It is always a bit awkward when you finally get around to reading this much-ballyhooed book and discover that as far as you are concerned, it is at best OK. It’s much worse when you read it and decide it’s awful.

I’ve had that happen a number of times over the years, and my first reaction is always “Ohmigosh, what am I going to say to all those friends who love it so much?” After a small delay, my second reaction is usually “What the heck do they see in this, anyway?” and my third is “I’m really tired of hearing about how great this is when I disagree.”

That’s the point at which I generally pull up my big girl pants and admit to everybody that no, I didn’t think the couple were absolutely adorable, I thought they were idiots and spent most of the book wanting to smack them upside the head, or that the style was so wooden that the characters never came alive for me, or that no, I didn’t think that plot was particularly clever and original, I thought it had long gray whiskers back when Homer was looking for subplots for the Odyssey.

Fortunately, most of my friends react to this with long, productive discussions about what each of us likes in a book and why, rather than with tar and feathers. One of the first things that becomes obvious when you do this is that every reader seems to have a particular itch or two. If a story doesn’t scratch that itch, it doesn’t matter what else it does right; the reader won’t like it.

For instance, a while back one of my friends highly recommended a story that she’s read many times; I thought it was fairly decent, but I’ll never go back to it. The difference is that for her, plot is paramount, and this story had it in spades; it was a convoluted spy thriller that never dropped a thread or faltered in pace or atmosphere. I could appreciate that, but I didn’t actually like any of the characters, which dropped it from good to decent for me. More characterization might have helped, but the author seemed to be relying on characterization tropes that anyone who regularly reads that sort of spy thriller would be able to fill in, and since I read them by fits and starts, I couldn’t.

The first and most obvious conclusion to reach from all this is that the writer can’t please everybody. Some things are incompatible: you can’t do a book that’s both sweet, light, and fluffy and bitter, dark, and edgy. You also can’t write a story that has both a simple, spare, transparent style and a convoluted, lush, dense style at the same time, nor can you write simultaneously in first person and third person.

You could, theoretically, write a book that is neither one thing nor the other; that has light bits and dark bits, that’s fluffy in some spots and edgy in others, that has passages that are simple and spare and passages that are convoluted and lush, that alternates between scenes in first person and scenes in third. What usually happens when somebody tries that, though, is that they don’t get a story that appeals to everybody; they get a mish-mosh that doesn’t appeal to anybody.

Trying to give equal time to every possible thing that some reader might like ends up not giving enough time to anything to scratch any reader’s particular itch. It also tends to pull the writer’s attention away from the story and on to matters of technique, which is fine if the writer is trying for a technical tour de force or if he/she is trying to learn as much as possible as fast as possible by juggling as many things as possible. Focusing on technique to the exclusion of story is, however, not usually the best way to end up with a story that other people actually want to read. This is why writing exercises are called “exercises” and not “recipes for stories you can send out and sell.”

On the other hand, a story that is particularly strong in one area – one that does a really, really good job at scratching one particular, and particularly common, itch – will often find a large audience even if it does a lousy job with a lot of other things. It’s not always obvious just what itch the story is scratching, especially if one happens to be one of the folks who doesn’t care about it. This is the kind of book where people start off “Well, the characters are kind of cardboard, and the basic premise is pretty stupid, but…” and then they tell you why they love it anyway.

Ideally, of course, one wants to write something that is strong in as many compatible areas as possible. One may not be able to write a story that’s simultaneously slow-paced and fast-paced, or that has both a straightforward, linear plot and a convoluted one, or that uses a simple style and a dense, lush one at the same time, but one can certainly write a fast-paced, convoluted plot using a simple style, or a straightforward plot using a dense, lush style.

This is obvious once somebody says it, but too often it gets taken for granted, especially when writers of a particular genre – say, action-adventure – have realized that a particular combination of elements – say, fast-pacing, simple style, linear plot – works particularly well for whatever they’re writing. If enough writers adopt it (and they will, if it’s effective), that combination of elements becomes a standard for the particular genre, so much so that writers and readers don’t even notice what’s going on any more, until somebody does something different. It’s good to at least think about, though, because mixing things up can be a lot of fun – and can attract new readers.

 So my sister decided she wanted to see “The Hobbit” before she goes off on vacation with my Dad, and we rounded up the usual suspects and made arrangements for Friday, two days ago. After much discussion we all decided to meet in the middle (geographically speaking), which had the significant benefit of allowing us to go have Indian food at the good spot four blocks away from the movie theater.

