First Taiwnese interview -- Readmoo
I did two long email interviews (and an introduction posted earlier, https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog... ) this spring for my Taiwanese publisher, Fantasy Foundation, who have lately reissued the Chinese traditional characters translations of the first three Chalion/World of the Five Gods books. The two interviews cover much of the same ground, so I will space them out a bit.
First up was for a vendor called Readmoo.
https://news.readmoo.com/2020/05/22/i...
English original follows below:
Readmoo Taiwan interview Bujold May 2020
The Interview of The Curse of Chalion
Interview questions by Readmoo.
1. Why did you decide to make Cazaril, the protagonist of The Curse of Chalion, a 35-year-old middle aged man?
In what ways does having a middle aged protagonist with extensive experience, such as having worked as a Castillar, a castle warder, and even a slave, affect your plot development?
LMB: I don’t really “decide” what my characters will be. They appear in my imagination as already what they are -- or are going to be, since characters grow by their actions in their story. I may do some fine-tuning as the tale wends on and I discover things about them I didn’t know at first.
That said, Cazaril does have some historical inspirations among an array of interesting Renaissance men, in a type that pops up repeatedly in this period of European history – not monarchs themselves, but the middle-class ministers, secretaries, and assistants to kings and queens who helped gate the world from the sorts of feudal governments that were essentially run out of the king’s household, to proto-modern nation-states. Examples include but are not limited to Walsingham in England (and Cardinal Wolsey before him), Cardinal Richelieu in France, Cardinal Cisneros in Spain, and the ill-fated David Riccio in Scotland. Fantasy tales usually background such figures and go haring off after the more glittering young princes and princesses.
Young characters are a great aid to a writer when presenting a fantasy story, because the reader can learn about the world for the first time right along with them. But older characters can have more interesting minds, more complex thinking based on longer experiences. Since I write in a very close third-person-personal mode, with everything filtered through the current point-of-view character’s knowledge and perceptions, this gives me a roomier “headspace” to tell my tale
Cazaril’s war-captive slavery experiences were also loosely inspired by the real-life experiences of the Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes.
2. In the Quintarian setting of The Curse of Chalion, father, mother, son and daughter are the respective gender roles of the four seasons. How did you come up with that setting? As Umegat said to Cazaril in the book, Bastard, despite being the weakest among all five, has the great responsibility of controlling the balance. Why did you design it that way?
LMB: There were several factors in play when I came up with the religion of the five gods. First, I wanted to resist dualism, the division of the world and its woes into black-and-white, simple good-versus-evil. This is simplistic in fiction, and a dangerous error of thinking in real life. So having an array of gods that could not be divided up that way, or easily fitted into a rigid hierarchy of status, helped that along.
(Naturally, since humans are wildly addicted to status hierarchies and simplistic thinking, we also have the Quadrene heresy, which, comfortingly for some people, restores both.)
A “holy family” is a biologically natural way for people to construct their gods. A good deal of biological thinking on my part underlies the religion and magic of Chalion. For one key thing, the pantheon are not actually creator-gods, but instead were created or generated by the world as a sort of emergent property, and so have evolved along with it.
The Bastard, as fifth god, a trickster figure, and the controller of chaos, is pivotal in keeping the theology and the world fluid and not rigid, working smoothly as contrasted with having to break static patterns to allow any change.
3a. Who is your favorite character in The Curse of Chalion, and why?
LMB: Well, besides Cazaril himself, whose inspirations I described above, the character of the (five-gods-style) saint Umegat proved unexpectedly interesting and complex. The mad dowager queen Ista, though minor in page-time here, proved so gripping that she subsequently generated her very own novel, Paladin of Souls.
3b. How did you go about character creation?
LMB: The short version is, I write a story about them. Characters are created by the whole of their actions, including thoughts and words, over the courses of their tales. I write in chronological or story-time-order, so I begin at their tale’s beginnings and go on with them, and we both learn and grow together. More details of their backstories, angsty or otherwise, often get assembled in a just-in-time fashion as needed, apart from the necessary pre-writing making-notes phase to boot them up to the start-point.
With a continuing series-character, of course, much of the backstory is already created in detail and set by prior books. Any new character who walks onstage will have a similar hidden old story behind them, tacitly, though in much less detail and more malleable. And in some cases, although not Cazaril’s, also duller, which is why their story doesn’t start earlier.
3c. Did you use any real life references?
LMB: For The Curse of Chalion, I drew heavily on 15th Century Spanish court history, which was just as lurid and bloody as the better-known late Plantagenet and Tudor history from England.
