Writers Comment on Their Own Work

Fiction is always a joy, always an obsession and always hard (and gets harder as I get older). I write first drafts on a typewriter and so am placebound. I love to see the words and letters sprat down on the page. That is, when I begin to write. When I continue and get faster, that stops being important.

Writing has to be fitted around everything, everything. Teaching, friends, business correspondence, love, laundry, food, shopping. I have at least one or two medical appointments a week, sometimes three or four. And one marathon week it was five. I have constantly to ration my sitting and my standing and switch from one pain to another. It's always a matter for calculating: shall I continue and know I'll hurt for a week or two? Or stop? Or try handwriting? (How bad is my arthritis and will it get worse?) There are sieges of other illnesses, usually the result of medications, and then sometimes I can't write for months. (Two years recently.) So I'm always juggling illnesses, energies and time. Having to live with disabilities is like running a small business.

Fiction (sometimes non-fiction) begins with a first sentence or a smell or someone's gait or speech. Something inexplicably loaded with meaning. Sometimes from other books; either I want to do them better or present an anti-thesis to their thesis. Another s.f. writer wrote a book about a spaceship crashing on an uninhabited planet and the people on it colonizing the planet. I think this American-imperialist sort of business is morally dubious. In yet another book an unpleasant message (“There is nothing left to be done and we must die gracefully”) is given by an old, whitebearded, saintly patriarch. And my telling my writing class they couldn't write a first-person story which ended with the writer reporting her/his own death. These all came together and I had the beginning of We Who Are About To, in which the narrator does almost say “And then I died” at the end of the book. And I gave the message to the most unpopular, unappealing, unpleasant character I could, the point being that the truth or falsity of the message does not depend on the attractiveness of the messenger – but people act as if it did.