Glenda Larke

The plane was full from New York to Kuala Lumpur. The man sitting next to me was American.

‘Your first trip to Malaysia?’ I asked at some point, one of those casual questions you tend to ask of a fellow sufferer on a long flight.

No, he said. He had been an American Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia, back in the early 70s, he explained, and named the institution where he had been a lecturer.

I was startled. My husband had been one of the Malaysian initiators of that programme at a time when the country was short of tertiary science teachers prepared to teach in the Malay language and when many local educatonists and some politicians were scornful of the idea that science could ever be taught in the national language at university level. (From a modern perspective, this attitude seems incredibly strange. The past truly is another country.) A few dedicated Malaysians, a handful of Indonesians and members of the American Peace Corps proved the doom-sayers wrong.

Several among the Corps had become good friends to my husband and me. During the initial Malay language learning period, one American family was hosted by my in-laws in their village home. Much later, another – I’ll call him K – asked my husband to be his wakil (negotiating rep) for his engagement and marriage to a Malaysian. He’s looked us up on a more recent visit to Malaysia.

‘But you must know my husband!’ I exclaimed to my fellow passenger, and gave the name. ‘In fact, you and I have probably met before.’

He did indeed remember my husband, and yes, we probably had met a few times thirty-five years ago. ‘You’re an author, aren’t you,’ he said, ‘and you have a daughter in the US, and another who’s a musician in the UK.’

I was staggered. ‘How on earth did you know all that?’

‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘K drove me to the airport this evening, and he was telling me about you.’

K, of course, had no idea I had been in N.Y., let alone that on the plane I was going to be sitting next to the friend he had so kindly driven to Newark Airport. (Years before, he’d done the same good deed in reverse – he’d picked up our newly-arrived daughter at the airport and taken her to the Cornell post-grad campus in Manhattan.) Out of all the 300 plus people on that plane, none of whom I recognised, I was seated next to someone I had once met – who had been talking about me on the way to the airport!

Now that’s a coincidence.
They do happen. And many real-life coincidences are even odder than this one.

And yet coincidences are dangerous things to include in a story because, written down, they seem so trite and contrived. They jerk the reader out of his belief. The person who comes across them in literature tends to curl his lip up in a sneer, and mutter something about writers who think their readers must be pigeon-brained poodles to believe that sort of rubbish…Life Is Not Like That, they state.

Well, life is like that. But the good writer also has to be beware of writing too realistically. Sometime you can be too real for your own good.

There are ways of getting around the unbelievability of the coincidence, of course. Not confusing the unlikely with the impossible is a beginning. Having your characters comment on the unbelievability is (illogically) another way. Or you can, like Dan Brown, keep the action going at such a frenetic pace that the unlikely bits don’t have time to register on the reader…

Springtime where I grew up in Western Australia meant field mushrooms (which we just loved and went to pick each day to have for breakfast). They came with the first rains and studded the fields like miniature pale brown umbrellas, We could tell the difference between them and toadstools by the time we were three or four.
Springtime meant brown grass suddenly disappearing under a swathe of green. Springtime also meant wildflowers. And West Australia probably has more wildflowers than any other place on earth. I remember visiting a flowermarket in Amsterdam and seeing buckets of morrison and kangaroo paws and boronia and leschenaultia all those other flowers of my childhood on sale. I felt immensely saddened – as if they had somehow stolen part of my Australian-ness by growing something so quintessentially Ozzie on the other side of the world with a sign saying : Produce of Israel.

And then I moved to Malaysia, and spring meant nothing where weather or plants were concerned. It did mean birds on migration…great flocks on the move, unnoticed by almost everyone except the rice farmers and the coastal fishermen. How many Malaysians have I spoken to who had no idea that birds came and went through their land? It has taken bird flu for awareness to grow!

Then came six years in Austria, and suddenly Spring had a capital letter and put a spring in your step after the grey cold bleakness of a city winter.

Now here I am enjoying the colour of a Virginia spring without having gone through a winter. Now that’s the way to do it. And soon – less than a week – I shall be heading back to the tropics and home.

I take pride in writing fantasies that can be read on several levels. If you look, there is more there than just a great (I hope) story.

So what do I do when I see a reader’s comment that says something like, “A good entertaining story, but no great depth”? Get all huffy and mutter about readers that can’t see past the drip on the end of their noses?

And what about the opposite: the reader who talks about the deep dark meaning of my work and how I have commented on the connections between Donald Rumsfeld, the Da Vinci Code and the melting of the icecaps? (And no; no such book or reader exists…yet.)

Once a writer’s work gets out there into the public domain, what happens to it is largely beyond their control. And no matter how a reader might have mangled the subtler meaning, the writer has to grin and bear it – and to a degree sometimes even take the blame. Perhaps your writing lacked the clarity you thought it had?

Mostly though, I don’t think that’s the point. Each reader takes something different from a writer’s work. Perhaps the book did no more than entertain them for an hour or two. Perhaps it made them think about deeper issues of morality and ethics. Maybe it made them re-examine their politics, their environmental concerns, their relationship with their significant other, or how they feel about their dog. Perhaps it made them happier. Perhaps it even inspired them. And the writer will never know these things unless the reader sends an email or a letter or writes a review.

What does matter is this:
The writer has tried to let others see the world through the lens of his own eye. Each writer brings his own joys/fears/politics/ethics/morality to his writing. If, for a moment in time, the reader has been transported somewhere else, to see ( figuratively or literally) something they would not have seen otherwise, then the writer has done part of his job. If the picture the reader sees is not quite the one that you the writer intended, well – at least you have made them think. And that can never be a bad thing.

So if the reader doesn’t “get” what I have written, I smile, maybe learn something, and move on. I’m just glad there are people out there who read my work.

Fellow Voyager author and special friend Karen Miller very, very kindly chased down Jason Nahrung for me and I have now seen the review from the Brisbane Courier-Mail.
Apart from the bit I’ve already quoted, Jason also said:

Larke provided a refreshing approach in her previous Isles of Glory trilogy, and her new release, Heart of the Mirage (Voyager, $20.95), continues to engage.

At the end of the review he adds this:

Larke presents an examination of the ethics of imperialism and disenfranchisement. It is no accident the story is dedicated to Australia’s Stolen Generation and the Disappeared Ones of Argentina.

He’s actually the first person to have made mention of this acknowledgement to be found at the back of the book. If you have a copy, do read this. I don’t believe in being preachy in fiction, but nonetheless, this story is my (inadequate) tribute to people who suffered in a particularly heartrending way.

Justine Larbalestier over at her LJ asked a similar question the other day, actually in relation to killing off animals and whether that puts readers off…and if not, then what does?

I actually wrote the post on killing a cat to see if it would get a reaction. Nada. Maybe people were just too polite to tell me what they really thought. Or maybe they looked at the title and didn’t read it! (It was absolutely true, I hasten to add. And I deliberately didn’t mention that I am a cat person who is immeasurably distressed by stray cats in trouble, etc. However, I am also a very pragmatic farmer’s daughter, so accidently killing a cat that had unhappily chosen to sleep in the engine of my car was, to me, more messy than traumatic.)

But back to the topic of this post. What stops you in your tracks when reading? I mean what actual subject matter, rather than poor writing and stale imagery, poor characterisation, overwriting, incorrect facts – all things which put me off every time.

Do sex scenes bore you to tears, as they do me (mostly)? Or is it a torture scene that will make you chuck the book across the room? Too much graphic violence? Killing off a child? Weepy deadbed scenes? Dream sequences that you the reader think are real only to have the character wake up? (Geez, I hate that one.)