 Lois and I had seen the movie the week before (and our reaction was to immediately come home and watch “The Fellowship of the Ring” on Lois’s TV). Setting aside technical questions about frame rates and the desirability (or not) of 3D filming, the discussion brought up a lot of interesting things about working with a series in both literary and visual formats, and the difficulties inherent in translating from one to the other.

 The first interesting point is that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first, and at the time it was first published he did not know the significance the ring – and Gollum – would have in the later books. The movies were made in reverse order: The Lord of the Rings came first, and now we’re getting The Hobbit.

 This difference creates some interesting storytelling problems. The first is in tone. The Hobbit was written as a children’s book; it became an introduction to the epic trilogy that followed, but that was later. Moving from the tone of a children’s book to that of the adult fantasy is a little tricky, but only a little. It does, after all, follow the natural chronological flow, from child to adult, from children’s story to adult sequel.

 You don’t get the same effect, obviously, when you go the other way (from adult epic fantasy to children’s story), as the films do. The movie-makers chose not to try: the movie The Hobbit is filmed in much the same tone as The Lord of the Rings, and I can’t really see it working any other way.

 The question of tone blends into the question of continuity. The makers of the movies opted for continuity of tone and presentation movie-to-movie, rather than for consistency of book-to-movie tone and presentation.

 I’ve heard people grumble about this, but do bear in mind: the movie-makers had the choice. They had all four books right there in front of them before they ever started working on the first movie. Tolkien did not have that choice, because when he wrote The Hobbit he hadn’t yet made up all the things that came up later in The Lord of the Rings. Yes, he made some continuity changes to later editions of The Hobbit, but he could not have chosen to change the tone without doing a complete, massive rewrite of the book.

 It is, of course, possible that even if Tolkien had known the story was leading to The Lord of the Rings and the end of the age, he would still have chosen to write The Hobbit as a lighter children’s book. I take leave to doubt it, but authors have done stranger things. That choice, however, remains firmly in the realm of speculation, because Tolkien did not know. And I personally do not think that it would be right for a modern movie-maker to pretend that he is in the same position as Tolkien – that he’s making a children’s movie that those other books and movies don’t inform.

 Series continuity, whether in film or in print, is always a tricky business. Whether you write in chronological order, as Tolkien did with The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, or whether you tell one story and then back up and write a prequel, as Tolkien did later with The Silmarillion, there will be people who encounter the story out of order. I read The Two Towers first, because it was the only fantasy on the airport book rack when my family was heading out on vacation (I knew perfectly well it was the middle book of a trilogy; I simply didn’t care). I then galloped through The Return of the King, followed up with The Fellowship of the Ring, and only then discovered that there was an earlier book called The Hobbit.

 Similarly, one very-much-not-a-fantasy-fan acquaintance heard that The Return of the King had been nominated for Best Picture Oscar, so he went blithely off to see it without having seen (or read) The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers. Needless to say, he was deeply puzzled by the experience.

There is nothing whatever that a writer or a movie-maker can do to prevent this. You don’t have a choice in the matter. The only choices you have relate to how you tell the story: whether you try to make it accessible to people who may not have all the background, or whether you don’t.

Then one day I was stuck on a scene involving several characters talking to one another. I had no clue how to handle the speech tags (I didn’t call them that, because I didn’t know what speech tags were; I just knew that everything I tried looked wrong).

So I went to my bookshelf and pulled down one of my favorite books, more or less at random, and turned to a section of dialog. I remember paging around a bit, looking for a spot where three or four characters were all talking together. And when I got to it, I didn’t just read the scene; instead, I looked at the lines of dialog…specifically, at how I knew who was saying what in each one.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the lines did not end with “he said” or any equivalent. Some had the “he said” in the middle, or at the beginning, instead of at the end; some didn’t have a “he said” at all. Sometimes the characters did something or thought about something in the middle of a dialog paragraph, and quite often when they did, there were no “he saids” anywhere around. And so on.

I came away from that page with a much clearer idea of how to do what I wanted to do with my dialog. Much later, I realized that that was what people had been talking about when they said “read like a writer.”

What “reading like a writer” means is asking “what is this writer doing here?” or “how did the writer get that effect?” and then going and looking for the answer. It means you look at the words and phrases, at the way sentences and paragraphs are put together, at where the paragraph breaks and scene breaks are and what sort of sentences come before and after them, at the structure of scenes and chapters, instead of relaxing into them and just reading them for whatever effect they have.

It means paying attention to more than the story. You notice when the writer strings together chains of parallel structure, or how often (and exactly where) they use sentence fragments, dip into a character’s thoughts, provide graphic details (or don’t). You pay attention to rhythm and word choices, to italics and tenses, to what’s in dialog and what isn’t, to what’s implied and what’s explicit.

