Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "fantasy"
INSTEAD OF
When I first started scribbling for real, when I was in my early twenties, I wanted to write a novel about how wretchedly I had been tormented in the New Jersey public schools. I had never spoken more than two sentences about this misery before being dismissively interrupted, whether by parents, siblings, or college friends. This was long before anyone took bullying seriousIy; they said it was just life. I quite desperately wanted to tell my story and be heard.
So I scribbled. (Back then, it was for-real scribbling, with a Bic pen in a spiral-bound notebook.) But I hadn’t written more than a few pages before I realized how profoundly depressing, boring, and whiney was my plaint, all mimsy like a borogove (“Jabberwocky” jargon). Nobody would ever want to read what the mome rath outgrabe. Not even me.
So instead of that, I wrote –
No, actually, it wasn’t that simple. An unconscious, daydreaming process intervened for several months, maybe even a year. But eventually I wrote a fantasy novel about an evil king and his cruel minions and how two princes became blood brothers, endured tortures, rallied followers, and defeated the bad guys. Both of my heroes were me, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The golden one was my public, steady self and the dark, scarred one was my hidden, moody, messed-up self. It was about time we got acquainted, if only on paper.
The next novel was the same, except different. Indeed, I wrote fantasy novels of paired heroes for a decade before I put myself together as one person able to be, get this, female. But all that time I had written about being bullied and I was read and heard. I had done it. So I wrote fantasy instead of strict fact; so what?
And then I went on to write many more different sorts of novels. . . .
Caveat: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes – actually, most of the time after that first spate of fantasies – sometimes my novels are just novels, period. But occasionally they’re more. At least four of my YA novels were written in order to exorcise from my heart the horror of murder – various different real-life murders. And one of my children’s books was written in a three-week rage after I’d heard a racist comment from a neighbor. And then there were my problems with my mother, never resolved because she became dotty in her final decades, so they ended up in several novels, including the Enola Holmes mystery series.
But perhaps the freakiest book I’ve ever written “instead of” strict fact was FAIR PERIL, magical realism that many readers find hilarious. I began writing it when my husband fell in love with another woman, although he so earnestly denied having an affair that I believed him – consciously. But the smarter part of me prepared for divorce by creating a wacked-out narrative that starts like this:
“Once upon a time there was a middle-aged woman,” storyteller Buffy Murphy declaimed to the trees, “whose bung hole of a husband dumped her the month after their twentieth wedding anniversary. After she skipped having a life to raise three kids with him, he gives her the old heave-ho and off he goes with his bimbo.”
There’s much more, of course, concerning Buffy’s adventures with a talking frog in the Mall Tifarious, but what’s freaky is this: FAIR PERIL was written so far ahead of time that it was actually published the same month my marriage hit the fan, and my first copy arrived shortly before the splat. My then-husband picked up my brand-new book and carried it into the bathroom with him. When he came out a few minutes later, his face had gone frog-belly white. He said, “I can’t read this.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer me at that time, but before that October was over he finally told me the truth and moved out. “I hadn’t intended to leave you until spring,” he said. (!?!**#!)
I suppose I ought to thank myself for writing FAIR PERIL. It ends with my protagonist talking to the trees again, but making a new story. In writing my dress rehearsal for divorce, although I had thoroughly disguised the material with a wicked queen and a magical librarian, I had included my own healing process.
Whoa.
Instances like that make me look back and shake my head. I write books for a living; I write them one after another because otherwise I don’t know what to do with myself; but sometimes a book is more than just a book. It’s instead of. It’s a way to turn suffering into the write stuff. Luckily for me.
So I scribbled. (Back then, it was for-real scribbling, with a Bic pen in a spiral-bound notebook.) But I hadn’t written more than a few pages before I realized how profoundly depressing, boring, and whiney was my plaint, all mimsy like a borogove (“Jabberwocky” jargon). Nobody would ever want to read what the mome rath outgrabe. Not even me.
So instead of that, I wrote –
No, actually, it wasn’t that simple. An unconscious, daydreaming process intervened for several months, maybe even a year. But eventually I wrote a fantasy novel about an evil king and his cruel minions and how two princes became blood brothers, endured tortures, rallied followers, and defeated the bad guys. Both of my heroes were me, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The golden one was my public, steady self and the dark, scarred one was my hidden, moody, messed-up self. It was about time we got acquainted, if only on paper.
The next novel was the same, except different. Indeed, I wrote fantasy novels of paired heroes for a decade before I put myself together as one person able to be, get this, female. But all that time I had written about being bullied and I was read and heard. I had done it. So I wrote fantasy instead of strict fact; so what?
And then I went on to write many more different sorts of novels. . . .
Caveat: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes – actually, most of the time after that first spate of fantasies – sometimes my novels are just novels, period. But occasionally they’re more. At least four of my YA novels were written in order to exorcise from my heart the horror of murder – various different real-life murders. And one of my children’s books was written in a three-week rage after I’d heard a racist comment from a neighbor. And then there were my problems with my mother, never resolved because she became dotty in her final decades, so they ended up in several novels, including the Enola Holmes mystery series.
