Category: My Books: Why I Made Them

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Raphael was the third book of the series I call Trio for Lute.  Having killed off my previous protagonist was not much of a problem, especially as I had set the series firmly in a world where an afterlife was not an end to a character but a firm shove into another story-line.  Not one, however, I was responsible for at the moment.  I never felt I had abandoned Damiano when I killed him off.  He himself would not have felt so. He was even re-united with his dog, so in a sense I was off the hook for having killed her.

But the other character in the series, who had been growing and changing in the background while we were so concerned with the humans, was the angel Raphael.

Angels in stories were supposed to be unchanging voices – like the Chorus in a Greek play.  But I realized to my own surprise that in having the supernatural being interact so personally with a – well, with a person – I had started the process of turning him into a person, in the ordinary sense.

Didn’t mean to do it.  I don’t mean to do a lot of what happens in my books.

But another background character – his unpleasant twin brother, Lucifer – took advantage of that fact and had great enjoyment stripping my heavenly music teacher of all his belongings and props.  And so another story began.

I wrote Raphael years before there was a great public affection for angels.  When that craze happened I was a bit embarrassed, as I avoid being ‘trendy’, but Raphael, whether the flawless angel or the seeking, suffering being he was becoming, had never been that sort of angel at all.

But then I suppose everyone who writes about vampires believe his or her vampire isn’t the clichéd, over-done sort of vampire either.  It’s never for the writer to say.

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This novel was my first sequel.  I wrote it because there was still a lot of stuff the characters from DAMIANO wanted to say.  While writing it I discovered that although the characters may be the same people who prodded one to write the first story, the narrative voice would never remain the same.

The narrative voice is the person who is actually telling the story, not to be confused with the writer’s name, or pseudonym.  The narrative voice has its own vocabulary and syntax.  In fact, it has its own views on the story, and the person who sits down at the keyboard has little to say in the matter.  During first draft, nothing at all.

For me, the narrative voice wakes up after about thirty pages, which is why a book, even in crude first draft, has to be rewritten from the ending page and through the first section again, or else it seems the beginning was added on by a different, and less confident, writer.

The narrative voice in DAMIANO’S LUTE was edgier, more biting and less sentimental than the voice who wrote DAMIANO.  Different influences took over, and some different musics –  as it was set in different countries than the first.

I also killed off, not the dog this time, (I’d learned THAT lesson,) but the protagonist.  It was the second volume of a three book series, but I killed off the main character.  Both the characters and the story seemed to demand it of me.  Besides, there were other major characters to take his place.

I think it was Sam Gamgee who first said this to me, about the story going on even though people drop out of it. But Sam himself didn’t invent the idea.

Funny – I didn’t get a single death threat about killing off my hero. He wasn’t, after all, a dog.

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When Bantam allowed me to publish TEA, it was with the provision that I would then write a book which would be more worth publishing by them: that it would be solidly in a ‘genre’.  I didn’t know exactly what a genre was, but had read a lot of SF.  I repeat – I had read a LOT of SF – over the years, and was very willing to do whatever they asked in order to get another book published. After all, I had been told this first tiny book was merely a ‘foot in the door’ and I ought to be very grateful.

Grateful I was, and when advised by my first editor (and at the time I thought that ‘advised’ meant being told from on high) that the next book ought to be something called Sword and Sorcery, because that was what was selling at the moment, I didn’t think of disobeying.

I researched the term Sword and Sorcery, and it seemed to mean the sort of book that had been influenced by Tolkien.  There were a great number of those at the time. THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy had broken open my heart a number of times.  I was reading his books about once a year.  The others -the ones inspired by Tolkien – not so much.  But I was willing to write as told.  No.  I was not willing.  I was desperate.

But it wasn’t as easy to work from a model as I had expected.  I walked around the streets of  Palo Alto, CA, and thought about it, waiting for a story to open within me that would be Sword and Sorcery.  I started to sweat, because nothing was happening, and I had promised Bantam a book.

