In August 1988 I brought this story to the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop. That draft of the story included a disclaimer at the end, a statement that the story was fiction, that Geoffrey is my oldest child and that no landlord of mine has ever done us harm. The reaction of the other writers at the workshop ranged from annoyance to fury.
Karen Fowler put it most succinctly when she said, as best I can remember her words, “By telling this story in first person with so much detail from your own life, you've appropriated something that doesn't belong to you. You've pretended to feel the grief of a parent who has lost a child, and you don't have a right to feel that grief.”
When she said that, I agreed with her. While this story had been rattling around in my imagination for years, I had only put it so firmly in first person the autumn before, at a Halloween party with the students of Watauga College at Appalachian State. Everybody was trading ghost stories that night, and so on a whim I tried out this one; on a whim I made it highly personal, partly because by telling true details from my own life I spared myself the effort of inventing a character, partly because ghost stories are most powerful when the audience half-believes they might be true. It worked better than any tale I'd ever told out loud, and so when it came time to write it down, I wrote it the same way.
Now, though, Karen Fowler's words made me see it in a different moral light, and I resolved to change it forthwith. Yet the moment I thought of revising the story, of stripping away the details of my own life and replacing them with those of a made-up character, I felt a sick dread inside. Some part of my mind was rebelling against what Karen said. No, it was saying, she's wrong, you do have a right to tell this story, to claim this grief.
I knew at that moment what this story was really about, why it had been so important to me. It wasn't a simple ghost story at all; I hadn't written it just for fun. I should have known—I never write anything just for fun. This story wasn't about a fictional eldest child named “Scotty.” It was about my real-life youngest child, Charlie Ben.
Charlie, who in the five and a half years of his life has never been able to speak a word to us. Charlie, who could not smile at us until he was a year old, who could not hug us until he was four, who still spends his days and nights in stillness, staying wherever we put him, able to wriggle but not to run, able to call out but not to speak, able to understand that he cannot do what his brother and sister do, but not to ask us why. In short, a child who is not dead and yet can barely taste life despite all our love and all our yearning.
Yet in all the years of Charlie's life, until that day at Sycamore Hill, I had never shed a single tear for him, never allowed myself to grieve. I had worn a mask of calm and acceptance so convincing that I had believed it myself. But the lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell, and I am no exception. A story that I had fancied was a mere lark, a dalliance in the quaint old ghost-story tradition, was the most personal, painful story of my career—and, unconsciously, I had confessed as much by making it by far the most autobiographical of all my works.
Months later, I sat in a car in the snow at a cemetery in Utah, watching a man I dearly love as he stood, then knelt, then stood again at the grave of his eighteen-year-old daughter. I couldn't help but think of what Karen had said; truly I had no right to pretend that I was entitled to the awe and sympathy we give to those who have lost a child. And yet I knew that I couldn't leave this story untold, for that would also be a kind of lie. That was when I decided on this compromise: I would publish the story as I knew it had to be written, but then I would write this essay as an afterword, so that you would know exactly what was true and what was not true in it. Judge it as you will; this is the best that I know how to do.
Authors have no more story ideas than anyone else. We all live through or hear about thousands of story ideas a day. Authors are simply more practiced at recognizing them as having the potential to become stories.
The real challenge is to move from the idea through the process of inventing the characters and their surroundings, structuring the tale, and discovering the narrative voice and the point of view, and finally writing it all down in a way that will be clear and effective for the reader. That's the part that separates people who wish they were writers or intend someday to write a book, and those of us who actually put the words down on paper and send them out in hope of finding an audience.
To the best of my memory, here are the origins of each of the stories in this book:
I was working at The Ensign magazine as an assistant editor and sometime staff writer. Jay A. Parry was copy editor there, as he had been at Brigham Young University Press, where my editorial career began. In fact, Jay was the one who alerted me to the possibility of applying for a position at The Ensign and helped shepherd me through the process.
He and I and another editor, Lane Johnson, all had dreams of being writers. I had already had something of a career as a playwright, but when it came to prose fiction we were all new. We started taking lunch together down in the cafeteria of the LDS Church Office Building in Salt Lake City, riding the elevators down from the twenty-third floor, grabbing a quick salad, and then hunching over a table talking stories.
