Patricia A. McKillip:   Moving Forward

Locus, August 1992

Copyright Locus Publications, reprinted without permission.

"I started writing because I was too young to know better.  And I had an imagination, and I had to do something with it.  It's still there - it doesn't grow less with age.  In fact it seems, the more you use it, the more you have of it.   I'm pleased with all my books, but I don't think any of them are perfect.   When I finish a book, I want to turn away from it and do something else that's better.  So I feel uncomfortable when people tell me my best work was The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which I wrote 20 years ago.  I've lost interest in doing young-adult books.  I'm over 40, I want to write about adults now. 

"In a YA novel, you're dealing with things appropriate to a young adult."   Which doesn't mean they have to be sanitized: Controversial things are appropriate to YA books. "Nobody wants to write about abortion in adult science fiction, because it's an issue you've made your mind up on, and you don't have to be polemic about it in fiction.  As far as writing about that for young adults, it's very appropriate because it's something they're coming to grips with, and they need to think about and understand in ways that adult readers don't, because they've already formed their opinions.  If you're going to write about that, you would probably need to do it in a more contemporary novel, because the themes of science fiction are speculative, and you want to use your imagination and think of wild things to do with that.

"I have three different novels in the making at the moment, and I'm dying to finish them so I can think about new things.  There's the sequel to The Sorceress and the Cygnet.  Then I've got a 'fine arts in space' science fiction book, and a contemporary novel.  I've also got something else started, which might be a good fantasy to sell to make some money - which is a good and proper reason for me to be writing fantasy at this point.  I want to finish these books because I want to know what books are behind them, what books can be better than these.  There are ideas behind those ideas, wanting to come out.

"In fantasy, the problems are always basically the same, and in science fiction they rarely are.  In fantasy, the hero leaves home, goes on a quest, and comes back again.  And the landscapes are generally the same.  I know there are great exceptions, like urban fantasy.  Maybe what I'm trying to do is find different ways of writing fantasy too, so I won't get tired of my own work.

"The Sorceress and the Cygnet started out being one thing and turned into something totally different.  I had an urge to make the hero move from place to place.  Then he went and fell into a swamp, and got himself trapped in a house.   I was expecting to write just a plain, ordinary, male-oriented quest fantasy and that damn book just turned itself around and said, "No, you're not doing this, you're writing about women."  I got so interested in the female characters, that's the direction the book kept.  Essentially, it became a novel about women, and that's what I think the sequel is going to be about.

"For a long time I fought against doing a sequel, because I was concentrating on doing something new and different every time.  But I was intrigued by this character in the swamp, and I felt I hadn't really done her justice, so I wanted to go back to her.   She's a very powerful character.  She's a sorceress and a potential ruler at the same time, and she has a sense of humor.  The sequel is called The Cygnet and the Firebird.  It's something I've never done before, which is two different points of view, both from inside women's characters.  That's not easy for me.   As Gene Wolfe pointed out, you can't separate style from character, and if you have two totally different characters your style is apt to change.  What happened to me was, when my characters first got in a room together and started talking, everything just went dead.  I didn't have that third style.  Now it's getting easier. 

"I just finished one of a series of novellas that Byron Preiss and Robert Gould came up with.  The theme of these novellas if fairyland and pollution.  They're all going to be illustrated by Brian Froud, and I couldn't turn that one down.  I did about 150 pages of story set on the Oregon coast in modern times.  The sea people come and shake the human people into an awareness that there's a problem.  It's basically like traditional seduction stories - sea people come up like the selkies or the lorelei and slowly seduce these people - but their intention is far different from anything we're used to in fairytales.

"Somebody called my work "domestic fantasy" because all the kingdoms are so small and the households seem tiny and don't get into social issues and things.   Maybe that's why I like to write more science fiction, so I can get into that kind of thinking.

"I get fascinated by science fiction because the problems are so different.   You look outward, not inward like you do in fantasy.  You look outward to what society is doing and what it inhibits you from doing.  Also, I get intrigued by the science even though I don't understand a lot of it.  I didn't have great aspirations for writing science fiction, but I do like taking ordinary people with simple problems and sticking them in a situation in which extraordinary things happen.  Sort of like the magician in Fool's Run.  All he was going to do was give a tour, and look what happened.  I enjoy working with stuff like that.

"I have been tinkering with another science fiction novel, which I refer to as my 'fine arts in space' book.  Basically, it's about a museum curator who wants to take a traveling exhibit of interplanetary alien art to various planets in the system - and winds up in terrible hot water doing just that simple thing.  This is kind of a loose trading system, and they run into aliens who are interested in ancient civilizations with their own art.  These are collected in one huge museum, and he's taking some of it out to put on a tour.

"I think a lot of why I write has to do with the landscape and the detail I want to put into it.  The science fiction book floated under my nose one day when I was watching TV and having a gin & tonic and reading Time magazine and doing something else.  All of a sudden I got this vision of a man doing something simple on another planet and having it turn absolutely chaotic.  I can't remember what the central image was.  Just that juxtaposition of events is what fascinated me.   And what I would need to know:  there's geology involved, there's business, there's space flight, and there's art, which is the easiest part for me.  Then the characters.  I got the central character right off.  I could see him standing there.  And I wanted a woman character too, but she was more difficult.  Then the background started to come.

"I'm working on a purely contemporary novel too, about life in a small village.   It has a little bit of fantasy in it but it certainly wouldn't be considered a fantasy.  It is a project that always appealed to me.  What I'd like to do is a modern retelling of The Scarlet Letter.  I find the themes in that fascinating - the Victorian's idea of women.  The idea of someone torn between god and passion, and all that kind of stuff.  And the landscape - the forest, the tangled woods.   I want to say:  Look, this was the way it was told, but this is how it really is.  A woman is not a symbol.  And what would she be like in a modern age?  Also, what would constitute such hypocrisy and such terrible guilt in this age?  There's nothing much that people feel guilty about anymore, so it's an interesting problem.  It takes a special kind of person to feel guilty.  So what would cause a modern-day priest to feel this guilty?  I haven't ironed out all the details yet, but I'm tinkering with it.  Also, there are a lot of little bits and pieces of folklore associated, because religion is essentially ritual, seasonal ritual.   It really has a feeling for the change of seasons.  It makes for good atmosphere.  A few Halloween demons in there.

"Why do I want to write the contemporary novel and the science fiction?   I guess it's just a matter of creating landscapes.  If I dream up a strange planet with aliens on it, then I want to write about that, but at the same time I'm living in this tiny little village, so it's interesting to write about that too.  I can't seem to combine them.  What I want to try to do is use or refer to landscape in the same way early American writers did, like Melville and Hawthorne.  The forest was, to them, a symbol of something tangled and wild and passionate.  And Melville used the sea as an entity that people respond to.  I think it's easy to do in the Catskills, where I live.  People go out in the morning and the first thing they do is look at the sky and discuss the weather.  As far as landscapes in science fiction - I've crossed a few deserts in my life, but I don't want to put those deserts in  my head in the places that they were in life.  I don't want to put the Tucson desert around Tucson.  I want to stick it on another planet.

"When I was a teenager writing, I remember thinking this was the one place - when I had that pen in my hand and that paper in front of me - where I could tell the truth.   You have to spend so much time being this for one person, being that for another.   But what I wanted to do before was always move forward.  I didn't want to stop and examine things, I just wanted to keep the plot going.  I didn't want to slow the reader down, slow myself down from these other things I wanted to explore.  Now it's different.  I suspect it has something to do with being over 40.  The themes of adolescence aren't my primary concerns now.  What those concerns are, I guess I'll have to wait another 20 years to find out!"