Most specifically, you look at what is on the page, not what you think is on the page. More than once, I’ve had someone tell me quite positively that something was or wasn’t in a particular book, and had to show them the text in order to convince them that they were wrong. More than once, I’ve been wrong myself, and not realized it until I looked at the text and saw that X wasn’t in the story at all (or was there all the time). And you can’t build yourself a solid toolbox of useful writing techniques if you’re remembering the effects of the words on the page, and not the actual words that are there.

This is a lot harder than it sounds. I’ve had people inform me flat out that James White does not use any infodumps in his “Sector General” books…and had those same people come back suitably embarrassed after looking at the actual text and realizing that White nearly always uses a long narrative summary in the middle of one of the early briefing scenes, so as to get very lightly over the description of the case history of whatever medical problem the main characters will face. They hadn’t registered it as an infodump because White transitions into and out of the narrative summary so smoothly (and makes the information so interesting).

Yet moving seamlessly into and out of a long, interesting narrative summary is exactly the sort of thing I, as a writer, want to learn how to do…and that means that I have to learn to see what he did at the words-and-sentences level, so that I notice that hey, there’s a big infodump in the middle of this scene! And then I can ask, how did he do that without me noticing when I was just reading? And then I can maybe figure out exactly what he did, so that I have a chance of duplicating the effect some time when I need it.

I don’t read like a writer all the time. Mostly, I read to enjoy what I’m reading. But every so often I come across something in another writer’s work that makes me stop and ask myself, “How did he/she do that?” And then I go back to see if I can figure it out. Most of them don’t stick in my memory; it’s become a habit.

I couldn’t do it, not even when they let me cheat blatantly by listing authors instead of single titles. And here is why:

>It seems to me that a “must read” list for would-be fantasy writers should have as much breadth and depth as possible, both in terms of the length of time covered and in terms of the type of writing that’s covered. Because the point is, in my opinion, to give an overview of the field, both at present and historically. And ten slots just isn’t enough to do that in, as you will see in a moment.

J.R.R. Tolkein belongs on any must-read list for fantasy writers, whether you like his kind of thing or not; the success of “The Lord of the Rings” led directly to the founding of the modern fantasy genre as a separate category, and anything that seminal belongs on this sort of list. He also allows me to check off “epic fantasy” and “high fantasy” in the same slot. One down.

J.K. Rowling comes next, but not because of the wild popularity of the Harry Potter books – no, I put her on the list because her work is a synthesis of a whole lot of fantasy and YA fantasy tropes, from the coming-of-age story, to the boarding-school stories, to the orphaned protagonist and wise wizard mentor, to castles, secret passages, saving-the-world, magic swords, prophecy…. (I have remarked on more than one occasion that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had everything a kid could want in a story, except pirates.) It was a tough decision, because I’d really like to have Jane Yolen, Diana Wynne Jones, Nnedi Okorafor, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, L. Frank Baum, Patricia Wrightson, Edward Eager, Diane Duane, C. S. Lewis, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, or Phillip Pullman in the childrens-and-young-adult fantasy slot. There is a LOT of really excellent children’s fantasy out there.

I’d want one slot for humorous fantasy, and that belongs hands down to Terry Pratchett and his Discworld books. I’d like at least one slot for modern urban fantasy, but the choice is a lot less obvious when you have Charlaine Harris, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, and Jim Butcher all in competition for the slot. I think I’ll pick Neil for this one, on the grounds that his work covers a lot more territory than any of the others (though de Lint is a close runner-up in that regard). Two more slots full.

I’d like to have at least one slot for somebody who’s doing literary fantasy and/or magical realism, like Angela Carter or Robertson Davies or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll throw a dart at the bookshelf and pick Marquez, though again, it’s a tough choice.

That fills five slots with more-or-less modern writers; time to start looking a bit farther back. Dark fantasy should really have more than one slot, because I want one for H. P Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, and one for Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, or John William Polidori. That only leaves me with three slots left, though, so I might have to drop to one choice for dark fantasy.  I’ll put Lovecraft in one and Stoker in the other, for now.

Three slots left. One pretty much has to go to something Arthurian – The Matter of Britain has over a thousand years of roots in English fantasy fiction, and its traces show up in all sorts of unexpected places once you start looking (Star Wars?), and there are a zillion retellings and spin-offs, starting all the way back at Geoffrey of Monmouth. (The Arthurian legends are, I maintain, the fan fiction of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries.) I’ll pick Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, though T.H. White would also do very nicely; John Steinbeck’s version would be perfect if he’d only ever gotten it finished; Mary Stewart’s retellings are excellent and so are Rosemary Sutcliff’s two versions.

