It’s hard to imagine two books more different than Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun. The latter is set in our past, in 1693, at the chateau of Versailles and the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King. The former is set in our future, in a place never specified. The material possessions of the people in Dreamsnake are as spare as the trappings of Louis’ court were elaborate.
Yet I had the same feeling about The Moon and the Sun, while I was writing it, as I had about Dreamsnake. The books have a number of unusual similarities. Both novels involved characters who demanded to have their stories told. Though Dreamsnake is based on speculation about genetic engineering and The Moon and the Sun is based on speculation about human evolution, and neither contains any magical elements — SF if I ever heard it — they are often perceived as fantasy. Each book was rejected by the first publisher I offered it to, which then asked to see it again. In each case, my response was “Thanks, I’ve already sold it.” Both books were fortunate in their publishers.
The strangest fact about the two books is that I know where they came from.
As most writers will tell you, this is unusual.
We all dread the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” Not because it’s a stupid question. It’s a rather profound question, and often one that’s difficult, or impossible, to answer. The question inspires such apprehension that various cynical, sarcastic, or amusing answers to it have evolved. The most common is “I subscribe to the Plot of the Month Club, published in Schenectady.”
(I’m sorry, I can’t pass on the subscription address: I was sworn to secrecy when I joined Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.)
But Dreamsnake and The Moon and the Sun are unusual. When someone asks me how I got their ideas, I can answer the question.
I described the evolution of The Moon and the Sun in its afterword: scribbled note in response to a taped speech by Avram Davidson; research, screenplay, novel. (Update: Jim Henson Pictures optioned it.)
Dreamsnake began as a short story that I wrote at an early Clarion West writers workshop. By an interesting coincidence, Avram Davidson was the writer in residence who inspired the story.
On the first day of his teaching week, he made up two lists of words (one list pastoral, one technological), cut them apart, and put the slips into two Styrofoam cups. We each drew one random word from each of the cups.
We went off to lunch, moaning piteously about the ridiculous assignment: to write a story using both words. How could you write a story based on “Alpha Centauri” and “laughter,” or “psychoanalysis” and “lizard,” or “snake” and “cow”?
I was never clear on how I ended up with “snake” and “cow.” Maybe the slips got mixed up. Maybe Avram didn’t consider snakes pastoral. Maybe it was a joke. In any event, I thought life was hard.
“Why don’t you write a story with a main character named Snake?” said one of the other students. Then she laughed. She was one of the few people in the class who thought her two words were promising. (I don’t remember now what they were, but I do remember that she wrote a good story around them.)
“All right, I will!” I said, provoked.
That evening, the dorm hallway was deserted. Nobody stood around talking, nobody climbed the walls. Only one member of the class actually did climb the walls — and hide behind the ceiling beam to drop down on unwary passersby — though another liked to climb the roofs and try to figure out how to steal the gargoyles. Everybody was typing.
Almost everybody. I was stymied. I had a main character named Snake, but what was I to do with the wretched cow?
Somewhere around midnight the secondary meaning of cow, the verb form, wandered in out of left field (or possibly the back 40), and I wrote, “The little boy was frightened...”
I got twelve pages into the story before I bogged down again. It’s tempting to claim I was tired, but in truth I couldn’t figure out what a serpent named Grass would do.
I turned in my twelve pages the next day. As I remember it, almost everybody else turned in a completed story (good ones, too — at least half a dozen were published), but I had excuses. I wasn’t a student. I was the workshop organizer. I had a lot of organizing to do. I had to sulk because one of the local students threw a party and didn’t invite me. I had to track down some chicken feet so Avram could make soup.
My story languished for several weeks, very badly stuck on page twelve. People asked me about it. I glared.
Finally, during Terry Carr’s week as writer in residence, I realized that a serpent named Grass should have hallucinogenic venom. The idea came from out in the ozone (or maybe the back 40 again), and my only excuse for not realizing it sooner is that during the 1960s I was a science geek. I’m one of the few people around who understood Bill Clinton when he said he couldn’t inhale. My response to the question “Did you smoke dope in the ’60s?” is the minority reply: I admit I was too chicken.
(The majority answer is “Of course — didn’t everybody?”)
I stayed up all night writing the story of Snake and her serpents. In the morning I staggered to class and turned in my story and struggled to stay awake. That day’s stories came back, photocopied, and we all picked up our copies. I staggered back to my room (safely guarded by a poster Ursula K. Le Guin gave me: two buzzards on day-glo pink, the caption, “Patience, my ass! I’m going to kill something!”). I fell asleep.
The door of my room burst open and slammed against the wall. Someone stormed in.
I sat up, half asleep, completely disoriented.
She flung the manuscript to the floor. She was, as it happens, the student who told me to name my protagonist Snake.
“How dare you,” she cried, “write a story that makes me feel sorry for snakes!”
And stormed out again, slamming the door behind her.
“Huh,” I said, and went back to sleep.
The next day the story got a pretty good reception, though the class snake expert and boa constrictor owner said that even genetic engineering would not excuse a venomous python. Never mind, I said, it’s too heavy to carry, I’ll make it a cobra. Terry Carr said he would be willing to look at the polished story for his extremely prestigious anthology, Universe.
I was pretty puffed up by the end of class.
A week or so later, as I was putting the finishing touches on the story, I got a postcard from Terry telling me not to bother submitting it; he didn’t want to see it after all. I never did sell Terry Carr an original story.
Instead, I sent “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” to Analog. It isn’t what you’d normally think of as an Analog story, but Analog was the magazine I grew up reading. It was the place I always sent my stories first, even though John W. Campbell always rejected them without comment. (He was renowned for sending reams of comments on stories he rejected. Other people’s stories.)
Ben Bova had recently taken over as editor, and to my astonishment and pleasure, he bought the story.
“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” won the Nebula (despite a review that said it was a bad story because it shouldn’t have been published in Analog) at the 1974 Nebula Awards Ceremony in LA, organized fantastically by Jerry Pournelle. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, one of the guest speakers, handed me the award — a thrill equal to winning.
I hadn’t planned to expand the story, but the characters didn’t like being left, figuratively, hanging by their thumbs. They protested. That’s another thing many writers will tell you, besides that they have no clue where they get their ideas: a writers’ characters will walk into the writer’s mind and start talking.
When this happens, any smart writer won’t ask where the ideas came from — she’ll shut up and take the dictation on the story of her characters’ lives.