An Interview with Charles de Lint
and
MaryAnn Harris
Allan Weiss
AW: You’ve spoken elsewhere of the importance of the sense of wonder, and your desire to convey to your reader the sense of wonder or to recapture the sense of wonder in the contemporary world, and I was wondering if you find urban fantasy a way of providing your readers with a sense that there is more to the world than just the material?
CdL: Well, first I am just going to backtrack just for a second. I think one of the problems I have with a lot of fantasy now is that, to me, the high fantasy being published feels not so much like fantasy, as war novels. Instead of having different kinds of troops, they have the goblins, the dwarves—it is just armies, and I feel no sense of wonder. As for urban fantasy, to my mind, with the way that it’s described now, it, too, often lacks a sense of wonder. I’m not saying this is wrong. I’m just saying it’s not what I personally look for in a fantasy book.
Most modern urban fantasy deals with witches, vampires, or werewolves, and the protagonist is usually a private eye, police investigator, or whatever. Again, I read this stuff; I am not saying there is anything wrong with it. But it doesn’t give me a sense of wonder because the magical elements are very matter of fact. They are just part of a world, part of a life, and you don’t get the same feeling as you did when—I don’t know, let’s reference Tolkien—when the hobbits met elves for the first time, there was this tremendous sense of wonder. I use the word awesome all the time, but this was awesome. You felt uplifted when you read that kind of material, and that is what I miss.
I read a mystery novel, and I like it. I appreciate it for the characterization and the use of voice. What is marketed as urban fantasy today, I now read for the same reasons: for the characterization, the mystery, and the adventure. I no longer read it for the fantasy or the sense of wonder.
AW: So, the sense of wonder, in effect, comes out of the contrast between the mundane world: what’s happening around the magical dimension, in your works and in the works that you prefer, the mundane world around them, and the magic that comes through those characters.
CdL: Yes. To go back to Tolkien, to his essay on fairy tales, the whole thing is that you ground the story in the characters for the reader so that it is so realistic that they believe it. And so when you add in the magical elements, they are willing to suspend their disbelief along with it. For me, it is that odd feeling—the character walking down the street and they look at a junkyard and there’s a bunch of fairies floating around amongst the weeds. That kind of thing sparks a wonderful feeling inside me. That is the sense of wonder; that is what I look for.
I look back at the classic books, whether they are high fantasy or they have contemporary settings, and those elements are always the ones that work for me. I might read a book like Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, and there is a very strong element of humor to it, and yet that never takes away from the sense of wonder about that book. Or Beagle's A Fine and Private Place. It’s a ghost story, but it still has a sense of wonder, as well. I guess it is a nebulous thing—almost like saying, what is art?—it’s different things to different people.
As I keep saying, I don’t dislike urban fantasy as it is marketed today, and I am sure that some of the people who are reading it are getting a sense of wonder from it. I just don’t get it from it myself.
Terminology is just so confusing. People like what they like. When I was going off to do a book tour for Someplace To Be Flying I sat down with my editor, Terri Windling, and she said, “They’re going to ask you what kind of book you write. That is the first thing they are going to say: What’s the book about? What kind of book is it?” We were unhappy with all the terminology that was around at the time. There was contemporary fantasy, but some books were not always set in contemporary times; they were still in the field that we were talking about. Urban fantasy, again, was not always set in an urban setting; some had rural settings. So Terry and I came up with this term “mythic fiction.” If we are going to have a genre, we might as well make up our own genre. “Mythic fiction” seems to hold it perfectly because it deals with the elements of folklore and mythology that we love to use in our work—whether it is through retelling fairy tales or having fairy-tale elements or characters in a story, but it doesn’t lock you in to a particular historical point of time. It doesn’t limit your setting; it doesn’t have to be specific. It’s the mood, the tone of the story, and so many books fit into that. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock is not an urban book, and much of it is not contemporary, yet it is mythic fiction, very much so because it is set in the folklore of the British Isles.
