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The River Styx Runs Upstream
by Dan Simmons
Introduction
It's a cliche that writing fiction is a bit like having chil-dren. As with most cliches,
there's a base of truth there. Having the idea for a story or novelтАФthat moment of
pure inspiration and conceptionтАФis as close to ecstasy as writ-ing offers. The actual
writing, especially of a novel, runs about the length of a human gestation period and
is a time of some discomfort, frequent queasiness, and the absolute assurance of
difficult labor before the thing is born. Fi-nally, the stories or books take on a
definite life of their own once published and soon are out of the writer's con-trol
completely; they travel far, visiting countries that the writer may never see, learning to
express themselves flu-ently in languages the author will never begin to master,
gaining the ear of readers with levels of affluence and ed-ucation far beyond those of
their progenitor, andтАФperhaps the most galling of allтАФliving on long after the author
is dust and a forgotten footnote.
And the ungrateful whelps don't even write home.
"The River Styx Runs Upstream" was conceived on a beautiful August morning in
1979, in the summerhouse behind my wife's parents' home in Kenmore, New York. I
remember typing the first paragraph, pausing, and thinkingтАФThis will be my first
story to be published.
It was, but not before two and a half years and a myr-iad of misadventures had
passed.
A week after I'd finished writing the first draft of "The River Styx..." I drove from
western New York to Rockport, Maine, to pick up my wife Karen after her stay at
the Maine Photographic Workshop. Along the way, I spent a day in Exeter, New
Hampshire, meeting and talk-ing to a respected writer whom I'd previously only
corre-sponded with. His advice: submit to the "little magazines," spend
yearsтАФperhaps decadesтАФbuilding a reputation in these limited-circulation,
contributor-copy-in-lieu-of-pay markets before even thinking about trying a novel,
and then spend more years producing these small books from little-known
publishers, reaching only a thou-sand or so readers but trying to acquire some
critical un-derpinning.
I picked up Karen in Rockport and we began the long drive back to our home in
Colorado. I was silent much of the time, pondering the writer's advice. It was sage
adviceтАФonly one would-be writer in hundreds, perhaps thousands, achieves
publication. Of those who publish, a scant few manage to make a living at it ... even
a "liv-ing" below the poverty line. The statistical chances of be-coming a "bestselling
author" are approximately the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously
being attacked by a great white shark.
So between Rockport, Maine, and the front range of Colorado, I pondered, decided
that the advice was un-doubtedly sound, realized that the "little magazine route" was
almost certainly the wise way to go, and began to un-derstand that it was a sign of
maturity to realize that the quest for being a widely read author, a "mass market"
writer of quality tales, was a chimera ... something to be given up.
And then, about the time I saw the Rocky Mountains rising from the plains ahead of
us, I said, "Nahhh." Per-versely, I decided to go for the widest audience possible.
Cut to the summer of 1981, two years later. Dispir-ited, discouraged, all but broken
on the wheel of rejec-tions, chastened by reality, I "gave up" writing for publication
and did something I'd sworn I would never do: I went off to a writers' conference.
Paid to go to a writ-ers' conference. A "how-to", "this is the way to prepare your