The Furious Spinner

I met Lisa Goldstein in Chicago in 1982. We traveled on the train together to San Francisco. I think we talked nonstop for three days. I can't remember what we talked about, but I remember she was fascinating, and I was certain we would be friends for life. Her first novel, The Red Magician, won the American Book Award. Since then, she has had eight novels published, including The Alchemist's Door, Dream Years, and Tourists. Lisa is still fascinating. I'd take a three-day train ride with her any time.

K.A.: As you can probably tell from the previous interviews on FS, I'm interested in the creative process. How and when did you get started writing? Were you encouraged by your family?

L.G.: I always wanted to write, ever since I learned to read. I thought books were the coolest thing in the world, and writing them would be even better than reading them. I wrote a lot of short stories in college and later, got them all rejected, and then wrote one that a friend of mine said should be turned into a novel. So I did, and that became The Red Magician.


K.A.: The Red Magician was a great success with much critical acclaim. What was that experience like? Was such immediate success good for your creative process? Did it inspire you when writing your next novel or terrify you?

L.G.: Winning the American Book Award for best paperback was great. I got to go to New York and meet Alice Walker and Gloria Steinem, got lots of attention for the book, got publishers interested in the next one. It would be a truly ungrateful person who would complain about it, but ... Looking back on my career, I see that I was sort of seduced by mainstream acclaim. For a while I wrote some mainstream stuff because I thought I was supposed to, stuff that was just awful and that fortunately never saw the light of day. My true love, the place where I had my roots, was fantasy, but I moved away from that. Fortunately I realized where I was going and returned to it.

Also (and people always hate this when I say it) The Red Magician got nearly unanimous good reviews. That spoiled me very badly. When I got bad reviews later I wasn't prepared for it. It's taken me a long time to realize that not everyone is going to like the same things (that's why we have used bookstores), and that some (a few) reviewers are truly idiots and there's no reason to take what they say to heart.


K.A.: Your parents survived the Holocaust and The Red Magician was about the Holocaust, although it had fantastical elements. Did you feel as though you were fictionalizing your parents' story in some way or following a Judaica tradition of writing about the Golem, or was it just a story created from the clay of your history and creativity?

L.G.: When I wrote The Red Magician I'd been reading a lot of fantasy that came out of Celtic and Northern myths and trying to write something similar, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could write fantasy based on my own traditions. The story was based on stories my mother told me about growing up in Hungary and fantasy was added (of course), but a lot of the fantasy elements, like the golem, were there in the tradition I used.


K.A.: Your books are often about humans at odds with humans and human constructs, as opposed to being at odds with Nature. The narratives take place in the city. Is this purposeful or just a result of you writing what you know (i.e. you live in the city)?

L.G.: This is just because I don't know enough about Nature, and I do know about cities. I wish I did know the names of trees and things. (Sorry, a pretty lame answer, I know.)


K.A.: Your books, for the most part, are published as genre fiction. How do you feel about these kinds of categories? How do you feel about the state of fantasy these days? What is the significance of fantasy as part of literature? Is it escapism? Is it social commentary wrapped in magic?

L.G.: Categories seem very important these days. In the last few weeks I've had two or three people ask me how they should market their work, a question that's starting to make me very impatient. Just write the damn thing—the publisher's the one who's supposed to figure out the marketing. Having said that, though, I understand how hard it is to get published these days if you have a book that doesn't fit a marketing category.

I don't mind having my books called fantasy, though—it's such a broad topic it can include almost anything. And fantasy is being taken more seriously lately, especially since the Lord of the Rings movies. I'm really happy with the movies, and I'm even happier that so many people are going out and reading the books. All of this is very strange and wonderful when I remember going to obscure parts of the library thirty years ago to find more fantasy to read after I'd finished The Lord of the Rings. Going by the popularity of the movies, it looks as if fantasy has taken over the world. Tolkien said that he wanted to write a mythology for England, but it turns out that he'd written a myth for everyone, not just the English. (Okay, maybe for the Western world, since that's where he took his stories from.)

