bracelet or necklace. But she had much better ideas.
The goofy glory of the final necklace design is all Elise's doing, partly driven by technical considerations such as not attempting to cut up the pin backs, risking breakage. I'd like to think I do the same thing to genre tropes in my writing, but that's not for me to judge.
LSC: It's for your fans to judge. Is there a difference between your fans, that is, the people who enjoy your work, and Fans with a capital F?
LMB: Not really; fandom fans are a subset of the broader readership, in my experience. I first found fandom, or it found me, in the fall of 1967, just after I'd graduated from high school and was working in the book department of a downtown department store. I met a fellow from the local SF fan club, who invited me to a meeting. (The guys vastly outnumbered the girls, back then.)
I went to a few local conventions, and attended two Worldcons—my first was BayCon in '60-hum-something, '68 or '69. So when I returned to the convention scene in the mid-Eighties as a wanna-be pro, it was a fairly socially comfortable milieu for me. I understand some writers who first encounter fandom after they are published are a little baffled how to go on there, as it doesn't really fit expected commercial, literary, or academic models of writer-reader relationships, though it partakes of all of them. But most writers seem to learn pretty quickly. Note, fandom is not a unified body so much as an alliance of varied special interests; you have to locate your own kindred spirits in the array.
I have the fondest memories of sitting around the hotel bar in St. Petersburg, Russia, when I went to an SF conference there, discussing our mutual favorite old SF novelists with the full-blooded Tartar computer programmer from Kazakhstan. This stuff gets around.
LSC: Which brings us to the subject of fan fiction, and through that, to the Internet.
LMB: What the Internet has done to fan fiction has been fascinating. Fan fiction has completely exploded. What has stunned me and blown all my prior theories of fan fiction out of the water was the number and variety of things that have fanfic written about them. I would never in my wildest dreams have expected there to be fifty fan fictions based on 1984 on one site, and even Flatland had some. Say what? Pat Wrede has a theory that the Arthurian Cycle was actually medieval fan fiction, and the more she points out parallels the more you realize she's right! People took their favorite characters and wrote expanded stories about them. They didn't have the Internet, but they did their best.
The Internet has made the idea of fan fiction accessible to a whole bunch of people who have never heard of fandom, run across the mimeographed magazines, or otherwise discovered the genre. So you had things like 35,000 Lord of the Rings stories, and over 125,000 Harry Potter stories on that same site where I found the ones based on 1984. (More by now, no doubt.) Many of them are dire, but even the bad ones have this weird fascination at first. And once in a great while, there's a brilliant one that could only be fanfic, as part of its brilliance comes from a sort of embedded commentary on the original text.
During the year leading up to and away from my mother's death—she passed away in 2003 at the age of 91—I discovered and read a huge amount of on-line fanfic (not on my work, I should add). Besides the sheer novelty and fascination of seeing what a form I'd first discovered thirty-five years ago was now mutating into, it was about the only thing I could stand to read—it felt like fiction for which I was in no way responsible, I suppose, at a time when my real-life responsibilities had no possible happy outcome, but still had to be met and endured. Anyway, reading in slices down and across fandoms, with all the other variables held constant, I could actually see the way each reader-writer's head was processing the primary text differently, according to their measure. And having watched the process of how different psychological concerns hijack the texts in the petri dishes of fanfic has also altered my awareness of how the exact same processes work, better disguised, in profic.
LSC: What do you think of fan fiction based on your own work?
LMB: I find it very flattering, like fan mail but in different media. It tells me my work touched someone on a very deep level, for it to evoke that kind of energy in return. It's art in response to art: some folks sew costumes, some write or sing songs, some draw or paint pictures. Some write fanfic.
For a while there was a theory that if you did not defend your copyright from these things you would lose it, but I think reality has changed so much that theory is never coming back. You can't stuff the genie back in the bottle. That's a relief, because I understand what kind of game those people are playing. Writers who don't like fanfic may not understand the psychology of reading for pleasure, or may fear their own work could be distorted in readers' heads by the adulteration, which is I think true but inescapable; all original texts are altered in the first place by the mere act of different minds reading them. I think there's more power to be had by figuring out the flow and going with it. It's a huge, fascinating new phenomenon and I think it's going to go some interesting places. Nevertheless, I daren't read fic on my own work, because I get idea and style leaks—I pick up voice like lint—and I'm afraid of losing track of where an idea might have come from.
LSC: What has the Internet done for you personally?
