Many of them have this in common, though: they express doubts that the author will read the letter, let alone answer it. The letter is an act of faith. It’s as though they’ve put a message in a bottle and tossed it into the sea. But …
… well, when I was young, I wrote a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, just as he was becoming extravagantly famous. I think the book that impressed me was Smith of Wootton Major. Mine must have been among hundreds or thousands of letters he received every week. I got a reply. It might have been dictated. For all I know, it might have been typed to a format. But it was signed.
He must have had a sackful of letters from every commune and university in the world, written by people whose children are now grown-up and trying to make a normal life while being named Galadriel or Moonchild. It wasn’t as if I’d said a lot. There were no numbered questions. I just said I’d enjoyed the book very much. And he said thank you.
For a moment, it achieved the most basic and treasured of human communications: you are real, and therefore so am I.
After thinking about that, I’ve tried to persuade myself that the mail isn’t a distraction from writing but some kind of necessary echo of it. It’s part of the whole process. A kind of after-sales service. There is, admittedly, the terminally weird letter, although these are rare. And sometimes the handwriting defeats us. And readers who want to continue a lengthy correspondence sometimes have to be gently let down, because of God’s lack of foresight in putting only twenty-four hours in one day. But apart from those rarities, they all get answered sooner or later … I hope. It’s part of the whole thing, if ever I manage to work out what the whole thing is.
WYRD IDEAS
The Author, Autumn 1999
… these days, of course, there are as many e-mails as letters.
“Hey U R 1 kewl dood, can U give Me some Tips about Writing?” You may be familiar with e-mails like this, if you’re known to be an author with an Internet address. On the Internet, no one cares how you spell. Dyslexia is imitated, not as an affliction but as a badge of coolth. Some of the younger users regard as suspicious any suggestion that vaguely competent English has a part to play. I suggested to one correspondent that, if he wished to be a writer, he should allow grammar, spelling, and punctuation to enter his life; he bridled, on the basis that “publishers have people to do that’!
Ahem …
My e-mail address is public, and easily tracked down. I am a popular author. I no longer count the e-mails I get every day. I answer as many as I can.
Fairly early on, I learned that a filter on my mailbox was essential to electronic survival; that decision was made, in fact, in the days when I still used a 2,400 baud modem and someone decided to e-mail me their illustrated manuscript—all three megabytes of it (the ethos of the Internet was evolved by people who did not have to pay their own phone bills). Besides, a filter also helps cut out all that spam addressed to “friend.” No stranger who is up to any good calls you “friend.”
That was just irksome. Now I’ve hit what I think is a real problem.
One of the traditions of the fantasy and science fiction genre is communication; fans like to be in touch with lots of other fans and they embraced the Internet with amazing speed as an alternative to the mimeograph machine or computer printer. And another tradition has been “fan fiction.”
Plenty of other genres have their fans, but “fanfic” is unique to F&SF, as far as I know. People, out of the love of doing it, write further stories set in some professional author’s universe and using established characters and background, and publish them on an amateur basis for the pleasure of their friends.
Traditionally, since in many cases they themselves were once fans (it’s hard to imagine becoming a science fiction writer without having a liking for science fiction) the genre authors have turned a benign or blind eye to this legally dubious activity. Be happy that you have fans has been the consensus, and if you have fans they will be … fannish. It’s not a bad training ground for writers. It’s just part of the whole thing.
Authors who write a popular series find that readers are not passive receivers: they take the view that the author writes the script but the movie is played out in the reader’s own head, and therefore the enterprise is in some ways a collaboration or interactive one in which the reader has rights, if only the right to an opinion. This sort of thing has gone on for years in a private kind of way (“Dear Miss Austen, I think it would be really cool if one of your heroines were to fall in love with Napoleon …”). It’s probably healthy. The trouble is that the Net is not private and it magnifies everything, good and bad.
I used to read the two newsgroups devoted to me and my work. It is fun to see one’s books publicly deconstructed by an Oxford don on the same newsgroup as they are deconstructed by someone who thinks Star Wars is a really old movie. But I recently stopped reading them, after seven years.
I started to get nervous when people began posting, on the public newsgroups, plot suggestions for future books and speculation about how characters would develop. The Net is still new, and it is big and it is public, and has brought with it new perceptions and problems. (One minor one is that people are out driving their language on a worldwide highway without passing a test. Take the word plagiarize. I know what it means. You know what it means. Lawyers certainly know what it means. But I have seen it repeatedly used as a synonym for research, parody, and reference, as in “Wyrd Sisters was plagiarized from Shakespeare.” That was a book of mine and, yes, well, it certainly does add to the enjoyment if you’ve heard of a certain Scottish play and … er … where do I start?)
Now add to this the growth of strange ideas about copyright. At one end of the spectrum I get nervous letters asking “Will it be all right if I name my cat after one of your characters?” At the other are the e-mails like: “I enjoyed the story so much that I’ve scanned it in and put it on my Web page … hope you don’t mind.” Copyright is either thought to exist in every single word, or not at all.
In short, I began to worry, in this overheated atmosphere, about what would happen if I used a story line that a fan had already posted on the Net or on some fanfiction Web page.