I guess this ties in with what I see as the significance of fantasy. Myths are tremendously important, something people need to survive and to understand the world around them. When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties none of the myths that I heard (Greek and Roman, the Bible) spoke to me the way some of the contemporary myths do. For example, look at the way Tolkien used someone who wasn't a king or hero, a little person (literally) as his protagonist—that's very modern, and yet the whole book reaches back to some of the most ancient stories. So no, I don't see fantasy as escapism—quite the opposite.

K.A.: What is your process of writing? (Do you write every day, a few months out of the year, with a cup of coffee in hand, longhand, on the computer, etc.) Do you do lots of research beforehand? Do you write an outline?

L.G.: Before I started working in the library I would try to sit down and write every morning. Now I try to write on the mornings I have free. I used to use a very cursory outline, just a few pages of what the high spots should be, and trust that things would work out along the way. Now, though, I've started doing a lot more planning in advance and writing much more detailed outlines—and liking it, much to my surprise. One reason I started doing this is that I discovered that I don't have the greatest memory in the world, and I'd been forgetting things I'd meant to put in. Also, I used to have characters that I would trust to take care of themselves, but some of them never seemed to go anywhere or ended up as loose threads, meaning I'd have to go back and write them out or figure out something for them to do. So I decided to do more serious outlines and try to figure out where everything goes beforehand. I'd resisted this for a long time because I thought it would take the spontaneity out of writing (and also because it's very hard, at least for me) but I found that if I don't have to worry about where things are going I can stretch out and enjoy the trip, and that there is still a lot of room to move around in within the outline. And also, of course, if I found out that I didn't really want to continue along the planned route, or if the characters didn't want to, I could still change it.

As for research, if I'm writing a historical novel I do a huge amount of research beforehand. (Sometimes this can be very seductive—it can be more fun to research than to actually write the damn thing.) If I'm making up the world I'm writing in, I try to know a lot about the world before I start writing. In both cases I know a lot more than what actually goes into the book.

K.A.: I've noticed when speaking with editors and agents, they often seem to be under the impression that most writers are out here making a good living. When I talk to writers, I hear about how they are struggling to make ends meet. Many writers use pseudonyms to keep getting published when novels under their names might not be selling well; some give up writing all together. Are you able to make a living as a writer? If not, what do you do? What do you think of the state of publishing these days? Your novels have been getting published for over twenty years now. What changes have you seen you seen in the publishing industry during these years? Changes for the good? Changes that are detrimental to writers, readers, literature in general?

L.G.: My editor (Beth Meacham at Tor) just told me not to quit my day job—something you really don't want to hear from your editor. Beth is one of those editors who understands the economics of publishing—not surprising, since she's the one paying the advances. She says that publishing is hurting these days, that people are getting advances that are half what they used to be.

So I went out and got a part-time job at a library, and I also do some proofreading. And I wrote two books under a pseudonym. The books are different from what I usually write—less quirky, more straight fantasy. (I don't know what you'd call them, really—epic fantasy? high fantasy? High fantasy implies a hierarchy, which I really don't want to get into.) I was inspired by the Tolkien movies, which reminded me of what I used to like about this kind of writing, and by some good fantasy of this kind that's come out recently, particularly by George R.R. Martin and Patricia McKillip. Well, McKillip's good writing isn't just recent—she's always been great. And I have to say I had a terrific time writing the books. I don't know why I didn't do it sooner—maybe because I'd been classified as a literary writer and couldn't do this sort of thing, or so I thought.

The pseudonym was Beth's idea—she thought it was necessary in order to sneak the books into the chain stores. Enormous places like Barnes & Noble and Border's keep computer records of how well an author's books sell and will stop ordering that author if the numbers fall below a certain threshold. And judging from what people have told me the books have been snuck, so that worked out okay. (Beth is very knowledgeable about these things.) I'm going to say what the pseudonym is in a few months, but for now I want people who think of me as an obscure literary writer to pick up the book with no preconceptions.

