Communications with SFWA have unfortunately & for some unknown reason broken down; my default suspicion is technology but it could also be that, as SFWA is a volunteer organisation, all the admin who had been busting themselves senseless to make the actual (& virtual) convention come off are now exhaustedly catching up on life, paid work & sleep, & not answering SFWA mail. Meanwhile I have no idea where my first wodge of question-answering is hiding on the SFWA site, & I’ve had no acknowledgement whatsoever of my second wodge, so, since I’ve been NEGLECTING THE BLOG AGAIN partly because my trying-to-engage-with-readers energy has been going toward SFWA questions, I thought I’d hang both wodges here, so at least they’re not being wasted. Wasted perhaps being a somewhat dramatic verb in this instance since I’m doing my usual public-persona thing of reading a perfectly reasonable question & then grabbing the bit in my teeth & disappearing over the horizon in a wild tangent-tagging zigzag gallop. But that’s usually how I write the blog, so hey.
I’ve emboldened the queries to make them stand out.
First, I want to thank Robin for both The Blue Sword and for Beauty. Each arrived at critical moment for my own writing, and helped me decide on direction. My question is about The Blue Sword. How far were you intentionally challenging aspects of the standard stories we all held dear to that point? Did any other writer influence you to create that challenge, the way your work influenced mine?
Lol. ‘ . . . intentionally challenging aspects of the standard stories . . . ‘ You aren’t by any chance deliberately waving a red flag at a bu—I mean, a snorting, ground-pawing, matriarchal cow, are you? YES. When I was growing up, long long long ago, all the good stories were about boys. Boys got to do stuff. Girls didn’t. Jo March marries that boring old professor (like Marianne marries the horrible colonel with his flannel waistcoat), the girls in E Nesbit are always worrying about getting home in time for tea & have you ever stopped to think about the fact that while Dorothy speaks like anyone else in the WIZARD she suddenly starts lisping in the later books? ‘B’lieve’ & ‘s’pose’ & ‘’em’ & ‘’spect’ & so on & on. Now what the screaming doodah is that about? Can’t have a little girl going on having adventures can we? Let’s make her look like a twit. & that scene in Caddie Woodlawn—Caddie having been presented to us as a total tomboy—when only she is scolded for playing tricks on the stuck-up Annabelle because she’s the girl & girls have to grow up to keep the world sweet & beautiful because men can’t. KILL. ME. NOW. When I was first writing books that were published (!) & therefore first being interviewed, my war cry was Girls Who Do Things! I have lots of company now. Hurrah. To whatever extent that I’m partly responsible, both as writer & as example, for more Girls Doing Things in books, I’m delighted.
I’m a LOTR writer, pure & simple. I’m fond of saying (or possibly ranting) that every fantasy writer of my generation is a descendent of JRR Tolkien whether they want to be or not. I worshipped LOTR, & it totally shaped the writer I grew up to be—both for good & maybe not so good. I was endlessly depressed & angry & frustrated by the role, or lack thereof, of women, but because this was the world I was born into I also kind of thought, drearily, maybe that’s just the way it is for women? (I said in my speech that I didn’t look too hard for women SF&F writers because I at least half believed the redolent nonsense that women can’t write.)
PS: don’t talk to me about the films, I am not sane on the subject. I thought FELLOWSHIP was an honourable failure, I hated TT, & that’s as far as I got.
I’d like to ask Robin about “Chalice.” You’ve written a couple of versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” story, and I wondered to what degree you see “Chalice” as another retelling of the story? Particularly one that incorporates community and the environment. (I love “Chalice,” BTW, I reread it often.)
