The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (39 page)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did crash-land in the desert once, in the 1930s, and nearly died. That is a fact. He did not meet a little prince from another planet there. He met terror, thirst, despair, and salvation. He wrote a splendid factual account of that experience in
Wind, Sand, and Stars
. But later, it got composted, transmuted, transfigured, into a fantastic story of a little prince. Imagination working on experience. Invention springing, like a flower, a rose, out of the desert sands of reality.

Thinking about the sources of art, about where ideas come from, we often give experience too much credit. Earnest biographers often fail to realise that novelists make things up. They seek a direct source for everything in a writer’s work, as if every character in a novel were
based on a person the writer knew, every plot gambit had to mirror a specific actual event. Ignoring the incredible recombinatory faculty of the imagination, this fundamentalist attitude short-circuits the long, obscure process by which experience becomes story.

Aspiring writers keep telling me they’ll start writing when they’ve gathered experience. Usually I keep my mouth shut, but sometimes I can’t control myself and ask them, ah, like Jane Austen? Like the Brontë sisters? Those women with their wild, mad lives cram full of gut-wrenching adventure working as stevedores in the Congo and shooting up drugs in Rio and hunting lions on Kilimanjaro and having sex in SoHo and all that stuff that writers have to do—well, that some writers have to do?

Very young writers usually
are
handicapped by their relative poverty of experience. Even if their experiences are the stuff of which fiction can be made—and very often it’s exactly the experiences of childhood and adolescence that feed the imagination all the rest of a writer’s life—they don’t have
context
, they don’t yet have enough to compare it with. They haven’t had time to learn that other people exist, people who have had similar experiences, and different experiences, and that they themselves will have different experiences . . . a breadth of comparison, a fund of empathic knowledge, crucial to the novelist, who after all is making up a whole world.

So fiction writers are slow beginners. Few are worth much till they’re thirty or so. Not because they lack life experience, but because their imagination hasn’t had time to context it and compost it, to work on what they’ve done and felt, and realise its value is where it’s common to the human condition. Autobiographical first novels, self-centered and self-pitying, often suffer from poverty of imagination.

But many fantasies, works of so-called imaginative fiction, suffer from the same thing: imaginative poverty. The writers haven’t actually used their imagination, haven’t made up anything—they’ve just moved archetypes around in a game of wish fulfillment. A salable game.

In fantasy, since the fictionality of the fiction, the inventions, the
dragons, are all right out in front, it’s easy to assume that the story has no relation at all to experience, that everything in a fantasy can be just the way the writer wants it. No rules, all cards wild. All the ideas in fantasy are just wishful thinking—right? Well, no. Wrong.

It may be that the further a story gets away from common experience and accepted reality, the less wishful thinking it can do, the more firmly its essential ideas must be grounded in common experience and accepted reality.

Serious fantasy goes into regions of the psyche that may be very strange territory, dangerous ground, places where wise psychologists tread cautiously: and for that reason, serious fantasy is usually both conservative and realistic about human nature. Its mode is usually comic not tragic—that is, it has a more or less happy ending—but, just as the tragic hero brings his tragedy on himself, the happy outcome in fantasy is
earned
by the behavior of the protagonist. Serious fantasy invites the reader on a wild journey of invention, through wonders and marvels, through mortal risks and dangers—all the time hanging on to a common, everyday, realistic morality. Generosity, reliability, compassion, courage: in fantasy these moral qualities are seldom questioned. They are accepted, and they are tested—often to the limit, and beyond.

The people who write the stuff on the book covers obsessively describe fantasy as “a battle between good and evil.” That phrase describes serious fantasy only in the sense of Solzhenitsyn’s saying: “The line between good and evil runs straight through every human heart.” In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral and internal. We have met the enemy, as Pogo said, and he is us. To do good, heroes must know or learn that the “axis of evil” is within them.

In commercial fantasy the so-called battle of good and evil is a mere power struggle. Look at how they act: the so-called good wizards and the so-called bad ones are equally violent and irresponsible. This is about as far from Tolkien as you can get.

But why should moral seriousness matter, why do probability and consistency matter, when it’s “all just made up”?

Well, moral seriousness is what makes a fantasy matter, because it’s what’s real in the story. A made-up story is inevitably trivial if nothing real is at stake, if mere winning, coming out on top, replaces moral choice. Easy wish fulfillment has a great appeal to children, who are genuinely powerless; but if it’s all a story has to offer, in the end it’s not enough.

In the same way, the purer the invention, the more important is its credibility, consistency, coherence. The rules of the invented realm must be followed to the letter. All magicians, including writers, are extremely careful about their spells. Every word must be the right word. A sloppy wizard is a dead wizard. Serious fantasists delight in invention, in the freedom to invent, but they know that careless invention kills the magic. Fantasy shamelessly flouts fact, but it is as deeply concerned with truth as the grimmest, greyest realism.