LMB: It has given me a window on the world, and is in process of eating my life, or at any rate, most of the waking time in it. I'm only just beginning to learn to use its resources. Usenet chat groups have been a laboratory of human behavior and blogs are a kind of networking out, tentacles reaching into all corners of society, so people who have otherwise been completely isolated are finding each other. My fan e-mail has been fabulous, but makes up for being easier to answer than snail mail by being more copious. I love being in easy e-mail touch with my agent, my editors, my friends and my children.
The main thing the Internet has done for my writing, I'm afraid, is slow it down. And it's severely cut into my reading time, unless you count reading off the screen.
LSC: Conversely, what have you done for the Internet?
LMB: I have a Website, The Bujold Nexus at www.dendarii.com, entirely fan run, which has proved to be a wonderful resource for all my PR needs. It came as manna from e-heaven. I was guest writer at a science fiction convention in London in 1995 and a British fan named Michael Bernardi came up to me and asked, "Do you have a Website?" to which I replied, "What's a Website?" At the time I didn't even have a modem. So computer-professional Mike, bless him, put one together for me, and has filled it with wonderful things and all sorts of useful links. So now when reporters or anyone else wants to know, "Who is this Lois/Louis/Louise . . . um, how do you pronounce that last name?" without having to read a pile o' books, I can just direct them to The Bujold Nexus.
LSC: And there's the on-line publishing of your most recent novels' first chapters at the Baen Website.
LMB: I adore the advent of on-line sample chapters, not least because they allow my books to sell on the basis of their words instead of their packaging. "The first sample is free. . . ." It allows people to browse on-line and make an informed buying choice. Every bit of increased exposure helps. People can't choose what they don't know about.
There are the e-books available from Fictionwise, too. As a new market, e-sales don't have to beat their way through the system of middlemen to get shelf space, and they're available to fans all over the world. That's cool. Most fascinating to me have been the recent sales of my audiobooks as MP3s over the Net—ninety percent or more of my current Blackstone audiobook sales are as downloads through its partner Audible.com.
LSC: For most of your career, "the work" meant the Vorkosigan novels. And yet recently you've moved on. Or at least away.
LMB: One of the reasons I had for leaving the Vorkosigan universe for the Chalion books—or at least leaving Miles, who is rather agnostic when he isn't in a foxhole—was that I wanted to do a fairly serious exploration of grown-up religion in a fantasy context. Miles's universe doubtless includes all the beliefs of ours plus a lot of new ones invented since. People are like that. Nonetheless, when I wanted to explore religious themes more directly, I needed a new universe and new characters.
I have been bemused by a certain kind of fantasy that treats religion and magic in a mechanical fashion—"Throw another virgin on the altar, boys, the power level in the thaumaturgistat is getting low!" People running about shooting lightning bolts from their fingers as though they were mystical Uzis, that sort of thing.
A lot of the ways genre fantasy treats religion seemed to me to be both superficial and unsympathetic. I wanted to look at both the positive ways religions function as social institutions, ways for people to organize themselves to get the everyday work of a civilized society done, and at serious mysticism. The real questions real religions grapple with don't have easy answers. A well-built fantasy world's religion ought, I thought, to reflect that complex reality.
The more recent Sharing Knife books, on which I've spent the past three years at this writing, have more to do with exploring genre-blending and series structures, being my first really long, closely connected, epic-sized tale—a tetralogy, it seems. They are also about bringing it all home, on more than one level.
LSC: Have you found any difficulties in switching genres?
LMB: A lot of my role models for writing were ambidextrous between fantasy and SF—Poul Anderson, C. J. Cherryh, L. Sprague de Camp, Roger Zelazny, the list goes on and on. I've always considered it normal to write both. The actual mechanics of putting a narrative together—scene selection, characterization, pacing, viewpoint, transitions, plotting, and so on—are the same for both. The two genres have slightly different lists of things to which they pay close attention. Fantasy tends, on the whole, to be more language and style conscious, and reaches, at its most intense, for some sort of experience of the numinous. SF rewards the exploration of ideas, and reaches for a kind of intellectual oh-wow oh-cool moment when the reader's understanding of the world seems to increase, and which may be the SFnal equivalent of the numinous.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden had this little dissertation about writers as otters. You can't train an otter, she says, because when you reward it instead of saying "Let's do that again!" it says "Oh, let's do something else that's even cooler!" This is the writer's approach. They want to surprise you, and if too many people have the same idea it begins to seem not so surprising anymore. "It does not appeal to my Inner Otter!" Drives editors nuts, because they're trying to train their writers. They want something within the range of marketability.
