The Furious Spinner

The SciFi channel is airing a miniseries based on Ursula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea. I read the series when I was an adult. I greatly admire LeGuin's writing, especially her essays, but I remember I was annoyed with the books because a woman was not the main character. I thought, she's a woman; why isn't Ged a girl! I had read three billion books where boys or men were the main characters and I wanted to read about a girl or a woman. In later years, LeGuin talked about some of those things, acknowledging, for instance, that she should have come up with a different pronoun than "he" when talking about the sex-shifting people in The Left Hand of Darkness. She is not happy with the film version of her series. They have taken her multicolored cast of characters and whitewashed them. I can imagine the frustration. My novels are filled with multicolored people of various ethnicities, spiritualities, sexualities. I've read about other writers and their frustration with Hollywood. Most say, "Take the money and run."

I have absolutely no experience with Hollywood or the movies; I'm sure I would make many mistakes if I were approached. What I've learned from publishing is that you can't believe it unless it is in writing. No matter how much someone reassures you that this or that will happen: it won't happen unless it is in writing and you've both signed on the dotted line. Thems just the facts.

I have no problem asking for changes in a contract, and I don't think any writer should. (All they can do is say "yes" or "no.") My very first contract was for a short story I sold to Asimov's. They wanted the rights to all the characters in my story forever. I had been to Clarion the year before, and the instructors (who were all writers) had drilled it into our heads that we needed to be business people, too. I called Damon Knight and talked to him about it; plus I sent him the contract. I called the contracts person at Asimov's and told her I couldn't give her rights to my characters. She said, "OK," and suggested a couple other changes (to my benefit), and we crossed out all those sections I didn't like.

I think the publishers try to get as many rights as they can because that's what they need to do, and it's the responsibility of the writer to keep as many rights as she can. Damon got the publisher to change the contract somehow for other writers, but I can't remember exactly how. I have asked for changes on nearly every contract I've signed since then, and I've almost always gotten the changes I wanted. If the editor is a writer, the contract is usually much better.

Just some thoughts on this cold and sunny almost-winter day.

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