A related point: The job of the imagination, in making a story from experience, may be not to gussy it up, but to tone it down. The world is unbelievably strange, and human behavior is frequently so weird that no kind of narrative except farce or satire can handle it. I am thinking of a true story I heard about a man who rationed his daughters’ toilet paper. He had three daughters and it infuriated him that they used so much toilet paper, so he tore all the toilet paper rolls into the little component squares, and made three piles of six squares on the bathroom counter, and each daughter was to use one pile each day. You see what I mean? In a case like this, the function of the imagination is to judge whether anything so bizarre belongs in the story without turning it into farce or mere gross-out.

The whole matter of “leaving it to the imagination”—that is, including elements of the story only by allusion and implication—is
enormously important. Even journalists can’t report the full event, but can only tell bits of it; both the realist and the fantasist leave out a tremendous amount,
suggesting
through imagery or metaphors just enough that the reader can imagine the event.

And the reader does just that. Story is a collaborative art. The writer’s imagination works in league with the reader’s imagination, calls on the reader to collaborate, to fill in, to flesh out, to bring their own experience to the work. Fiction is not a camera, and not a mirror. It’s much more like a Chinese painting—a few lines, a few blobs, a whole lot of blank space. From which
we
make the travellers, in the mist, climbing the mountain towards the inn under the pines.

I have written fantastic stories closely based on actual experience, and realistic stories totally made up out of moonshine; some of my science fiction is full of accurate and carefully researched fact, while my stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things on the Oregon coast in 1990 contain large wetlands and quicksands of pure invention. I will refer to some of my own works in hopes of showing how fictional “ideas” arise from a combination of experience and imagination that is indissoluble and unpredictable and doesn’t follow orders.

In my Earthsea books, particularly the first one, people sail around all the time on the sea in small boats. They do it quite convincingly, and many people understandably assume that I spent years sailing around on the sea in small boats.

My entire experience with sailboats was in my junior semester in Berkeley High School, when they let us take Sailing for gym credit. On a windy day in the Berkeley Marina, my friend Jean and I managed to overturn and sink a nine-foot catboat in three feet of water. We sang “Nearer My God to Thee” as she went down, and then waded a half mile back to the boathouse. The boatman was incredulous. You
sank
it? he said.
How?

That will remain one of the secrets of the writer.

All right, so all that sailing around that Ged does in Earthsea does not reflect experience—not
my
experience. Only my imagination, using that catboat, and
other people’s
experience—novels I’d read—and some research (I do know why
Lookfar
is clinkerbuilt), and asking friends questions, and some trips on ocean liners. But basically, it’s a fake.

So is all the snow and ice in
The Left Hand of Darkness
. I never even saw snow till I was seventeen and I certainly never pulled a sledge across a glacier. Except with Scott, and Shackleton, and those guys. In books. Where do you get your ideas from? From books, of course, from other people’s books, what are books for? If I didn’t read how could I write?

We writers all stand on each other’s shoulders, we all use each other’s ideas and skills and plots and secrets. Literature is a communal enterprise. That “anxiety of influence” stuff is just testosterone talking. Understand me: I don’t mean plagiarism: I’m not talking about imitation, or copying, or theft. If I thought I had really deliberately used any other writer’s writing, I certainly wouldn’t stand here congratulating myself, I’d go hide my head in a paper bag (along with several eminent historians). What I mean is that stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, and like actual experience gets composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination, and comes forth entirely changed, our own, growing out of our own mind’s earth.

So, I acknowledge with delight my endless debt to every storyteller I have ever read, factual or fictional, my colleagues, my collaborators—I praise them and honor them, the endless givers of gifts.

In my science fiction novel set on a planet populated by people whose gender arrangements are highly imaginative, the part about two people hauling a sledge across a glacier is as factually accurate as I could make it, down to the details of their gear and harness, how much weight they haul, how far they can get in a day, what different snow surfaces are like, and so on. None of this is from my direct experience;
all of it is from the books I’ve read about the Antarctic ever since I was in my twenties. It is factual material woven into a pure fantasy. As a matter of fact, so is all the stuff about their gender arrangements; but that’s a little too complicated to go into here.

Once I wanted to write a story from the point of view of a tree. The “idea” of the story came with the sight of an oak alongside the road to McMinnville. I was thinking as we drove by that when that oak was young, Highway 18 was a quiet country road. I wondered what the oak thought about the highway, the cars. Well, so, where do I get the experience of being a tree, on which my imagination is to work? Books don’t help much here. Unlike Shackleton and Scott, oaks don’t keep diaries. Personal observation is my only experiential material. I have seen a lot of oaks, been around oaks, been in some oaks, externally, climbing around; now I want to be in one internally, inside. What does it feel like to be an oak? Large, for one thing; lively, but quiet, and not very flexible, except at the tips, out there in the sunlight. And deep—very deep—roots going down in the dark. . . . To live rooted, to be two hundred years in one place, unmoving, yet traveling immensely through the seasons, the years, through time . . . Well, you know how it’s done. You did it as a kid, you still do it. If you don’t do it, your dreams do it for you.