Naturally, when we actually wrote the stories down, we showed them to each other. In many ways we were the blind leading the blind—none of us had sold anything when we began. Yet we were all professional editors; we all worked in a daily mill of taking badly written articles, restructuring them, and then rewriting them smoothly and clearly. We might not have known how to sell fiction, but we certainly knew how to write. And we also knew how to see other people's work clearly and search for the soul of their story, in order to preserve that soul through any number of incarnations as text.
(Indeed, that may be the reason I have always been so skeptical of the whole contemporary critical scene, in which the text is regarded as some immutable miracle, to be worshipped or dissected as if it were the story itself. What anyone trained as an editor and rewriter knows is that the text is not the story—the text is merely one attempt to place the story inside the memory of the audience. The text can be replaced by an infinite number of other attempts. Some will be better than others, but no text will be “right” for all audiences, nor will any one text be “perfect.” The story exists only in the memory of the reader, as an altered version of the story intended (consciously or not) by the author. It is possible for the audience to create for themselves a better story than the author could ever have created in the text. Thus audiences have taken to their hearts miserably-written stories like Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, because what they received transcended the text; while any number of beautifully written texts have been swallowed up without a trace, because the text, however lovely, did a miserable job of kindling a living story within the readers' memories.)
How other stories in this collection grew out of that friendship, those lunchtime meetings, will be recounted in their place. This story came rather late in that time. I had already left The Ensign magazine and was beginning my freelance career. I still had much contact with the Ensign staff because I was supposed to be finishing a project that I had not yet completed when I resigned my position as of 1 January 1978. In one conversation I had with Jay Parry, he mentioned a terrible dream he had had. “You can use it for a story if you want,” he said. “I think there's a story in it, but it would be too terrible for me to write.”
Jay lacks my vicious streak, you see; or perhaps it's just that he was already a father and I wasn't. I'm not altogether sure I could write this story after Kristine and I started having kids. At the time, though, Jay's nightmare image of a child with flipper arms drowning in a toilet seemed fascinating, even poignant.
I had recently read whatever story collection of Harlan Ellison's was current at the time, and I had discerned a pattern in his toughest, meanest tales—a sin-and-punishment motif in which terrible things only seemed to happen to the most appropriate people. It seemed obvious to me that the way to develop this deformed baby into a story was to have it come into the life of someone who deserved to be confronted with a twisted child.
After my first draft, however, I submitted the story to Francois Camoin, by then my teacher in writing classes at the University of Utah. I had taken writing classes before, and except for occasional helpful comments had found that their primary value was that they provided me with deadlines so I had to produce stories. Francois was different—he actually understood, not only how to write, but also how to teach writing, a skill that is almost completely missing among teachers of creative writing in America today. He didn't know everything—no one does—but compared to what I knew at the time he might as well have known everything! Even though I was selling my science fiction quite regularly, I still didn't understand, except in the vaguest way, why some of my stories worked and others didn't. Francois helped open up my own work to me, both its strengths and weaknesses.
As a playwright I had learned that I have a tendency to write in epigrams; as one critical friend put it, all my characters said words that were meant to be carved in stone over the entrance of a public building. That tendency toward clever didacticism was still showing up in my fiction (and probably still does). It was Francois who helped me understand that while the events of the story should be clear—what happened and why—the meaning of the story should be subtle, arcane; it should be left lying about for readers to discover, but never forced upon them. “This story is about guilt,” said Francois. “In fact, the child, the tiny Fury, is guilt. When you have a word embodied in a story, the word itself should never appear. So don't ever say the word 'guilt' in this story.”
I knew at once that he was right. It wasn't just a matter of removing the word, of course. It meant removing most sentences that had the word in it, and occasionally even whole paragraphs had to come out. It was a pleasurable process, though not without some pain—rather like peeling away dead skin after a bad sunburn. What was left was much stronger.
It appeared in a rather obscure place—Roy Torgeson's Chrysalis anthology series from Zebra books. But Terry Carr picked it up for his best-of-the-year fantasy anthology, so it got a little better exposure. My name is on it, but much of this story is owed to others: Jay, for the seminal image; Harlan, for the basic structure; and Francois, for the things that aren't in the text here printed.
Like “Eumenides,” this story began with someone else's nightmare. My wife woke up one morning upset by a strange lingering dream. We lived at the time in a rented Victorian house on J Street in the Avenues district of Salt Lake City. We were only a bit more than a block from the Emigration Ward LDS meetinghouse, where we attended church. In Kristine's dream, the bishop of our ward had called us up and told us that they were holding a funeral for a stranger the next day, but that tonight there was no place to keep the coffin. Would we be willing to let them bring it by and leave it in our living room until morning?