CdL: Yes, I guess so. I don’t think that shocking the reader is a necessity for that. Some of Poe’s stuff is quite dark; I don’t think you necessarily have to do that. But yes, often when I use supernatural or fantastical elements in my books, I am trying to develop that sense of wonder, but I am trying to make it so that people just pay attention to what’s around them, as it already is. You can go out in certain landscapes and get a sense of that awesome feeling, that sense of wonder that you can get from reading a fantasy book. So I like to point out that kind of thing as well.
I also write about the problems we have in the world today—the things that are going on, such as abusive relationships or homelessness—all the different things that plague our contemporary society. For me, I think it is important to write about it. I don’t think that every fantasy writer should write about it, but I like those elements in my books. The one thing that I do very strongly believe is that the magical elements should never solve the problems in the book. The problems should always be solved by the people. They might be able to use the mythology or the fantastical elements as a guide, but they have to make the changes themselves, because otherwise it is not fair to my readers.
I get letters from people all the time—people in abusive relationships, as adults or as children—how they dealt with that all through their life. Reading my book has been sort of a healing process for some people, and I think that is obviously a good thing. It is very gratifying that the book can help them in that way. I don’t think that book could help them if magic solved the problem, because some fourteen-year-old kid in backwoods Arkansas reading a book where the magical elements solve the problem will just say, “Well, how come it is not there for me?” I want the tools that they get from the book to be tools that they can actually use to go forward from what’s happening to them, as opposed to wishing for a fairy godmother.
CdL: No, I think it is society that makes that graying of the moral scale in fiction these days. They often talk about how, even if you are writing a historical book, or if you are reading a book about the fall of Troy by someone who wrote it in the twenties, or in the forties, or in the sixties, or today, you actually get four different points of view as to the moral compass of the characters in the book. That is because when people are writing books, they are always writing about their own time. It doesn’t matter whether it is set three thousand years in the future or three thousand years in the past, they are not writing about those times, because it is impossible for us to know what it would be like to live in those times. Instead, we are using that as a basis to write about our own time, and I think that in our own time, right now, everything is very gray and muddy in terms of good and bad. There are certain obvious things that we know are correct, are the right thing to do; and things that we know are the wrong thing to do, but there is a lot of muddiness in there—a lot of good people are doing bad things, and bad people are doing good things—and that actually becomes good material for writing as well, but it also reflects what our society is at the moment.
In the information age that we have today, everything goes so fast, you often hear about how a mass murder, especially if it is done by a kid, that they got that idea from playing video games or from listening to violent heavy metal music. My feeling is that it does not so much come from that, as it comes from the fact that information is spread so quickly. When I was a kid growing up, we didn’t get a lot of news beyond our city, and only a bit about what was happening in Canada, and a little bit less of the world. Now, if something happens anywhere, like that horrific thing that just happened in Scandinavia a few weeks ago, we would have heard about it back in the sixties, but it would have been very filtered. It would have taken a while, four or five days, but now we know instantly. So that information, that overload, is happening quickly. We are getting information so fast that people who have that sort of tendency already—and often what they are looking for is attention, anyway, it is a bit of a matter of “look at me”—because so much of this is disseminated throughout our news system, they just pick up on it this way. I think if they want to ban anything, they should ban the news.
AW: There is one other question that I was particularly interested in asking, and that had to do with the prominence of female protagonists in your work. You have said on a number of occasions that you find fiction to be an excellent way of exploring things that are unknown to you, that by taking on a female protagonist, the voice of a female protagonist for example, you can explore what it is like to be somebody you’re not. I wondered if you could talk about the prominence of female protagonists in mythic fiction, in contemporary or urban fantasy? What do you think is going on there?
CdL: I believe that as a writer, I am entertaining myself, first and foremost. I am entertaining myself, I am informing myself, I am teaching myself, and hopefully other people will enjoy the process once the book is done. So when I am writing a book, I just want to learn something from it. So often I will pick something I don’t know a lot about. I recently wrote a book called The Mystery of Grace, and I decided to have the lead character be a mechanic for vintage custom cars. I like the look of them, but I didn’t know anything about it, so it was something I could learn about as I was researching and writing the book. Same thing with different cultures; same thing with the different sex. I like to figure out what it is like to be something else, to learn something from the process, and if I am writing from the female point of view, I have to pay a lot more attention to the world around me and to what is going on and to what the other half of the world is doing and thinking and feeling and believing. And that, to me, is great. It is a learning process.