Thank you. 🙂
I’ve been thinking about this—retelling Beauty & the Beast—in the few days since I read your question. Have I ever written a story that includes a more or less standard love story, where one character falls in love with one other character, that doesn’t include them being from wildly different backgrounds, rather often that one or the other of them isn’t quite human, or that at least one of them has non-standard-human powers & skills? I said in the afterword to ROSE DAUGHTER, my second official Beauty & the Beast retelling, that someone once said that every writer has only one story to tell, & their life (& their royalties) depends on whether they can continue to find interesting ways to retell that one story. CHALICE isn’t an official Beauty & Beast retelling, to me, but it’s certainly another of my finding-each-other-across-what-should-be-insurmountable-differences stories. I’ve always felt like a misfit in human society—not that this is unusual; I would guess both most creative people of whatever colours & stripes & most of their audience, whatever their colours & stripes, would say the same, which must be just about everyone—& in my case this is the way it manifests itself in my stories. Hey, I’m a romantic. I believe in love across great divides. (I didn’t manage to marry a purple seven-limbed Betelgeuse-ian, but Peter was 25 years older than I & from another country, which counts for something.)
I am increasingly interested in community as I get older, of connections between & among people, not just one-on-one. Beauty & the Beast is basically a two-person (sic) story. Beauty’s family is critical but minor. I’m an only child from a (dysfunctional) military family that moved posting to posting every year or two. I came to even the idea of community later than many people. I, ahem, like it. CHALICE can be read as a close cousin to Beauty & the Beast, with the organising principle or motivation of CHALICE being community & the necessity of community. & community inevitably includes environment. People, human or otherwise, are rooted in their landscape; trouble comes if they don’t know this or don’t respect it. As for the bees specifically, well, I’m an animal nerd, although mostly I stick to standard critters like dogs, horses, cats. I’m aware that Mirasol’s bees are a lot more like dogs, horses & cats than standard this-world beekeeper’s honeybees. But CHALICE’s bees, I hope, underscore the community aspect. How exactly honeybee community works has fascinated beekeepers—& people who just like reading about beekeeping—since someone twisted the first skep together.
We’ve had a whole raft of not good — actually really bad — Robin Hood movies the last few years, or decades, and after the most recent one I went back and re-read “Outlaws” as a palate cleanser because I think it’s one of the best Robin Hood retellings… and it really got me thinking about what makes a good Robin Hood story. So — what are your thoughts about what makes a good Robin Hood story verses ones that aren’t successful?
(And I’m another one who loves “The Blue Sword.” When I found it I was a horse crazy misfit teenager who had just moved across country, and I think it was a perfect book for that moment.)
Thank you. 🙂
I think what I said in my afterword to OUTLAWS remains true—that Robin Hood works best as what its current teller wants to tell & its current audience wants to hear. (One hopes that these two perspectives will align.) Human society is likely to go on enduring upheavals between the haves & the have nots, including sneaky outliers who stealthily take from the haves & give to the have nots, while the major action or lack of it about social & material inequality is going on elsewhere. So the possibility of future Robin Hood retellings should remain pretty robust.
This also gets me out of having to acknowledge that the list of Robin Hood films I’ve seen is very, very short & the list of Robin Hood films I haven’t seen is very, very long. I haven’t even seen Prince of Thieves because I’m AHEM not a Kevin Costner fan AHEM although I do get a little starry eyed & wistful at the thought of Alan Rickman eating the scenery as the Sheriff of Nottingham. I never saw Robin & Marian because someone told me the plot & I was FURIOUS. (Audrey, how could you? You can’t have needed the money??)
Even I’ve seen The Adventures of Robin Hood. I’d take Basil Rathbone over Errol Flynn any day—& I believe Rathbone could have de-sworded Flynn with his eyes closed; I like to think that’s what you’re really seeing in his face as he lets Flynn win. Veering into feminist territory, as I am wont to do, I was fascinated many years later to find out that Olivia de Havilland was a fire-breather off screen. I only saw her early films where she played revoltingly swoony girls, never more so than in Robin Hood. (She’s quoted as having had a crush on Flynn. What is it with him anyway? His nose is too long & his eyes are too close together. Also I am resistant to the kind of charm based on adoring oneself so much one expects to sluice everyone else along into a vast quivering mass ejaculation of adoration. No thanks. I’d rather read a good book.) The Flynn-Rathbone is the classic Robin Hood of my childhood, although my enduring memory is the TV series with Richard Greene & that theme song.
