The Road to Amber (61 page)

F
or a short piece (I’ve never done a novel of this type) I sort things out in reverse. When I was reading Clive Barker’s
Books of Blood
I recall thinking, over and over again, as I’d come to the end of each tale, “If I were doing something like this I’d have to begin with that final striking image and then work backwards to justify getting there.” In other words, it’s the way some other people are said to write mystery stories, beginning with the results and plotting back to the opening.

Atmosphere being more important in horror fiction than in many other areas of writing, I would take some time before beginning to establish in my mind the exact tone (defined as the author’s attitude toward the material). Once I’d worked it out for myself I’d have set a machine into operation which would color the writing throughout from that point of view. On the practical level this would manifest in things such as choice of adjectives, sentence length and complexity, and would even influence the percentage of purely descriptive prose in the piece. This is a variation on the trick I use in mimicking someone else’s style, and the name of the game is Mental Set. It beats memorizing mannerisms by a mile and a half.

Flowing from the above, for a piece of writing (horror or otherwise) in which I am building atmosphere, I also employ a device similar to one I use in composing action sequences: I write in slow-motion. What I mean by this is that if I just show what happens it plays too quickly. They tell beginning writers, “Don’t tell what happened. Show what happened.” Yeah. Okay. That’s generally true. But for action and atmosphere you don’t
just
show what happened. You show and you show… It’s almost a case of telling them what you’re going to tell them, telling them, and then telling them what you told them. Not quite that blatantly, and you might want to call it foreshadowing, mimesis, peripeteia or somesuch, but what you’re aiming for is thoroughness with all due deliberation. Whenever I’m doing it I just flip a slow-motion switch in my mind.

So, backward-plotting, tone and pacing are my three answers to your question as to my main considerations in writing a piece of horror fiction.

This short essay originally appeared in the 250-copy limited edition
Grimoire
, a supplement to
The Stephen King Companion
. Editor George Beahm noted, “Writing is largely an intuitive process, much more from the subconscious than the conscious, and for that reason writers are reluctant to look too closely. Happily, there are writers who are in sufficient command of their craft to write about the creative process—Stephen King comes to mind, as does Harlan Ellison, and so does Roger Zelazny.”

Mimesis
is mimicry.
Peripetiae
are sudden reversals of fortune.

I
brought with me a collection of notes I’ve made over the years for various talks I’ve considered giving at different places I’ve gone to. I’ve leafed through them several times and thought first I might devote my talk to science fiction and the two cultures—the old C. P. Snow thesis—and offer a suggestion that science fiction is still probably one of the best means by which the liberal arts and scientific cultures talk to each other. It’s a meeting ground of both. But it also occurred to me that this being a university setting I might talk about it from a more literary standpoint, something like Northrop Frye’s four modes of characterization, pointing out that the higher modes, which were used quite a while back, are no longer used anywhere else in literature except in science fiction, and attempting to make a point that this gives us a greater degree of freedom than probably anybody writing anything except certain forms of modern poetry.

Then I said to myself, this is silly. I’ve talked to a lot of people here who are writing and doing a very good job of it. You have an enormous number of winners of the L. Ron Hubbard “Writers of the Future” contest. You have an enormous number of people who are not winners, but who are writing and selling, and a lot of people who are writing and not selling yet, but probably will. I was amazed to learn the proliferation of writing groups in the area.

It seems that there is such a terrific interest in writing that perhaps it would behoove me to talk more about writing than about literary theory or about the effects of the things we write on the people who read our stuff. So it occurred to me that perhaps it might be more amusing, or edifying, or perhaps even instructive, or at the outside educational, if I were to talk about such matters as have come across my experience in thirty-some years of writing, because I feel that if you write long enough you encounter just about every bizarre situation that can arise, many of them ones which one cannot even visualize from the outset.

I was saying the other night to someone when we were talking about art that I was a great admirer of Michael Whelan’s, but that it was a pity that the only Michael Whelan cover I’d ever had happened to be plagiarized.

I received a copy of
Trumps of Doom
from the publisher and looked at it. This was the hardcover Arbor House edition. I thought, “Gee that looks familiar.” My son walked through the room later and said, “I’ve seen that cover before somewhere.” About a week or so later I learned that Michael Whelan’s attorney had phoned the Arbor House people and said, “Do you know that you’re running a Michael Whelan cover which he did for Fred Saberhagen’s
Brother Berserker,
only slightly airbrushed with a few colors changed, on Roger Zelazny’s
Trumps of Doom?”
This was very embarrassing because Fred happens to be a very good friend of mine, and I was usually down to his house about once a month for dinner. He had a framed copy of his cover hanging in the back hall, which I walked past dozens of times. Of course that’s where I had seen it.

It was kind of a pity because the fellow was just out of art school a few months, I think, and had gotten commissions to do something like three covers. The other two were
bona fide
, original covers he’d done for other publishers. I don’t think they were science-fiction related. He had this one science fiction cover for which he had no idea. Just thought he’d pull something at random and change it a little bit and get away with it, not knowing he was ripping off possibly the best known artist in the area. Needless to say, he will never illustrate in the area again now that word has gotten around about him.

That was my first exposure to plagiarism. Another one was much more interesting. I came back from a vacation visiting a relative in Hawaii. The cleaning lady came in while we were away to put the house in order, and she left me a note that said, “Your agent phoned and says not to worry. The plagiarism matter is being dealt with.” I knew nothing whatsoever concerning a plagiarism matter. I called my agent and he said, “Oh yes, there was an interesting situation that came up in Detroit recently.” The Detroit Automobile Dealers Association gives a spring auto show every year, and they decided this year (I forget which year this was now) to sponsor a writing contest wherein they offered a $1,000 first prize, $500 second, and $250 third and also would print the winning story in the program book for the auto show, an edition of twenty-five thousand copies. This was done.