Kristine isn't in the habit of saying no to requests for help, even in her dreams, and so she agreed. She woke up from her dream just as she was opening the coffin lid.
That was all—a stranger's coffin in the living room. But I knew at once that there was a story in it, and what the story had to be. A coffin in your own living room can only have one body in it: your own. And so I sat down to write a story of a man who was haunting his own house without realizing it, until he finally opened the coffin and climbed in, accepting death.
What I didn't know when I started writing was why he was left outside his coffin for a while, and why he then reconciled himself to death. So I started writing as much of the story as I knew, hoping something would come to me. I told of the moment of his death in his office, though he didn't realize it was death; I wrote of his homecoming; but the ultimate meaning of the story came by accident. I can't remember now what my mistake was in the first draft. Something like this: During the office scene I had written that he had no children, but by the time I wrote his homecoming, I had forgotten his childlessness and had him hear children's voices or see their drawings on the refrigerator—or something to that effect. Only when I showed the first draft of the story's opening to Kristine did we (probably she) notice the contradiction.
It was one of those silly dumb authorial lapses that every writer commits. My first thought was simply to change one or the other reference so they were reconciled.
However, as I sat there, preparing to revise, I had an intuition that my “mistake” was no mistake at all, but rather my unconscious answer to the fundamental question in the story: Why couldn't he accept death at first? Instead of eliminating the contradiction, I enhanced it, switching back and forth. Now they have children, now they don't. He could not accept death until their childlessness was replaced with children.
If you want to get psychological about it, Kristine was pregnant with our first child at the time. My “mistake” may have been a traditional freudian slip, revealing my ambivalence about entering onto the irrevocable step of having and raising children. What matters more, however, is not the personal source of the feeling, but what I learned about the process of writing: Trust your mistakes. Over and over again since then, I have found that when I do something “wrong” in an early draft of the story, I should not eliminate it immediately. I should instead explore it and see if there's some way that the mistake can be justified, amplified, made part of the story. I have come to believe that a storyteller's best work comes, not from his conscious plans, but from his impulses and errors. That is where his unconscious mind wells up to the surface. That is how stories become filled, not with what the writer believes that he believes, or thinks he ought to care about, but rather with what he believes without question and cares about most deeply. That is how a story acquires its truth.
The idea for this story came simply enough. My son, Geoffrey, was a born insomniac. It took him hours to fall asleep every night, and we learned that the most effective way to get him to sleep was for me to hold him and sing to him. (For some reason he responded more to a baritone than a mezzo-soprano.) This would continue until he was four or five years old; by that time I was spending a couple of hours a night lying by his bed, reading in the dim light from the hall while humming the tune to “Away in a Manger.” When he was a baby, though, I stood in his room, rocking back and forth, singing, nonsense songs that included tender lyrics like, “Go to sleep, you little creep, Daddy's about to die.” Even when he finally seemed to have drifted off I learned that he was only faking, and if I laid him down too soon he'd immediately scream. I appreciate a call for an encore as much as the next guy, but enough is enough. Especially since Kristine was asleep in the other room. Most of the time I didn't begrudge her that—she would be up in the morning taking care of Geoffrey (always an early riser no matter how late he dropped off) while I slept in, so it all evened out. Still, there were many nights when I stood there, rocking back and forth, listening to both of them breathing during the breaks in my lullaby.
One night I realized that Geoffrey's breath on my shoulder was exactly in rhythm with my wife's breath as she slept in the other room. The two of them inhaling and exhaling in perfect unison. My mind immediately began to take the idea and wander with it. I thought: It doesn't matter how long Daddy stands here singing to the kid, the bond with his mother is always the strongest one, right down to the level of their breathing. Mother and child share the same breath so long together—it's no surprise that out of the womb the child still seeks to breathe with her, to cling to the rhythms of his first and best home. From there my thoughts wandered to the fact that the unborn child is so tied to the mother that if she dies, he dies with her.
Before Geoffrey fell asleep, the story was written in my mind: Breathing in unison is a sign, not that people were born together, but that they were now irrevocably doomed to die together.
