Re: What we learn from writing

On 27/06/2011 14:48, Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
On 6/27/11 7:47 AM, Michelle Bottorff wrote:
David Friedman<ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


3. The story is not necessarily reflecting the author's worldview, so
much as wrestling with it - and the author is not guaranteed to win.

I hope this isn't required.

Because I haven't noticed my worldview getting into any wrestling
matches, and you think that I would, wouldn't you?

I'd think so. The story is reflecting exactly what I want it to reflect,
and I am ALWAYS guaranteed to win, because within the world of the story
I am indeed Lord God Almighty, Creator of All and Master of All Things.
I may be an overweight balding geek in this world, but in the worlds of
my creation I am the All and the One.


Not in mine. I'm not remotely qualified to be That. I am just some bloke. If I'm ever anything more exalted than a footloose, bullshitting rhapsodist who can occasionally coax Her to play the muse for me, it's somebody more like my King of Elfland - enchanter hidden and pre-eminent, not bound by the timestream of earthlier fields, and yet for all his craft and secrets still very much only one man, limited in morals and knowledge and imagination, and as capable of stuffing up as anybody.

And not stuffing up only. The King is not immune to the dangers of his world, merely better proof against them than your average Olympian. So with me: the worlds of my creation are inside my mind, and I maintain that there are things anybody may find on mental wanderings that will drive them to death, or whisky, or velvet Jesuses, or Jesus' example.

I am so much more ostensibly overpowered than any one of my Universes in concert, that this 'susceptibility' is almost silly - as foolish to worry about or hope for as being struck by a meteorite, or having a meteorite blow up my garden brambles. But I *might* in one of my worlds find the Illearth Stone that will ruin me, or the Sangreal that will nourish me, or the Rod of Ron that will cause me to abandon fiction in disgust and cause me to devote the rest of my life to the art and craft of plumbing.

These are just the penalties of human experience and thought, not unique to fiction or the arts at all. Still, it's fair to say that more of my profound experiences come through song and story and making than is, I think, the average. It's not my profession, but it is my vocation. However that may be, the real God and All has *nothing* to fear or - a horrid notion, this - hope, from anything in Their creation. I am not God, only a very great enchanter in my own domain; and I am often surprised, and not seldom tricked, and sometimes rejoiced or terrified, by the things I make and discover.

Mark you, when I first made my worlds as a very young boy, I *was* to a mighty good approximation God and Creator, complete and entire. There was a problem with that. The problem is that they were not very good worlds, because they were only as big as I was, and I consciously managed them down to the bone.

Now I tell from a worm's-eye view instead - sometimes, admittedly, a very big Worm's indeed - and my worlds, as continuous transformations of this one, repay me by remaining bigger than I am. The Bat Sea Coast, from my twenties, is a rather good and moderately open-ended conceit, justified by housing a few really good characters. Daea, from my thirties, might be as big as Middle-Earth if fully worked out. It is, I think, a far weaker wreaking than Tolkien's in a similar creative spirit. The 'Kateverse', child of my forties, was meant to be small and solid enough to hold an alternate Yorkshire and Westmoreland properly - and became so very great and various, so full of liveliness and contradictions, that if I ever stop writing in it, it will certainly not be because I've run out of things worth saying in it. I could write a hundred years in it and not come to the end of it. Why, I've barely stepped three hundred miles in it from my own door!

This no doubt sounds mystical, and probably pretentious. It isn't meant to be. But I have no idea how else to describe it, absent telepathy for sharing my process directly.

I control what I *write* about my secondary worlds, in the same sense I control what I write about the primary one in which I live and breathe - with similar reservations, or lack of same, about honesty and whether I can be arsed. Control my worlds themselves, though? Yes, partly, just as I partly and critically control my own mind in which they are embedded; whereas the idea that I exercise sovereign control over *every* aspect of my own mind is, I think, something which psychology debunked a very good while ago indeed.

It is thus that my wildwoods are wild, and I can never be entirely sure what I will meet in them.

This is the clearest explanation I can presently offer.

--
Cheers,

Gray
http://goat-in-the-machine.blogspot.com/
.

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