LSC: You have to go through the editors, the publishers, and the marketers to reach the reader. But then, you've done so.
LMB: I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure. My own literary favorites include, among many others, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, and of course C. S. Forester. All of these writers created not works of art, but, on some level, works of life. Theirs are creations who climb up off the page into the readers' minds and live there long after the book is shut. Readers return to such books again and again, not to find out what happened—for a single reading would suffice for any book if plot and idea were all—but because those characters have become their friends, and there is no limit to the number of times you want to be with your friends again.
I have been, therefore, vastly pleased with the number of readers who have written to tell me that my stories have stood their friend in time of need: the mother of a handicapped child; a blind man who lived in rural Kentucky, and "read" the books on audio tape; a woman who reread them all over a weekend and went back to solve a problem at work that had seemed intractable; a soldier serving in a difficult post in the Middle East; a young woman who took them with her to reread during the week of aftershocks of the California earthquake, when she was camping in her backyard, unable to return to her damaged house; a woman fighting depression and an array of medical problems, who felt well enough after a reread to get up and continue coping with her life.
One reader wrote to let me know that my books had informed his thinking, when he grappled with the task of composing a statement for his national church council on what its position was to be viz cloning and other looming biotechnologies.
And then the writer gets one of those letters, as I suspect most writers do—paraphrased from memory—"Dear Ms. Bujold, I want to thank you for the very great joy your work gave my husband during the last six months of his life . . ."
Joy to the dying? Where does that fall on any intellectual grid of "literary merit"?
And then you realize that we're all dying, here. And so.
I admit, though, my all-time favorite fan letter was from a woman in Canada. She wrote to tell me she had been reading Shards of Honor, and, not wanting to put it down, took the book along to read while standing in line at the bank. She is not, she added, normally very scatterbrained or oblivious, but she does like to focus on what she reads. Eventually, she got to the teller to do the necessary banking. The teller said she could not give her change, as the robber had taken all her money.
"What robber?" my reader asked.
"The one who just held us up at gunpoint," the teller explained. It turned out that while she had been engrossed in reading, a masked gunman had come in, robbed the bank, and made his escape, and she never noticed a thing.
My reader wrote me, "All I can say is, it must have been a very quiet robbery. The security guard at the door asked if I could describe the thief for the police. Embarrassed, I said no, I didn't think I could."
LSC: This story was told to me at a mystery convention—I was pleased to discover that it wasn't the equivalent of an urban legend, but quite true. Talk about escaping into a book!
LMB: Years ago I read an interview with a forensic pathologist who said he had never gone into a bad crime scene, where he had to clean the blood off the walls and whatnot, in any place where there were a lot of books. It occurs to me that because books give us escape even though we may be physically trapped wherever we are, they give us a "time out" space. People who don't have this have to stay in the pressure cooker as the pressure goes higher and higher, until they finally explode into violence expressed either externally or internally in stress illnesses. Books give readers a place to go. This is good for your health and potentially good for the health of the people around you as well. In that sense, I think reading can be a form of self-medication.
Both historical fantasy and futuristic science fiction have the appeal of being very far away from here, that escapist element. Of course the more you read about history, the less you want to go live there, but it still has that romanticism—not in the sense of sexual romance but in the sense of exotic places. "Escapist" is one of those terms that get used with a sneer, but I'm getting to be more and more of the opinion that it has a value in its own right that isn't being properly appreciated.
That said, if there is any meaning at all in any work of fiction that can be transposed back to real daily life, it lies in the characters' lives and moral dilemmas. "All great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection," as one of my characters remarks. The human condition is a mess and always has been, and visions of perfecting it are a snare and a delusion, but we can all grab for great moments—for one floating instant, to do better than we think we can. Heroes are just people who are lucky or determined enough to match the moment—and at least once, to get it right when it matters.
LSC: So now, after this long strange (and one hopes, ongoing) journey, that's what it's all about?
LMB: If writers have a duty, it is to think as clearly as we can; to reexamine all our assumptions repeatedly on both micro and macro scales. Happily, this also will yield us better fiction. A novel is a slice out of the writer's worldview. The slice in turn, if it is coherent, generates as an emergent property a comment on living as human beings, which is the book's theme. We experience theme, even if we cannot articulate it openly, as an exhilarating sense of meaning to the book. The book has succeeded in creating meaning inside the head of another person. And in my worldview, that's what art is for.
LSC: Thank you. For every word.