I don't know why publishing is hurting, though I'm sure ordering by computers can't be helping. What I see is definitely detrimental to writers. As I said before, publishers are leery about taking books that can't be categorized in some way, so a lot of terrific books are not getting published. (I was surprised and delighted to see your book getting a home, because it really is one of those books that are hard to classify.) I think that this caution is hurting publishers as well as authors, because they are surely missing out on something great, something that could be the next big thing. Something like Watership Down would not have been published in this climate (though I'm not a big fan of Watership Down). Or look at The Lord of the Rings—the publisher liked it so much they took it even though they thought they'd lose money.

Also, when publishers play it safe people start writing safe books—books that are written to a formula, with nothing new or fresh about them. I said earlier that there's good fantasy out there, but there's also some really really bad fantasy. I read a lot of fantasy while I was writing my books, and I was appalled at what I found—books went on and on with no editing, because people apparently want fat books these days. One of the things that really started to bug me was the language in these books—the writers used all kinds of anachronisms (like the word "lifestyle," for example) that would never have been used in the milieu they were writing about. (The "lifestyle" of most of the people in these medieval-style landscapes was that they farmed
the land for their lord and then died. They didn't really have a choice.) There were also archaic words that were used in a way that was out-and-out wrong. I kept wondering where the copy editors were, but I suppose if publishers are cutting costs the copy editors are among the first to go.

K.A.: Your novels often have political overtones—politics being a human construct. Is your writing influenced by current politics, or current world events? Do you think the present administration is inspiring writers to speak out, or terrifying them with aspects of the Patriot Act, etc.?

L.G.: A lot of the politics in my novels comes out of my parents' lives, the fact that I know people who lived under terrible dictatorships. Most people in the United States have no concept of how bad things can get. My father, for example, grew up in Nazi Germany. His father was half-owner of a company that imported auto parts from the United States. One day the co-owner of the business decided he wanted to have the entire thing, and he went to the Gestapo and told them he'd heard my grandfather making unpatriotic comments about Hitler. (This was in 1935, before things got really horrible and Jews were being rounded up for no reason.) So the Gestapo came after my grandfather—who fortunately saw them coming in time and hid in the attic. The next day the family left for Holland.

This seems frighteningly similar to today's climate—the way some people have lost a right to representation and a speedy trial and have disappeared in Guantanamo, the way we're encouraged to hate certain groups of people and to, as Bush's former press secretary said, "watch what we say." I can't help but think that it's 1935 here, and that we could lose even more freedom if we're not careful.

I definitely learned to value the rights we have from my father. He always seemed a bit amazed at the amount of freedom of speech he had in the United States, the fact that you're not only allowed to say bad things about your leaders but that every four years you're supposed to, if you believe that leader should not be reelected. He used to repeat that famous quote by Voltaire— "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." He wasn't even a very liberal person when it came to voting, but this was something he passionately believed in. Right now, when it's hard for me to find something to like about my country, I try to keep in mind the First Amendment, which is, if you think about it, an absolutely amazing thing for people in the eighteenth century to have written. When had they seen freedom of speech or freedom of religion put into practice? How many people of different religions did they even know? And yet they obviously thought it could work.

K.A.: Are there particular writers or creative people who inspire you, keep you going when you're discouraged?

L.G.: The person I keep coming back to and thinking about is Ursula Le Guin. There's an amazing writer who manages to be popular and yet not sell out her vision. Like I said, there's so much stale fantasy out there, so it's always wonderful to read her stuff.

K.A.: What are you working on these days that you're excited about? Anything new coming out?

L.G.: I'm excited about the new fantasy novels. I think I learned a lot while writing them, and they're different from anything I've ever done. (Though people who know I wrote them say my style is still the same—I couldn't get away from it.) One of the things people kept complaining about with my books was that they were too short, and I think I finally learned how to spread out and write bigger, at least somewhat. An editor of mine, Shawna McCarthy, once told me my books should have more scope, and I was young and foolish (and a bit full of myself after winning the award—see above) and felt sure she was wrong. Well, after twenty years I think I finally learned something about scope. Shawna, if you're reading this, I'm sorry—you were right.



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