Stories, stories everywhere

One of the perennial items tossed at every living writer in almost every interview is “Where do you get your ideas?”

One well-known writer famously provided an address for an Ideas Shop in Schenectady (and had people TAKE HIM SERIOUSLY). I usually say that I have an Ideas Tree growing out back (and I’ve had people take THAT semi-seriously).

Most writers, though, when confronted with the Question, simply fling their arms up in resignation and say “EVERYWHERE!” And they are, of course, right. Look at the last week of news.

First we had the Fairy Tale – the dashing young man in the scarlet uniform, the blushing bride with the tiara, the Kiss on the Balcony. The fairy tale of marriage, enacted Grand Scale – the horses, the carriages, the gorgeous dresses (and the unbelievable hats), the pageant and the panoply. The couple roared off in an Aston Martin. This is the way stories are born, and built, and accreted to, tales like barnacles on hoary old original stories which are falling apart with age and antiquity. We add things, new things like the Aston Martin. But we still grow misty-eyed at young love, at the Prince and Princess on their wedding day, and we still spin fairy tales.

Then, days after the Wedding Story, we have the story of War, and Death, and Revenge. The so-called “mastermind” of the 9/11 tragedy – and I use the word advisedly, and I do not mean just the falling towers in New York – Osama bin Laden is reported dead. America dissolves into triumph. At last, the smear on American pride is avenged, and the man who dared to attack the Greatest Nation on Earth has met his end at American hands.

And was buried post-haste. The Internet spouts something about Muslim tradition… and a *sea burial.* Which is on the face of it ridiculous. There are backtrackings saying that there was a mis-speak somewhere that all anybody meant to say is that bin Laden was buried “within 24 hours, as per Muslim tradition”. Whatever the story, I don’t think there’s a body there to be seen, a death there to confirm. The conspiracy theorists can now start lining up, please, with various and increasingly outlandish reasons as to why this is all a whitewash and Osama isn’t REALLY dead, etc etc etc. The mundane details just get in the way of a good legend being born.

The ostensible reason for American wars being waged on the Afghanistan and Pakistan fronts was supposedly bin Laden (and man, it took them TEN YEARS TO FIND THE DUDE?…) One would think that now this is over the troops over there are going to be brought home post-haste. I wouldn’t hold my breath. There’s a story here that’s now greater than the sum of its parts. The holy war is going to be hard to rein in, particularly since even the gung-ho triumphalists parading about wrapped in flags and screaming “Mission REALLY accomplished!” are aware, have GOT to be aware on some fundamental level, that this is a head cut off a Hydra. At least until now the Americans KNEW who the enemy was; he was the bogeyman who flung the planes at the New York towers. But who’s going to take his place? OF COURSE America will have to remain in the back country of the ‘stans, until further notice, because they have to find out who the NEW Face of the Enemy is, track him down, and cut another head off the Hydra. But it never ends, and the thing about the Hydra of Greek Mythology, is that it tends to regrow its chopped-off heads on a regular basis. War without end. Amen.

You can make a story for that. A Story. There it is, lying there right at your feet, ripe for picking up.

What else has been happening in the world lately? Elections in Canada? Only a little further back in the timeline, the tsunami in Japan? Human beings, living every day. Dealing with death and taxes, weddings, tragedies and joys, triumph and revenge, hypocrisy, making mistakes, casting votes, traveling in airplanes, winning prizes, paying bills, cooking meals, burying loved ones or welcoming new ones into the world, falling down and picking themselves up and starting all over again.

Blogging, even.

Telling stories.

We’ll take that with us, when we take our first steps towards the stars. This capacity for making lives into legends, people into archetypes, history into myth.

We are a race that is built of Story. And there are stories… everywhere.

Talisman Books

Alison Goodman defines a Talisman Book as “one of those novels that you read over and over again, a book that seems to resonate through you, that wards off the disappointments and insecurities of everyday life.”

My Talisman Books are the ones I’d rescue from a burning building. For example:

– My dogeared paperback copy of ‘Lord of the Rings’. This book – broken-spined, tattered, beloved – was probably one of the first thing that made me kneel at the altar of fantasy and begin SERIOUS worship there. Tolkien made me realise that the big epic dreams that crowded my imagination were FOR REAL, and were valuable. This book is the physical embodiment of that realization. It’s a talisman not just because of its identity but because of what it represents, the kind of hugeness and wonder and awe and the way it made me cognisant of my place in this world.

– ‘Tigana’ by Guy Gavriel Kay, because it’s one of the best BOOKS I’ve ever read. The writing and the story make this amazing for me and so does the visceral emotional connection I feel to the underlying themes of the book.

– ‘Nine Princes in Amber,’ the now out-of-print paperback edition that made Roger Zelazny lift his eyebrows in utter astonishment when I gave it to him to sign and ask me where on earth I’d got that copy because it had been out of print for YEARS.

– A volume of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, because all stories live inside that book, and I could read them and dream up the rest of a lost world by his tropes.

– And because it’s irreplaceable, a really ancient and ill-favored book with dull gray covers – a broken down book, loved well long before I had my hands on it, with scribbled commentary in the margins and on the bottom of the pages. This is the book that lived beside my grandfather’s bed, the book that he read and re-read and re-read, the scribbles in the margins are his thoughts, and in his hand. He’s been gone these twenty years. He’ll never speak to me again except through this book, and I WOULD go through fire to get it.

Those are Talisman Books in the purest and most glittering sense of the word. There are many many books that I love, and have adored over the years.

– But forgive me if I add another to my Talisman Book list, a book that I wrote. A hardcover edition of “Secrets of Jin Shei”, the book to remind me what I am, what the culmination is of all the gifts that all my other books have poured like gems into my waiting spirit. I’ll take a copy with me and show it to people if I lose the power of speech and they ask me who or what I am. Because that is what I am. Will always be. I am the creator of THIS THING, this book, this collection of words, this story… this Talisman.

There were the books which drew my tears – “Les Miserables”, Howard Spring’s “My Son, My Son”, Karl May’s “Winnetou” (although it took me YEARS to unlearn all the “facts” I though I knew about the American Indian culture in general and the Apache in particular after I finished reading his work), Jack London’s “Call of the Wild”, almost ANYTHING by Ursula le Guin, a book not many people reading this will have heard of but whose title translates as “The Time of Death” by a writer of my own tongue and tribe by the name of Dobrica Cosic and another book by one of my own, Ivo Andric’s “Bridge on the Drina”.

Lest you should think that I spent my entire reading life weeping, there are books that drew my laughter – Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat”, T. H. White’s “Once and Future King”.

And there are the comfort books I return to because I know I can find solace there – “Song of Arbonne”, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”, Mary Stewart’s Merlin books, “Shadow of the Moon” by M. M. Kaye or any fat historical novel by Sharon Penman (but particularly “Here Be Dragons”), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Poisonwood Bible”, lots of stuff by Pearl Buck, books by Henryk Sienkiewicz, John Galsworthy, Boris Pasternak, Nikos Kazantzakis, Daphne du Maurier. Of more recent vintage, Catherynne Valente whose poetic vision enthralls me or Neil Gaiman whose dark and sardonically twisted tales and characters draw me in and China Mieville whose surgical command of the English language leaves me breathless and humbled.

So – what are YOUR Talisman Books?