But perhaps the freakiest book I’ve ever written “instead of” strict fact was FAIR PERIL, magical realism that many readers find hilarious. I began writing it when my husband fell in love with another woman, although he so earnestly denied having an affair that I believed him – consciously. But the smarter part of me prepared for divorce by creating a wacked-out narrative that starts like this:
“Once upon a time there was a middle-aged woman,” storyteller Buffy Murphy declaimed to the trees, “whose bung hole of a husband dumped her the month after their twentieth wedding anniversary. After she skipped having a life to raise three kids with him, he gives her the old heave-ho and off he goes with his bimbo.”
There’s much more, of course, concerning Buffy’s adventures with a talking frog in the Mall Tifarious, but what’s freaky is this: FAIR PERIL was written so far ahead of time that it was actually published the same month my marriage hit the fan, and my first copy arrived shortly before the splat. My then-husband picked up my brand-new book and carried it into the bathroom with him. When he came out a few minutes later, his face had gone frog-belly white. He said, “I can’t read this.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer me at that time, but before that October was over he finally told me the truth and moved out. “I hadn’t intended to leave you until spring,” he said. (!?!**#!)
I suppose I ought to thank myself for writing FAIR PERIL. It ends with my protagonist talking to the trees again, but making a new story. In writing my dress rehearsal for divorce, although I had thoroughly disguised the material with a wicked queen and a magical librarian, I had included my own healing process.
Whoa.
Instances like that make me look back and shake my head. I write books for a living; I write them one after another because otherwise I don’t know what to do with myself; but sometimes a book is more than just a book. It’s instead of. It’s a way to turn suffering into the write stuff. Luckily for me.
HOW I GOT STARTED
Warning: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
How I got started is not necessarily how anybody else should.
When I graduated from college in 1970, age twenty-one going on sixteen, I was already married, not knowing what else to do with me because I was an English Literature major. (“Would you like fries with that?”) By 1972 my husband was serving a year-long internship and I was unemployed for the duration. I was bored, directionless (barring housework; ugh), vegging in bed until noon and daydreaming about cowboys, outlaws, gypsies et al. But while giving an appearance of uselessness, I did have a deeply hidden, never-admitted ambition: to write the Great American Novel. However, nothing in my experience, my education or my reveries seemed to give me a handle on it.
Not until decades later, when I read the trenchant essays of Joanna Russ, did I understand what had been my problem. Here is how she begins her sardonic list of possible topics for women writers based on the English Literature canon:
1. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West.
2. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear.
3. An English noblewoman, vacationing in Arcadia, falls in love with a beautiful, modest young shepherd. But duty calls; she must return to the court of Elizabeth I to wage war on Spain. Just in time the shepherd lad is revealed as the long-lost son of the Queen of a neighboring country; the lovers are united and our heroine carries off her husband-to-be-lad-in-waiting to the King of England.
And several more. I particularly like the one about a young man who unwisely puts success in business before personal fulfillment and ends up a neurotic, lonely eunuch, having neglected his masculinity. But satire aside, this list helped me understand, in retrospect, why I couldn’t figure out what to write: My college courses had given me nothing I could use, as a woman, except Jane Austen.
Really. She was the only female author we studied.
Again let me emphasize that this insight came later. At the time I muddled in mental murk with only instinct to guide me. I happened to read FORTUNE MADE HIS SWORD by Martha Rofheart, and it set me daydreaming about a prince named Hal. But my Hal bore no resemblance to the historical Henry V. He was a numinous (and luminous) imaginary being on horseback; I just wanted to write his adventures. But where. . .when. . . how. . . .
By creating an imaginary world for him, that was how. So no one could say I got it all wrong.
The first sentence I penned into my new spiral-bound notebook in August, 1972, as I recall: “A young man rode through the forest.” This is to show you how lame I was as a writer, starting out. We all are.
I did not intend to write Tolkienesque fantasy, just heroism set in an invented world. I wasn’t trying to be a real writer, I told myself; this was just a hobby, like crocheting. But as I scribbled during every possible stolen moment in the next couple of years, and as the book well and truly cozened me into its enchanting spell, somehow magic crept in like vines, and subplots flourished like kudzu. I filled seven notebooks with bad handwriting. Not until I had started typing a final draft, however, did I admit I intended to submit THE BOOK OF SUNS for publication.
Clueless, I sent a dozen letters at random to publishers whose addresses I found in the front matter of volumes on my bookshelf:
To whom it may concern:
Like a hen that has hatched a duck’s egg, I have produced something I have no idea what to do with. How does one go about having a book published?
This is utterly, totally the wrong way to start a query letter, but I didn’t know it WAS a query letter as I described the novel I didn’t know was a fantasy. Nor did I know how nearly miraculous it was when one editor responded, very informally, scrawling on my own letter and returning it to say she would have a look.
A few months later, back came the manuscript, rejected but including a three- page letter explaining why. My book was a bit too long. Actually, it was twice the length it should have been. It was inconsistent in style, and none of the styles were good, especially not the one using “thee” instead of “you.” It needed more action and tighter prose. Plus a great deal more. But the characters were appealing.
