nother prolific science-fiction author in Gene Wolfe's shoes might decide it's time to rest on his laurels after a writing career that has spanned decades. But then he wouldn't be Gene Wolfe. The esteemed writer is busy at work on a new novel called The Wizard Knight, which is already
destined to end up as a bigger story than one novel can hold.
While Wolfe might take issue with those who call his work "intricate," "complex" or "dense," science fiction notables are impressed. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute states that Gene Wolfe's importance has been twofold. "The inherent stature of his work is deeply
impressive, and he wears the fictional worlds of SF like a coat of many colours."
This man of many stories began writing science fiction in the 1950s and sold his first story, "The Dead Man," to Sir in 1965. Since then he's written over 20 novels and somewhere around 250 short stories. From his Nebula Award-winning "The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories" to his acclaimed Sun series to his plentiful short stories, Wolfe has left his mark on the field of science fiction and fantasy.
Myth has it that Wolfe may or may not have been involved in creating the process which makes Pringles potato chips during his career in engineering. What is known is that he has won nearly every award a science-fiction writer could win, with the exception of the Hugo. About his work he says, "Although it has never won the Hugo, it has been nominated eight times. So far."
Wolfe talked with Science Fiction Weekly about the Internet, writing and going into outer space.
What do you think of this newfangled Internet thing?
Wolfe: I think it has been oversold. It certainly has a great deal of potential. It seems to be useful in many respects. Well, it is a technological miracle, let's put it like that. I don't think that it does provide many of the things that it is being said to provide. Having said that, let me say
this. There is nobody in the world who knows less about these computers than I do. Little kids on the street know more about handling a home computer than I do.
Well, they grew up with it.
Wolfe: I came to it, basically, in old age. I was 70 when I bought my first computer. I still am 70. I am not an expert and I never expect to be an expert.
You have a story called "Copperhead" on SCIFI.com. So, you're looking at online publishing as an outlet for your stories.
Wolfe: Sure, sure. You look for possible areas where you can sell work. Certainly.
Do you foresee that the online marketplace is going to replace traditional publishing?
Wolfe: Not in our lifetimes. Not in mine and I don't think in yours. What will eventually happen, I think, is some third thing is going to come along and replace both of these. It may be something both computers and ink-on-paper print can claim, but I do not know. I am not going to try and
predict what that third thing might be. What we're looking at is that print has some certain disadvantages, particularly slowness, the speed of it. The computer has also certain disadvantages, particularly the inability to just stick it in your coat pocket and the inability to read in the bathtub. And I think that we need something that will be between these two. I could speculate, but it would just be speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.
Well, we started talking about computers before I was planning to.
Wolfe: We can get into computers all you like. I know very little about them. I'm definitely talking from the outside on this one. You know, I have never set up my own Web site and I don't think I ever will, because I don't really want to learn that much about it. A lot of people are fascinated by
it and that's fine, but I'm not one of those people. There are a lot of people who are fascinated by horses. I used to ride a lot. I kind of like horses. I'm not fascinated by them.
In some ways the Internet is the biggest library in the world. I found out a lot about you. Something to do with Pringles potato chips, but we don't have to talk about that.
Wolfe: [laughs] Well, it is perhaps the biggest library in the world in some senses. You could say that I'm an inferior researcher and you're absolutely right. But with me it depends a great deal on what I'm looking for. Some things I just absolutely come up against a wall when I try to research them on the Internet. Other things, it's amazing. I go in and fool around for 15 or 20 minutes and I have the information that I want. I did not even know if the captain of the Mayflower was known. And in 15 or 20 minutes on the Internet, I had the name of the captain of the Mayflower. Now that's very, very nice. It really is. I tried to research some other stuff on classical mythology, and what I found were sources that were very superficial and very poorly documented. You want to be able to say what your source is. There's the assumption that somehow classical mythology exists canned and this is what it is and that's it. Which is of course, is like saying that Christian theology exists canned and this is what it is and that's it. There are widely varying opinions and widely varying beliefs in various areas.
Sometimes the more specific your search the better your luck.
