The Road to Amber (63 page)

Writers like other funny things. Of course most of you who are interested in writing know by now that when you start out you’re writing on spec. You’re writing stories or books, then trying to hustle them. Once you get accepted beyond a certain point, you have an agent who goes in and hustles the book first and gets the contract and then you write the book. Again the perversity of my mind sometimes amazes me. I don’t know if I can always connect it with the creative process or not. It’s the dark side of the force. But when they start asking me for outlines… Doubleday was good about not asking me for outlines, probably because the advances were so low in those days. They didn’t have much to lose. But I started writing for other people as well, and they wanted outlines. I discovered that all I had to do was say some general things about what the book was about, and work out one key scene that I intended to put in, then devote most of the outline to that one key scene. Then I’d sit down and write whatever I wanted, so long as I stuck that scene in somewhere. This worked for me fine. I got very good at faking outlines until I realized I was cheating myself because I had never really learned how to write an outline. There came a point when I needed one, and I had to actually sit down and learn how to outline.

Tony Hillerman, by the way, still doesn’t outline. When he had to teach that course in creative writing, he came to a luncheon with a bunch of writers and said, “Does anybody here have a spare outline? I’m supposed to teach a class next week on outlining and I’ve never outlined a book. If anybody has an outline for a book I can borrow I can at least show them an outline.” He borrowed an outline from Lois Duncan who writes juveniles and went in and lectured successfully on outlining. He still doesn’t outline, but the bottom line is, as they say, your track record. If your stuff sells, you can get away with all sorts of things that you couldn’t get away with when they were just taking a chance on you.

The place where I really had to learn to outline was when I started getting much larger advances and they were getting nervous. One editor told me, in confidence, that an outline really just provides a gentlemanly way of rejecting a novel you don’t like, because you can always find something in a novel that doesn’t jibe with the outline, and you can build it up from a molehill into a mountain and then ditch the book on that basis without getting into a big argument with the author. Another place where outlines really came in handy, I learned, was when I started collaborating on books with other people, since then you both really do need to know what’s going to happen. Some of the books I have written in collaboration, like the ones with Bob Sheckley, I had to outline. Bob is a person who just can’t outline. I learned my skill in outlining basically from Fred Saberhagen, who’s a magnificent outliner.

I look back over my own career, and counting some collaborations and some books of poetry and some children’s books, along with the stuff I’m best known for in fantasy and science fiction, I’ve written around fifty books. Someone asked me my favorites and I said there were five—
This Immortal
,
Lord of Light
,
Eye of Cat
,
Doorways in the Sand
, and recently
A Night in the Lonesome October
. Some are heavier than others, but they’re all books where I took chances. Taking chances is important. You can’t always play conservative. If you do, you fall in a rut. If you fall in a rut, you start to die creatively.

Someone asked about my favorites at a convention in England last fall at Leeds. I listed those five, and he said, “But you’ve written fifty books.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Sturgeon’s Law.” Smart-assed Brit! He said, “No, no, I didn’t mean the other ninety percent was crappy.” I said, “I know what you mean, but there is some truth to it.” Will Cuppy once said, in
The Rise and Fall of Practically Everybody
, that history can’t be working in high gear at all times. Some parts of history are worth more than others for one’s intellectual regard, and I feel the same is true for writers. You can’t always be working in high gear at all times, but if you’re a professional you’re supporting yourself, or yourself and a family through your writing skills. You have to write all the time whether you feel like it or not. On those occasions when you do not feel like it, you have to rely on the craft rather than the art and inspiration. I sometimes think too much is made of inspiration. It’ll come when it comes, and when it comes it’s wonderful.

Zelazny delivered this Guest of Honor speech at Life, The Universe, and Everything XII, which took place in Salt Lake City February 16-19, 1994.

I
n the only photo I have of Phil Cleverley, he is throwing me to the ground with an effortless aikido technique which perfectly controlled my attack. He is somewhere in his mid-thirties. His shoulder-length hair is unmussed, his
hakama
draped, almost artistically, over hip, thigh, leg. My feet are high in the air; his expression is emotionless above his neat beard. The photo was taken by a passing photographer for the
New Mexican
, out early on a Saturday morning looking for human interest material.

It was a balmy spring day, sunny, with a bit of bird song and a small breeze about us, as I recall. There had been some rain the night before but the ground was not wet, only a little damp. There would be a few grass stains on the gi. Nothing that a little bleach wouldn’t remedy. Nobody else had shown up for class that morning in the park, and I was getting a private lesson. I think I had my brown belt at the time.

Phil taught a very soft style of aikido; that is, there were no jerks, wrenching movements, hard grabs—except from the person doing the attacking. There were times when I didn’t even feel his touch, just felt myself suddenly off-balance, turning, falling. Not at all like the judo I had studied back in college. As effective, though.

I spent seven summers with Phil in that place, Patrick Smith Park, between Canyon Road and West Alameda, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. April through October, usually. Winters, Phil would rent space in a dojo, Kerry Li’s or Cody Templeton’s, where we would throw and be thrown on mats. He liked the grassy ground of the park best, however—often remarking that it was our real school—partly because one is seldom attacked for real when standing on a mat, partly because he was very fond of the outdoors. I never learned till the day of his funeral that he’d been an Eagle Scout as a kid.

Soft style. Hard style… I remember Bill Gavel, a former Marine unarmed combat instructor, telling me in my earliest judo classes that when you are pulled you push, that when you are pushed you pull. He taught a lot of pure combat stuff, too, as opposed to the sport, things involving crushing larynxes, breaking necks and spines, and it all seemed good and useful, and the push-pull business really did work—after lots of practice. Later, Phil was to tell me that when you are pushed or pulled you turn. He was aware of the push-pull response as well, and when I questioned him upon the distinction he’d shrugged and said, “Not better. Not worse. Just different.”