So now I have two slots left. I’m torn. There are all the Victorian fantasists (Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, George MacDonald); there are the classic literary fairy-tale writers like Charles Perrault and Madam d’Aulnoy; there are sword-and-sorcery greats like Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard (whose Conan the Barbarian arguably founded the whole sword-and-sorcery subgenre); there are the heroic fantasists like Howard Lamb and C. L. Moore; there are writers like Evangeline Walton, who’ve done magnificent retellings of older works like the Mabinogian. There’s historical fantasy, which includes much of Tim Powers and several of Poul Anderson’s as well as folks like Susanna Clarke, and the Orientalists, like Earnest Bramah, Barry Hughart, E. Hoffman Price, Lucy Chin, and William Wu. There are writers who don’t fit into any subclass, like Mervin Peake and E.R. Eddison and James Branch Cabal, and writers who fit in multiple possible subcategories, like John M. Ford and Ursula le Guin and Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny. And that doesn’t even get to things like Homer or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or the explosion of fantasy in comics and manga…

I will throw out Shakespeare on the grounds that everyone has probably already seen or read “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” already, and I will throw out Sir Richard Francis Burton on the grounds that he merely translated The Arabian Nights Entertainment rather than actually writing it.

And then I will cheat mercilessly. Twice. First by putting the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies on the list, all sixteen of them, even though Ellen and Terri are editors and not writers. Those volumes are as close to a comprehensive overview of the best of the best fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror available in English for the sixteen years they cover, in-genre and out-of-genre, and they include recommendations for novels (which of course couldn’t be included in an anthology of short fiction).

And last I’m going to cheat by filling my last slot with that prolific writer, Anonymous, because it lets in an enormous number of folk tales, fairy tales, myths, and legends all at once, from the Poetic Edda and the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ramayana, to Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and the Arabian Nights.

And that’s where I give up. Ten slots, multiple candidates for all of them, and I still had to leave out dozens of possibilities and cheat twice. Fantasy is just too broad a field. Maybe if I did a “top 100″ list…

The son went away happily and read the books, then dutifully presented himself for the talk. And the first thing his mother said was, “So, did the sex in those books bother you at all?”

The boy’s eyes went wide. “There was sex in those books?” he said in astonishment. “I better read them again!”

I mention this because once again it is Banned Books Week, and I’ve been poking around in the statistics on book challenges that the American Library Association has been collecting for the past twenty years. A few quick calculations show that sexual explicitness was a factor in roughly thirty percent of the challenges, and that 72% of the recorded challenges were to books in schools or school libraries…and the vast majority were brought by a concerned parent.

This is unsurprising, really. People will go to amazing lengths to protect children – their own or other people’s. And I don’t know anyone who, reading levels aside, thinks third-graders should be reading graphic horror, slasher books, or something like The Silence of the Lambs. The problem is with where to draw the lines, and with who draws them.

It’s also a problem of trust and fear. Challenges to books always are. We don’t trust other people to see the same things we do, to have the same objections, to be intelligent or compassionate or concerned enough to come to the same conclusions we do about a particular subject or a particular portrayal. We don’t trust them to agree with us – and why should we? There’s plenty of evidence around that other people don’t hold the same opinions, whatever those opinions may be.

When it comes to children, however, the issues of fear and trust come out even more strongly. As I’ve pointed out before, fiction is dangerous. Parents fear – sometimes rightly – that their children will be hurt, that they won’t be able to handle scenes or concepts that are too advanced, that they will be exposed to ideas and values that are contrary to the ones the parents believe in. That fear knows no politics; in talking with librarians and teachers, I’ve heard over and over that as many challenges come from the political left as from the political right. The objections are different; the reasoning is always the same: children should not be exposed to X because it will hurt them in some way.

And the more I see and hear of this, the more I wonder: Does anyone ever ask the kids what they think? Not often, I suspect. Yet the vast majority of children I’ve talked to seem to me to be much more sensible and aware than most adults give them credit for. They’re quite capable of spotting and avoiding books that bother them. They know a lot more, at pretty much every age, than most adults think they do, and they don’t automatically absorb and agree with things just because someone wrote about it.

