DN: You’ve mentioned that in writing workshops the most common mistake you’ve seen is what you call “inconsistent point of view.”
UKL: That’s when you shift from one person’s mind to another’s, the way Tolstoy and Woolf do so splendidly, but you do it awkwardly or you do it without knowing you are doing it. The thing about point of view is awareness. Changing it requires intense awareness and a certain amount of practice and skill in the shifting. Successful shifting gives binocular or more than binocular vision. Instead of a single view of an event, you do what Rashomon does, offer multiple perspectives, but without having to retell the story multiple times as Rashomon does. You can do it as you tell the story, and the multiple points of view lead to greater puzzlement or greater clarity about what is going on, depending upon what you want. I think the authorial point of view, because it allows such shifting, is the most flexible and useful of all the points of view. It’s the freest.
DN: It wasn’t until reading Steering the Craft that I realized just how experimental Charles Dickens’s Bleak House was. You discuss it, not necessarily as a text to emulate, but to show some of the radical choices he made both in terms of how he alternates point of view and also how he alternates tense.
UKL: Half the book is written in the present tense, very unusual in that period. And those are the passages written in the authorial point of view—an almost eagle-eye view, rare at any time. It’s an extraordinary book.
DN: You’ve said that modernist writing manuals often conflate story with conflict. What do you mean by this?
UKL: Well, to preach that story is conflict, always to ask, “Where’s the conflict in your story?”—this needs some thinking about. If you say that story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you’re limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is part of life, I’m not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it’s not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things.
DN: It’s amazing how quickly we fall into battle metaphors in common speech when speaking about almost anything.
UKL: I do try to avoid saying “the fight” for such and such, “the war” against such and such. I resist putting everything into terms of conflict and immediate violent resolution. I don’t think that existence works that way. I’m trying to remember what Lao Tzu says about conflict. He limits it to the battlefield, where it belongs. To limit all human behavior to conflict is to leave out vast, rich areas of human experience.
DN: You raise this issue in your otherwise very positive review of the latest novel by Salman Rushdie. Your concern is that the dark jinni in the book, the force of destruction, is inextricably linked to the creative impulse in a way that gave you pause.
UKL: Yes. At the very end of the book there is a suggestion that if we aren’t forever at war we will be peaceable and boring and dull and not do anything worth doing. All I can say is that’s not my experience of war and peace. I was a kid during the Second World War. All-out war is not a period where creativity gets much play. Coming out of that war was like coming out of a very dark place into an open world where you could think and do something other than war, the war effort, fighting. Where there was room for creation, not just destruction.
DN: You’ve been a strong voice behind the idea that science fiction and fantasy are as much literature as realist or mimetic fiction or memoir. At one time you even said, “Fake realism is the escapism of our time.” You describe a long uninterrupted lineage for fantasy back to the Mahābhārata and Beowulf.
UKL: I was just trying to point out that possibly the oldest form of literature is fantastic. It begins in myths and legends, and in hero stories that become mythologized, like The Odyssey. But I think the exclusion of genre writing from literature is in the past now. It’s hard for me to stop talking in those terms, though, because I had to keep arguing for so long that genre is literature just as much as The Grapes of Wrath is. Of course most of it isn’t as good—but most realism isn’t as good as The Grapes of Wrath either. Judgment by genre is just wrong—stupid, wasteful. Most people know that now.
DN: This makes me think of the essay you wrote back in 1974, “Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” and makes we wonder if perhaps we are starting to come to terms with dragons in America now?
UKL: Yes and no. That’s a wider thing than the genre/literature argument. A fear of using the imagination is very deep in America. It shows in our schools, where apparently kids read less and less and less fiction. And do they get any poetry at all anymore? How does our education train and exercise the imagination? Well, I don’t know, so I shouldn’t talk about it.
DN: Steering the Craft engages this conversation and complicates it in a good way, I think. In the book you omnivorously quote from Virginia Woolf and Mark Twain and Charles Dickens but also from Margaret Atwood and J. R. R. Tolkien and even from Native tales, like the story of the Thunder Badger, as examples of different techniques. You fluidly move between these worlds, which you can also see in your own fiction, these varied influences. But it feels in a way that you are making a quiet statement in the craft book that these are all literatures.
UKL: Absolutely. In a recent online workshop in narrative fiction at Book View Café, I found that over and over again I want to send people to read Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories, for his long sentences, or for his descriptions. If you want to see how to write a sea battle, go to O’Brian. He is an incredibly good action writer. But how does he do it? He’s certainly worth studying. Within genre you can find marvelous examples of writing.
DN: You have been very interested in Taoism and Buddhism over the years and translated your own version of the Tao Te Ching. How do you see that influencing your writing? Are you able to articulate a way in which you feel those are influencing story?
UKL: It goes so deep that it is hard for me to articulate. I’m not good at analyzing my own writing. The Lathe of Heaven is an obvious example of using a Taoist approach to life. Though I didn’t use the I Ching to write the book, the way Philip K. Dick did to write The Man in the High Castle, the movement is continuous change, and in Lathe it happens through dreams. So you never quite know if it is a dream or if it is real. That is my book where the Asian influence is most clearly on the surface. But that sense that everything is always moving and changing—well, if you ask me what story is about, it’s about change.
DN: I may be reading too much into this quote of yours, but this felt like it evoked something about Buddhist philosophy with regard to the relationship of self to art. You say: “Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this, in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end. I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way, and find the focus of the story, and follow the movement of the story, the story will tell itself…” This feels like a very different approach to story than one of willfulness to put something down on the page.