IGMS Issue 9 Page 20

  SCHWEITZER: Have you ever had any Hollywood interest, with or without Johnny Depp?

  FRIESNER: I have had a couple of books optioned, but so far nothing has happened. But that's how it works. You get someone who says, "Hey, let's put on a show. My uncle has a barn," and then the uncle doesn't let them have the barn. I don't know all about how it works, but it's nice to think somebody thinks one of my books might make a good movie sometime.

  SCHWEITZER: If you were to radically change direction again, have you any guesses as to where you might go? I can just imagine you as a hard-science writer. It would be interesting. [Friesner laughs.] How do you think Esther Friesner the Analog writer would be?

  FRIESNER: Pretty much impossible. I'm not saying this because I'm a girl and I'm a blonde and as blonde Barbie girl says, "Math is hard," but I have so many things in my background that I already know about, and I never did very well in school in the hard sciences. I could see myself writing an Analog story in one of the so-called "soft" sciences, and I have done books using biology. But chemistry and physics . . . I never took physics and in chemistry I managed to blow up the impossible-to-explode oxygen-making setup experiment.

  SCHWEITZER: I saw somebody do that when I was in high school.

  FRIESNER: Oh really? This was great . . .

  SCHWEITZER: The guy I saw do it brought down the overhead lights with the force of the blast and hurt himself.

  FRIESNER: Wow. I didn't do that, but we did have flames shooting out of the mouth of the test tube and the teacher came over and said, "It appears you've had an accident here." That was when I thought, you know, I don't think I'm going to like chemistry very much. And I never took physics. My husband has despaired of me. He is very much into the hard sciences. "But . . . physics is fun! Physics is so cool!" You know, he said the same thing about calculus. I don't believe him very much.

  SCHWEITZER: Maybe the approach to writing about science, and the way into Analog, would be satire.

  FRIESNER: Really.

  SCHWEITZER: Analog has always run funny stories, particularly in the Probability Zero department.

  FRIESNER: I have found funny stuff in science before. Some of it is pseudo-science. When I get my hands on it I can get that science to pseudo up so fast it would make your head spin, as in the first thing I ever sold. Well, there's a device here. That's the core of the story. Granted, someone will never be able to come up with this technology, but you can't say we never will, can you? And it was a funny story.

  I never know where I am going to go next, so maybe I would do a science story, although right now my latest reading for pleasure project, which is usually where I wind up getting my ideas from, is alternating between reading Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in English translation -- my French is good but not that good -- and finally reading through the entire Bible. I have decided to read a chapter a day and really pay attention to some of the things that are said. Since I've never done it. I've read spottily through the Old Testament and very spottily through the New Testament. Now I am going to read the whole thing, including all of those "And so-and-so begat so-and-so . . ."

  So far I have actually come up with the idea that if they can calculate the date of creation, as Bishop Usher did, then they can certainly calculate the date on which the Ark finally landed. Why don't we celebrate Ark Landing Day? And somebody said, "Yes, that would be May 5th." So happy Ark Landing Day, everybody. It's just full of ideas. It's wonderful. So, I'm not reading anything in science that is inspiring me at the moment. Marcel Proust and the Bible.

  SCHWEITZER: Which is funnier?

  FRIESNER: I'm the girl who found a comedy moment in Moby Dick. And it was supposed to be a comedy moment too. I wasn't just pulling it out of thin air. The chowder scene. It's pretty funny. In Moby Dick it is all by itself and very sad and lonesome, but it is a comedy moment. So I really don't know. I am going through them both very, very slowly. But it's rich reading. I'm enjoying it. I think that's the key to what I do. I enjoy what I do. I like writing even when it's hard. It's like solving a puzzle. I don't consider it to be a chore. I don't consider it to be a stern duty. It's fun.

  SCHWEITZER: What are your actual writing methods like. [Friesner laughs.] I collect them as a hobby . . .

  FRIESNER: Not particularly anything fancy. I will sometimes get an idea out of a weird title. A title will pop into my head or present itself to me by the strangest means. The first time I won a Nebula Award it was for "Death and the Librarian." I got the idea for the title because Terry Pratchett gave me two little pewter figurines. They were about an inch and a half high, from Diskworld. One was of Death and one was of the orangutan who is the Librarian. And I go, "Ooh! Death and the Librarian! Thank you!" And then I sat there and the words just echoed. I thought, that's a good title, "Death and the Librarian."