Wolfe: Well, I was trying to find some specific points on classical mythology, not just research classical mythology. What it was, I was writing a story called The Lost Pilgrim about a time traveler who intends to go back to sail on the Mayflower to the New World. He can talk Indian dialects and his idea is that he will make sure that everything is peaceable between the Pilgrims and the Indians. His time travel goes considerably awry and he ends up on an island in the Mediterranean shortly before the Argo comes. And in the hope of visiting various ports and catching up with the Mayflower somewhere, he boards the Argo and goes off with Jason and Hercules and a lot of people like that. That's what I was doing and that's why I wanted to know who the captain of the Mayflower was, so I could use it in my story. I also wanted to research various points on who was on the Argo and what happened, and on that I was wasting my time. I spent about, I don't know, an hour probably poking around and got nothing that was of any value.
Beyond computers, you've been imagining the future for quite a long time. What's the coolest invention? What's the most amazing thing?
Wolfe: The most amazing thing is early space travel. When I was a small boy, which is when I started reading science fiction, every responsible adult would tell you or me that space travel would never occur in our lifetime. It's the same thing that I was talking about ... the third thing that will replace books. Yes, maybe a thousand years from now, human beings would be able to reach the moon, but it's going to be a thousand years from now. It's not going to be 10 years or 20 years or 50 years or 100. It's extremely remote and it will probably never happen at all. It's exactly the kind of thing that a lot of people say now about interstellar travel. And they were wrong. They were wildly and preposterously wrong.
Are you ready to buy a ticket on the space shuttle when you can?
Wolfe: No, indeed. I have no desire to go out in space just in order to go to space. It seems to me like sailing out into the middle of the Atlantic to sail. I'm not terribly interested in sailing. I'm interesting in going to France or someplace. I'm interesting in reaching some destination. I'm very
interested in the fact that generations, thousands of generations, saw as a lamp what is now seen as an island. I mean the moon. And the same thing is in the process of becoming true of things like Mars and Venus. Eventually I think it will spread out. The question is how and when.
So if you could get a ticket to Mars?
Wolfe: If I could get a ticket to Mars now, no. I want to wait until it's got better restaurants [laughs]. You know, Woody Allen said, "You know there must be intelligent life in space. The question is do they have good Chinese restaurants and do they deliver?" Which is really a joke, but it's also a very profound remark. When you say do they have good Chinese restaurants, what you're really saying is, "How much are they like us?" And when you say, "Do they deliver?" you're saying, "Can they get here?" Both of which are profound questions. And at the present, we have no answers.
Let's talk about your fiction a bit, tell me about your new novel, The Wizard Knight.
Wolfe: The Wizard Knight. Well, it's not my new novel. It's the novel I'm trying to construct. I've basically laid the foundation and I'm trying to get the thing under a roof now. After I get it under a roof, there's still an awful lot of stuff to do in the way of hanging wallboard and
running wiring and plumbing and all this stuff. In other words, it's one heck of a long way from finished. What I am hoping to do is two long books, and I mean long. I mean massive fantasy novels. Do you know a good word for a two-book trilogy?
I don't think so.
Wolfe: I really want to call it a biology [laughs], but I don't think that's going to fly. Of course, I'm famous for writing a five-book trilogy. So, now I would like to do a two-book trilogy and that's what I'm aiming at.
What's the story about?
Wolfe: I can give you, I guess, the gross outlines. I don't know how interesting they will be. It is about a young American. As I visualize him now he is about a high-school freshman, who wakes up in a completely different universe, completely differently constructed, in which he is in a culture
that is rather like an early medieval or late Dark Ages in our world. But it is religiously and philosophically more akin to the Norse than to the Christian.
We're on the level of somewhere like 800 or 900 A.D. perhaps. Something like that. And this world, of course, has all sorts of bells and whistles in it. For one thing, it uses the Norse compassing with a theory of the universe, in which you have a middle layer, which is where we are, and layers above and
layers below, which are terribly accessible. And in the course of time he starts moving through some of these layers, and of course, there are "people" from these layers also moving into and out of his area. And there are also giants and god knows what all. I've told David Hartwell, who is my editor at Tor ... has been for years and years, that this book has giants in the way that some dogs have fleas. It also has talking animals and I'm going to keep them all [laughs]. There's an awful lot going on, which is why it's so darn long.
What was the inspiration for this?
