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Biography of a Writer: in three parts Written in 1999 Part One
I remember writing my first story when I was in fourth grade. The tale dealt with the adventures of a pirate dragon, who was misunderstood by the humans who lived near by. In sixth grade I wrote and illustrated a children’s book about a puppy, called "Spotty Gets Lost," of which I can safely say that the illustrations were the most creative element. In seventh grade I wrote a sequel (not as good) called "Spotty Goes To The Beach," which was inspired by my family’s trips to the Oregon coast. However, I think a lot of children do this kind of thing in school. Certainly my own kids are assigned writing projects and writing workshop in their classrooms. So the question remains: why do some people keep writing and indeed get obsessed with it? How did I become a writer?. I’m not sure how well any of us can reconstruct what we did and more particularly why we did it. When I was a pre-teen, my brother and I drew maps and devised stories about those places. Later, in junior high, we designed a space ship and signed up kids in our classes (he was a year older than me) to be part of the crew. I was going to be the ‘astrogator,’ the made-up word for stellar navigator. In retrospect, I suppose that writing fiction is a form of navigation: I’m the person who ‘pilots’ the reader through the plot. Writing appealed to me as a teenager because, in part, it was a way to explore other ‘worlds’, to ‘live’ for a time in a more exotic landscape. Just about anything was more exotic than the small town in Oregon where I grew up. Without question,
the biggest influence on my writing as a teenager was J.R.R.Tolkien’s THE
LORD OF THE RINGS, which I read in or around eighth grade. Strangely, few
of the many stories I wrote over the next four years bore much resemblance
to Middle Earth, but all of them without exception took place in fantasy
or science fictional worlds. In fact, I’d lump them all together as fantasy
worlds, no matter whether the setting was the as-yet-unknown future or
the forever-unobtainable past, because the science fictional worlds as
much as the fantasy ones were about exploring a universe far beyond the
one I lived in.
My first major project I wrote in 9th grade in tandem with my then-best-friend, Dawn Hilton: we drew maps and wrote stories about two pairs of adventurers. In 10th grade I wrote a long story about traveling musicians in a fantasy world, and in 11th grade I began my first extended world building project, for a land called Thedeth that included wizards, winged horses, the earliest iteration of the Eika (called ‘dragonmen’), a map, and a glossary of over 1000 words. My first extended novel-length piece I wrote during 11th and 12th grades, banging out much of it over the summer on a typewriter. It was set in yet another world, and detailed the stories of three princesses who leave the palace and have an adventure (and romance!). The most characteristic feature of all these early projects was that I rarely finished them. I have file folders full of half starts and false starts and notes and ideas, most of them, quite honestly, not particularly original, but none of them a waste of time: it’s this constant working through of the process that lays the foundation for serious work later. In college I finally finished a novel, one set in the world of Thedeth, called WHEN WINTER COMES. It currently resides in a trunk in my attic. The fairest thing I can say about it is that it ‘shows promise.’ I also wrote (and finished) a novella about a young noblewoman who is taken captive, and began a more ambitious project, a fantasy re-telling of the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain, in which Britain is an island called Clywegnte and the Romans are called the Hentir. This project was an important watershed for me: for the first time, I did actual research on a historical period in order to build a world that had greater verisimilitude than a fantasy world made up out of generic whole cloth. For instance, at one point the main character, on his way home, crosses a stretch of marshland by following a causeway built through the marshland to carry foot traffic of just this kind; in the fourth Crown of Stars book I describe a similar causeway constructed through fenlands, although in this case it’s built out of wood, not of stone. I also made extensive notes on the history of the world, and, also for the first time, wrote ‘selections’ from the literature of the world to scatter throughout the text. I consider this unfinished novel to be my first real exercise in serious world-building. The actual writing is no better than one would expect, but the world building still holds up after all these years. Also, in this unfinished novel a theme crops up that has been present in everything I’ve written since: a sense of the historical process. The main character, Jasomme, is a boy of 18 who will experience the initial conquest as well as the (ultimately futile) resistance, becomes an historian, the first known among his people, and as an old man he writes a history of the conquest. A sense of history pervades my writing, this idea that nothing is static, that things change, and that actions have consequences and those consequences, many of them unintended, lead to further choices and actions. All of my books explore this understanding of life. Even writing this small essay examines the flow of history, the sequence of events and choices that led me to become a professional writer. Coming next: Writing the first draft of JARAN at the age of 22 (and you can’t believe how really embarrassingly bad it was!), and what happened then. Last updated: February 2003 |