The Gate Thief

AFTERWORD


For those who wish for an afterword that is a continuation of the themes of the book, I must disappoint you. Instead, I want to talk a little about the practical difficulties that only the writers of fictional stories have any reason to care about.

This book was six months late, but for good reason. If I were still the young writer of Songmaster and Treason, or even the not-so-young writer of Saints and Ender’s Game, I would have delivered the book on time. It would also have been a very different kind of fiction.

In the years since then I’ve learned something about the structure of storytelling. I realized, just as I began writing the book in time to meet the original deadline, that I had the structure all wrong. I was going to use this book to tell the story of the wars of the Mithermages who had received the enhancement of their powers—thus melding the world of meddling gods shown in the Iliad and Odyssey with our modern kind of warfare.

Then I realized that I couldn’t tell that story and only bring in the conflict with Set at the end. That had to be at the heart of the story all the way through, or it would feel tacked on, an extra element when the real story was over. As I tell my writing students, you have to promise the story you are going to end. The ending of this series is the climax of the struggle with Set. Just as the Mithermages will supercede the wars and geopolitics of the drowther world, so also the war with Set must supercede all other concerns in the minds of those few who know that it’s going on.

Once I faced that structural necessity, I realized that I was not ready to tell that story. All my thought and development had been in the world of the Mithermages, while the magery of gatemages and manmages remained nebulous and ill-formed in my mind. In order to tell this story, I needed to develop a complicated rule set. What is it, exactly, that a manmage does? Or, for that matter, a gatemage?

So instead of delivering a book, I essentially started it over—always a depressing bit of news for an editor who trusted you to deliver when you said you would. But Beth Meacham, my editor for most of my career, also understands that it’s better to deliver the best book I’m capable of than whatever book happens to be ready on the due date. Her patience is extraordinary, because the patience of editors is not passive. She has to fend off and placate marketing staff who are wondering just when (or whether) the promised book will appear; she has to make decisions about whether to go through the expensive and disappointing process of changing the publishing schedule. Fortunately, her employer and my publisher, Tom Doherty, shares the same literary values—that getting it right is more important than getting it now. My responsibility, then, is to be sure that any delay is worth it.

I happened to be listening, during this time, to a course on ancient Egypt from the Great Courses series. When I heard the description of Thoth as being very much like Hermes and Mercury, including healing, I realized that I could benefit greatly by adapting a version of Egyptian lore to my literalizing of Indo-european gods. Ka and ba corresponded—or could be made to correspond—with the way I was already using “inself” and “outself” in the Mithermages series. That allowed me to name the Belgod I had taken from Semitic and biblical tradition. Set made a lovely, dangerous enemy. And as I invented more and more of the lore surrounding him, tying him to the dragon in the book of Revelation, the workings of manmagic became something rich and fascinating, and very close to what I had already developed for gatemagic. In other words, they made a consistent whole, and one that I believe corresponds with the real world in significant metaphorical ways.

Having invented the world I needed, I then had to find a way to make it clear to readers. What made it especially difficult was my determination that all the communication between ka and ba had to be on a pre- or sub-verbal level. We don’t talk to our own minds and bodies in language, and so when I had Wad-Loki’s ba trying to share his memories with Danny North’s ka, I had to put it on a nonverbal level. Yet books are written in words. Finding a means of representing non-speech in speech was daunting. I hope that for most readers, I succeeded.

As I learned more about manmages, the character of Anonoei began to grow. I began this novel with no idea that Anonoei would be important in it; she insisted on growing into something important, she and her sons, and so they will be major figures in the third and final volume.

Another problem was to keep from getting so caught up in the lore of magery that I lost track of the real world—our world, and Danny’s place in it. It was very important to me that his friends become memorable individuals, and that Danny fall in love in a serious way. These high school students should not be merely Danny’s foils, people he can talk to in order for us to learn what he is thinking. In this novel, they represent us, the drowthers, ordinary people who are in awe of the gods, if we believe in them; and I have met few people who didn’t have some conception of a god, whether they would apply that title to it or not. How would these teenagers respond to having the new kid turn out to be the equivalent of Hermes and Mercury and Loki and Thoth?