Nevertheless, protecting children is an adult’s business. Unfortunately, protection is not a one-size-fits-all thing. The book that gives one child nightmares may be exactly what another child needs to read to help him/her cope with a difficult situation. The real decision is not “Should we protect all children from nightmares by removing this book from places they can easily find it?” but “Do we take the chance that one child will be hurt directly by leaving on the shelves a book that will give her nightmares, or do we remove the book and take the chance that another child will be hurt indirectly because he has been denied access to something that would have helped him?”

People who want books pulled off school library shelves are trying to protect all children, without recognizing that different kids have different needs and without trusting young people to stop reading books that are too much for them. They come down hard on the side of preventing direct harm (as they see it), rather than preventing indirect harm. Yet it’s a lot easier to teach children not to put a hand on the stove because it will burn them (immediate, direct harm) than to convince them that eating greasy hamburgers from the take-away place is bad for them (long-term, indirect harm) – at least, my siblings and I begged for the take-out hamburgers for years and years, despite our parents’ explanations, while I don’t recall any of us ever defying them over the stove.

Adults, as a group, don’t really trust anyone under twenty-one to make good decisions or good choices. But while it is obviously true that the younger the child, the less life experience they have from which to draw conclusions, I don’t think that young people do any worse, as a group, than adults when it comes to a lot of the decisions they have to make. I also think the old saw about the way you avoid making mistakes is through experience, and the way you gain experience is by making mistakes. And frankly, making a mistake about what kind of book to read is a lot safer than some of the, um, experience I remember gaining along the way.

Lines do have to be drawn sometimes, but I think that decisions about what is appropriate for all children (as opposed to a particular parent’s individual child) need to be made with great care and consideration, and probably with the default being to let a particular book stay on the shelves. Because I think that children can be trusted considerably farther than many adults think when it comes to avoiding – or, like my friend’s son, just not seeing – material in books and stories that are harmful to them.

I am a little reluctant to do this, which is why I had that other post all set to go. And the reason I’m reluctant is that I don’t actually have a ton of experience with ebooks. Then I looked into some statistics and realized that nobody has a ton of experience with ebooks – at least, not with the current ebook market. Because the current market is less than two years old. If my rough calculations are correct, two years ago, ebooks were less than 1% of the total US book market; last year, estimates were running 15-20% of the total market. And nobody seems to know whether this means people are buying ebooks instead of hardcopy books, or whether they’re buying ebooks in addition to hardcopy books.

Personally, I suspect it’s a bit of both. I adore my iPad, which I’ve had all of six months, but I only have two kinds of books on it: 1) books I already own in hardcopy, but that I want the convenience of being able to read on the road (that would be things like Pride and Prejudice for fun, and The Journals of Lewis and Clark for research), and 2) books that were only ever published electronically, so I couldn’t get them in hardcopy.

This may change at some point. I can foresee a day when I’ll only want my most favorite books in hardcopy, and I’ll get everything else in electronic format. (If I start seriously running out of bookshelf room, that day may come sooner rather than later…a four gigabyte flash drive would hold most of my collection, could I get them all in e-format, and it takes up a lot less space and is only about $10 if I catch the sale at Target with a coupon.) I have no idea whether this is the usual way to use ebook readers, or whether most ebook users went fully electronic as soon as they could and never looked back.

As a professional writer, I’m deeply interested in this cool new method of publishing stuff. For one thing, it represents a possible end run around the traditional publishing system for all sorts of things. Novellas and short story collections have both been hard to sell to traditional publishers; a lot of writers seem to be putting together their own ebook-only versions and taking them direct to Amazon. Similarly, gigantic 300,000-word novels are too fat for traditional publishing; they have to be split into two volumes in order for the binding machinery to be able to handle them, and then they seldom do as well as all-in-one-volume books. For ebooks, length doesn’t matter so much – at least, it doesn’t affect the cost of publication.

I also know a couple of professional U.S. writers who’ve been unable to get British publishers interested in their work; Amazon.uk is perfectly happy to take their ebooks and make them available direct, for a much larger royalty cut than they’d get from a traditional publisher.

I am much less sure how well all this would work for an unknown new writer. There seems to be at least some indication that the book-buying public is skeptical of novels that haven’t been through some sort of publication process involving gatekeeping, editing, and proofreading. A writer who has a following may be able to get people to buy his/her original ebook publications; I suspect it’s a lot harder for unknown newcomers to bypass the usual publication process and make a go of it.

My opinion in this regard was unfortunately confirmed by a quick run through some of the direct-to-Amazon ebooks that are available. A lot of them read like the bottom half of the slush pile – incorrect punctuation, sloppy syntax, incoherent prose, mixed-up word choices. Some of them obviously didn’t even run the spelling checker before they made their deathless prose available to all comers.

