"James Alan Gardner - Gravity Wells" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

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practically everything.

Far be it from me to take sides in the famous (one-sided) fight between Shaw and Shakespeare;
but I confess, I like prefaces and enjoy reading what writers have to say about their writing. One of
the great formative influences in my youth was the Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan
Ellison. Every story in the book started with an introduction by Ellison and ended with an afterword
by the authorтАФsome of them chatty, some of them evasive, some of them talking about what goes
through a writer's head as he or she tries to make a story work. It was the first time I really got a
sense that people sat down and wrote this stuff: real people with real lives, not godlike beings who
exuded words effortlessly. In Dangerous Visions, Ellison talked about getting together with these
people, shooting the breeze, or maybe just walking with them down the streets of Greenwich
Village... and the authors themselves talked about rewrites, struggling with characters, inventing
details, and putting them down on the page.

This was a revelation to me when I was twelve or thirteen. It made writing real; it made the
writers real. I won't say it made me think I could be a writerтАФI'd been writing stories since
kindergarten, so writing was already in my bloodтАФbut it made me think of writing in a different way.
Instead of tossing off imitations of stuff you saw on television, writing could be something you thought
about: something you put your heart into rather than scribbling words as fast as possible so you could
show off to all your friends.

Therefore, when I started to write the introduction to this book, I wanted to offer the same kind
of inspiration to anyone reading this preface. I wanted to tell potential writers there's no magic
involved: just work and discipline, gradually developing your insight and technical skills. There is, no
doubt, some indefinable quality called talent, but neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to tell if
you have it. All you can do is write and write and writeтАФand of course, read and read and readтАФin
the same way that Olympic marathoners simply run and run and run. (Yes, I know marathoners do
more to train than just running... and there are useful training exercises for writers, too. But the heart
of running is running, and the heart of writing is writing. Everything else is auxiliary.)

Unfortunately, when I tried to write that kind of inspirational material for this book, the results
truly sucked. They reeked. They blew dead bears (as teenage boys were fond of saying around the
time I read Dangerous Visions). The whole write-up was godawful claptrap, so utterly pompous and
idiotic my computer started to make gagging sounds. It only went to prove another thing Shaw said in
his introduction to Three Plays for Puritans: the reason many writers don't publish prefaces is that
they can't write them.

So what can I say? If you want a good preface, go read Shaw or Dangerous Visions... or
another of my favorites, Samuel R. Delany's preface to Distant Stars. All I'm going to do is talk
about the stories in this book: how they came to be, why I wrote them, and perhaps what I think of
them now.

One more note about talking about one's work. There's a story (probably false, but I still like it)
that the first time Beethoven played his Moonlight sonata, someone came up to him afterward and
said, "The music was very beautiful, sir, but what did it mean?"

Beethoven answered, "An excellent question. Here's what it meant." Whereupon he sat down at