I will admit that as the years have gone on, I have continued using female protagonists simply because I like the idea of having strong characters who stand up for themselves and do things as role models. Once you realize that writing has the potential to be a role model, then of course you’ll become aware of it and do things like make the nurses male and the doctors female, make the mechanics female. You do things like this on purpose simply because you just want to show that everyone is capable of doing everything—you know, if that is what you are interested in, if you happen to like cars more than you like dolls, it’s cool, because it happens, it is out there, people do that.
If you don’t know a culture and you write about that culture, then it stops being scary, it stops being strange, it becomes more familiar to you, you can appreciate it more, and then there is no reason to be freaked out about it. So that learning process is really good.
I think there are so many female characters in books now because there are so many female writers, and female writers have always been writing, but they are finally getting a chance to get out there and be published, and once they got published they found an audience. And then it’s one of those things—supply and demand. Once publishers realized that they could have a female writer, that they didn’t have to hide their sex behind initials or a fake name like André Norton—it’s just part of the way society is changing and growing. The interesting thing, of course, is that so many of the female characters in fantasy today are really kick-ass. They are way tougher than most of the guys are in the books, which is interesting. Again, role model stuff, standing up for ideas, standing up for themselves.
CdL: I was going to say, families of choice…
AW: Yes, families of choice, non-traditional families that characters establish for themselves. Traditional family never seems to be all that great…
CdL: Well, I don’t know, not completely. I have a few books that have pretty good family relationships. But no, I’m not sure that I believe one hundred percent that the family of choice is better than a family of blood, but I do think that everyone’s got to respect each other in the group, and that obviously doesn’t always happen in blood families. Whereas in a family of choice, I guess I write about it because to me it is a really good concept. The family of choice is a valid family, especially for people who do not have the opportunity to come from a supportive one. I mean, there is no such thing as a dysfunctional family because all families are dysfunctional to some degree, but some people come from more horrific backgrounds than others do.
Human beings have a natural inclination to pack up a bit and so the family of choice is a good idea. You get the same support that you get from a good blood family, but you are getting it from people you have chosen, whom you respect and who respect you. It seems to me that it is a very worthwhile part of our contemporary society. If you look back to fantasy, all those quests [characters] went on, they weren’t called that but they were basically families of choice as well. In Tolkien, the hobbits and the elves and the wizard all get together and go off to do their thing, and the way that they take care of each other and care about each other—that’s all family of choice as well. I just see it as a very viable alternative for people who don’t have a good blood family relationship, or it is also an added element to those as well. So, we have holidays where it is so pounded into our brains that we should be together with our families—on Christmas or Easter or whatever it is—and that is the time of year when suicides run high and depression is really strong because people have this idea that that is what they should have, and if they don’t have it, there is something wrong with them. A family of choice is a way of giving them that. You can still be with a family, but it is a family you choose. I just feel that it is a really good element to have, something worth nurturing.
MAH: Another thing about that is in the fantasy (and I am sure science fiction) genre, if you go to conferences and conventions and things like that, so often you hear people arriving and saying, “Oh, finally I am with my tribe,” and you just feel this sense of belonging in certain groups, and it's a wonderful thing to behold. Charles and I were at a music festival called Faerieworlds in June and you never saw so many happy people together, and people communicating with each other instead of looking at their phones the whole time. You hardly saw phones out at all. And we had been to one a couple of years ago called Fairiecon in the Baltimore area, and we were really struck by that tight-knit feeling that people had—more so than anywhere else. It is just a beautiful thing to behold. So within the genre itself, it kind of begets feelings of family and tribe, if you will, and it is very sweet.