There are gems in the pile, but it’s not worth my time to hunt them down – not when I can spend that time browsing more e-editions of traditionally published books than I’ll ever have time to read, all of which have passed some minimum editorial standard, as well as having been professionally edited and proofed. I suspect I am not the only reader to feel this way.

On the other hand, I find myself a lot more willing to take a chance on an electronic freebie or 99-cent publication by an author I don’t know than I am on a $7 paperback that’s going to take up shelf space and be a lot more nuisance to get rid of if I don’t like it. I still want someone to pre-screen things for quality, though, and for now, that means traditional publishers.

What does this mean for writers trying to break into publication? More choices, and not enough information. Nobody really knows how all this is going to affect traditional book publishing, and it’s all changing so fast that today’s predictions may be totally out of date by next Wednesday. So once again, we’re back to figuring out what it is you want, how much and what kind of work you’re willing to do, etc.

If you really want to get in on the ground floor of exciting new technology (and are willing to take the risks that go with that sort of thing), then I’d say now is the time. Ground-floor time doesn’t tend to last very long. Do bear in mind, though, that e-publishing is so new that even the e-publishers don’t necessarily know the best way to publicize and sell original e-books, so you’ll likely be spending a fair amount of time and effort doing publicity even if you get accepted by one of them. If you decide to self-e-publish, the work load will be even greater – you have design and layout, editing and proofing considerations as well as marketing…and your marketing efforts will have that extra resistance to overcome in readers like me who still want the kind of gatekeeping that publishers do.

If, however, you’re interested in doing your own e-book simply because you’re so frustrated with the traditional publishing system…well, it’s not going to be any less work, or any less frustrating, really. The work and the frustration will be coming in different places, that’s all – and if you are the sort of person who can tolerate those frustrations and do that work, but who can’t tolerate the stuff that goes along with traditional publishing, it’s a possible alternative. I wouldn’t, but I’m not a risk-taker and I would purely hate doing all the promotion and marketing stuff. But that’s me. Different strokes, mileage varies, etc.

The first and most obvious use is as practice. Even if you don’t take seriously the old saw about having to write a million words of crap before you can write anything publishable, some amount of practice is generally a Good Thing, and it is ever so much easier to do the practice pieces if you’re doing something you can show to eager readers. Nowadays, you can even get actual feedback and responses from people you do not actually know, which is even better (at least, it is when the feedback is positive).

The value of fanfiction as practice has been tacitly recognized for a really long time. Even back in the 70s and early 80s, when fanfiction was about as acceptable as thirteen Hells Angels at a highbrow Southern garden party, it was quietly acknowledged that quite a few writers (and some editors) got their start in the business writing, editing, and publishing fanfiction. As fanfiction slowly inches toward respectability, more writers are willing to let people know that they started off writing fanfiction, and there are quite a few who are willing to admit that they still write the stuff for fun.

The thing that fascinates me about fanfiction, though, is the way that it models the decision tree that writers go through (whether consciously or unconsciously) to get to their final product. For those of us who do this part mostly unconsciously, it can be interesting and instructing to see the multitude of alternate paths that a story could have taken, all laid out more-or-less neatly in different authors’ fanfics. The main character’s horrible childhood could have been much worse, or much better, with interesting plot-consequences either way. The protagonist could have chosen to trust a different wise mentor figure or companion, or to go it completely alone. Different aspects of the background are brought forward or pushed back, sometimes changing the whole feel of a story even if the basic plot remains much the same. The main character’s decision to take – or ignore – a particular bit of advice, to provide – or not provide – a bit of crucial information to someone else a few chapters earlier, an impulsive or better-considered act by anyone at all results in the plot veering in a completely new direction. Friends become enemies; enemies become friends; goals and objectives and results shift and change.

The enormous number of alternatives are easiest to see in those fandoms that have a correspondingly enormous number of fanfics available – things like the Harry Potter books, or The Lord of the Rings. And if one can manage to mentally adjust for the wildly varying levels of skill that the different fan authors have, and their frequent obsession with romance, etc., it becomes even clearer just how many completely different stories one can get out of a single situation and set of characters.

I think the whole question of alternatives is key to understanding the mixed-to-lukewarm reception a lot of fanfiction gets from authors. I rarely read any of the fanfiction based on my own books (never, unless it’s been recommended by one of the five people I trust to screen for me), and a large part of the reason is that I, like most writers, know a whole lot more about my characters and my world than the stuff that gets into the books. I can’t let go of that when I read the fanfiction; consequently, there is about a 95% chance that even the best fan story will “feel wrong,” because the author has no way of getting the unpublished details right. I suspect this is a problem for a lot of writers who squirm uncomfortably when they’re asked about fanfiction.

