(Continued from page 4)
DR: You mentioned earlier that you see yourself as a writer who serves the story rather than the other way around. Do you think writers who take the opposite approach are undermining the story they are telling?
SD: Well, certainly I have seen extremely self-conscious books published in which writing seems to be a form of game rather than an exercise in commitment or passion. Sometimes books, maybe the mainstream books with the most wildly unconvincing characters, are the books that achieve the highest literary acclaim and, moving much closer to home, there are plenty of places within science fiction and fantasy where one can see that the writer is using the story to put forward a personal position and such. They don’t pretend that this is not true – writers like Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas in some of her novels – these are writers who have a feminist political agenda and they design stories to preach on that particular subject.
Well, you can find that attitude across the entire spectrum of literature – you can find it in mystery novels, you can find it in romance novels, and you can certainly find it all over mainstream novels. The writer John Nichols – who happens to live in New Mexico, so I know of him – is a passionate socialist and most of his novels are really socialist tracts. Ayn Rand who wrote all those massive books like The Fountainhead and whatnot, you know she’s trying to preach the kind of Nietzschean superman philosophy that she happened to hold. That is something that writers have done for a very long time but it doesn’t carry any weight with me, I don’t care what their political views are.
I care whether they can engage me in their characters enough so that I care what happens to them, and that sounds relatively simple and crude, but I actually perceive it as something transcendent. That’s where empathy comes from, that’s where the fundamental bonds that connect one human being to the next come from – the ability to see inside another person’s psyche and care about what you see there.
I describe it this way and it sounds simple and mundane but I think it is the most humane and even redemptive function that storytelling could possibly serve and standing here and telling you about how I think we should save the rainforests – which I happen to think we should – is simply not going to unite me with my readers in an act of understanding, an act of understanding that goes beyond everybody’s individual experiences. It’s not going to unite me with them in the same way that telling a good story is.
If I can tap into the deepest wellsprings of storytelling inside myself, I can touch and bond with the hearts and souls of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people – not for my glory, but for the common good. It’s good for us because it makes us care about things other than ourselves. I’m the child of missionaries, of course I have a mission, but my mission doesn’t involve preaching anything. My mission involves trying to induce a state of sympathy and understanding in my readers. And I do that by committing myself as completely as I can to the characters and the story that I’m writing about. I don’t ask them to speak for me.
DR: That’s interesting, because one of the notable things about your writing is that it does tend to display some very visible themes – personal responsibility, the nature of reality, consequences of one’s actions. They come through very strongly, which people might expect is the result of you as an author deliberately choosing to focus on themes, but it would seem not…?
SD: But they come through strongly in my work because the characters I’m writing about care about them – not because I’m preaching about them, but because they care. The fact is I’ve never struggled with the kind of belief/unbelief issue that Thomas Covenant struggles with in the first Chronicles. On the other hand, I have spent my entire life studying the complexities of personal responsibility; I’ve needed to know that as a human being, never mind the fact that it’s relevant to what it is I write. I don’t sit down and say: ‘oh, I need to write a story about personal responsibility’, I don’t do that, but because I care about personal responsibility, it probably shows up in everything I write, because I care about empathising with people who are in pain. That probably shows up in everything I write. That doesn’t mean I sat down to write it for that reason, but it’s part of who I am and so it gets expressed in what I write, that’s not the same thing as having an agenda that I’m trying to put forward.
DR: So you would say that it’s the best stories that create the most empathy?
SD: That would be my view, and I know not everyone would agree with that, nor should they, it just happens to be my feeling.
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Other Links: Stephen Donaldson’s Website | Death Ray Magazine