Q: When you write fiction for adults versus your young adult fiction, I like to read both, and I find that your writing style is still very similar…because obviously it is still your writing. But is [young adult fiction] a vehicle for different themes that you are looking at when you write for specific age groups or is it more the kind of story you are trying to tell or is it something that you decide after you write. Who it is aimed at?
CdL: For years I answered that question by saying that I just write the same kind of story, the only difference with the young adult is that the characters are younger and the books are usually shorter. I finally have my first Canadian publisher, Penguin Canada, after thirty years in the business, and my editor there is Lynn Missen. I had a really good process in terms of working with her on this first book that is coming out with them, and I realized that there are a whole bunch more differences than I assumed. One thing is the pacing. I was writing my young adult books with the same pacing as my adult books, and it is really better to have a little burst in the young adult books, so I was kind of learning how to do that. But otherwise I have been doing fairly similar things. It is not that I have different themes that I want to explore—in fact, sometimes what I like to do is use the same kind of themes that I am working with in my adult books—but write them for young adults to hit a different audience. My themes are so simple: things like family of choice is a good thing, that it is good to be nice to each other, loyalty…these sorts of things. Very very basic stuff is what I am writing about, and hitting an audience at that age seems to be a good place to put those ideas in their head.
MAH: Even the perils of loyalty….
CdL: Yes.
MAH: Loyalty can be quite a problem if you are being loyal to someone who is not doing the right thing.
Q: Popular culture is kind of a broad term. More specifically, could you tell us what you think of steampunk fiction?
CdL: Well, because of going to Faerieworlds and Faeriecon, I just feel that in a way, it is a branch off of that sort of idea, because a lot of steampunk is a look, and when you go to the Faerieworlds conventions, or the music festival we went to, everyone is really paying attention to their costuming. When we were there this summer, ten thousand people attended the festival, and the whole audience dressed as fairies, or pirates, or belly dancers, or in steampunk type stuff. So a lot of that idea has come out of the costuming, or the visuals, and I have noticed that now books are coming out and it feels like a reverse thing, as opposed to before, when books would inspire the costuming and the role-playing. Now it is the other way around.
Not that there hasn’t been steampunk fiction around. K. W. Jeter and Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock and those guys back in the nineties were doing steampunk, but it never really took off. Now it seems to be taking off and there is an Internet TV show that I think ran for about 15 episodes. There are books, comics, and I’m sure there will be movies, too, but it seems to me that it is kind of a reverse thing, the influence. I think it is really cool and interesting, and when you talk to these costumers, they have full stories for why they have this goggle thing here, and what this blunderbuss does, and what this cage is meant to hold, what kind of fairies…. They are very involved in it. I always think that kind of thing is fun. I really like it when people are really into something, and stuff happens from that.
CdL: That is actually a good question. I guess when I was speaking earlier, I was speaking about specific problems in our real world that people are going through. Like I was saying, an abusive relationship is probably the best example. To me, it is just wrong to solve that with magic. But for pretty much anything else, as long as you set it up, the interesting thing about magic is that you can make magic to be part of the problem as well as the solution. In other words, I feel that when you are writing a fantasy book, you should have rules for your magic, and there should be a cost for it. And that gives you all sorts of plots right there so that, if anytime you use a spell, x happens, then you can build that up.
In other words, if you have magic just be magic and you can just pull the rabbit out of the hat whenever you want, then there is no tension left in the book except what kind of clever spell you can come up with. But if there are limits to it, and we know what the limits are, if we know that the character can only do so much magic before his limbs stop working, and as you read the book and he’s used the magic and you are counting in your head—one more time and his limbs are going to stop moving, what is he going to do, how is he going to figure it out—that kind of tension makes it interesting. If he could just forever keep pulling the rabbits out of the hat it would be boring.
So in terms of solving the problems, I guess it is more plot problems that you can use magic to solve. For me, personally, I just don’t want to solve real world issues with supernatural elements, with fairy godmothers or magic wishes—that kind of thing. But I find in a lot of fantasy today, magic is not used properly. Again, magic to me has that sense of wonder. I am going to bludgeon you over the head with that, but that, to me, is a really important aspect of what drew me to fantasy. It is not necessarily going to be that for everyone else, but what drew me to fantasy was a sense of wonder.