Wolfe: Lord, I don't know. I decided basically I wanted to do a story about a knight without getting deeply into medieval civilization or medieval Christianity. I wanted to do something that was a lot similar to that. If you really tried to handle the medieval in some kind of a meaningful way, it's
enormously complex. I think that 12th-century France was probably a good deal more complicated than 21st-century America is. The technology was much [less advanced], but the social levels, the kinds of laws that were involved and all this sort of thing are very complicated and difficult, and I wanted to get away from all that. Basically, I'm not really interested in writing an extremely accurate novel [that takes place] during the Hundred Years' War. That wasn't my interest. I was interested in fantasy novel with knights running around and hitting each other with swords and knocking each other off horses, among many other things.
You make it sound so simple, yet your fiction is often intricate and complex.
Wolfe: Well, I will probably be criticized in this case for not making it intricate and complex enough. I don't know. I get a lot of that. I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases in which there is nothing ambiguous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.
I wanted to ask you about the Sun series. Are you finished with that?
Wolfe: Yes, I am, as far as I know. Yes. Obviously I'm not going to be a fool and say, "No, I am never going to go back to that. I don't care. You can torture me." But I have no plans to go back to it.
How would you sum up the series? Did it come off as you wanted it to?
Wolfe: Oh, it came off as something far larger than I originally intended, if that's what you mean. When I started off writing what became The Shadow of the Torturer, I was going to write a novella. I'm serious. I was. I can give you the plot of the novella that I had planned. That was what I intended to do. And I got into this and I kept thinking, gee, there is so much good stuff here to do, and so I kept making it bigger. I thought, well, this is going to be a novel instead of a novella. Then I
thought, well, it's going to be a trilogy. And when I read the trilogy, the third book was about 50 percent thicker than the first two. The first two were about the same size. So I split that in two. Instead of cutting it, I embellished it more. The storytelling contest, for example, was embellishment.
Which as it turned out got me a wonderful review in Playboy, because some Playboy reviewer was just knocked out by the storytelling contest. I don't know why, but he was. And I ended up with four books of approximately equal length. Then David Hartwell came back and said, "We have to put in a paragraph at the end. It says, 'Oh, by the way, Severian goes off world and he gets a white hole and he comes back and inserts it in our sun and hides the universe'" [laughs]. And I said, "That's more than a paragraph." So we ended up with an agreement that said he would publish the four books as I had written them, provided I would write a fifth book in which the white hole was inserted in the sun and all this stuff, which I did. That's The Urth of the New Sun.
And then I started writing a generation-ship novel and gradually realized that these were people who had come off from Urth in much earlier ages. That Pas was the digitized personality of Typhon, and had existed at the time the ship was launched and that these horrible gods that they had were in fact
his family, his wife and his children, and so on.
Of all the novels and short stories you've written, what's your favorite?
Wolfe: That changes from time to time to time.
What is it today?
Wolfe: That's something that I have not thought about much today [laughs]. Let me think. Let me think ... I know [later] I'm going to say, "Damn, I shouldn't have said that."
Well, what was it yesterday?
Wolfe: You're just doing this [laughs] ... I think this is all some sort of a sadistic impulse ... I would say that among novels my favorite is probably There Are Doors. Have you read that by any chance?
Not yet.
Wolfe: Ah ha, now it's my chance to get back. OK, I can tell you stuff about the plot and about the characters and you don't know whether I'm fibbing or not ... I think that it is the book that has the most penetrating things to say about the human condition and particularly about the nature of
love.
What about your shorter fiction?
Wolfe: Now, I'm back to really wondering and wondering ... See I'm trying to go over mentally, something like 250 stories. Then there are some it seems to me that nobody has ever paid sufficient attention to, and I can rattle off some of the titles of those.
You could get your fans to go look them up.
Wolfe: If they could find them, because some of them have been published in obscure places and they have not gotten much play. I wrote a little story called "The Wrapper," about a man who can see into another universe by looking through the cellophane wrapper on a piece of candy. You know, nobody has ever paid the skinniest attention to the story, and I really like it. I think it's good.
How does that make you feel when you write something you think is special and it gets ignored for the most part?
Wolfe: If it's a short story you expect it. Writing short stories is like ... I think I'm borrowing this from Ray Lafferty, tossing rose petals into the Grand Canyon and then listening for the thud when they hit bottom. You learn to expect that. Once in a rare while, somebody writes you 20 years
later and says, "Oh, you know that wonderful story that you wrote," either "I have just discovered it and I think it's tremendous," or "I read it 20 years ago and it has stayed with me ever since," or something like that. Then you feel very, very good, but you don't expect that stuff to happen. You know that it generally won't happen. I wrote a little story called "The Death of the Island Doctor," which I like a lot, and nobody has paid the least attention to it ever.