But what provoked my OUTLAWS most was flaming-doodah Howard Pyle, which was the print Robin of my young impressionable years. The women are worse than Tolkien’s, & what’s with the murderous nun booming in out of nowhere as a particularly unpleasant plot device? Robin can’t just die, it has to involve treachery by a woman. Go Girl Power. What I wanted, as will come as no surprise to anyone reading the 2023 SFWA Grand Matriarch’s answers to questions, is a Robin Hood containing WOMEN WITH THEIR OWN FREAKING HONOUR & RESPONSIBILITY & AGENCY THANK YOU VERY BLASTED MUCH. & oh, my, didn’t I take some ferocious kicking for providing it! I was MESSING WITH A CLASSIC! I was inserting a bunch of girls into a boys’ own adventure which had done very well as such for centuries! Well, yes. I’m afraid that was the point . . .
& if there isn’t a multiracial LGBTQ+ retelling soon, I’ll be surprised—& a little disappointed, because it would suggest to me that Robin Hood is no longer live in people’s imaginations, & that would seem to me enormously too bad . . . pause . . . I’m sitting here staring into the middle distance & roughing up an outline. But the story would probably come better from someone who isn’t white, cis, middle-class & over 70. Although I don’t know where the lines are, & I have a lot of trouble with narrow definitions of ‘write what you know’ which, as the the opening salvo, eliminates all F&SF. We’re all in it together, & the more we can imaginatively step over each other’s lines & begin to comprehend each other’s realities, the better. But this isn’t easy. & some of us have better imaginations than others, & people who have been repeatedly bashed may be quite reactive if the bruises are bumped, & most if not all of us—probably all of us—have prejudices & habitual ways of thinking we’re not even aware of. Sigh. Good intentions are a start, but then the hard graft begins.
Perhaps there already is a nonbinary Robin out there with purple hair & a bad attitude & I haven’t happened across them.* I don’t keep up. (See: how many films I haven’t seen.) In which case please send title & author. (See: how many films I haven’t seen, & if it’s a film, don’t bother.)
Oh yeah, horse crazy teens. Greatheart, Sungold, Talat. Fast saves Rosie (& everybody else), but theirs isn’t a horse-crazy-teen relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still a horse-crazy-teen story waiting for me to tell it, but meanwhile there is a cranky old mare in a story that’s comparatively speaking on the short list of what I write next. Next-ish. Oh, for readers of the old blog, I did finish KES—well, part one; it’s one of my annoying semi-cliffhangers, I’ll go on with it if I can—that’ll appear some day, somehow, complete with Monster. & Sid of course.
* (Yes, it’s true, I can’t live without footnotes. Any poor confused person who tries to read my blog^ is well aware of this.)
I hate ‘they’ for someone who doesn’t identify as either male or female. The nonbinary is fine; ‘they’ is not. To my ear, & yes, I am het cis female & old with it, it is dehumanizing. We need more pronouns. & as soon as we get a nonspecific one I am going to start using it. Long before LGBTQ+ was a visible thing, I hated that you couldn’t be identified as ‘she’ without specifying your blasted marital status: what flaming business is it of anyone’s but yours & your husband’s if any? (I’m also trying to remember when lesbian couples started calling each other ‘wife’? Or for that matter gay men calling each other husband, but they aren’t outed by ‘Mr’.) Says the woman who couldn’t get a mortgage for her first house unless her (nonexistent) husband or her father cosigned. KISS. MY. ASS. I did eventually find a bank who would take me (possibly with tongs) but they were strange & indie-fringey. But when I was a girl growing up, ‘Miss’ was pathetic & spinstery, & spinster was a bad word; ‘Mrs’ meant you were officially owned by a member of the patriarchy. This may not make any sense to anyone else, but to me, ‘they’ for nonbinary has a similar sort of feel: people, individuals, are being jammed into a language that was created by the ruling class & they don’t fit. I love the complicated insanity of the English language; one of the additional reasons why I’m a slow writer is because I keep falling down word-choice rabbit holes, I have reference books all over the floor & a zillion tabs open in my browser. But English is not great about certain aspects of defining, or allowing not to be defined, what it is to be a human being.^^
PS: I have a friend with DID. They call themselves ‘they’. I get this. But being gender fluid or nonlinear sexually doesn’t make you a THEY. Well, unless you say it does. In which case please explain.