I was very lucky that when I grew up, my reading was much in the late sixties, early seventies, and there really wasn’t a flood of material. You can go into any bookstore today and there is a fantasy section and there are just a million titles to choose from. When I was first reading this material, there was no fantasy section. You could read every fantasy book that came out in a year. You could read them all—there was that little being published—and you had to search them out.
What is most interesting about them is that every one was different from the one before. They all had elements that drew you to that kind of reading, but you would never mistake one author for another, and this was back in the days of reprinting. Some of these authors were quite old, but I discovered them when I did because they were being reprinted under the Ballantine Sign of the Unicorn series. But you would never mistake Lord Dunsany for Tolkien, for William Morris, for James Branch Cabell—their writing was all so different, and yet it still gave you this sense of wonder. So if it was dark—Clark Ashton Smith, or Lovecraft—it still had this element within it.
It just seems to me that now, magic in many books is just a fancy gun or a fancy knife. It is not really magic magic—it is just another weapon, as opposed to everything else it could be. But again, it is a personal thing. I never say, “Don’t do this.” I am just saying what appeals to me. So I don’t do that in my books because it doesn’t appeal to me.
Q: A question about consistency of the voice within either just one book or generally, for example, consistency over a number of books. How difficult is that to maintain, and does it ever go off…you know, “that’s not quite what she would say” or “how she would say that,” that kind of thing—for example, with your character Jilly?
CdL: That’s a good question. The hardest thing for me is starting a book or a story. In fact, it is just as hard for me to start either, and what makes it hard is the voice. So, even if I am writing in third person, I am still writing from a very deep point of view. I am in that point of view of third person, so I am always looking for that voice. So every book or story that I start, I write over and over again just trying to get that voice, whether it is simple things, like whether I am going to do it in first person or third person, whether I am going to do it in present tense or in past tense. And I have reasons why I make all the different choices. But I just keep exploring. I’ll keep rewriting the beginning of a book in different voices, trying to find the one I am looking for, the one that will work. Once I get a voice, I am usually pretty good about sticking to it, but I am not one hundred percent sure about that. I guess I stick to it most of the time; it is hard to say.
Writing is a lot of hard work. That is without question. If you are going to write a novel, for instance, don’t expect to be inspired to write that novel in the height of inspiration for the year or so it takes you to write the book. It’s not going to happen. What inspiration does is get you to start the book in the first place, the idea of it. But if you work, if you put your ass in front of your computer or whatever method of writing you work with all the time, every once in a while you get a gift, and sometimes the gift is just a scene, sometimes the gift is a full story, sometimes the gift is a character.
You were talking about Jilly. I was working on this story. I was going to my first-ever convention that I was the main guest for in Long Beach, California for the Mythopoeic Society conference, sometime in the eighties. I write every day, and this was in pre-electronic days, so I didn’t want to bring my novel with me because my novel was this big stack of manuscript pages and notes. So I decided I was going to write just stuff, just going to throw things down. I was working on a story called “Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair,” about a four-page section in there where this professor is having a conversation with a student of his named Jilly Coppercorn. And that element right there—as soon as I wrote her name—I knew everything about her. All the stuff you found out later on, her personality, everything, I knew it all at that point, and I never lost her voice. So you get these gifts. But the only way to get a gift is to work every day.
There have been a few other stories I started—a story I was working on called “Coyote Stories.” I don’t know if you know that one. That story, I just sat down and boom, it just came out. I don’t think I changed maybe ten words in the story from when it came out of my head to when I put it down, as opposed to other stories, which I rework endlessly to make them look easy.
As a writer you often tend to try to use large words—you try to be writerly. It is a natural inclination: If you are going to write something it should be writerly, it should have substance. Use “aqua” instead of “water” because it has more substance to it. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite. The truth is that we should make them as simple as possible. Not simplistic, but very simple conversation. That’s my feeling, anyway. I like books that are conversational.