Wasn't that story in one of your first collections?
Wolfe: I think you're probably thinking of "The Death of Doctor Island." That's a different story. I wrote a story called "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories." It was up for the Nebula. Isaac Asimov announced it as the winner. I went up to get the trophy. The committee jumped up, white-faced, and said the winner was "No Award." This was the runner-up story. And Issac in reading his list had just sailed past the words "No Award," and come to what he was looking for ... the name of the winner. So he went to the first human-type name that was on the list, which was mine, and announced me. Perfectly innocent mistake and he felt awful about it.
So I got back home and I told somebody about this, I think it was probably Joe Hensley, a mystery writer. And Joe said, "Well, well, Gene, all you have to do now is write 'The Death of Doctor Island,' and everybody will feel so guilty that they'll vote for you and you'll win the Nebula." [Laughs]. And I thought, "Joe, OK, you think that I can't do that. I can write a story called 'The Death of Doctor Island,'" and I did and by God, he was right. It won the Nebula. So then people kept bringing me switched titles on it. And I wrote another one
called "The Doctor of Death Island," which nobody likes much, including me to be honest. And later after that I wrote one that I like a lot called "The Death of the Island Doctor," which is about a college professor who has basically dragooned the university into allowing him to teach a course on
islands. And it's about his only two students and the way that he dies and the effect that his death has on his students, which I think is a lovely little story, and I'm the only one who does.
Have you tried to get it collected?
Wolfe: I'm going to see. I don't think that it has been included in a collection. I've got an awful lot of uncollected stuff. You know, David Hartwell, my editor, has been coming back recently and saying, "You know, we ought to do another collection. There must be enough stuff out there for another collection." There's enough stuff out there for about three. I don't think I'm ever going to see it all collected.
Sounds like a trilogy of collections.
Wolfe: Yeah [laughs] ... Collections do not sell well. You know, publishers do them kind of as sidebars to popular novels, and unless your name is Harlan Ellison it's very hard to get them published.
When you're working on a new novel, what's the process that you go through to develop it?
Wolfe: Well, usually I have a bunch of ideas sneaking around in my head. People always say, what's the original idea. Usually I have a bunch of them really. Can I tell you how Severian got started? This is maybe a fairly good illustration for the kind of thing that happens. As I told you, this thing was going to be a novella. I was at a con with Bob Tucker, and Bob, I think, was fan guest of honor or something. And he felt that he had to go to a panel on costuming, because some good friends of his that were costumers were on this panel. And he said, "Gene, come and sit with me on the panel on
costuming so I'll have somebody to talk to." And I said OK. So I'm sitting there with Bob listening to people talk about how you do masquerade costumes and I started pouting because nobody had ever done one of my characters as a masquerade. And I said, "Gee, this isn't fair, by God. You know, I'm going to
complain to my congressman. There must be some sort of a law about this." And after awhile, I realized I had never written, at that time, a character who would make a good masquerade costume.
So while they were saying all this stuff, I was sitting there thinking, "Now let's see. Let's create a character who will make a good, dramatic, easy masquerade costume and then somebody will do my character in a masquerade. So I said, black boots, black trousers, black cloak, because black is a very dramatic color and masqueraders always want to have cloaks if they possibly can. A mask, because many fans look silly, and it works much better if you can cover up their face. So, here was this guy and
he had the black trousers and he had the black boots and he had this black cloak and he was wearing a black mask, and I thought, "Who the hell is he? Where did he come from? How did he get to be whatever it is he is? Oh, wait a minute. We have to give him a sword, because masqueraders love swords." So I gave him a big sword and I realized that he was probably the public executioner. And then I thought, "How did he get this job? Where did he come from? What brought him here?"
Then I planned out this novella, which was going to be about a torturer executioner who falls in love with the woman who is being tortured. She dies. He mourns her and later receives a letter that says, "I am alive. I was saved by my friends and the whole thing was basically a hoax, and I would love to have you visit me in such and such a place." Which is in fact a trick, and he goes off looking for his love. And, of course, she is not there. That was my original idea. So, as I say, it got bigger and bigger and bigger and turned into a trilogy and ended up as a pentology.