  The story that I wrote couldn't have anything to do with Diskworld; but it was not dark, but an emotional piece. It was the sort of story where when I stop reading it in public and look up, there are people weeping. So it does what it is intended to do. But my method is that sometimes I start with a title, and decide, "Well, what can I hang off this title?"

  Sometimes I start with an idea and I flesh the idea out, and if it doesn't work, you can throw it out. I bless the day they made word-processors, because in the old days I would write something on a typewriter and being pretty lazy I'd say, "Yeah, that'll do," even though it could have stood a rewrite. I think I am writing much better now that I can rewrite easily.

  SCHWEITZER: That may depend on how you do your rewrites. I actually had to learn to rewrite on a computer.

  FRIESNER: Oh . . .

  SCHWEITZER: My method involved typing one draft, and then marking it up and the retyping the entire thing, to gain a certain creative momentum. It is the difference between saying, "Remember that joke I told last night? The punchline should have been this ____" and telling the joke again, with all the timing and gestures in place. I went through a transitional stage where I would write the first draft on a typewriter, and then do this creative rewrite on the computer. So did you find that your actual methods changed when you switched to computer?

  FRIESNER: I don't think so. I always was a child of the keyboard. I never wrote in longhand. My parents always let me near the family typewriter and didn't care what I did. So my handwriting stinks and it is slow, so I don't think writing has changed that much, except that it's so much easier to move the block of text here where it should be, or take things out. But sometimes I'll miss something when I am rereading on the screen. You can't do the riffle through the pages. But if that were really to adversely affect the writing, I will just have a printout and riffle through the pages and say, "Okay, this should have gone there." I've just gotten used to it. I haven't noticed a change. I haven't had a problem. The only change I have noticed is that it is so much easier.

  SCHWEITZER: Always tell new writers that if you can't write a novel with a pencil, you can't write one with a computer, but if you can the computer's output will be a whole lot neater. What would be your sage advice for beginners.

  FRIESNER: Okay . . . there is a lot of sage advice, but it is not the advice of absolutes. When you are a writer you have to be very sensitive and observant, because if you are not you won't be able to create characters except for walking yourself through things. You will not be able to think, how would someone who is not at all like me act? I have had some characters in my stories who are just monstrous beings doing things I would never do in my life, but I can imagine how they would do it. But you also have to have something of a tough skin, because writing, especially if you want to have it published professionally, brings rejection. I have been writing since I was about three years old, telling stories, having my mom write them down. But when I started sending stories out, I'd get a rejection and I'd stop writing for months, because I thought "They hate me." No they didn't. They just didn't like the story. So you have to get over that. You have to be persistent, but you shouldn't b
e pig-headed. You can stand there and say, "Oh, they don't like me because they're stupid and horrible and evil," or you can sit there and reread what you have written and say, "You know, this could have been better. Let me try a different way."

  So it's a balancing act. You have to know yourself, and you have to be willing to face truths about yourself. You also have to pay attention to the fact that writing is an art, but it's also a craft. You may have written the most beautiful thing, but if you are sending it out to an editor, well, do you know how many manuscripts most editors have to go through? You had better know how to make a professional-looking manuscript. You have to be able to know that your writing may be special and you may be a special human being, but there is no special treatment for you when it comes to submitting. If they say "No e-mail submissions," yes, they mean you. No e-mail submissions. They're not going to make an exception. They're very, very busy. Writing is an art, writing is a craft, and writing is a business. Sometimes very fine writing does not get published because the people who are in charge of publication don't consider it to be commercially viable. How are you going to get paid if they're not earning money selling stuff people want to buy?

  I always used to love the idea of being just the writer as artist, but the reality is that you have to be artist, craftsman, and business person. You have to be able to hear no, and you have to be able to say, "No this time, but maybe next time yes. What can I do to get to that yes." I think you have to like what you are doing, because if you are only writing so you will be rich and famous, and you don't like writing, if you don't enjoy it, it's going to show. People have their own troubles. They are not going to want to be not entertained by what you have set in front of them.

  SCHWEITZER: Thank you, Esther.

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