4a. You have mentioned that your interest in sci-fi came from your father, who had an impact on your writing as well. In The Curse of Chalion, are there any setting or plot points that show this influence?
LMB: My father had the most influence in my science fiction, particularly my fourth novel (and first Nebula Award winner) Falling Free, which featured among other things his engineering specialty, welding engineering, which he taught for many years at Ohio State University. He did not much influence my fantasy writing, which came later on in my career.
4b. What sparked your interest in writing?
LMB: Reading. Which, for me, took off in about third grade due to increased access to a wider range of school library books. My interest in writing started in junior high school, now over fifty years ago. My best friend Lillian (who also went on to write professionally under the name Lillian Stewart Carl) and I exchanged what would now be recognized as fan fiction, extensions of our favorite stories and television shows from the mid-60s. (I don’t think the term “fan fiction” yet existed, although the thing itself certainly pre-dates us – Sherlock Holmes derivative stories were being written from very soon after the originals were first published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and arguments can be made about the Arthurian cycle from the Middle Ages.)
4c. How did you come to write The World of the Five Gods?
LMB: The full answer to this would cover the last 20 years of my career, which I am not going to attempt to relate here. The first spark came from making the connection in my head (in the shower, one cold February day at the end of the last millennium) from two previously acquired pieces: the aforesaid Spanish court history, picked up from a recent college course on the subject that I’d taken for fun; and a stray character, secretary to a duchess, whose beginnings I’d created for a letter game that my writer friend Patricia C. Wrede and I had started and then dropped. So I’d had a setting without a character and a character without a story, both sitting idle; when they at last came together, we were off and running.
5. You have written fan fiction of Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. Why did you choose those two series as your subjects? In your fan fiction works, what did you keep and what did you change from the original story? Why? How do you feel about readers creating fan fiction of your own works?
LMB: Not answering the first parts of this because it was 50 years ago. Really, people, get a grip!
Moving along to this century, I am pleased that some readers find themselves so engaged with my stories that they are inspired to write fan fiction, but I need them to not send it to me. Fanac is for the fans. (“Fanac” is a slang contraction of “fannish activity”.)
6. Would you share with us some of your favorite fantasy and sci-fi works, as well as your go-to book genres and writers to read? Since you have written Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, what are some of your favorite detective novels and why? What books would you recommend to readers and why?
LMB: [Skipped this one due to fatigue, but I thought the interviewer's odd focus on old -- very old -- fanfiction curious.]
7. How do you conduct your research when world-building and creating religions for a series? What resources do you use to find your information?
LMB: Aside from the entirety of my life’s experiences and all the people I have ever talked to, all piled up in the heap of my memory, I read a lot of history, both as a general interest, and more specifically targeted when I have honed in on a particular story idea. So “resources” would be “wherever books are found”. In these days of Google, writers can ask more targeted questions and get the answers magically out of the air, any time of the day or night, which speeds things up considerably. I used to have to hit the library, or when local resources failed, interlibrary loan (a wonderful service) and wait weeks for books to arrive, which as often as not would fail to answer the question I’d started with anyway. Though they sometimes answered questions I hadn’t thought to ask, so it was never a waste.
8. What do your kids and family think of your work? What advice have you received during the writing process and how did it affect your works?
LMB: [See fatigue, above.]
9a. Before becoming a writer, what kind of jobs did you have? How have those experiences impacted your writing?
LMB: In addition to homemaking and motherhood, my principal early work experience was as a drug administration technician (a kind of nurse’s aide who gave medicines to all the patients on a hospital floor) at a major university hospital. This job lasted the decade of my 20s, most of the 1970s.
Prior to that was a grab-bag of short-terms jobs: working on the packing line and then as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio; retail clerk in a now long-gone discount department store; and, if you want to go all the way back to my very first paid job at age 12 or so, shoveling out stalls at a horse barn.
The medical experiences particularly have informed all my work, along with parenthood, but my youthful horse mania has certainly proved useful for my pre-industrial fantasy settings.
9b. Would you share some unforgettable experiences in your writing career?
LMB: [Skipped again. Really, this was supposed to be 10 questions; they'd slipped in something like 28.]
9c. As a writer, what does your daily routine look like?
LMB: As a writer, I don’t have a daily routine. My inspiration has always arrived in irregular lumps. If I can see it in my head, I can write it; if the pictures aren’t there yet, I have to wait. Back when I was trying to write a novel a year, I figured my professional output should be about two chapters a month.