You'll have a bunch of ideas that come together. You say, "Gee, I've been thinking about this character and I've been thinking about that character. And I could put two of these characters together and it would make sparks fly." I've been writing a little story about a princess on a glass hill. You know, the fairytale thing. A knight who comes to rescue her and she has been brainwashed in such a way as she can speak his language, but she is in fact a beautiful young Chinese woman with a rather different set of assumptions and a rather different way of speaking from his. You try and do that stuff a lot. I just got through writing a little horror story about a brother and sister. The brother and sister are virtually the only characters in the story. I wrote it for the World Horror Convention program book. The brother is adventurous, slightly brutal, somewhat patronizing of his younger sister, who is rather more timid and shy than he is, but also a reflective, sensible sort of person. So they're two good characters, and they rub up against each other. He tends to ride off in all directions and she tends to sit and think about things, and maybe get a little lost in thinking about how things ought to be and the way that they used to be. So you do that sort of thing and think of situations that you want to see someone in.
What's the story called?
Wolfe: "Mute" ... You think wouldn't it be grand to have someone in such and such a situation. Wouldn't that be interesting. So you take some of these characters and put them in a situation, and maybe you're concerned by what's really meant by loyalty, what's really meant by love, what's really meant by honor, and so forth. How do human beings face up to death and loss, and so on? And so that all gets into it.
When I start I certainly want to know who the central character is. In the second place, I want to know where the story is going. What the destination is. Now I may change that destination while I'm writing. That happens sometimes, but I don't start out without one and just write and hope that something occurs to me. I have read too many stories that were clearly written like that.
What do you think is the secret to continuing to write well after so many stories, so many worlds, and so many characters?
Wolfe: Well, I think that trap people get into is writing the same thing over and over. I could name authors, but I'm not going to do it, because I have no desire to wound those people. But there are a good many people out there who have written a good book, but they have written it six or seven times, or a good story. In some cases they are stuck on this. I had a student one time who was ... this was when I was teaching Clarion, this young woman was very intelligent and very creative and she was hung up on the beginning of menstruation. Apparently this had been a very pivotal event in her life that had deeply affected her, and she kept writing stories about the onset of menstruation. And I told her, "Yeah, go ahead and do it. Get it out of your system. Write about this until you have said what you need to say about it." And there are people, I think, who never ever get it out of their system and
they continue to write about this thing, whatever it may be, again and again and again and again. I'm sorry to say that all too often these are people who are 40 and 50 years old, and they're still trying to get even with mommy and daddy. And I get really sick of that.
Do you find that too many people are rewriting old stories in science fiction today?
Wolfe: Absolutely. There are too many people who are writing stories that Isaac Asimov wrote far better in the '50s. It's like the movies. The movies are generally in a terrible rut because they're being made by people who know nothing except movies, and they have always wanted to be the
director or the producer of Some Like It Hot, or whatever. Some classic movie of 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, and so they are.
Who's your favorite author? Any new people on the horizon you're impressed with?
Wolfe: Patrick O'Leary, he is one of them. He has a novel that's coming out, and he's been sending me the reviews, and the reviews have just been raves. And it seems that he has written something that's better than anything he's written before. And he has written some very, very good things. The name of the book is The Impossible Bird, coming out from Tor. Kathe Koja, I'm reading a lot of Koja's short stories. I have not read her novels. I've not gotten around to it. Some of the short stories are wonderful and I don't use that word lightly. Somebody who I'm very impressed with, although she definitely needs more work and seasoning, is Kelly Link . There is an awful lot
there and I think that she is getting better rapidly. I think the best thing that she's written that I've read is "The Girl Detective," which I thought was just marvelous. Some other stuff is really very, very good, but I can see some flaws in it and I wish that I had read it in manuscript and been able to
talk to her a little about it before she published it. I can see some things that could have been done, I think, considerably better. But she has a lot of fresh ideas and a gifted pen.
Overall are you happy the level of science fiction right now? Do you think writers are working hard enough to be creative?
Wolfe: I certainly not happy with the overall level of the genre. I don't think I ever have been. I'm not sure that the problem is that people aren't working hard enough to be creative, although that may be. I think a lot of people have fallen for this idea that if you tell a good story, it
doesn't matter how you tell it. And I don't think that's true. In the second place, the fact that this was a good story when Robert A. Heinlein did it, does not mean that it is a good story now for you.
So what advice do you have for new writers starting out and trying to get published?