Now here is where I did something right. I phoned the editor and thanked her for her letter. I managed a few intelligent questions to clarify what I needed to do. I asked her whether she would be willing to look at a rewrite. She said yes.
Then I rewrote as fast I could.
Even though I did not yet know how editors tend to come and go like diet fads, I still sensed that I should waste no time. I rooted out out the kudzu subplots but had the sense to save them for use in future books. I cut away fatty descriptions and added muscle to the action, using oldish English throughout – dreadful stuff, in hindsight, methinks, I dare say, alas and alack.
Then back to the typewriter I went, hitting each letter very hard to make two carbons. I developed exceptionally strong fingers, and somewhat stronger prose as finger fatigue encouraged me to leave out unnecessary words. Finally, I headed back to the post office to send another brown-paper bundle to Pocket Books.
This time, instead of a rejection letter, I got a phone call from my editor. The book was accepted! I was to be published! I was so excited that I didn’t even negotiate my advance – a big mistake, but I did not yet know or care. I was an author!
The book was still so bad that it came back to me for rewrites. And again, and again. The editor and her staff actually rewrote parts of it themselves to show me what a scene in a novel should resemble, and even in my ignorance I sensed that this was exceptional effort on their part. That very first editor of mine, whose name I shamefully cannot remember, went way above and beyond the call of duty in my case, then dropped out of publishing never to be heard from again. Maybe I was the death of her.
THE BOOK OF SUNS was published in 1977, but Pocket Books released it as general fiction, not fantasy. It sold 35,000 copies. Not bad, but not good. A few years later, I re-re-re-re-rewrote it – THAT is when I focused on the mythic fantasy element – and it was republished as THE SILVER SUN, the title change being necessary because, as my new editor told me, “We don’t want booksellers saying, ‘Oh, no, not that turkey again.’”
Wise editor. With the rewrite, a different title and a wonderful Carl Lundgren cover, the erstwhile turkey sold over 200,000 copies. So I wrote another one, trying to make it better.
And that was how I got started.
How I got started is not necessarily how anybody else should.
When I graduated from college in 1970, age twenty-one going on sixteen, I was already married, not knowing what else to do with me because I was an English Literature major. (“Would you like fries with that?”) By 1972 my husband was serving a year-long internship and I was unemployed for the duration. I was bored, directionless (barring housework; ugh), vegging in bed until noon and daydreaming about cowboys, outlaws, gypsies et al. But while giving an appearance of uselessness, I did have a deeply hidden, never-admitted ambition: to write the Great American Novel. However, nothing in my experience, my education or my reveries seemed to give me a handle on it.
Not until decades later, when I read the trenchant essays of Joanna Russ, did I understand what had been my problem. Here is how she begins her sardonic list of possible topics for women writers based on the English Literature canon:
1. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West.
2. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear.
3. An English noblewoman, vacationing in Arcadia, falls in love with a beautiful, modest young shepherd. But duty calls; she must return to the court of Elizabeth I to wage war on Spain. Just in time the shepherd lad is revealed as the long-lost son of the Queen of a neighboring country; the lovers are united and our heroine carries off her husband-to-be-lad-in-waiting to the King of England.
And several more. I particularly like the one about a young man who unwisely puts success in business before personal fulfillment and ends up a neurotic, lonely eunuch, having neglected his masculinity. But satire aside, this list helped me understand, in retrospect, why I couldn’t figure out what to write: My college courses had given me nothing I could use, as a woman, except Jane Austen.
Really. She was the only female author we studied.
Again let me emphasize that this insight came later. At the time I muddled in mental murk with only instinct to guide me. I happened to read FORTUNE MADE HIS SWORD by Martha Rofheart, and it set me daydreaming about a prince named Hal. But my Hal bore no resemblance to the historical Henry V. He was a numinous (and luminous) imaginary being on horseback; I just wanted to write his adventures. But where. . .when. . . how. . . .
By creating an imaginary world for him, that was how. So no one could say I got it all wrong.
The first sentence I penned into my new spiral-bound notebook in August, 1972, as I recall: “A young man rode through the forest.” This is to show you how lame I was as a writer, starting out. We all are.
I did not intend to write Tolkienesque fantasy, just heroism set in an invented world. I wasn’t trying to be a real writer, I told myself; this was just a hobby, like crocheting. But as I scribbled during every possible stolen moment in the next couple of years, and as the book well and truly cozened me into its enchanting spell, somehow magic crept in like vines, and subplots flourished like kudzu. I filled seven notebooks with bad handwriting. Not until I had started typing a final draft, however, did I admit I intended to submit THE BOOK OF SUNS for publication.
Clueless, I sent a dozen letters at random to publishers whose addresses I found in the front matter of volumes on my bookshelf:
To whom it may concern:
Like a hen that has hatched a duck’s egg, I have produced something I have no idea what to do with. How does one go about having a book published?