My other problem is that if, by some miracle, the fan author does get it right, their story tends to slide into my head and take up residence as “what really happened.” Which creates all sorts of potential for legal problems if I ever hope to write anything else in whatever the base series is. It’s much simpler to just avoid the problem, and to be able to say truthfully that I don’t read it.

I think the first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read was the paperback of Charmed Life, some time in the early ’80s and I immediately went looking for more of the same. I was delighted to find the run of Greenwillow hardcovers under YA, and rapidly became a devoted fan.

In 1987, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Brighton, England that year. Practically the first thing I saw was that I’d been put on a panel that Diana was to moderate. I had that sinking sensation that you get when you know you’re going to make a fool of yourself in front of one of your idols, but it wasn’t like I was going to tell them I couldn’t do it. And then I walked into the Green Room a bit ahead of the panel, checking out name tags, and there she was.

She looked like the best kind of witch in the world, with bushy black hair down to her shoulders and an infectious grin, a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I took my courage in both hands and stepped up, and she blinked over at me and said cheerfully, “You’re on my panel. I have to introduce you. Who are you? What have you done?”

I was still suffering from the worst kind of stage fright, so I just pulled out the copies of my books that I’d brought along and handed them to her. She shuffled through them and then looked up at me with a frown. “But these look marvelous!” she said accusingly. “Why haven’t I heard of you?”

“Um, American writer?” I stammered, and she grumbled something about publishing and which books got published in different countries, and that was the start of a twenty-four-and-a-half-year friendship.

Most of the time, it was a letters-and-emails sort of friendship, and an erratic one at that. Neither of us had a lot of time to spend writing letters. Periodically, one of us would put together a big box of books that weren’t yet available in the other one’s home country and ship them off to the other; it was a toss-up whether it was more fun to pick out things I thought she’d like, or to see what she’d chosen for me. That was how I got hold of Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm, and Sally Odgers’ Translations in Celadon.

We saw each other mostly at conventions. There was one where Diana was going around asking everyone to suggest types of magic swords for a project she was working on. The suggestions got increasingly more hilarious as the hour got later, but she wouldn’t talk about the project because it wasn’t completely settled yet. The project turned out to be The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which later generated The Dark Lord of Derkholm.

Diana always said that her books were true after the fact – whatever she wrote about eventually started happening to her in some way – and she had a string of hilarious anecdotes to prove it. She was friendly to nearly everyone, and she and her husband were beyond hospitable – when I told her I’d be back in England in 1996 and asked if we could arrange a meet-up, the next thing I knew, she’d arranged a ride down from London for me and my travel buddy so that we could stay overnight at her home.

She was funny and dear and energetic, and even when she complained about things, she was entertaining. I will miss her for the rest of my life, even more than I’ll miss her unwritten books, and I will always remember her as the best kind of witch there ought to be.

“Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate, and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of work, and the viewpoints of both the author and the receiver of information.”

–Intellectual Freedom Manual, by the American Library Association, 7th edition 

It is once again Banned Books week, and I still have a few things to say about the subject. I’m going to start by referring folks to the American Library Association website, where you can find information about banned books and an extremely interesting list of the top ten books challenged by year.

Books get challenged for all sorts of reasons, and by all sorts of people. A couple of years back, I was on a panel on the subject for a regional convention of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators that included a writer who’d been told that a particular young writers’ conference would allow him to speak but would not make his most recent book available to children because the main character was a high school boy trying to figure out how to come out as homosexual to his friends and family; a writer who’d been told by a different conference that they would allow him to speak but would not carry his book because it had overtly religious content; and me, which is an interesting story on its own.

I was on that panel because six months earlier, I’d been at lunch with a number of fellow writers who had just heard about the first incident mentioned above. They were all indignant, shocked, appalled, and surprised…and while I was just as indignant and appalled at the conference’s attitude, it fairly quickly became obvious to everyone at the table that I was neither shocked nor surprised that something like that could happen “in this day and age.” So they asked me why.

“Because that kind of thing happens all the time,” I said.

“No, no, certainly not!” they all told me.