My life can be viewed as one long struggle with my own body. I wasn't hopelessly uncoordinated as a kid. If I tried, I could swing a bat or get a ball through a hoop. And I suppose that if I had worked at it, I could have held my own in childhood athletics. But some are born nerds, some choose nerdhood, and some have nerdiness thrust upon them. I chose. I just didn't care about sports or physical games of any kind. As a child, given the choice, I would always rather read a book. Soon enough, however, I learned that this was a mistake. By the time I got to junior high, I realized that young male Americans are valued only for their contribution to athletic contests—or so it seemed to me. The result was that to avoid abuse, I avoided athletic situations.
Then, when I was about fifteen, I passed some sort of metabolic threshold. I had always been an outrageously skinny kid—you could count my ribs through my shirt. All of a sudden, though, without any change that I was aware of in my eating habits, I began to gain weight. Not a lot—just enough that I softened in the belly. Began to get that faintly pudgy wormlike look that is always so attractive and fashionable, especially in teenage boys. As the years passed, I gained a little more weight and began to discover that the abuse heaped upon nerds in childhood is nothing like the open, naked bigotry displayed toward adults who are overweight. People who would never dream of mocking a cripple or making racial or ethnic slurs feel no qualms about poking or pinching a fat person's midriff and making obscenely personal remarks. My hatred of such people was limitless. Some of my acquaintances in those days had no notion how close they came to immediate death.
The only thing that keeps fat people from striking back is that, in our hearts, most of us fear that our tormentors are right, that we somehow deserve their contempt, their utter despite for us as human beings. Their loathing for us is only surpassed by our loathing for ourselves.
I had my ups and downs. I weighed 220 pounds when I went on my LDS mission to Brazil in 1971. Through much walking and exercise, and relatively little eating (though Brazilian ice cream is exquisite) I came home two years later weighing 176 pounds. I looked and felt great. And the weight stayed off, mostly, for several years. I became almost athletic. My first two summers home, I operated a summer repertory theatre at an outdoor amphitheatre, the Castle, on the hill behind the state mental hospital. We weren't allowed to drive right up to the Castle, so at the beginning of every rehearsal we would walk up a switchback road. Within a few weeks I was in good enough shape that I was running up the steepest part of the hill right among the younger kids, and reaching the stage of the Castle without being out of breath. We had a piano that we stored in a metal box at the base of the amphitheatre and carried—not rolled —up a stony walkway to the stage for rehearsals and performances of musicals (Camelot, Man of La Mancha, and my own Father, Mother, Mother, and Mom). Soon I was carrying one end of the piano alone. I reveled in the fact that my body could be slender and well-muscled, not wormlike at all.
But then I began my editorial career and my theatre company folded, leaving me with heavy debts. I spent every day then sedentary and tense, with a candy machine just around the corner. My only exercise was pushing quarters into the machine. By the time I got married in 1977 I was back up to 220 pounds. Freelance writing made things even worse. Whenever I needed a break, I'd get up, walk thirty feet into the kitchen, make some toast and pour some orange juice. All very healthy. And only about a billion calories a day. I was near 265 pounds when I wrote “Fat Farm.” It was an exercise in self-loathing and desperate hope. I knew that I was capable of having a strong, healthy body, but lacked the discipline to create it for myself. I had actually gone through the experience of trading bodies—it just took me longer than it took the hero of the story. In a way, I suppose the story was a wish that someone would make me change.
Ironically, within a few months after writing “Fat Farm,” our lives went through a transition. We were moving to a larger house. The first thing I did was take all my old thin clothes and give them away to charity. I knew that I would never be thin again. It was no longer an issue. I was going to be a fat person for the rest of my life. Orson Welles was my hero.
Then I began packing up our thousands of books and carrying and stacking the boxes. The exercise began to take up more and more of each day. I ate less and less, since I wasn't constantly looking for breaks from writing. By the time we got into our new place, I had dropped ten pounds. Just like that, without even trying.
So I kept it up. Eating little—I now followed a thousand-calorie balanced diet— and exercising more and more, within a year I was 185 pounds and was riding a bicycle many miles a day. And I stayed thin for several years. Not until I moved to North Carolina and got a sedentary job under extreme tension did I put the weight back on again. I sit here writing this with a current weight of 255 pounds. But that's down almost ten pounds from my holiday high, and I'm riding an exercise bike and enjoying the sensation of being hungry most of the time and—who knows?
In short, “Fat Farm” isn't fiction. It's my physical autobiography.