Phil had come to aikido with a background in Shotokan karate, kempo, and t’ai chi. One day when I was hunting for more distinctions he told me, “In karate when you block and counterpunch, you reject the attack, you reject the attacker. In aikido you embrace the attack, you embrace the attacker, and you turn.”

“What’s wrong with rejecting the attack and the attacker?” I’d asked.

He shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “Neither way is right or wrong. They’re just different approaches. Look at them as metaphors.”

So, later, I did tae kwon do for six months, twice a week, on the side, to improve my attacks for aikido. It was not so much that I wanted the first, beginner’s, belt in that art, but Phil’s attacks—and those of the other people in the class who had done some form of karate—were so much cleaner than my own, that I felt a need to improve my attacking half of things. While it is true that aikido is mainly a defensive art, half of the time in class is spent being an attacker (
uke
), so as to give one’s partner (
nage
) a chance to practice the defenses.

The concept of blocking and attacking was not totally unfamiliar to me. It had been there when I fenced for four years, as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve (then just Western Reserve, as it didn’t get together with Case till 1967), receiving varsity letters in the sport in my sophomore, junior, and senior years. I’d taken fencing in lieu of regular Phys Ed, as I couldn’t stand team sports. Individual performance was something else, though. After the first year, the teacher had suggested I tryout for the team, and I did. I wound up as captain of the épée squad in my final year, possibly by virtue of a certain double-jointedness which permitted my drawing my elbow back at an unnatural-seeming angle out of reach of riposte while going for a wrist touch. And parrying and attacking, beating a blade aside and attacking, is but an extended version of blocking and punching: Reject the attack, reject the attacker. Point!

Somewhere along the line, I learned the Japanese martial arts term for what I’d always sought in all affairs:
suki
. It means an opening. One can get all philosophical about yin and yang and mutual arisings, but basically it means that whatever you do you make yourself vulnerable somewhere. A skilled defensive player invites the attack and moves into the opening, the
suki
, which it creates. Even powerful, focused blows create their own
suki
, for strength is put forth in a wavelike pattern—exert, relax, exert, relax—and a soft-style martial artist will tell you that every moment of strength in the hard-style player’s effort is followed by a moment of weakness. Avoid or parry the blow, and there is the
suki
. The soft stylist tries to avoid personal moments of strength and weakness himself by letting his strength flow at the same level at all times. No exertion, no lapse, enter the opening, embrace the attack, turn.

I am facing one of the pupils in the class I taught. I ask her for a
munetski
punch to my midsection. Initially, I face her squarely. As the attack commences I am moving forward and turning. If the punch connects, it does not matter. It will roll off of me in the course of the rotation. I apply the technique. I reverse my turning. She is on the ground.

Hard, soft, push-pull, reject-reject, circular-linear. None of this was unfamiliar, once I understood what the terms meant in practice. “The martial arts are a microcosm of the big world,” Phil said. “It’s all there.”

“So what do you do if the person attacking you has studied silat or capoeira or some kung fu form you’ve never heard of?” I asked him.

“You can’t learn them all,” he told me. “I’ll tell you one thing not to do, though: Never enter another man’s universe, because in there he’s God.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t try to play by his rules. He knows them better than you do. Try to make him enter your universe.”

“How?”

“You might have to provoke his
ki.”

“What do you mean?”

He gave me the finger.

End of Zen parable.

W
inter, in the late fifties: The skies were ashen and sober and there were small ridges of snow at the curbs ides on East 185
^th
Street. It was a Friday. My parents always did the week’s shopping on Fridays, in the stores that lined that thoroughfare. While they were about it I browsed the Woolworth’s and Neisner’s five-and-dimes, the one bookstore, and the drugstores’ magazine racks. At one point, I waited for a break in the traffic and then hurried to cross the street. Partway over I struck a patch of ice and felt my feet go out from under me. I was pleased that I did a breakfall without thinking. My right arm struck the pavement at a forty-five-degree angle out from my body simultaneous with my turning my hip and spreading the force of the impact along the outside of my right leg just as my left foot made contact with the street. It was a good breakfall, and I picked myself up, brushed myself off, and continued on to the store I was headed for. I recall thinking, “At least I’ve gotten this much out of judo.” I’d been doing it for a year or so then.

A few years ago I was walking down my steep, blacktop driveway one winter day to pick up the morning papers when I struck a patch of ice. This time, as I felt myself slip forward I relaxed my upper body; it felt as if everything from my shoulders down to my waist instantly drained into my center. I sank into the slide and rode with it as if I were skiing. When I came to the edge of the ice, I stepped off, straightened to my full height, and continued on down the hill. Later I tried it again intentionally, just for the hell of it, and I responded the same way each time. I embraced it and went with it. I had been doing aikido for three or four years at that point.

One does the same
ukemi
(breakfalls) in aikido as one does in judo or jujutsu; one also does a rolling version which brings one back to one’s feet. The appropriate species of
ukemi
depends on the vector of the throw, and after a time one’s body just knows which sort to employ, from somewhere down at the level of the spinal nerves. One learns to fall from one’s center as well as to move from it in the vertical.

One member of my aikido class was Leroy Yerxa, Jr., son of the old Ziff-Davis science fiction writer of that name. Later, widowed, his mother had remarried—William Hamling, who soon had Leroy reading the slush pile of his magazine,
Imagination
. Leroy and I are the same age, and he was reading it in his teens at the same time I was writing and trying to sell. It is likely that he’d rejected some of my early stories, though I’ve never mentioned the possibiliry to him. I wonder, after all these years, whether he was the one who penned me the “Sorry, try again” on one of those early slips. One of life’s odd turnings or returnings.