Then the author sold reprint rights on the story to the
Detroit Free Press
, which also printed it about a week later. Then letters started coming into the Detroit Automobile Dealers Association pointing out that this story had first appeared in a collection called
Dragons of Light
edited by Orson Scott Card. It was written by Roger Zelazny and subsequently appeared in his collection
The Last Defender of Camelot
. The attorneys for the Detroit Automobile Dealers Association looked at my story and at this story with someone else’s name on it and noticed that it was a verbatim copy. Not even a comma had been changed. They called my agent and said, “Look…”

Now, on the Michael Whelan thing an interesting thing had happened. Whelan’s attorneys had called Arbor House and asked for a settlement, which Arbor House immediately looked at. Arbor House then said “of course it’s a rip-off, we’ll pay it. But we were ready to publish the book and had spent a lot of money advertising with this cover so now that we’ve gone this far, how much more money do you want so we can keep on using the cover?” So Whelan made out very nicely. I think he made out better than I did. I don’t know. I never compared notes with him on it.

The Detroit Automobile Dealer Association’s attorney said, “Look, our client’s obviously conducted the contest in good faith. They couldn’t check out every story to see whether it’s original, but they feel badly about this. How’s about we send you a check for $500 for Roger Zelazny and a letter of apology from the people who ran the contest. We’ll get our money back from the person who won first place with it.” (I’d feel badly if I’d come in second or third.) But I made 500 bucks, and the
Detroit Free Press
, which had reprinted it, said, “Well how’s about we give you a big write-up and tell the story of what happened in the contest plus plug all your books and things so that you don’t sue us?” I said, “Sure I’ll take the free publicity, and you can send it out over the wire service, too.”

In neither of these instances can I see any way it could have been avoided. There’s no way a person in some editorial capacity can check on everything that comes in. But looking at it from the other side, there are ways one can protect oneself.

I once got a letter from a fellow who took a writing course at the University of New Mexico from Tony Hillerman, whom I happened to know. He had just read
Eye of Cat
and felt that a short story involving Navajos the fellow had written some time back and submitted to Tony was ripped off in the book. The only way I could have seen his story, of course, would have been if Tony had shown it to me. He had asked Tony, and Tony had said he’d never shown anybody stories from his class. But the fellow said he’d feel encouraged as a writer if I would tell him Tony had shown me the story and I had copied parts of it. I wrote back to him and said something like, “Would you also like me to label the letter exhibit A? But no, I never heard of you until I received your letter, and I’d like to keep it that way.” It made me feel bad, actually, that somebody thought I was so hard up for an idea that I’d rip offsomebody taking a writing class or that Tony would let me do so.

Well, I decided to look into plagiarism a little, and I discovered two strange stories. One is that a fellow had a story published some years back in a non-science fiction magazine, which was followed about three months later by a story by Frank M . Robinson in
Amazing Fantasy and Science Fiction
. The story involved a group of anthropologists in the Middle East that were studying a desert tribe and were present when a solar eclipse occurred. All the tribesmen ran out and started banging on pots and pans until the eclipse was over. The anthropologists asked them what happened and they said a dragon was eating the sun and it was their job to keep making enough noise to drive him away so the world wouldn’t remain in perpetual darkness. In the story, the anthropologists persuaded them part way through the eclipse that it was nonsense and they stopped pounding on the pots and pans, and it never got light again. The two stories were identical. The guy whose story appeared first sued Frank Robinson. Robinson was able to prove that he had no access whatsoever to the fellow’s story. The date on the contract proved he had actually written and sold his story sometime back. Access is the key to proving plagiarism.

What happened is that both Robinson and the other fellow had read a report in
The New York Times
of an actual instance like this, except that the anthropologists didn’t persuade the natives to stop beating pots and pans at the sun. They both happened to read the same account and say this is a good story idea if we just gave it one little twist. They both happened to think of that same twist. I probably would have thought ofit if I had heard the same story. The first guy was very incensed because his story came out first, but there was no access, no ill will or anything. The charges were dropped, and everybody growled and went away.

But then there was another instance, one that bothered me. Years ago Arthur C. Clarke received a story in the mail from someone saying, “I’ve sent this story to a number of magazines. Nobody wants it. Would you take a look at it and tell me what’s wrong with it?” Clarke actually read the story and wrote the fellow back a letter giving a list of things he felt were wrong with the story and returned it to the author, and that was it. Some years later Clarke wrote a story which was somewhat similar to that. He professed he didn’t even remember having seen the story, but the guy sued him, and in court he produced Clarke’s letter and said, “I have evidence that Clarke had access to my story.” Clarke was able successfully to defend himself based on his reputation alone; he didn’t need to do anything like that. But that bothered me.

According to my attorney and some people I know who have been sued for plagiarism or who have sued somebody else for plagiarism, the key to it is not just showing that there was some similarity between one thing and another. The key seems to be in showing that the party who came in on it second had access to the first party’s material, which is usually hard to prove. Harlan [Ellison] has been very lucky on that and has collected a number oft imes, but all of this plagiarism business made me very nervous. I mean, I’ve seen it from both sides—I’ve been accused of it and I’ve been plagiarized. So I asked my attorney what I should do, and he said whenever anybody sends you a story, just return it with a covering letter stating I’m returning your story unread because my attorney will not permit me to read anything that is uncopyrighted and unpublished. He said I shouldn’t read anything unless I was in a formal teaching situation, was editing something, or perhaps was judging a contest. So I made a practice not to do it after that.