This is utterly, totally the wrong way to start a query letter, but I didn’t know it WAS a query letter as I described the novel I didn’t know was a fantasy. Nor did I know how nearly miraculous it was when one editor responded, very informally, scrawling on my own letter and returning it to say she would have a look.
A few months later, back came the manuscript, rejected but including a three- page letter explaining why. My book was a bit too long. Actually, it was twice the length it should have been. It was inconsistent in style, and none of the styles were good, especially not the one using “thee” instead of “you.” It needed more action and tighter prose. Plus a great deal more. But the characters were appealing.
Now here is where I did something right. I phoned the editor and thanked her for her letter. I managed a few intelligent questions to clarify what I needed to do. I asked her whether she would be willing to look at a rewrite. She said yes.
Then I rewrote as fast I could.
Even though I did not yet know how editors tend to come and go like diet fads, I still sensed that I should waste no time. I rooted out out the kudzu subplots but had the sense to save them for use in future books. I cut away fatty descriptions and added muscle to the action, using oldish English throughout – dreadful stuff, in hindsight, methinks, I dare say, alas and alack.
Then back to the typewriter I went, hitting each letter very hard to make two carbons. I developed exceptionally strong fingers, and somewhat stronger prose as finger fatigue encouraged me to leave out unnecessary words. Finally, I headed back to the post office to send another brown-paper bundle to Pocket Books.
This time, instead of a rejection letter, I got a phone call from my editor. The book was accepted! I was to be published! I was so excited that I didn’t even negotiate my advance – a big mistake, but I did not yet know or care. I was an author!
The book was still so bad that it came back to me for rewrites. And again, and again. The editor and her staff actually rewrote parts of it themselves to show me what a scene in a novel should resemble, and even in my ignorance I sensed that this was exceptional effort on their part. That very first editor of mine, whose name I shamefully cannot remember, went way above and beyond the call of duty in my case, then dropped out of publishing never to be heard from again. Maybe I was the death of her.
THE BOOK OF SUNS was published in 1977, but Pocket Books released it as general fiction, not fantasy. It sold 35,000 copies. Not bad, but not good. A few years later, I re-re-re-re-rewrote it – THAT is when I focused on the mythic fantasy element – and it was republished as THE SILVER SUN, the title change being necessary because, as my new editor told me, “We don’t want booksellers saying, ‘Oh, no, not that turkey again.’”
Wise editor. With the rewrite, a different title and a wonderful Carl Lundgren cover, the erstwhile turkey sold over 200,000 copies. So I wrote another one, trying to make it better.
And that was how I got started.
LEARNING TO CRY
When I was fifteen, I started daydreaming so thoroughly and compulsively that I sometimes worried about myself. The dreams involved a brave and darkly handsome hero trudging on bare bloody feet across a desert of endless deprivation with the cruel marks of an enemy’s whip on his bare, muscular back. Then another hero, almost equally handsome, finds him and rescues him and they cling to each other, sobbing. I had this or some similar home movie going in my head in school one day when a nice girl stopped by my desk and exclaimed, “My God, Nancy, what’s the matter?” Nothing, nothing at all, I told her, stricken with embarrassment. I hadn’t realized how my mind movies showed in my thin face and wide eyes. From then on I tried to limit them to bedtime, when I would choose one (I had numerous variations) and then lie awake half the night suffused in emotion.
My bed was usually the motel’s rollaway cot, unless it was rented out. Then I slept on a sketchier folding contraption, a lounge chair, often in the basement during tourist season. In the wintertime I slept in one of the motel rooms, sometimes so cold that frost formed on the inside of the windows. I had no room of my own. Let’s not fault my parents; their financial struggle might have been partially imaginary, but they could not help being old and shortsighted. Working with them to make a go of the motel gave me the satisfaction of a good job well done. But socially, my teen years were pretty bleak. No fashionable clothes, no friends, no boys. The main source of love and joy in my daytime life was my lop-eared, oversized Sheltie dog, Betsy, who would sleep under my cot as I fantasized the nights away.
When, thanks to my thrifty parents, I went away to college, I assumed they would keep Betsy for me. Meanwhile, I did my best to make up for lost time, and succeeded: clothes, dates, friends instead of daydreams. Things had changed. I had changed, or so I thought until one day in my junior year I got a phone call from my mother – and in my family, phone calls meant bad news.
She told me she had given Betsy away.
What? Betsy was my dog; Mom couldn’t give her away, and I, now a changed person, was not going to let her. I would insist she had to get Betsy back. I was opening my mouth to do so as Mom hurriedly spoke on.
“...to a nice, nice lady, and she tied her out to a picnic table and Betsy jumped up on the table and down the other side and the chain was too short and she strangled to death.”
Oh, Betsy. I pictured my stupid dog, white fluff of her underbelly exposed, hanging dead. Of course she was dead. Mom would not have told me she gave my dog away if she hadn’t died. She would have waited until I came home for a holiday. Where’s Betsy? Oh, we gave her away, sweetie.
Every inflection of my mother’s telephone voice begged me not to react. Not to be angry and not to cry. We didn’t do emotions in my family. For years I had been the de facto mother and Mom the little girl I was not supposed to hurt, but never so much as at that moment.