Wolfe: Oh, tons of it. As I say, I have taught numerous writing courses and it's very hard to give general advice because you need to know what the people are doing, where they're coming from, what they're trying to do. In the first place, they need to read the type of material that they are trying to write, written by good writers. In other words, if they are trying to write short stories, and I think any new writer should write short stories, then they should find good short stories and read a whole lot of them and keep on reading them. Secondly, perhaps most obviously, they need to write and
rewrite and revise. I think new writers frequently have the idea that they write the first draft and that's it. The thing that goes on so often with new writers, beginning writers, is that they write a story and when they come to the end they are finished. Then they pick up a collection by Neil Gaiman , say Smoke and Mirrors, which is a swell, swell short story collection. Gaiman is a fantastic writer. And they read something in there and they compare what they have written to that, and they realize that theirs is nothing like as good.
Well, in the first place Neil Gaiman has been doing this for 20 years or more, maybe more. I don't know. In the second place, what you're reading is probably Neil Gaiman's fifth draft. And they started in June and what they're reading is their first draft. They have to realize that it's only in bad movies that somebody becomes an overnight success with no preparation, no nothing. I wish I remembered what actor it was I saw interviewed on TV. The interviewer was saying, "Well, you are an overnight success." And he said, "Yes, overnight success takes 15 years." And that's about right. Somebody gets into it and
they knock around for 15 years or so, and suddenly they do something really that's outstanding and everybody says, "Who is the new guy?" Well the new guy is some guy or gal who has been knocking around for 15 years. Generally speaking.
You have to think about what you're writing. So often I read stuff by people and they have not thought about what they're writing and I catch myself. It all goes down smooth and it looks just great. I come back to it later, and I read it, and I say, "Oh, my God. This will not work. This is not flyable." I have a very intelligent 19-year-old woman who has been writing since she was 12, who occasionally sends me stories and things to read. And I have a look at them and try to get back, and too often I come back and say something like, "But you're having this person watched by bowmen, and it's pouring rain. In 30 seconds their bowstrings will be wet and their bows will be useless. And she says, "Oh, I didn't think of that." You have to think of that. You have to think of that stuff.
I read a very nice story a while back, laid in 19th-century Paris. Part of it concerned a stage dagger which had fake blood concealed in the handle, so that when one actor appear to stab another actor, blood appeared to come out and it would look good on the stage. And one character tells
another that there is a pint of blood in the handle. In the first place you cannot possibly get a pint of liquid in the handle of the dagger. Come on, it's completely unrealistic. And secondly, the 19th-century Frenchman in Paris is not going to measure the quantities of fluids in pints. That's an
English measure. He would use metric. He would give it as so many cubic centimeters of blood. As soon as the writer writes that kind of thing I'm ready to drop the book and kick it across the room, because he's not thinking about what he's doing. It's not a matter of research. Anyone can look at a dagger in a museum someplace and see that it won't hold a pint. And anybody with any intelligence ought to know they use the metric system in continental Europe.
You need to get your head straight on what [you're trying] to do. You have to realize, for example, that plot is like salt in a stew. You need salt. You certainly don't need too much. Too much plot will kill you dead. If you don't have any plot at all, you may be able to get by if you've got enough pepper
and garlic, and so on. Okay. But if you've got too much plot add more meat and more potatoes and more carrots and more celery, until you have this enormous plot full of stuff ... until you've written a five-book trilogy. You need to understand that the idea for a story is basically an idea for an ending.
Probably 10 years ago I was at a con in Michigan somewhere, and I was sitting on the floor in a room party with a bottle of beer and talking to a circle of friends. And I had people come up to me, various different people, and offer me a story idea. Not only were none of these ideas
original, and believe me, none of them were, but they were not really story ideas. They were opening situations. You cannot start writing, or you should not start writing with just the opening situation. Yes, it would be interesting if someone made a deal with the devil that allowed him to be believed by anyone who heard him talking providing he talked between midnight and 1 a.m., but that is an opening situation. To have a real idea, you have to say where am I going to go with this? And that was what [these people] did not have. Not that I would have taken what they were supplying anyway, because as I said these weren't original ideas. Once you get accustomed to generating ideas, it's a matter of selecting which ideas you've got time enough to work on and not of brainstorming to try and get new ideas. Plot is not an idea. Plot is what happens in the course of the story. The idea is what is the story about. Where is it going?
