Hello, everyone. I had intended on getting online earlier, but just returned to the farm from Melbourne. As I type this, I can see Wilson’s Promontory, which is on fire. The destruction to wildlife is incomprehensible.

I’m available to schmooze about just about anything…the business and, er, art of writing; editing; where ideas come from; science fiction and fantasy as genres; historical fiction, etc. Some of you may be familiar with my novel about Leonardo da Vinci entitled The Memory Cathedral. I’ve also written a historical novel about the Civil War (from the perspective of a fourteen year old) entitled The Silent and an alternate history of the 60’s, 70’s. and 80’s, featuring James Dean as the protagonist. It’s called (as one might guess!) The Rebel. And I’ve written science fiction, of course. I wrote a novel called The Man Who Melted about which Robert Silverberg wrote: But Jack Dann, back there in 1982 or 1983, has one of his characters talk about having forgotten to send out for groceries on the Net, as happens late in The Man Who Melted; and those of us who are aware that there was no such thing as the Internet in 1982, let alone companies that will take Internet orders for grocery deliveries, feel that sort of shiver of surprise at the author’s gift of clairvoyance that readers of sixty-year-old Heinlein novels experience again and again as they find him describing the world of his near future — our recent past — with amazing accuracy.

There is also a game (alas, writes the author) called The Man Who Melted Jack Dann. To find out about that, you’ll have to do some Googling.

Just for fun, I’m pasting in the afterword from my short story collection Jubilee. It’s about…where I get my ideas.

Slip Me a Fiver:

by Jack Dann

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Every author has been asked that question hundreds of times. In fact, I remember being on a panel some years ago with authors Joe Haldeman, George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, Edward Bryant, and Harlan Ellison when that question was asked (yet again). Everyone tried to answer as best he could…you’ll find that writers (this one included!) tend to get longwinded when trying to answer that question. But when Harlan’s turn came to answer, he just nodded knowingly, and said, “Well. that’s easy, folks. There’s this idea service in Schenectady, New York. Every week I send them twenty-five dollars, and every week they send me back a fresh six pack of ideas. That’s all there is to it.” He folded his arms over his chest, and the audience laughed. Nevertheless, several people came up to Harlan after the panel and asked…

“Uh, excuse me, Mr. Ellison, but could you give me the address of that idea service in Schenectady?”

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“Where do I get my ideas?” has always been a difficult question for me to answer because ideas not only come from my own personal experiences, books I’ve read, stories I’ve heard, etc., but they also take different forms. Some are narrative, while others are essentially visual; and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the idea is for a short story, a novelette, a novella, or a novel.

The idea for “The Diamond Pit” came to me when I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz.” After I read that story, I knew I would have to write my own story about the richest man in the world…a homage to Fitzgerald.

I saw the plot of “The Diamond Pit” rolling out ahead of me as if I was sitting in a locomotive and seeing the track twisting and turning as I whipped around this curve and that.

I glimpsed my protagonist, Paul Orsatti.

I “knew” he had been a mail pilot and a roustabout and played piano.

Although specific details might have been muzzy, the form of a rough plot and the cast of characters were all there. The rest was just connecting the dots…something akin to lucid dreaming.

In contrast, the idea for the title story “Jubilee” came to me as a single visual image some years ago when I was writing the novel High Steel with Jack C. Haldeman II. I saw in my mind’s eye, as if the scene was really before me, crowds of people milling around on stone quays in a decaying city like Venice. One by one, men, women, and children jumped into the water and became transformed into sea-creatures. I had used the idea of genetically altered mer-creatures in High Steel as a throw-away; but the image of people being transformed by some unknown force in the water was so powerful that it seemed to burn in my memory. I would think about it every few weeks. Just that image, like a recurrent dream.

So too did my novel The Memory Cathedral begin as a powerful visual image. I was sitting in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City and reading a biography of Leonardo da Vinci when I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye a squadron of high-Gothic looking airplanes flying over Renaissance Florence. It was as clear and detailed and real as Giorgio Vasari’s painting of Florence. I saw planes passing over the Duomo, saw them reflected in the mirror of the Arno River; and I knew, I knew then that I had to bring that image to life.