^ Yes it’s been another bad week, but I have a post in progress
^^ Really I’m being very good about footnotes. Blog readers will appreciate that this many words in a blog post would have racked up DOZENS of footnotes by now. (Well. Several. Trailing even more sub-footnotes.) But with reference to the whole freaking if you’re a woman you’re defined by your marital status: I use [NO TITLE] R McKinley Dickinson in my private life. Yes, I took Peter’s name when I married him: along with being a savage, head-tearing-off feminist, I’m also a romantic (see: all of my books) & I wanted to share a name with my husband. He would have taken McKinley on—& he called himself Mr Robin McKinley when we went to the States, frequently to the confusion of his listeners but it made me feel all warm & fuzzy—but I find that keeping up the savage-feminist thing is a real energy drain, & making him adopt McKinley seemed to me a principle too far. Keeping your own name too is, & was even thirty-plus years ago, a little lower profile for a married woman, so I became McKinley Dickinson, which goes on too long when you’re spelling it for someone over the phone. Living in the UK as a Robin confuses things further because here the default for the name is masculine; if I sign something Robin McKinley Dickinson the answer is inevitably addressed to Mr McKinley Dickinson. One of my pet peeves is web sites that DEMAND you choose a title; when so obliged, I do take Mrs. I’ve never liked Ms; it seems to me too clearly stuffed into use to plug a social gulf, & wielding it always felt like starting an argument. (I worry that our new nongenderspecific pronouns are going to have to run this gauntlet.) There was a web site very recently that offered, at the bottom of the title list, ‘Other’. So I ticked Other. & when my address popped up on the ‘review your order’ screen my name was Other R McKinley Dickinson. Hilarity. This may be my new default.
I’d love to ask what Robin’s reading and if she has book recommendations for us.
Golly. How long have you got? I’m not a very good book reccer however because I’m an absent-minded dilettante who is usually reading about 1,000,000 books simultaneously & all over the genre map.
I’ve often told the story of the (male) professor where I graduated from college (Bowdoin, where coeds as we were repulsively called back then, were a recent & mostly unwelcome innovation) saying condescendingly that all us English lit majors would find ourselves reading increasing amounts of nonfiction as we got older & (implied) wiser, although whether that included girls was perhaps unclear, since of course girls couldn’t think rationally anyway & the only wisdom we were liable to accrue would be about cake-baking techniques & house-plant care. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but not all that much. Being recognized as intelligent may have been a little more Augean for those of us who weren’t built for for the Socratic method; flights of fancy have always been my strong point, which doesn’t go over well with the patriarchy. I was a black-leather-motorcycle-jacket, Frye-boots wearing bitch in those days, & while I wince at my excesses, I’m still sympathetic to the feelings that produced them.
ANYWAY. It’s true, I read more nonfiction now than I did a few decades ago. There are seasons in my life when I read very nearly exclusively nonfiction, although it tends to be the soft end, animals & archaeology & psychology & history-of-the-common-people, what the yokels back on the farm were doing while the kings & princes [sic] were out slamming each other on the battlefield or over the [non]negotiating table. So if you’re expecting F&SF, um. Two fantasy novels I’ve actually read recently which I liked a lot however are LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS by Ryka Aoki& THE MAGICIAN’S DAUGHTER by HG Parry. I spent most of STARS thinking ‘she can’t possibly bring this off.’ She did. I was leaping around punching the air at the end. If you need any further reason to read it, how about this quote:
‘Ever wonder why . . . if there is intelligent life out there, the universe isn’t teeming with activity?’
‘Maybe the universe is filled with introverts?’
::falls down laughing:: I bet every (other) introvert who’s read it copied that carefully into their commonplace book too.