One theme that runs through mythology is the amazing fecundity of the gods—the world seems half-populated by their bastards. While a few of these are rapes (in the old sense of “carrying off” the human female, whether the sex turned out to be consensual or not), it’s also a fact of human life that there are certain women who are irresistibly drawn to powerful males. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. This is not true for all women, or for all powerful people. But Danny North would not have to look like a young George Clooney or Robert Redford in order to attract the notice—let alone the eager desire—of a certain contingent of young women. His power, his intelligence, and, I must add, his innate goodness would make him desirable to many girls, for reasons as various as the girls themselves.

The result was that my original outline for this book is now an amusing cast-off; that which survives from it will be in the third volume, while most of what’s valuable in this book was not in the outline. Stories are invented as you go along, if you’re writing them properly, and that means that characters and situations that come out of nowhere can blossom into productive mines that bring out tramloads of metal-rich ore. My skill as a refiner is a different issue. But I think the ore I smelted to make this book is of a much finer metal than what I originally planned.

How can we tell, though? The earlier version was never written, not a word of it. It existed in my head, so I think of it as real; but no graduate student will ever pore over the differences between drafts, because the book you just read is the only draft that actually hit the paper.

How do you unfold the tale in an order which will be clear and interesting to readers who obviously begin the book knowing almost nothing about the story, and must end it understanding all? I regard it as the essence of good structure that all the key information will have been presented earlier in the book, so when you move through the climactic scenes at the end, everything is already clear to the reader, because it was so well explained earlier on. This means that the exposition is front-loaded. But readers won’t tolerate (nor should they) a story that begins with nothing but exposition.

The device that works best is for the point-of-view character to know little more than the reader does. Thus when the viewpoint character learns it, so does the reader.

But what if the viewpoint character’s learning is also vague and highly subjective? And how much information is too much for a given scene? Boredom and inclarity are the ways to drive readers out of a book, to make them close it and never open it again. The goal, then, is to provide the light with enough sweetness at every stage that the reader will stay with you, learning constantly but also getting the rewards of a good story along the way. This is not a trick—here are the good bits, so you’ll keep reading the boring bits. On the contrary, the good bits require the explanations, but the explanations themselves need to be part of the action, so that it never feels as if the story has stopped cold while the reader is brought up to speed. This is such a delicate dance that most writers fail at it most of the time. And most of us realize that we will never find the perfect way to tell a story; it’s likely that there is no such thing. We just keep dancing as fast as we can, hoping to take you far enough into the workings of the world that, when you move from one event to the next in the story, you always know where you are and what’s happening, and you always understand just what is at stake.

This is hard enough with fiction that takes place in the “real” world; when the world itself must also be explained, the expository burden becomes dreadfully heavy. The result is that some writers skimp on world development, coasting along by borrowing the stereotypes of earlier writers in the field. Others include every detail of their world creation, whether it’s relevant to the plot or not, as if they wanted to make all their readers memorize The Silmarillion before they were worthy to read The Lord of the Rings.

This is a long way of saying that the better your world creation, the heavier the expository burden. And sometimes your world creation is so deep and rich that the actual story never measures up to it.

In the effort to create a story that does measure up, sometimes you’re late; but that does not imply that being late will make your story better. My most popular book was written in a single swath, more quickly than I could have imagined possible. This does not imply that moving quickly through a tale will make it better, either. Each story poses its own unique set of problems. It merely happens that the problems I had to solve in order to tell this story were some of the hardest, creatively and technically, that I’ve ever faced in my writing career.

That’s the problem with growing older and more experienced. Decisions that would have been “good enough” when I was thirty now seem like cheap shortcuts to me at sixty-one. I know how to write better than I did before; but knowing better usually means that I have to work harder, invent more, and find solutions to ever-more-difficult expository problems. This is why writers never retire. If we’re doing our job right, we’re always just figuring out how this thing is done; we’re always novice writers flailing about to find some kind of solid ground for moving forward.