Tag Archives: old books

I’m sure everyone who reads here has heard variations on “it’s easy to write: just open a vein and let it pour out”. What it is, is dying in order to live. Everyone who truly lives knows how this works. Writers do it all the time.

Of course, Sarah is to blame for this. Her post yesterday led me here: I was raised on books. Hell, I should introduce myself with “My name is Kate, and I am a compulsive reader”. If there’s print on it, it gets read. If there’s anything vaguely print-like on it I’ll drive myself insane trying to read it.

I have no memory of life before reading. My parents tell me I was reading simple things by the age of three – my memories from that far back are fragmentary and hard to pin down to any specific age or time – and by the time I’d started school I’d effectively forced them to use a height-based shelving system. If I shouldn’t read it, it was shelved too high for me to reach. What they didn’t realize was that I could climb…

I devoured anything in print. Enid Blyton, Laura Ingalls Wilder, hundreds of others I couldn’t begin to name. There were old books from my grandmother’s childhood (yes, English boarding school stories), my parents had old “books for boys” and “books for girls” with all their articles and serialized stories – I preferred the ones for boys because there was more adventure – books written in the 1900s for mothers to read to their children… and of course the ones I wasn’t supposed to read which I climbed to and investigated. Some I read, secretly, others were just boring (in some cases because I wasn’t old enough to get what was in them… I was a strange child).

At the same time I went through fads where if I got the choice I’d read a particular kind of book. At one point it was horsey stories (started, I think, by Black Beauty. Funnily enough none of the horsey books for children came close to that), then when I’d read out the supply at the local and school library I started browsing widely again until something caught my interest and became the next reading fad (possibly mysteries – I know the Famous Five was in there somewhere). Rinse and repeat… Historicals got a run, too. Of course once I hit science fiction and fantasy there I stayed, but I’ll still read anything if my supply of reading material is limited enough (for some things I have to be really bored).

Looking back at some of these old favorites with an adult eye, I see different things. I see the attitudes of the era, sometimes shining and sometimes reeking through the prose. No doubt future readers will see the same things with what I write. We’re all to some extent products of our time and have very basic assumptions built into everything we do.

And this is why, in order to fully live, you have to die.

Those assumptions, those attitudes, got there at a very early age. I’d guarantee not one Victorian or Edwardian writer who characterized their villains as “evil-looking” in a time when the belief that what was inside inevitably reflected on the outside sat down and deliberately set out to make the cannibal tribe look evil and the noble tribesman who assists the hero looks rather more… well… white. Their standards of what looked good were built as children in a time when darker skin meant lower class, rough, and possibly dishonest (their parents grew up in a world where pale skin meant you were wealthy and didn’t need to work outdoors). No, they wrote their story and their assumptions came along for the ride, and shaped the end result.

Basically, they’re so ingrained they become part of the person. So of course, when one of these assumptions dies so, at least in part, does the person who owns it. A really good writer actively seeks them out and kills them in order to build a new set that will allow them to write the next story even better (they might not succeed – but this is what allows writers to speculate on wildly different core assumptions… to a certain extent).

The thing with this is that when you immerse yourself into a different assumption set, you lose part of who you were and become… someone else. To write Impaler and as I write the sequel Kaziklu Bey, I take on what I hope is the mindset of a late 15th century Eastern European man. Each time I do this, it melds rather more with my own mindset, and a little more of who I am changes to something else. The merging kills part of who I was – I am no longer so certain that people should be judged entirely on their merits. To some extent this is a little more merciful: I never had much patience for stupidity, and my personal measure of “too stupid to live” would eliminate 90% of the human race. It’s also rather more cruel. I’m less inclined to forgive well-intentioned disasters, and have been known to express regret that impaling certain co-workers would ruin the carpet (okay, I do test software for a living, and sometimes what comes out of the developers hands is… beyond frustrating).

Sometimes, too, to really appreciate something you need to throw away all the preconceptions and just take it as it is. The cat doesn’t like to sit on your lap? Maybe a kitty bed on the desk where a free hand can provide snuggles is the way to go. The big six won’t touch your book with a barge pole? Maybe it’s time to take the leap of faith, lose that assumption that those in power also have moral authority, and publish it yourself (then again, if your book is thinly disguised Star Wars fanfic shipping Luke and Jabba the Hutt, maybe not… The lawsuits might not be the worst thing about that.)

You see? If in your imagination you can see where things might go if you just say “fuckit” and do what weird/bizarre/repulsive thing you’ve always wondered about, maybe you’ve got a story there. Or maybe a cautionary tale. But if you don’t die a little and live the new thing, you’ll never find out.