The thing I liked enormously about DAUGHTER is how good she is with both magical world-building & this-world recognisable emotional reality. In my experience you too often get only one or the other. If you’re going to write about people like rabbit familiars & crippled half-ravens, you need not only the imagination to come up with these creatures but the insight to make them real for a reader.
Ordinary fiction: to my surprise I really liked LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus. I never like hot, talked-about books; also its tongue in cheek style is very in your face & takes some getting used to. Or it did for me. It’s probably the talking dog (well, the thinking dog) that won me over; that & the delicious & frequently painfully funny collision of the—here we go again—patriarchal world our heroine lives in & her obstinate, humourless placing of one foot after the other in the direction she wants to go. Which is inevitably the long, frustrating way around because she is, after all, a woman in a man’s world. DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver. This is another one the author couldn’t possibly bring off, except she did. That voice. Wow. I don’t even know where to start. & yes, okay, DAVID COPPERFIELD, but never mind. I forgot about David for chapters & chapters; & maybe it’s because I live now & not in Dickens’ Victorian London I found Kingsolver’s social scalpel sharper than Dickens’, & I’m a big Dickens fan. (I am NOT starting about Dickens’ women, & how he can only write the bad & crazy ones. I am NOT.)
Nonfiction: I got started on forensic psychology by hearing an interview with Gwen Ashead, who wrote (with a ghost writer) THE DEVIL YOU KNOW. On the radio she sounded thoughtful & interesting, & her book is still the best of the bunch in my opinion. The worst thing about it to my eye is the stupid title; maybe it works for other people but it looks like a publisher’s fever dream to me, & I would never have picked it up if I hadn’t heard the interview. THE FIVE by Hallie Rubenhold. This is another one I only picked up because I heard the author being interviewed. I obsessively avoid everything about Jack the Ripper, & am creeped out by the enduring & what seems to me salacious fascination of this story about how five poor women died horribly. Jack is nearly a genre all by itself. Ugh. This however is about the five poor women, who they actually were—human beings! Fancy that! &, you know, they had lives & everything? Sad lives with very sad endings, but the book is a brilliant piece of history, & brings both the women & their world to grim & vivid life. Even though you know how it ends you’re sitting there watching these women’s lives unravelling & muttering, Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Underlining that this is about the women, Rubenhold doesn’t tell you a thing about the murders themselves.
I seem to have given you six books all with women authors . . .
Please let Robin know how much we appreciate this!
🙂
Thoughts on what writers of fiction can learn from writing in other mediums? (film, etc)
::falls down laughing::* Pass. I haven’t a clue. I’ve earned about $2.37 on film & TV rights in the last forty-plus years because I don’t like the contracts, which tend to say that the producer owns everything you’ve ever done or ever will do, & they’ve never offered me enough money to make me wonder if it might be worth it, & they’re not going ever to offer me enough money because I’m not Big & Famous or Screen Worthy enough. I have occasionally thought of trying to write a script—there’s this vampire idea that keeps stubbornly presenting itself much more in visuals than in words on a page, WHY??? Whereupon I attempt to translate it into words on a page & next time it storms through my mind, there it is, all freaking scenery again. Like I have the remotest idea what film people are looking for.
But I don’t think I want to learn to write scripts, which is a particular craft & skill set to the story-telling art, & some of that craft & skill is about being a team player, which I am not. I have friends who do script work & it sounds like way much harder work than my kind of story telling. Granted I’m lucky because my stories have tended to sell to book publishers more or less in the shape that I hand them over, but given that enormous piece of good fortune, it means that I don’t have anyone leaning over my shoulder & saying, cut the sensitivity we need another car chase. Or dragon slaying. Or, we’ve signed up X & X wants another dragon slaying, & no sensitivity at all, he/she/it/they don’t do sensitivity.
* Again. I am a silly person. As well as a frequently humorless curmudgeon about, for example, equal rights for human beings of all abilities, outlooks & persuasions. I could get into animal rights here too, & that plants are also living creatures . . . but I won’t.