I went along. Rather woodenly said it was okay. I hung up the phone and pretended nothing terrible had happened. I did not cry.
I hadn’t changed much after all.
While still in college I married a man very much like my parents, and after I graduated, my life became rather bleak and, just as before, I daydreamed compulsively. Eventually I tried to offload the daydreams by writing them down. I wrote THE SILVER SUN, then THE SABLE MOON, then a prequel called THE WHITE HART.
I scored my first publishing contract when I was twenty-five years old. My father had recently died of congestive heart failure. (I did not cry.) At the time when I became “Authorized,” my mother was sixty-five years old.
Now I am sixty-five.
I did not think about any of this until after I started re-reading THE SILVER SUN. Did my sixty-fifth birthday trigger the impulse that made me pick up the post-adolescent “starter” book I had not bothered with for decades?
I expected to be judgmental about the writing. What actually happened I did not expect at all:
Re-reading THE SILVER SUN, I underwent a breathtaking shift in viewpoint. I felt as if I was my own mother reading my first novel for the first time and finding out. . .enormities. To heck with the imperfect prose; the sheer vehemence of the emotions blew me away. Who was the changeling child who had written these mythic fantasies so deeply textured with generation after generation of magical princes questing for wholeness? The tortures I inflicted on my characters, the intensity of their suffering, the heroism of their sacrifices, the extremes I put them through... I seemed to be saying, indeed I seemed to believe, that one must become godlike in perfection to find love. Or even to deserve it.
Good Lord, what had been going on in the young woman who wrote that book?
Even armored as she always was in Buddha-like serenity, I think Mom must have felt something of this sort, sensed something disturbing. While giving me placid credit for having written and published, she did, back in 1977, have one hesitant question. “Nancy, how. . .why. . .what made you think of those awful punishments?”
Punishments? Ordeals, I would have said, or tortures, or torments, but punishments? It was a term one would apply to a child, and maybe that was what set me off. Quite spontaneously and untruthfully I told her, “They were what I thought you and Dad were going to do to me if I misbehaved.”
She showed no sign of being shocked or hurt, but I’m sure I did hurt her. Well, good. That was what she got for giving my dog away to some dumb woman who killed her.
The pity of it is, Mom and I never had a chance to talk things out in any other way. By the time my writing finally revealed my selfhood to me, helping me to become whole and take ownership of my anger, Mom had developed senile dementia. She sat and smiled but she was gone. I cried for her many times during the twenty-some years before she finally died.
My bed was usually the motel’s rollaway cot, unless it was rented out. Then I slept on a sketchier folding contraption, a lounge chair, often in the basement during tourist season. In the wintertime I slept in one of the motel rooms, sometimes so cold that frost formed on the inside of the windows. I had no room of my own. Let’s not fault my parents; their financial struggle might have been partially imaginary, but they could not help being old and shortsighted. Working with them to make a go of the motel gave me the satisfaction of a good job well done. But socially, my teen years were pretty bleak. No fashionable clothes, no friends, no boys. The main source of love and joy in my daytime life was my lop-eared, oversized Sheltie dog, Betsy, who would sleep under my cot as I fantasized the nights away.
When, thanks to my thrifty parents, I went away to college, I assumed they would keep Betsy for me. Meanwhile, I did my best to make up for lost time, and succeeded: clothes, dates, friends instead of daydreams. Things had changed. I had changed, or so I thought until one day in my junior year I got a phone call from my mother – and in my family, phone calls meant bad news.
She told me she had given Betsy away.
What? Betsy was my dog; Mom couldn’t give her away, and I, now a changed person, was not going to let her. I would insist she had to get Betsy back. I was opening my mouth to do so as Mom hurriedly spoke on.
“...to a nice, nice lady, and she tied her out to a picnic table and Betsy jumped up on the table and down the other side and the chain was too short and she strangled to death.”
Oh, Betsy. I pictured my stupid dog, white fluff of her underbelly exposed, hanging dead. Of course she was dead. Mom would not have told me she gave my dog away if she hadn’t died. She would have waited until I came home for a holiday. Where’s Betsy? Oh, we gave her away, sweetie.
Every inflection of my mother’s telephone voice begged me not to react. Not to be angry and not to cry. We didn’t do emotions in my family. For years I had been the de facto mother and Mom the little girl I was not supposed to hurt, but never so much as at that moment.
I went along. Rather woodenly said it was okay. I hung up the phone and pretended nothing terrible had happened. I did not cry.
I hadn’t changed much after all.
While still in college I married a man very much like my parents, and after I graduated, my life became rather bleak and, just as before, I daydreamed compulsively. Eventually I tried to offload the daydreams by writing them down. I wrote THE SILVER SUN, then THE SABLE MOON, then a prequel called THE WHITE HART.
I scored my first publishing contract when I was twenty-five years old. My father had recently died of congestive heart failure. (I did not cry.) At the time when I became “Authorized,” my mother was sixty-five years old.
Now I am sixty-five.