I have written all over the clock, as the schedule of the people around me changed what times I had available. After my kids started school, I fell into the habit of writing in the morning or early part of the day, which still persists. Mid to late afternoon, I hit a physiological slump and am usually done for the day.
“Making it up” and “writing it down” are two different phases of the process for me. Walks are quite useful for the first part. I seldom compose directly at the computer, but rather, work out my scenes in notes, capturing thoughts and pinning them down. I take the notes to the keyboard to keep myself organized; extra bits and a lot of fine-tuning then happen as I type.
9d. If you were to have a different career, what choices would you consider and why?
LMB: It’s a bit late for that. Prior to my current aging-eye issues (macular pucker, mainly – you can look it up on Wikipedia) limiting my reading endurance, I might have named editing, in one form or another. I did edit one anthology back in the 90s, but I didn’t enjoy that task as much as I did and do writing original fiction.
10. Do you have any plans to write a new series? Why?
LMB: Why, indeed. At age 70, I am officially semi-retired, which for me turns out to mean that I keep writing, but do much less PR, travel, or public speaking. (Although people are now trying to pursue me into my house to do online public speaking, which is just as bad.) I’ve also been happily experimenting with indie self-e-publishing through a series of novellas, now up to 8 in number, centering on Temple sorcerer Penric kin Jurald and his resident demon Desdemona, set in another part of the World of the Five Gods and chronologically falling between The Hallowed Hunt and The Curse of Chalion with its sidewise sequel Paladin of Souls. I’ve also done an e-novella set in the world of The Sharing Knife tetralogy, and one short Vorkosigan novella. All are available worldwide in English on the Kindle, iBooks, and Nook vendors.
I am taking my projects one at a time, as my inspiration, interest, and energy flow, without commitments to any future guarantees. Which is pretty much the way I’ve always worked, only more so.
For anyone who wants more Bujold essays, I direct you to Sidelines: Talks and Essays available as an ebook (in English only, sorry) from the previously mentioned ebook vendors. But, really, go to the stories first.
***
Ta, L.
First up was for a vendor called Readmoo.
https://news.readmoo.com/2020/05/22/i...
English original follows below:
Readmoo Taiwan interview Bujold May 2020
The Interview of The Curse of Chalion
Interview questions by Readmoo.
1. Why did you decide to make Cazaril, the protagonist of The Curse of Chalion, a 35-year-old middle aged man?
In what ways does having a middle aged protagonist with extensive experience, such as having worked as a Castillar, a castle warder, and even a slave, affect your plot development?
LMB: I don’t really “decide” what my characters will be. They appear in my imagination as already what they are -- or are going to be, since characters grow by their actions in their story. I may do some fine-tuning as the tale wends on and I discover things about them I didn’t know at first.
That said, Cazaril does have some historical inspirations among an array of interesting Renaissance men, in a type that pops up repeatedly in this period of European history – not monarchs themselves, but the middle-class ministers, secretaries, and assistants to kings and queens who helped gate the world from the sorts of feudal governments that were essentially run out of the king’s household, to proto-modern nation-states. Examples include but are not limited to Walsingham in England (and Cardinal Wolsey before him), Cardinal Richelieu in France, Cardinal Cisneros in Spain, and the ill-fated David Riccio in Scotland. Fantasy tales usually background such figures and go haring off after the more glittering young princes and princesses.
Young characters are a great aid to a writer when presenting a fantasy story, because the reader can learn about the world for the first time right along with them. But older characters can have more interesting minds, more complex thinking based on longer experiences. Since I write in a very close third-person-personal mode, with everything filtered through the current point-of-view character’s knowledge and perceptions, this gives me a roomier “headspace” to tell my tale
Cazaril’s war-captive slavery experiences were also loosely inspired by the real-life experiences of the Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes.
2. In the Quintarian setting of The Curse of Chalion, father, mother, son and daughter are the respective gender roles of the four seasons. How did you come up with that setting? As Umegat said to Cazaril in the book, Bastard, despite being the weakest among all five, has the great responsibility of controlling the balance. Why did you design it that way?
LMB: There were several factors in play when I came up with the religion of the five gods. First, I wanted to resist dualism, the division of the world and its woes into black-and-white, simple good-versus-evil. This is simplistic in fiction, and a dangerous error of thinking in real life. So having an array of gods that could not be divided up that way, or easily fitted into a rigid hierarchy of status, helped that along.
(Naturally, since humans are wildly addicted to status hierarchies and simplistic thinking, we also have the Quadrene heresy, which, comfortingly for some people, restores both.)