I did a big thing for the last class I taught on how to develop the plot of Cinderella, and went through the process. You know, the prince is going to rescue her. Rescue her from what? Well, from her family. She was despised by her family, and so on and so forth. And we worked through it and we got
the whole plot of Cinderella in terms of some guy brainstorming a story to a friend. That stuff is easy because you look at what is, what they need, what they're trying to do, whatever it may be. And then what can go wrong.
OK, here is a mad scientist in a castle in Europe and he has discovered the means of reanimating dead flesh. OK, what is he going to do? How is he going to demonstrate this great discovery to the world? Well, he has a reanimated corpse, but he can do something far fancier than that. He can
make up his own individual out of reanimated parts. OK, now what can go wrong with this? Now you're up and running. What can go wrong? Obviously when he's got this new person that he reanimated, the new person may not be as cooperative as he assumes. And so on. Characterization is absolutely essential. All these things are really absolutely essential. You've got to have them, just like you've got to have a left front wheel and a right front wheel. People think that it's hard, and because they think that it's hard they won't do it. Have you noticed that?
Yes.
Wolfe: You characterize in brief by showing the character acting, speaking or thinking in a characteristic fashion. And you do not characterize by telling the reader this person is brave or foolish or ingenious or what have you. You show the person being ingenious. You show the person being brave. You show the person being foolish. And you never tell it at all. It's so easy to say and it's almost impossible to get people who are trying to write to actually do it. When I taught Clarion West in Seattle, there was a guy there who I will call Bob. Believe me, his name was not Bob. He should have been the best writer in the group. For one thing, he had already been through Clarion East. He was getting up in his high 30s. He had been writing for a long time and you would think this is going to be one of the top people. He wasn't, and the reason he wasn't was that when he wrote a story and had to
introduce a new character, he stopped everything dead and he lectured anywhere from half a page to three pages about this character. Who he was, where he came from, what he looked like, what he liked to eat, what his relationship with other characters had been in the past, what his motivations were, how
he dressed. At the end, I was the last week instructor when I was at Clarion West, and I got this last story from Bob, and I read it through, and he was still doing the same damn thing. He was using these to tell the reader how they should feel, in his opinion, about this character. And I said, "Look, Bob, I've been here a week. I know the five instructors. I know they are all good writers, except for the one editor who is a good editor, and I know damn well that all five of these people have been telling you not to do this. And I know that I have been telling you not to do this all week. Now it's Friday
and it's the last day of Clarion, and you are still doing it. Why are you still doing it?" And he said, "Well, I think we need that." Well, what do you do?
It sounds like he wasn't listening.
Wolfe: No, he was listening. He wasn't agreeing. He knew what everybody was telling him, but he had an inner certainty that this is the way that it should be done. And you couldn't get through that.
Did that disillusion you then?
Wolfe: No, it made me realize that it is easy to tell people how to write and extremely difficult to make them believe you. The most recent class I taught, which is now a year and a half ago maybe, I went and gave two lectures to very wealthy posh Chicago suburb to people who wanted to write.
And these are well-educated people, largely with too much time on their hands. At the end of it, I gave them my whole spiel and we workshopped stories, and I gave them one of my stories that we workshopped. At the end of it, I had them coming up to me and saying, "Well, look, you said not to do this and so and so does this in this story, so why can't I do it?" And what they're basically after is getting my permission to write badly. You know, yes, so and so does it. No, you shouldn't do it. So and so can sell the story for whatever reason it may be. Maybe so and so is sleeping with the editor. Maybe so and so's story is good enough in other respects that the editor buys it anyway. But what good is it to you if I tell you, "Look, you can do all this bad stuff in your story." Are you going to write to the editor and say, "Look, I have Gene Wolfe's permission to write as badly as the story is written" [laughs]. The
editor is going to have a hearty laugh and throw that letter in the round file, and probably throw the story in the round file too, and then say he never received it when you say why didn't you send the manuscript back.
It's so tough to tell people, to get people to believe, if you want to do it successfully, these are the things you have to do. That's like somebody who goes into a store and buys a violin and decides to play it my way. No. There are thousands of talented musicians who have played violins and they have worked out the way that you play a violin to play it well and be able to produce all the various notes that you want to produce quickly and purely. And if you say no I just want to sit with the violin across my lap like this and not bother with putting rosin on the bow, okay. You can do that. But you are never going to get a job playing the violin.
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