I did not think about any of this until after I started re-reading THE SILVER SUN. Did my sixty-fifth birthday trigger the impulse that made me pick up the post-adolescent “starter” book I had not bothered with for decades?
I expected to be judgmental about the writing. What actually happened I did not expect at all:
Re-reading THE SILVER SUN, I underwent a breathtaking shift in viewpoint. I felt as if I was my own mother reading my first novel for the first time and finding out. . .enormities. To heck with the imperfect prose; the sheer vehemence of the emotions blew me away. Who was the changeling child who had written these mythic fantasies so deeply textured with generation after generation of magical princes questing for wholeness? The tortures I inflicted on my characters, the intensity of their suffering, the heroism of their sacrifices, the extremes I put them through... I seemed to be saying, indeed I seemed to believe, that one must become godlike in perfection to find love. Or even to deserve it.
Good Lord, what had been going on in the young woman who wrote that book?
Even armored as she always was in Buddha-like serenity, I think Mom must have felt something of this sort, sensed something disturbing. While giving me placid credit for having written and published, she did, back in 1977, have one hesitant question. “Nancy, how. . .why. . .what made you think of those awful punishments?”
Punishments? Ordeals, I would have said, or tortures, or torments, but punishments? It was a term one would apply to a child, and maybe that was what set me off. Quite spontaneously and untruthfully I told her, “They were what I thought you and Dad were going to do to me if I misbehaved.”
She showed no sign of being shocked or hurt, but I’m sure I did hurt her. Well, good. That was what she got for giving my dog away to some dumb woman who killed her.
The pity of it is, Mom and I never had a chance to talk things out in any other way. By the time my writing finally revealed my selfhood to me, helping me to become whole and take ownership of my anger, Mom had developed senile dementia. She sat and smiled but she was gone. I cried for her many times during the twenty-some years before she finally died.
TRUTH, IN A WEEK, PLEASE
Over the years I have helped lots of students with projects, but this questionnaire stands out from the crowd. Of all the “assignments” I have received, this one has to be the most challenging and, proportionately, interesting.
Here, minus the name of the sender, is the e-mail I received:
Hello, Ms. Springer. I am writing a paper for my high school English class that requires me to survey a certain demographic of people, and I have chosen authors. If you could take just a few minutes to answer my questions, I would really appreciate your insight! I need the responses back in a week if possible. Thank you!
Here’s what I sent back:
I found your questions highly intelligent and insightful but very difficult to answer concisely!
Name: Nancy Springer
Age: 65
Race: human
Gender: kinda wish that were irrelevant
Q: What qualities do you consistently put into the protagonists of your novels? Why?
A: Writing fiction is not putting qualities into characters. I mean, it’s not like baking a cake; let’s add some nutmeg and a dash of integrity. . . . It’s instinctive, intuitive, holistic, and if there’s any consistency in my protagonists, it’s only because they come out of me. I suspect, although I haven’t taken a survey, that most of them are either lonely or loners, because that’s how I am.
Q: How has being an author changed you?
A: Being an author literally saved my life and turned it around. I had clinical depression, I think since childhood, and starting in my twenties I had obsessive thoughts of suicide for years at a time. But in the process of writing fantasy novels, I gradually discovered who I was, stopped hating me, and learned to deal with life more positively. Writing is not a cure-all but it made a huge difference for me.
Q: How does love in the real world compare to fictional love?
A: It depends on whose fiction the love is in. I think many romance novels do readers a disservice by giving them unrealistic expectations of “being swept away by love.” In my early fantasy novels, the love relationships between characters are extreme, unusual, and probably unrealistic because of my psychological problems. In my later work, I hope, I depict love more realistically!
Q: If you truly had the power to change anything about the world, where would you start?
A: I’d start all over, tens of thousands of years ago, and have humankind develop in harmony with the world’s other living creatures and in profound respect for the planet we live on. I envision a world with far more forest and far less pavement. I’m a dreamer.
Q: What is the difference between reality and perception?
A: Once I was sitting in an airport watching an older woman, a younger woman, and a young man. I formed the preconception that the young man was traveling and his mother and wife had come to see him off. I saw them embrace him – or that was actually what I thought I saw until the young woman walked onto the plane. My perception was different than the reality. People tend to see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and remember things differently than other people having the same experience.
Q: What is truth?
A: I don’t know. I’ve spent most of my life just trying to figure out what is good or what is right. Truth is too abstract for me. I do know that Keats said, “Beauty is truth; truth beauty,” but I think he was wrong. I don’t like to favor beauty over ugly. They’re two sides of the same coin. Things seem to work by opposites. A great gift is a great burden. A strength may well become a weakness. Maybe truth is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways.
Here, minus the name of the sender, is the e-mail I received:
Hello, Ms. Springer. I am writing a paper for my high school English class that requires me to survey a certain demographic of people, and I have chosen authors. If you could take just a few minutes to answer my questions, I would really appreciate your insight! I need the responses back in a week if possible. Thank you!
Here’s what I sent back:
I found your questions highly intelligent and insightful but very difficult to answer concisely!