And it's no accident that the story ends with our hero set up to fulfill ugly violent assignments. The undercurrent of violence is real. I hereby warn all those who think it's all right to greet a friend by saying, “Put on a little weight, haven't you!” You would never dream of greeting a friend by saying, “Wow, that's quite an enormous pimple you've got on your nose there,” or, “Can't you afford to buy clothes that look good or do you just have no taste?” If you did, you would expect to lose the friend. Well, be prepared. Some of us are about to run out of patience with your criminal boorishness. Someday one of you is going to glance down at our waistline, grin, and then—before you can utter one syllable of your offensive slur—we're going to break you into a pile of skinny little matchsticks. No jury of fat people would convict us.
I think it was in a conversation with Jay and Lane that we began wondering what death might feel like. Maybe, after all our fear of it, the actual moment of death—not the injuries leading up to it, but the moment itself—was the most sublime pleasure imaginable. After a few months of letting this idea gel in the back of my mind, I hit on the device of using time travel as a way to let people experience death without dying.
Time travel is one of those all-purpose science fictional devices. You can do anything with it, depending on how you set up the rules. In this case, I made it so that the time-traveler's body does materialize in the past, and can be injured—but upon return the body is restored to its condition when it left, though still feeling whatever feelings it had just before the return. It's a fun exercise for science fiction writers, to think up new variations on the rules of time travel. Each variation opens up thousands of possible stories. That's why it's so discouraging to see how many time-travel stories use the same old tired cliches. These writers are like tourists with cameras. They don't actually come to experience a strange land. They just take snapshots of each other and move on. Snapshot science fiction might as well not be written. Why write a time-travel story if you don't think through the mechanics of your fantasy and find the implications of the particular rules of your time-travel device? As long as we're dealing in impossibilities, why not make them interesting and fresh?
But I digress. Being a preacher at heart, I found that with this story I had written a homily of hedonism as self-destruction. Absurd as these people may seem, their obsession with a perverse pleasure is no stranger than any other pleasure that seduces its seekers from the society of normal human beings. Drug users, homosexuals, corporate takeover artists, steroid-popping bodybuilders and athletes—all such groups have, at some time or another, constructed societies whose whole purpose is celebrating the single pleasure whose pursuit dominates their lives, while it separates them from the rest of the world, whose rules and norms they resent and despise. Furthermore, they pursue their pleasure at the constant risk of self-destruction. And then they wonder why so many other people look at them with something between horror and distaste.
The origin of this idea is simple enough. I learned to drive a car only in my early twenties (the state of Utah required that you take driver's ed. before you could get a license, my high school didn't offer it, and I never had time to take it on my own), and so went through my aggressive teenage driving period when I was over twenty-one. Thus even as I went through my bouts of naked competitiveness and aggression on the highway, I was intellectually mature enough to recognize the madness of my behavior. And, rarely, that intellectual awareness curbed some of my stupidest impulses. For instance, long before freeway shootings in California, I realized that when you flash your brights at some bozo you're taking your life in your hands. No, the way to punish a freeway offender was to do it passively. Follow them. Just—follow. Not tailgating. Just—following. If they squirt ahead in traffic, don't leap out to follow. Just work your way up until a few minutes later, there you are again, following. If they really deserve a scare, take a little bit of time out of your life and take their exit with them. Follow them along residential streets. Watch them panic.
I never actually went to that extreme—never actually followed somebody off the freeway. But I did follow a couple of bozos long enough that it clearly made them nervous; yet I never did anything aggressive enough to make them mad. They could never really be sure that they were being followed. It was the crudest thing I can remember doing.
I thought for a while of writing a humor piece about freeway games—ways to pass the time while on long commutes. But when I showed my first draft to Kristine, she said, “That isn't funny, that's horrible.” So I set it aside.
Later, taking a writing course from Francois Camoin, I decided to write a story that had no science fiction or fantasy element in it. While trying to think of something to write about, I hit on that “freeway games” essay and realized that when Kristine said it was horrible, I should have realized that she really meant that the idea was horror. A horror story with no monster except the human being behind the wheel. Somebody who didn't know when to stop. Who kept pushing and pushing until somebody died. In short, me—only out of control. So I wrote a story about a normal nice person who suddenly discovers one day that he's a monster after all.
I remember reading a spate of stories about human beings who had been cyborgized —their brains put into machinery so that moving an arm actually moved a cargo bay door and walking actually fired up a rocket engine, that sort of thing. It seemed that almost all of these stories—and a lot of robot and android stories as well—ended up being rewrites of “Pinocchio.” They always wish they could be a real boy.
