Old Ideas, New Visions

P. E. Schilling: So why do we write?  Personally, I think the reason I write is tied into my lack of commercial success. I keep writing about a world that could be a home for me, because I rarely feel at home in the world where I am, but my made-up worlds just aren’t that dramatic. It has villains that can listen to reason or be defeated in an honorable duel, not like bestselling books with unrelenting psychopaths or the real world with its foggy evils like greed, deceit, and prejudice.

Margaret Ruse: You’ll get the hang of it. I became a writer because I decided if I was going to be poor, I’d rather be a writer than a professor. I thought my opinions would be a bright burst of light, but I was so sure of my opinions I had trouble remembering to explain why they are right.  

               PES: Don’t professors at least have some job security? A steady pay check?

               Ruse: Once upon a time, but the laws of supply and demand apply to labor as much as anything else. Our universities are creating far more people with doctorates than they create jobs for them, so they can pay them peanuts and treat them like crap. Senior professors go along with it, because they like having the cheap labor to do the boring stuff. You’d think after supposedly spending so much time studying Marxism, humanities professors at least would care about their graduate students.

Paul Severus: I can’t really help being a writer. The ideas are a constant flow out of my subconscious and then organized by my consciousness. If I didn’t write, they would clog up my brain and I couldn’t think of much else anyway. I mostly write fantasy because as a kid I mostly read fantasy and history, but not historical fantasy or even historical fiction, because I didn’t want them getting confused in my head. I spent a lot of time teaching English in Asia, because those jobs are like getting paid full time for part time work, leaving plenty of time to write, read foreign literature, and hang out with new people. Of course, just going to a new country isn’t a guarantee of a consciousness expanding experience. Too many of the Westerners I met over there spent their weekends getting drunk off their ass. For them, it was just a way to delay accepting adult responsibilities after finishing college.

               PES: Has reading foreign literature changed the way you right?

               Severus: It gave me insight into the sort of characters that would inhabit Asian themed fantasy. It helped me create a magical system based on Taoism, Shintoism, and Buddhism. I couldn’t be completely loyal to any one of them, because unlike the real world, a fantasy world needs magic to have consistent, logical rules. Magic in a fantasy world has to be like physics in the real world, because if magical laws didn’t make sense, people couldn’t cast spells, any more than people could have technology in a world without reliable physics.

               Ruse: When I was teaching ESL in China, I realized that the human mind is a lot more flexible than cultural analysis can account for. I showed my college students an X/Y graph version of American politics, with the X line for how economically liberal to conservative Americans are, and the Y line for liberal to conservative socially, but as I talked to my students, we couldn’t even come up with X/Y graph. Instead we created a Venn diagram of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and “Western influences.”  

Jonathan Shandy: I have to admit, a lot of the heroes in my fiction are improved versions of myself.  It lets me get the girl, win the argument, beat up the bully, usually in the reverse order. I can live in a world that feels more just.  The romantic subplot is always important to the main plot, and the heroine my ideal woman.

               PES: Do I want to ask about your ideal woman?

               Shandy: She respects herself too much to be a conformist. She doesn’t let a man stand between her and what she wants in life, nor does she fall into the trap of the Sexual Revolution by sleeping around and doing drugs. Navigating the double standards we hold women to has made her wise and occasionally sarcastic. She does martial arts, because I think women athletes have done a lot of internal work to rise above society’s expectations in order to excel, while male jocks too often succumb to traditional expectations.

                              Ruse: I don’t think the Sexual Revolution is a trap just because you have used negative sounding words to describe it. It’s about women making choices, whether you like them or not.

                                             Shandy: Yes, but he asked about my ideal woman in particular.

Penny Nichols: Someone famous said writing was easy, all you have to do is cut yourself and bleed on the page. For me, its more like cutting a cyst and squeezing out the pus. All those ideas and feelings infected by disappointment and fear make it so hard to simply be happy. They have to go somewhere, or they stagnate and breed pestilence. If I write about them, I am letting them out. But looking back on my life, I see the limitation of writing for my emotional health. It was always just a temporary solution. I’ve had to pull away somewhat from life, talk with a therapist, and meditate on a regular basis to actually feel better.

               PES: How is your therapy going?

               Nichols: She certainly puts things in perspective. She seems to find me a relief from her much more trouble clients. We have a similar sense of humor. She laughs so often during our sessions I’m beginning to wonder if I missed a calling as a stand-up comedian.

                              PES:  Some of your critiques of our stories have certainly given us laughs.

                              Shandy: I know I never laughed so hard at my mistakes before.

Benny Donalds: I write to make sense of reality and clarify my thinking. Art is like a microscope turned on our inner lives. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing about characters arguing, or a character arguing with themselves, or writing a college paper. In fact, I remember the information in the papers I wrote a lot longer than from the tests I studied for, because when writing a paper, first you do research, then you organize it, then you write it, then you rewrite it.

               PES: Sounds like another good reason to keep A.I. out of the educational process. Its job is to make it easier for you, which means you learn less.

               Donalds: Pretty much everything about computers in the 21^st Century is making people dumber. We’re losing our attention spans. We have more trouble concentrating.  We learn less from what we’re reading. Our colleges are giving up against the tide and assigning students less work, so it’s affecting us all the way up to our intellectual elites. A.I. won’t have to take over. We’ll give control over to them on our own.

                              Shandy: Personally I look forward to the take over by our A.I. overlords. Then I can focus my time and energy on reading, writing, and getting in shape for the ladies.

Donalds: Do you really think you’d be a better boyfriend than Commander Data?

Shandy: Ouch. Point taken.