Name: Nancy Springer
Age: 65
Race: human
Gender: kinda wish that were irrelevant
Q: What qualities do you consistently put into the protagonists of your novels? Why?
A: Writing fiction is not putting qualities into characters. I mean, it’s not like baking a cake; let’s add some nutmeg and a dash of integrity. . . . It’s instinctive, intuitive, holistic, and if there’s any consistency in my protagonists, it’s only because they come out of me. I suspect, although I haven’t taken a survey, that most of them are either lonely or loners, because that’s how I am.
Q: How has being an author changed you?
A: Being an author literally saved my life and turned it around. I had clinical depression, I think since childhood, and starting in my twenties I had obsessive thoughts of suicide for years at a time. But in the process of writing fantasy novels, I gradually discovered who I was, stopped hating me, and learned to deal with life more positively. Writing is not a cure-all but it made a huge difference for me.
Q: How does love in the real world compare to fictional love?
A: It depends on whose fiction the love is in. I think many romance novels do readers a disservice by giving them unrealistic expectations of “being swept away by love.” In my early fantasy novels, the love relationships between characters are extreme, unusual, and probably unrealistic because of my psychological problems. In my later work, I hope, I depict love more realistically!
Q: If you truly had the power to change anything about the world, where would you start?
A: I’d start all over, tens of thousands of years ago, and have humankind develop in harmony with the world’s other living creatures and in profound respect for the planet we live on. I envision a world with far more forest and far less pavement. I’m a dreamer.
Q: What is the difference between reality and perception?
A: Once I was sitting in an airport watching an older woman, a younger woman, and a young man. I formed the preconception that the young man was traveling and his mother and wife had come to see him off. I saw them embrace him – or that was actually what I thought I saw until the young woman walked onto the plane. My perception was different than the reality. People tend to see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and remember things differently than other people having the same experience.
Q: What is truth?
A: I don’t know. I’ve spent most of my life just trying to figure out what is good or what is right. Truth is too abstract for me. I do know that Keats said, “Beauty is truth; truth beauty,” but I think he was wrong. I don’t like to favor beauty over ugly. They’re two sides of the same coin. Things seem to work by opposites. A great gift is a great burden. A strength may well become a weakness. Maybe truth is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways.
TRAUMA BEHIND THE BOOKS
Oyez, oyez, a bunch of novels of mine are back digitally! Open Road Media recently went live with them, half YA, half mass market fantasy. And regarding the YA novels, they requested the usual information: describe the book, the characters, how you got the idea, any backstory behind the title of the book or why it was written – aaaaak, for so many books? As the task was so daunting, I cheated. I tried to group the books. At first I just wrote about the horse books. But then this came up:
When my kids were in high school, one of their classmates was riding a four-wheeler along a trail when he hit a cable strung at neck height; it crushed his windpipe and killed him instantly. The cruel person who hung the cable was never caught. This incident traumatized me to my core and haunted me so much that it took two books, years apart, to exorcise it.
One was SKY RIDER, in which the dead boy reappears as an angry ghost to care for a horse that is about to be euthanized. Dusty, the girl who owns the horse,can no longer ride because of a painful back injury she sustained when her alcoholic father was driving drunk. She, her father, and the boy Skye all require healing.
The other book is TOUGHING IT. In the first draft, Tuff and his brother Dillon are riding their dirt bike up a mountain trail; Dillon is killed by the cable. For plot reasons, I later changed the cable to a gun trap. This book, again, is about grief and the healing process. And a river. The river goes on flowing.
So I ended up grouping by trauma. Another mystery book of mine, BLOOD TRAIL, is based on a truly horrific murder that stunned my community. A teen boy killed his brother with a knife, as was made all too evident by the blood trail throughout the house. I needed to exorcise the crime from my mind, and also to address the small-town reactions of denial, disbelief and incomprehension. The story is told from the point of view of Jeremy, the murdered teen’s best friend. The mystery is not who did it, but why, and it is a question without any satisfactory answer. Again, there is a river, and it goes on flowing.
And yet another trauma: SEPARATE SISTERS was written as my way of dealing with the problems of a messed up family I knew. One girl lived with her father and was a total rebel. I met her through horseback riding. She wore black skinny jeans, black paddock boots, a black Desperado hat and an austere long-sleeved shirt, sometimes with a tie, all year long, no matter how hot the weather got. I would give her rides home when she ran away from school, and she became just about the only groupie I’ve ever had. Her father would bring her to my book signings, and she would sit with me behind the table to keep me company. For hours. Her sister and mother I met at musical events at the high school; the other sister took singing lessons, wore dresses, was popular and lived with her mom. My groupie, the rebel girl who lived with her father, despised both her sister and her mother. I liked everyone in the divided family, and I wanted so badly for this family to heal that I wrote a book about an artistic sister and a brainy sister, similarly divided, who finally bridge the gap.