In years since then, the fashion has changed and more sf writers celebrate rather than regret the body mechanical. Still, at the time the issue interested me. Couldn't there be someone for whom a mechanical body would be liberating? So I wrote a story that juxtaposed two characters, one a pinocchio of a spaceship, a cyborg that wished for the sensations of real life; the other a hopelessly crippled human being, trapped in a body that can never act, longing for the power that would come from a mechanical replacement. They trade places, and both are happy.
A simple enough tale, but I couldn't tell it quite that way. Perhaps because I wanted it to be truer than a fantasy, I told the story from the point of view of a human observer who could never know whether a real trade had taken place or whether the story was just a fantasy that made life livable for a young girl with no arms or legs. Thus it became a story about the stories we tell ourselves that make it possible to live with anything.
All this was many years before my third son, Charlie, was born. I never really believed that someday I would have a child who lies on his bed except when we put him in a chair, who stays indoors unless we take him out. In some ways his condition is better than that of the heroine of “Sepulchre of Songs”—he has learned to grasp things and can manipulate his environment a little, since his limbs are not utterly useless. In some ways his condition is worse—so far he cannot speak, and so he is far more lonely, far more helpless than one who can at least have conversation with others. And sometimes when I hold him or sit and look at him, I think back to this story and realize that the fundamental truth of it is something quite unrelated to the issue of whether a powerful mechanical body would be preferable to a crippled one of flesh and bone.
The truth is this: The girl in the story brought joy and love into the lives of others, and when she left her body (however you interpret her leaving), she lost the power to do that. I would give almost anything to see my Charlie run; I wake up some mornings full of immeasurable joy because in the dream that is just fading Charlie spoke to me and I heard the words of his mouth; yet despite these longings I recognize something else: You don't measure whether a life is worth living except by measuring whether that life is giving any good to other people and receiving any joy from them. Plenty of folks with healthy bodies are walking minuses, subtracting from the joy of the world wherever they go, never able to receive much satisfaction either. But Charlie gives and receives many delights, and our family would be far poorer if he weren't a part of us. It teaches us something of goodness when we are able to earn his smile, his laughter. And nothing delights him more than when he earns our smiles, our praise, and our joy in his company. If some cyborg starship passed by, imaginary or otherwise, offering to trade bodies with my little boy, I would understand it if he chose to go. But I hope that he would not, and I would miss him terribly if he ever left.
This story is a bit of whimsy, based in part on some thoughts about censorship and in part on the experience of knowing Doc Murdock, a fellow writing student in Francois Camoin's class. Doc really did support himself at times by gambling, though the last I heard he was making money hand-over-fist as a tech writer. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
I almost never consciously base characters on real people or stories on real events. Part of the reason is that the person involved will almost always be offended, unless you treat him as a completely romantic figure, the way I did with Doc Murdock. But the most important reason is that you don't really know any of the people you know in real life—that is, you never, ever, ever know why they do what they do. Even if they tell you why, that's no help because they never understand themselves the complete cause of anything they do. So when you try to follow a real person that you actually know, you will constantly run into vast areas of ignorance and misunderstanding. I find that I tell much more truthful and powerful stories when I work with fully fictional characters, because them I can know right down to the core, and am never hampered by thinking, “Oh, he'd never do that,” or, worse yet, “I'd better not show him doing that or so-and-so will kill me.”
And, in a way, “Prior Restraint” is proof that for me, at least, modeling characters on real people is a bad idea. Because, while I think the story is fun, it's also one of my shallower works. Scratch the surface and there's nothing there. It was never much deeper than the conscious idea.
By the way, this story was a long time making it into print. I wrote the first version of it very early in my career; Ben Bova rejected it, in part on the grounds that it's not a good idea to write stories about people writing stories, if only because it reminds the reader that he's reading a story. His advice was mostly right, though sometimes you want to remind readers they're reading. Still, I liked this idea, flaws and all, and so I sent it off to Charlie Ryan at Galileo. He accepted it—but then Galileo folded. Charlie wrote to me and offered to send the story back. I knew, however, that I wouldn't be able to sell it to Ben Bova or, probably, anybody else. So when Charlie suggested that he'd like to hang onto it in case someday he was able to restart Galileo or some other magazine, I agreed.