I still like beautiful writing. Someone like Alice Hoffman—her prose is just beautiful, but if you just look at it, if you break it right down and look at it, it is very simple prose. The cadence, and her choices of how she puts sentences together, it just makes this beautiful flow. You aren’t even aware that you are reading while you are reading her, but yet if you stop and look at the prose, it is very beautifully done. And that is actually harder to do than to write the writerly stuff—the big words and the long sentences.
MAH: About keeping it simple, can you talk about using “he said/she said”?
CdL: Yes, I was actually having a discussion about that with one of my editors this summer. I have a book coming out called The Cats of Tanglewood Forest, which is based on a picture book I did with Charles Vess. I have expanded it about four times and he’s done about fifty new paintings for it. I was working with a new editor on it and she kept saying to me that she wanted to change some of the speech indicators, the “he said/she said” to “he declared” and different things, and I really strongly believe that you should almost never use anything except for “he said/she said.” Once in a while you can change it a little bit, but “he said/she said” are absolutely invisible. Readers don’t even see those words. All they do is their job—they tell you who is talking.
What I am saying is, don’t say, “‘Stop!’ he ejaculated,” which is a real term from the turn of the last century; they would just use as many different words as they could find to indicate who is speaking.
CdL: The world itself is definitely a character. For me, anything—even the background—is a character as well. I try to make it that way. The Newford stories came just by a complete fluke. I didn’t actually develop that whatsoever. To backtrack, when I first started writing, my books were set in Ottawa or around Ottawa because that is what I knew. Then, as my writing job allowed me to travel as a guest at conventions, I got to see other cities and towns, and I got a bit of a hankering to write more in them, in a different setting than Ottawa presented. But I didn’t feel comfortable enough because I hadn’t lived in those places, but I just liked the elements. So when I was asked to do a story for an anthology, I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I’m just going to write a story in a city and I am not going to say what the city is, so no one can call me on which way the streets were or whatever. I can just do what I want. Then I wrote the story, and I had a lot of fun with it and I got an invitation for another anthology and I thought, I liked that so much I’ll do it again. So three or four stories later, I realized I was writing about the same place and I really should be a little coherent about it, so I paid more attention to it at that point.
But I am kind of done writing Newford stories because as I mentioned last night, every person who lives in Newford appears to have had an extraordinary experience at this point, and it was just too much baggage, so I wanted to leave it behind. But when I was writing them, I really enjoyed it and I actually still miss some of those characters. But what I really liked about it was, I would be writing a book and I would start to think to myself, what’s Geordie doing?—and I would have him do something in the background in the course of the novel and it was really fun. So there was a continuity to the whole thing that I really enjoyed, but it wasn’t planned whatsoever—not until the last three books when I wanted to wrap things up. There was a bit more planning then.
Q: When you deal with books that go between worlds, how do you keep the structure so that it still coheres when you are going back and forth between two different sets of action, so the reader doesn’t feel tossed around?
CdL: Yes, well, it is obviously a tricky thing to handle at times. Any time you switch, whether it is between one world or another, or one time zone to another, or from back in the past to the present or future, it gets confusing. You have to make it clear for yourself, is the best way I can put it. If it is clear for yourself, then hopefully that clarity will pass on to your readers.
There are writerly tricks you can use. Sometimes I have done things like switching tenses when I am going from the otherworld to this world. I might have otherworld sections in the present tense as opposed to the past tense, if it works. Again, this is something I can’t say—there are no rules for it. Every time I do it in a different book I have to figure out whether it works. Or I have done things where, if I am writing from the viewpoint of the mythological, fantastical characters, I will sometimes write their viewpoints in a different tense than the viewpoints of the mundane characters. Or I might have the mundane characters in third person and then switch it to first person for the fantasy. I just play around with it to try to make those differences more exact, easier to follow. But I guess the rule of thumb is, as long as you don’t get confused where you are, then hopefully your reader won’t get confused, either.
That is my belief on the whole thing: that we should always be doing something that excites and interests us. As long as we are doing that, then at least one person is happy and satisfied, and we can see where it goes from there.
Well, thanks very much for coming out!
AW: Thank you very much.