But the most influential trauma started way back when I was an intelligent, obedient kid who was bullied. Ever since then I have been daydreaming about a dark hero who is a poet, a musician, a visionary, and who is terribly wronged. This figure appears repeatedly in my fantasy novels for adults, but also he is Nico, the rock star betrayed by his fellow lead singer and best friend, in THE FRIENDSHIP SONG, a contemporary fantasy novel for middle-grade children. And he is Kamo in SECRET STAR, a YA novel I can’t quite call realistic because there’s so much mysticism, music and heart in it. SECRET STAR is told from the viewpoint of Tess, a teen girl who live in rural poverty, wears old jeans and Red Wing work boots, and is such a misfit she is physically endangered. This is a gritty, tough, yet lyrical book. THE FRIENDSHIP SONG's protagonist is Harper, a girl whose dad is about to marry a weird woman named Gus, who does folk art and plays a twelve-string guitar with magical qualities. Harper and her friend Rawnie worship the group Neon Shadow, and when dark, handsome Nico falls ill to the point of death, the girls venture down a twelve-string tunnel to rock&roll hades in order to save him.
Whew.
I discovered that, out of all the YA books just published, there were only a few that didn’t evolve out of some sort of personal trauma in my life. Those few include DUSSSIE, my pubescent-Medusa fantasy, and POSSESSING JESSIE, horror, and LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER, Edgar-winning mystery.
Open Road Media also released about an equal number of my fantasy titles for adults. I wonder: might they, also, sort themselves into groups by trauma? Stay tuned.
When my kids were in high school, one of their classmates was riding a four-wheeler along a trail when he hit a cable strung at neck height; it crushed his windpipe and killed him instantly. The cruel person who hung the cable was never caught. This incident traumatized me to my core and haunted me so much that it took two books, years apart, to exorcise it.
One was SKY RIDER, in which the dead boy reappears as an angry ghost to care for a horse that is about to be euthanized. Dusty, the girl who owns the horse,can no longer ride because of a painful back injury she sustained when her alcoholic father was driving drunk. She, her father, and the boy Skye all require healing.
The other book is TOUGHING IT. In the first draft, Tuff and his brother Dillon are riding their dirt bike up a mountain trail; Dillon is killed by the cable. For plot reasons, I later changed the cable to a gun trap. This book, again, is about grief and the healing process. And a river. The river goes on flowing.
So I ended up grouping by trauma. Another mystery book of mine, BLOOD TRAIL, is based on a truly horrific murder that stunned my community. A teen boy killed his brother with a knife, as was made all too evident by the blood trail throughout the house. I needed to exorcise the crime from my mind, and also to address the small-town reactions of denial, disbelief and incomprehension. The story is told from the point of view of Jeremy, the murdered teen’s best friend. The mystery is not who did it, but why, and it is a question without any satisfactory answer. Again, there is a river, and it goes on flowing.
And yet another trauma: SEPARATE SISTERS was written as my way of dealing with the problems of a messed up family I knew. One girl lived with her father and was a total rebel. I met her through horseback riding. She wore black skinny jeans, black paddock boots, a black Desperado hat and an austere long-sleeved shirt, sometimes with a tie, all year long, no matter how hot the weather got. I would give her rides home when she ran away from school, and she became just about the only groupie I’ve ever had. Her father would bring her to my book signings, and she would sit with me behind the table to keep me company. For hours. Her sister and mother I met at musical events at the high school; the other sister took singing lessons, wore dresses, was popular and lived with her mom. My groupie, the rebel girl who lived with her father, despised both her sister and her mother. I liked everyone in the divided family, and I wanted so badly for this family to heal that I wrote a book about an artistic sister and a brainy sister, similarly divided, who finally bridge the gap.
But the most influential trauma started way back when I was an intelligent, obedient kid who was bullied. Ever since then I have been daydreaming about a dark hero who is a poet, a musician, a visionary, and who is terribly wronged. This figure appears repeatedly in my fantasy novels for adults, but also he is Nico, the rock star betrayed by his fellow lead singer and best friend, in THE FRIENDSHIP SONG, a contemporary fantasy novel for middle-grade children. And he is Kamo in SECRET STAR, a YA novel I can’t quite call realistic because there’s so much mysticism, music and heart in it. SECRET STAR is told from the viewpoint of Tess, a teen girl who live in rural poverty, wears old jeans and Red Wing work boots, and is such a misfit she is physically endangered. This is a gritty, tough, yet lyrical book. THE FRIENDSHIP SONG's protagonist is Harper, a girl whose dad is about to marry a weird woman named Gus, who does folk art and plays a twelve-string guitar with magical qualities. Harper and her friend Rawnie worship the group Neon Shadow, and when dark, handsome Nico falls ill to the point of death, the girls venture down a twelve-string tunnel to rock&roll hades in order to save him.
Whew.
I discovered that, out of all the YA books just published, there were only a few that didn’t evolve out of some sort of personal trauma in my life. Those few include DUSSSIE, my pubescent-Medusa fantasy, and POSSESSING JESSIE, horror, and LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER, Edgar-winning mystery.
Open Road Media also released about an equal number of my fantasy titles for adults. I wonder: might they, also, sort themselves into groups by trauma? Stay tuned.
Last Seen Wandering Vaguely
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