Once again July is gone. The year begins to show its age at sundown, the feeling of late afternoon seems to last for most of the day.
I have plans for some brisk and businesslike articles once autumn comes in and the world has its back-to-business crispness again, but before then I'd like to take time in the sunny and sleepy gap between months to think over what got me here in the first place.
I want to try and understand why people tell stories in general, why I want to write stories in particular.
There may be an unlimited number of answers to the first question, or the answers may in the end just be more questions without end.
But to the second question, why this is for me, I should be able to apply my reason and knowledge to uncover something worth knowing.
The simplest and shortest answer is probably best to start with: I want to write good stories because I love to read good stories.
Which stories are these?
For August, I will look at my favorites. The stories that, for me, never get old, the ones that matter to me, and have become part of me over the years. I will take them apart, put them back together, and try to see what it is that gives them so much value. Most importantly, what there is in me that makes sense of that value, that makes it real?
This is the first of four parts. I'll begin the project with what to me is the simplest and easiest kind of story to love, the ones that create a world of their own and invite us to come explore them.
The Riddle-Master Trilogy
Patricia McKillip (1976-1979)
"When you open your mind and hands and heart to the knowing of a thing, there is no room in you for fear." -Patricia McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed
Writing believable magic is a subtle art. There’s both an aesthetic aspect, what does it feel like, and a psychological, what is the reason people do what they do.
What would it feel like to live in a world where the possible and the impossible are interwoven just along the border of the imagination? What reason would people have to create such powers, and then how would those reasons change once they were used?
About once a year, or every other year. I return to the world of three books.
They are:
The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976) Heir of Sea and Fire (1977)Harpist in the Wind (1979)
now usually sold collectively under the title listed above, but first encountered by me under the enigmatic name Riddle of Stars.
Again and again I walk the journey of these books. I wait lonely beside a fire with a certain harpist, in the middle of vast fields of night. I sit hungry with an ancient king for days, in a clay hut, until he cuts my hands, to give me the shape of winter winds, so I can run with the wild vesta, find a wizard thought long dead and ask him one question.
What's at stake in these stories has been at stake a thousand times before: a nameless evil force returns out of the past, to destroy over the world and everyone in it.
So what sets this book apart?
Three things. The characters, the magic itself, and, most importantly, the details.
The characters, their descriptions and behavior, getting to know them and be surprised by them, I will leave to McKillip, and to you. I think it's better you forge your own bonds with them if you want to enjoy the story. However, one comment: she does give us a brief description of characters when they come into the story, but unlike what so so often happens in genre fiction, her imagery adds to the scene every time rather than taking one out of it. The feel of the hints of the imagery of each character locks so tightly with the tone and action it not only keeps us in the moment but becomes necessary. How could she not have described them? It was part of what happened.
I mentioned above that the trick to writing this magic well is twofold: one has to find the right feel or aesthetics of the thing, and the right emotional reason behind it, and to write your story along the line that bridges the two.
In an ordinary magic trick, the game is usually to take an ordinary everyday object and make it extraordinary. A card floats, a woman vanishes, a bird appears out of nowhere. The fiction writer, in terms of the feel of the fantastic, has a somewhat easier job than that if the real life illusionist; we have to present something which feels mundane and solid enough for the reader to believe in, then find a way to re-present it in a way that is extraordinary.
McKillip’s magic takes this task to what may be its logical limit: her world is one where the concerns and activities of the people is almost universally mundane: the farmers farm, the traders trade, the students study, the rulers rule. But woven through all of these, and essential to all, is what the story calls the power of land-rule, the second-sight of the world’s rulers, who are by and large the book’s key characters (our hero is one, and his journey opens mostly as a way to meet and consult his yet un-met peers in each of the unique portions of the realm).
They are each able to sense and understand every inch of their kingdoms; every gravel shard in the towering mine-mountain, every new-planted seed in the fields, every root of the swamps, every wolf in the forest. These are bound to the land-rulers, and the land-rulers to them, they are in many ways one and the same thing. All other magic in her stories is derived or dependent in some way on this principle: the beauty and emotional power the ordinary things in nature have over our lives.
Thus the entire world of McKillip’s story is the basis for her magic. The stakes are still world-sized, but are so much more wonderfully personal than we usually find them: the world ought not be destroyed just because it would be bad in general, but because we are made to empathize with the characters and their reasons for loving the world they live in. The world has value in and of itself.
And in believing in the wonder such a world would hold for its inhabitants, we are handed our own ordinary world back, glowing from inside with a new extraordinary light of its own. Those far lakes are our lakes, those splendid, unique, and powerfully beautiful trees are the ones standing along the fields beside the road we take every day.
McKillip takes the un-obvious and crucial decision to wed the reason for her characters and her world to have magic with the feel and sense of the magic itself, and her world is all the more fantastically real-feeling for it.
Finally, there are the details. It’s what almost every good story is made of.
These three stories thrive on description, on the beauty of the images and of her way of bringing them through, which is vividly impressionistic and almost prismatically indirect. That is, she has a marvelous knack for taking something, or a person, or a place, that is resistant to description, and give us in very few and simple words the exact feeling that such a thing might leave us with looking back on it later.
Unlike Tolkien, that famous and meticulous attendant to a sort of written tableau vivant, and whom McKillip cites as an inspiration for the work, McKillip paints her imagery with a spare, almost minimalist hand; you will not notice what she’s leaving out, because it is of no relevance to the story she’s telling.
It is simply itself, and in sentence after sentence, page after page, you get the impression of an artist who has found just the right line to draw to key the energy out of a sketch of life.
Her words emphasize the points that the characters see as both unexpected and weirdly familiar: in other words, what they find memorable. There’s an overpowering example of this ability almost on every page of the story, and without doubt it’s what’s brought me back to walk the journey again and again over the years.
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