A “holy family” is a biologically natural way for people to construct their gods. A good deal of biological thinking on my part underlies the religion and magic of Chalion. For one key thing, the pantheon are not actually creator-gods, but instead were created or generated by the world as a sort of emergent property, and so have evolved along with it.
The Bastard, as fifth god, a trickster figure, and the controller of chaos, is pivotal in keeping the theology and the world fluid and not rigid, working smoothly as contrasted with having to break static patterns to allow any change.
3a. Who is your favorite character in The Curse of Chalion, and why?
LMB: Well, besides Cazaril himself, whose inspirations I described above, the character of the (five-gods-style) saint Umegat proved unexpectedly interesting and complex. The mad dowager queen Ista, though minor in page-time here, proved so gripping that she subsequently generated her very own novel, Paladin of Souls.
3b. How did you go about character creation?
LMB: The short version is, I write a story about them. Characters are created by the whole of their actions, including thoughts and words, over the courses of their tales. I write in chronological or story-time-order, so I begin at their tale’s beginnings and go on with them, and we both learn and grow together. More details of their backstories, angsty or otherwise, often get assembled in a just-in-time fashion as needed, apart from the necessary pre-writing making-notes phase to boot them up to the start-point.
With a continuing series-character, of course, much of the backstory is already created in detail and set by prior books. Any new character who walks onstage will have a similar hidden old story behind them, tacitly, though in much less detail and more malleable. And in some cases, although not Cazaril’s, also duller, which is why their story doesn’t start earlier.
3c. Did you use any real life references?
LMB: For The Curse of Chalion, I drew heavily on 15th Century Spanish court history, which was just as lurid and bloody as the better-known late Plantagenet and Tudor history from England.
4a. You have mentioned that your interest in sci-fi came from your father, who had an impact on your writing as well. In The Curse of Chalion, are there any setting or plot points that show this influence?
LMB: My father had the most influence in my science fiction, particularly my fourth novel (and first Nebula Award winner) Falling Free, which featured among other things his engineering specialty, welding engineering, which he taught for many years at Ohio State University. He did not much influence my fantasy writing, which came later on in my career.
4b. What sparked your interest in writing?
LMB: Reading. Which, for me, took off in about third grade due to increased access to a wider range of school library books. My interest in writing started in junior high school, now over fifty years ago. My best friend Lillian (who also went on to write professionally under the name Lillian Stewart Carl) and I exchanged what would now be recognized as fan fiction, extensions of our favorite stories and television shows from the mid-60s. (I don’t think the term “fan fiction” yet existed, although the thing itself certainly pre-dates us – Sherlock Holmes derivative stories were being written from very soon after the originals were first published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and arguments can be made about the Arthurian cycle from the Middle Ages.)
4c. How did you come to write The World of the Five Gods?
LMB: The full answer to this would cover the last 20 years of my career, which I am not going to attempt to relate here. The first spark came from making the connection in my head (in the shower, one cold February day at the end of the last millennium) from two previously acquired pieces: the aforesaid Spanish court history, picked up from a recent college course on the subject that I’d taken for fun; and a stray character, secretary to a duchess, whose beginnings I’d created for a letter game that my writer friend Patricia C. Wrede and I had started and then dropped. So I’d had a setting without a character and a character without a story, both sitting idle; when they at last came together, we were off and running.
5. You have written fan fiction of Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek. Why did you choose those two series as your subjects? In your fan fiction works, what did you keep and what did you change from the original story? Why? How do you feel about readers creating fan fiction of your own works?
LMB: Not answering the first parts of this because it was 50 years ago. Really, people, get a grip!
Moving along to this century, I am pleased that some readers find themselves so engaged with my stories that they are inspired to write fan fiction, but I need them to not send it to me. Fanac is for the fans. (“Fanac” is a slang contraction of “fannish activity”.)
6. Would you share with us some of your favorite fantasy and sci-fi works, as well as your go-to book genres and writers to read? Since you have written Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, what are some of your favorite detective novels and why? What books would you recommend to readers and why?
LMB: [Skipped this one due to fatigue, but I thought the interviewer's odd focus on old -- very old -- fanfiction curious.]
7. How do you conduct your research when world-building and creating religions for a series? What resources do you use to find your information?
