Looking Up at the Sky

There is a wonderful essay on the Future Fire blog by Filipina writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz about how colonisation has shifted Philippine culture so much, even their natural skin colour is considered inferior to white, and how you can write sci-fi from that tangle. It’s well-worth a read.

I’m not going to address any issues of colonisation. I want to use a question in the essay for an entirely different discussion: who do you want to read your work?

It kisses bumpers with a discussion I was having with Allegra and William Drood about William’s lack of motivation to write. Both Allegra and I said the same thing: we rediscovered our love of writing when we remembered why we started doing it.

See, let me tell you a story.

A few years ago now, I had been slowly slipping myself into the pool of short spec-fic and getting used to spending time in slush piles. But, well, it felt more like grinding away at something than anything enjoyable. I had to learn the tropes, the market, what people wanted, what people would pay for, the clichés, the cliques… What I wanted to write wasn’t what was selling, so I changed what I was writing.

Salmon. Both tasty and wise.

I was at a gathering of druids. The house is a single-story bungalow in the middle of a field in Nebo. The fridge is a bucket of cold water outside the front door, the sofas are old and tired, the Aga’s on and it’s night outside. I sit around a table with Allegra as she chats to the druidess, and she mentions the problems I’m having with my writing. The man next to me has got to be about twelve foot tall, and most of that is beard. His personality is as big as the bear that is his totem. He picks up a deck of animal oracle cards, tells me to shuffle them and take one. I do as commanded. I show it to him.

“Salmon,” he intones. “You said you were having trouble with your writing. Go back to the source.”

I nod and don’t say anything, because I’m young enough to think I know better than the forces of the universe.

But he was right, that bearded bear of a man. I needed to remind myself why I wanted to be a writer.

I was six. It was creative writing in class, and I was writing a story where a mud monster attacked my friends and I. I can still see what it looks like. The story wasn’t finished when class was, and so I took it home and finished it. It was the first–the only–time I’ve ever voluntarily taken classwork home and finished it. Yeah! I thought. This is what I’m going to do when I’m grown up!

With lightsabers. Everything is more awesome with lightsabers.

So, I write to tell stories about cool people doing awesome things. Like fighting mud monsters or talking to the spirits of stars or sinking the British Empire’s engine of terror.

And who do I want to read my stories? That six-year-old kid. The twelve-year-old kid he grew into and the fifteen-year-old kid that followed. Any kid, of any age, who wants to open a book and crawl into a world where awesome things happen, things that are too big for the real world to contain. Because they’re always there, in my head, and I like to know I’m not alone.