Then one day I walked past a record shop window and there was an album cover on display.  The album was called Number 2, by Pierre Bensussan.  I’d never heard of him, but the picture on the cover, which was of a young man with a guitar, asleep on a medieval-seeming dining chair, while an obvious king in robes pulled a beautiful woman aside with a hushing finger to his lips – was so simple and lovely and fairy-tale-like that I started imagining things right there on the street.  I even went in and bought the album, so I could look at the picture some more.

The music inside was astonishingly good and wakened all my stalled imagination.  And at the same time this was going on, I was reading a book about the fourteenth century in Europe.  I don’t remember if I picked up that book with an eye toward Sword and Sorcery or simply because it was a good book, but between the two influences, Bensussan’s music and the story of the tumultuous fourteenth century in Europe, DAMIANO was born.

I became frantically careful that I got my facts in order about the place called Savoy as it was at the time I had chosen.  It seemed to me then, and still seems to me, that when one writes a story containing an impossibility, such as magic, everything else in the story ought to be very realistic, to create a Suspension of Disbelief Bridge upon which the reader can travel, without worry he’s going to plummet out of the story entirely.

I was told DAMIANO was a failure as a Sword and Sorcery novel, though I had done my best to follow the rules as I thought they were written. It was not a popular failure, it was simply another genre-breaker.  I think I’ve written nothing except genre-breakers, benders or simply genre ignorers throughout the years.  I’ve never done it on purpose.

The music flowing in my head as I wrote the book wasn’t even medieval, but I consoled myself with the thought that we don’t really know what that music did sound like. Since it was written by young people, it must have had a lot more force and heart than what is now played, so formally, as Early Music.  When people didn’t live so long, surely they had to live it up a bit.

DAMIANO is perhaps the most sentimental book I’ve yet written.  That, again, seemed to go with the time and place.  If one’s life is likely to be short, one’s feelings are likely to be long.  I got a lot of letters into my mailbox after writing DAMIANO: some of them I still remember.  Some of the people I still know.  I got mail from Catholic Sisters.  That was an enormous surprise.  I’d never thought of the sisterhood as the sort of place where people wrote fan letters.  I’ve learned a lot since.

I also learned another thing.  You don’t ever, ever kill the dog in a novel.  The hero, possibly.  Other people, most certainly.  But not the dog.  I got at least one death threat about that.  Luckily that was in a time when it was not so easy to find a writer.  There were publishing houses and agents: worlds of protection in between the reader and the writer. But if I have one lesson to give young writers first publishing, it is this; don’t kill the dog.

Unless, of course, you really have to.

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This is the first book I published, although perhaps the tenth I wrote.  Thank the gods none of the others saw print, because they were all floundering messes. A kind woman named Elizabeth Lay, who was an agent, sat me down and had me read aloud every line of the manuscript I had sent her.  My embarrassment at my clumsy phrasing and lack of story arc was great, but aside from opening my ears to what I sounded like, she also hinted how I could have written it better.  My hostility to her suggestions rebounded into the creation of new phrases and story lines which were not my originals nor her suggestions, but a third path.  This is, I think, how writers and editors work together to create a books that stands by itself.  We writers never appreciate the gift until much later.

Perhaps 18 months after I gave her the ms., I got a phone call in the kitchen.  It was my agent, and she said to me “First, sit down.  What ever you’re doing, just sit down.”

And so I sold a book.  The advance was miniscule, and so was the percentage, but she said it was a foot in the door, and indeed it was.  Part of the deal was that I was to write for Bantam Books another book which would be more ‘classifiable’  in the fantasy genre.  I did write them another book, but I fear it was no more classifiable than the first.

The public reaction to this tiny novel astonished me.  I had to remind myself frequently that public reaction comes and goes like the weather, and that I was still the same writer on the edge of publishability as I was before.  That attitude has helped me to survive the ego-wrecking world of publishing and of criticism.

By the way, I wanted the book called OOLONG, which means Black Dragon in Chinese and is also a sort of tea.  Bantam would not buy the title, and in the end it was just another battle between editor and writer over the proper words.  I still think OOLONG would have worked.