LMB: Aside from the entirety of my life’s experiences and all the people I have ever talked to, all piled up in the heap of my memory, I read a lot of history, both as a general interest, and more specifically targeted when I have honed in on a particular story idea. So “resources” would be “wherever books are found”. In these days of Google, writers can ask more targeted questions and get the answers magically out of the air, any time of the day or night, which speeds things up considerably. I used to have to hit the library, or when local resources failed, interlibrary loan (a wonderful service) and wait weeks for books to arrive, which as often as not would fail to answer the question I’d started with anyway. Though they sometimes answered questions I hadn’t thought to ask, so it was never a waste.
8. What do your kids and family think of your work? What advice have you received during the writing process and how did it affect your works?
LMB: [See fatigue, above.]
9a. Before becoming a writer, what kind of jobs did you have? How have those experiences impacted your writing?
LMB: In addition to homemaking and motherhood, my principal early work experience was as a drug administration technician (a kind of nurse’s aide who gave medicines to all the patients on a hospital floor) at a major university hospital. This job lasted the decade of my 20s, most of the 1970s.
Prior to that was a grab-bag of short-terms jobs: working on the packing line and then as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio; retail clerk in a now long-gone discount department store; and, if you want to go all the way back to my very first paid job at age 12 or so, shoveling out stalls at a horse barn.
The medical experiences particularly have informed all my work, along with parenthood, but my youthful horse mania has certainly proved useful for my pre-industrial fantasy settings.
9b. Would you share some unforgettable experiences in your writing career?
LMB: [Skipped again. Really, this was supposed to be 10 questions; they'd slipped in something like 28.]
9c. As a writer, what does your daily routine look like?
LMB: As a writer, I don’t have a daily routine. My inspiration has always arrived in irregular lumps. If I can see it in my head, I can write it; if the pictures aren’t there yet, I have to wait. Back when I was trying to write a novel a year, I figured my professional output should be about two chapters a month.
I have written all over the clock, as the schedule of the people around me changed what times I had available. After my kids started school, I fell into the habit of writing in the morning or early part of the day, which still persists. Mid to late afternoon, I hit a physiological slump and am usually done for the day.
“Making it up” and “writing it down” are two different phases of the process for me. Walks are quite useful for the first part. I seldom compose directly at the computer, but rather, work out my scenes in notes, capturing thoughts and pinning them down. I take the notes to the keyboard to keep myself organized; extra bits and a lot of fine-tuning then happen as I type.
9d. If you were to have a different career, what choices would you consider and why?
LMB: It’s a bit late for that. Prior to my current aging-eye issues (macular pucker, mainly – you can look it up on Wikipedia) limiting my reading endurance, I might have named editing, in one form or another. I did edit one anthology back in the 90s, but I didn’t enjoy that task as much as I did and do writing original fiction.
10. Do you have any plans to write a new series? Why?
LMB: Why, indeed. At age 70, I am officially semi-retired, which for me turns out to mean that I keep writing, but do much less PR, travel, or public speaking. (Although people are now trying to pursue me into my house to do online public speaking, which is just as bad.) I’ve also been happily experimenting with indie self-e-publishing through a series of novellas, now up to 8 in number, centering on Temple sorcerer Penric kin Jurald and his resident demon Desdemona, set in another part of the World of the Five Gods and chronologically falling between The Hallowed Hunt and The Curse of Chalion with its sidewise sequel Paladin of Souls. I’ve also done an e-novella set in the world of The Sharing Knife tetralogy, and one short Vorkosigan novella. All are available worldwide in English on the Kindle, iBooks, and Nook vendors.
I am taking my projects one at a time, as my inspiration, interest, and energy flow, without commitments to any future guarantees. Which is pretty much the way I’ve always worked, only more so.
For anyone who wants more Bujold essays, I direct you to Sidelines: Talks and Essays available as an ebook (in English only, sorry) from the previously mentioned ebook vendors. But, really, go to the stories first.
***
Ta, L.
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Alexandra
(new)
Jul 22, 2020 02:01PM
The translator sorta mis-translated the bit about the older characters being put into the background, etc. The Chinese version said older characters might have more fascinating backgrounds and shine brighter than the princes and princesses...
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Alex wrote: "The translator sorta mis-translated the bit about the older characters being put into the background, etc. The Chinese version said older characters might have more fascinating backgrounds and shin..."Yeah, I figure translation into any foreign language is a gamble; I cannot imagine the challenges of trying to translate carefully chosen English into such a structurally different language as I understand written Chinese to be, even assuming the translator understands the nuances and implications in the source material in first place. (Which not even all native-source-language readers will.)
Control freak as I am about my prose, even I concede there are places where I just Need To Let It Go.
Ta, L.