My story “Da Vinci Rising” draws on that same hallucinatory image (at least hallucinatory for me!), which became transformed in the writing.

Once I try to capture my original visual image in words, in a story, it changes. The image remains, informing the story, but the story creates its own demands and seems to rework the image according to its own needs.

It has been my experience that stories which begin with a powerful visual image become stories of discovery. I’ve likened the experience of writing them to being a sculptor working on a huge block of marble. He knows that the statue he’s going to create is in there, but he has to find it in the material. One of the central scenes in The Memory Cathedral, an exorcism of Sandra Botticelli, was not planned by the author. It felt as if the characters were leading me into the story, and I had to rework what I had written to accommodate them. I think that such discoveries give a story authenticity, a firm internal logic.

The structures of my “visual image” stories are often discovered in the writing. This was certainly true of my short story “Tea.” I had an image of a woman who covered all the windows and mirrors in her apartment with aluminum foil. I knew that the apartment was in Sea Gate, the tip of Brooklyn, New York…my old apartment. I knew that she would have tea with a shadowy figure, that she was Jewish and would confront the Holocaust. That’s all I “knew.” But as I wrote, I could just hear Lorelei Lanzman whispering, musing. I could make out her thoughts, her daily routine of shopping and talking to the neighbors—and talking to herself—and line by line, the story evolved out of and transformed my initial image.

I should probably come clean and admit that sometimes the characters mutiny. They take over. They make up the dialogue. They create new and unexpected plot twists. When that happens, I always have the sensation that I’m simultaneously typing and watching a movie on the screen of my laptop. I feel like I’m just a conduit for the dialog and action.

While I’m working on a story, it does, in fact, feel like a live thing.

When I was a child, I used to believe that the fictional characters and imaginary places in books were real. I’d open a book, and the words and pictures would come alive. The characters would wake up and dance and play and have adventures. And when I closed it, they’d simply go to sleep.

In the quick of my subconscious, I still believe that.

After all these years…

Which is probably one of the reasons I keep writing.

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Oh…

To answer that vexing question about where I get my ideas, I can only say, “Slip me a fiver, and I’ll give you the address of this idea service I know in Schenectady…”

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And for those heroic readers who have gotten this far, if you’re interested in talking about Australian sf and fantasy, the phenomenal quality of our writers, Dreaming Again, or anything else, etc., I’m right here…

Oh, yes, and my website is jackdann.com.

Cheers!

The significance of reading has changed for me over the years; or to be more precise, new reasons for reading have settled over earlier ones in sedimentary layers.  This week I plan to summarise various phases of my reading life (though I’m happy to chat about any aspect of reading or writing).

Like many bookish people I was read to as a child – in my case by my mother.  From the beginning I experienced reading as an act of love, and a passion for story naturally followed.  (It’s not surprising, perhaps, that love of one kind or another is a central theme of the vast majority of novels.)  A favourite book of mine from those days was The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown, which begins with the following immortal words:

      “Born at sea in the teeth of a gale, the sailor was a dog.  Scuppers was his name.” 

On the corresponding page, Scuppers is depicted in a mackintosh and rain-hat at the helm of a sloop in ferocious seas (apparently whelped and weaned and sent straight up on deck).  These days, I love dogs as avidly as books, and my mother has a Labrador retriever named Scuppers.

In a daring narrative move, the second page of The Sailor Dog recounts the hero’s puppyhood in a single sentence: “After that he went to live on the land”.  The rest of the story tells of Scuppers’ adventures as he reclaims his maritime heritage, and it occurs to me now that my subsequent reading – and for that matter my writing – is in part a search for fleeting moments of tenderness such as those experienced during my first contact with books.

“Born at sea in the teeth of a gale…”

Author with faithful hound, Meddles