It was almost a decade later that a letter came out of the blue, telling me that Charlie was going to edit Aboriginal SF, and could he please use “Prior Restraint”? By then I was well aware of the relative weakness of the story, particularly considering the things I'd learned about storytelling since then. It might be a bit embarrassing to have such a primitive work come out now, in the midst of much more mature stories. But Charlie had taken the story back in the days when most editors didn't return my phone calls and some sent me insulting rejections; why shouldn't he profit from it now that things had changed? As long as the story wasn't too embarrassing. So I asked him to send me a copy and let me see if I still liked it.
I did. It wasn't a subtle piece, but it was still a decent idea and, with a bit of revision to get rid of my stylistic excesses from those days, I felt that it could be published without embarrassing me. I don't know whether to be chagrined or relieved that nobody seemed to be able to tell the difference—that nobody said, “ 'Prior Restraint' feels like early Card.” Maybe I haven't learned as much in the intervening years as I thought!
The genesis of this story is easy enough. I was living in South Bend, Indiana, where I was working on a doctorate at Notre Dame. One of my professors was Ed Vasta, one of the great teachers that come along only a few times in one's life. We both loved Chaucer, and he was receptive to my quirky ideas about literature; he also wrote science fiction, so that there was another bond between us. One night I was at a party at his house. After an hour of everybody grousing about the stupidity of Hesburgh's choosing a high school teacher named Gerry Faust as the football coach, we got on the subject of tarot. Ed was a semi-believer—that is, he didn't really believe in any occult phenomena, but he did think that the cards provided a focus, a framework for bringing intuitive understanding into the open.
Kristine and I are both very uncomfortable around any occult dealings, partly because we are very uncomfortable with the sort of people who believe in the occult. But this was Ed Vasta, a very rational man, and so I consented to a reading. I remember thinking that the process was fascinating, precisely because nothing happened that could not be explained by Vasta's own personal knowledge of me; and yet the cards did provide a way of relating that previous knowledge together in surprising and illuminating patterns. The experience led me to write a story, combining tarot with my then-new obsession with computers. The story itself is a cliche, a deliberately oedipal story by an author who thinks Freud's notion of an Oedipus complex is an utter crock. It's one of the few times that I've ever mechanically followed a symbolic structure, and for that reason it remains unsatisfying to me. What I really cared about were the ideas—the computer and the tarot cards—and I have since explored the interrelationship between storytelling computers and human beings in such works as my novels Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead.
This story began very recently when Lee Zacharias, my writing teacher at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, mentioned that suicide stories were common enough among young writers that she despaired of ever seeing a good one. I remembered that when I was teaching at Elon College the semester before I had gotten enough of those suicide endings to make the pronouncement to my students that I hereby forbade them to end a story with suicide. It was a cop-out, said I—it was a confession that the writer had no idea how the story really ought to end.
Now, though, I was feeling a bit defiant. I had said that suicide stories were dumb, and now Lee was saying the same thing. Why not see if I could write one that was any good? And why not make it even more impossible by making it first person present tense, just because I detest present tense and have declared that first person is usually a bad choice?
The result is one of the strangest stories I've ever written. But I like it. I enjoyed using this epistolary form to tell the tale of a hideously malformed relationship between a couple who had lived together far longer than they had any reason to.
This story came with its own afterword. Let me only add that since its publication, it has been criticized somewhat for its supposed cheating—I promise at the beginning to tell the truth, and then I lie. I can only say that it is a long tradition in ghost stories to pretend to be telling the truth; part of the pleasure in the tale is to keep the reader wondering whether this time the story might not be real. The ghost stories I've enjoyed most and remember the best have been the ones told as if they were true and had really happened to the teller. I tip my hat to Jack McLaughlin, a wonderful grad student in the theatre department at BYU, who spooked a whole bunch of us undergrad acting students with a really hair-raising poltergeist story that Actually Happened To Him.
I also enjoy the fact that criticisms of my story for violating expectations have all come from the more literary, “experimental” wing of the science fiction community. It seems that they love experimentation and literary flamboyance—but only if it follows the correct line. If somebody dares to do something that is surprisingly shocking instead of predictably shocking, well, fie on them. Thus do the radicals reveal their orthodoxy.
The fact remains that Lost Boys is the most autobiographical, personal, and painful story I've ever written. I wrote it in the absolutely only way I could have written it. So even if the manner of its writing is a literary crime, as these critics say, I can only answer, “So shoot me.” I'm in the business of telling true stories as well as I possibly can. I've never yet found any of their rules that helped me tell a story better; and if I had followed their rules on this story, I never could have told it at all.