So I told them about the teacher who almost got fired when a parent objected to her reading Calling on Dragons in her classroom, because “it taught witchcraft!” I mentioned the fellow YA author who was disinvited from a school visit (these are day-long programs where an author talks to several classes worth of kids and usually has lunch with the teachers, and for some YA authors, they contribute a goodly chunk to their income) because a parent noticed a title on her extensive bibliography that “sounded occult” (it was a mystery, with not a whiff of the supernatural anywhere in the text). I pointed out the well-publicized attempts to suppress the Harry Potter books (the series is #1 on the ALA’s top ten most challenged books of the decade for 2000-2009), and a few less-well-publicized attempts to remove from school shelves things like The Wizard of Oz (because Dorothy is too independent and solves her own problems), The Lord of the Rings (because it is “Satanic”), and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (because the stories are “too violent”).

None of this was, I thought, stop-the-presses news – certainly not to anyone who writes fantasy. But the other writers at the table were shocked all over again. One of them happened to be on the program committee for the regional conference, and she went home and put the panel together.

When she asked me to be on the panel, I immediately said yes, and then I went off to the internet to do some research. I wanted some examples that would hit closer to home. I found quite a lot, but as I looked through the web sites, I noticed something interesting. I live in Minnesota. All of the descriptions of book-banning incidents in Minnesota were from the websites of organizations based in distant states: Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Georgia.

So I poked a little more. There were quite a few local web sites publicizing Banned Books Week, and all of them did indeed have descriptions of surprising book-banning incidents. Incidents that took place in other states, like Texas, Georgia, and California.

OK, I admit that this is not a scientifically valid statistical survey. Still, it’s suggestive. Book banning doesn’t seem to be something that anyone wants to admit happens in their own backyard. And it is extremely easy to avoid admitting that it happens, because it is very, very rare that more than a couple of people even hear about a challenge. Often, the librarian (or, rarely, bookseller) and maybe an administrator are the only ones who ever hear that someone has objected to a particular book. They don’t notify other parents (the vast majority of book challenges are to schools or school libraries). They certainly don’t notify authors unless there’s an appearance involved – the only reason I know about my book and that teacher is that she came up to me at a conference and told me herself.

You can find some of the information if you look for it. The ALA collects statistics, but they can only include challenges for which there is a record – a newspaper article or a written report. By some estimates, that’s barely half the number of challenges or objections. And how many people ever bother to go looking? For the stuff that isn’t reported…well, you have to ask the school librarian or volunteer for the library review committee (if there is one and if it includes non-employee members).

I support Banned Books Week. I support it for all kinds of books. Yes, there are some that I personally wouldn’t have in my house, but if I only object to the banning of books I like and agree with, I’m as bad as the people issuing challenges to books I love.

I mulled it over for a few days before I figured out why I was having so much trouble coming up with an answer. See, the problem is that I really, really like my creature comforts:  hot showers and central heating and air conditioning and the internet (and all the rest of the high-tech toys of modern life) and so on. And there aren’t very many times and places that have those things, and the ones that do…well, I lived through those, and my memory is pretty good. I don’t really see a need to go back ten or fifteen years to do on-the-spot historical research when all I really need is to look up the occasional fact. (Go back fifteen years and arrange to buy a big wodge of Microsoft stock, maybe, but not for historical research.)

Really, it comes down to the fact that I’m a writer, not a historian. I care about odd details of everyday life and peculiar historical events because they are useful in my work, not because they are my work. And I learned long ago that I don’t actually have to have personal experience of something in order to write about it. Which was a great relief to me personally; my entire genre would disappear overnight if “you have to have done it yourself” ever became a requirement for writing about dragons and magic and so on.

Even people with a strongly kinesthetic learning style don’t have to murder anyone to write a murder mystery. There’s a reason it’s called fiction – no matter how gritty and realistic the story, a lot of it is still made up out of the writer’s imagination. Besides, I don’t write historical fiction. I write historical fantasy, which ranges from the sort of thing that is historically accurate “secret history” through alternate histories of varying accuracy to things like Lois Bujold’s The Sharing Knife, where the only thing that’s the same is the geography.

My stuff is somewhere in the middle of the range. Depending on the story I want to tell, I play fast and loose with the effects of real, acknowledged, everyday magic on historical events (which, realistically, would probably result in things being very, very different starting from whenever real magic was discovered). I don’t do carefully extrapolated “make one change in real history and work out in meticulous detail what happens from there” alternate history – if that’s what people are after, Harry Turtledove has a long list of really fine books that will keep them happy.

I still do lots of research, though. If something in my story is going to be different from real history, I want to do it on purpose and not by accident. More than that, though, is the fact that consistency is one of the fantasy novelist’s most useful and effective tools, and the easiest way to make one’s worldbuilding consistent and complex is to use what’s already there in real life. But I don’t need to go look at it in person. I can get everything I need while sitting in my comfy chair with my cats sleeping on my legs. Books are a grand thing.