10 April 2010

Spellwright: … In a world where words can come to life, an inability to spell can be a dangerous thing. And no one knows this better than apprentice wizard Nicodemus Weal.

Nicodemus is a cacographer, unable to reproduce even simple magical texts without ‘mis-spelling’—a mistake which can have deadly consequences. He was supposed to be the Halcyon, a magic-user of unsurpassed power, destined to save the world; instead he is restricted to menial tasks and mocked for his failure to live up to the prophecy. But not everyone interprets prophecy in the same way. There are some factions who believe a cacographer such as Nicodemus could hold great power—power that might be used as easily for evil as for good. And when two of the wizards closest to Nicodemus are found dead, it becomes clear that some of those factions will stop at nothing to find the apprentice and bend him to their will.

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AC: How many times have promo releases hailed debut authors and their ‘ground-breaking’, ‘original’ books, only to be confronted with ‘same old, same old’? Spellwright lives up to its hype and then some. I read this book in one sitting and while, at times, it is not an easy read, it was a real page-turner. The reader is immediately plunged into an unknown world that slowly reveals itself—there is no ‘information dump’ here! The reader, at times does struggle to understand this world, but all this is secondary to the reader empathy for the ‘wounded hero’—Nico. He faces derision from his peers, as well as his own doubts of self-worth, while realising that he has been marked for death for who and what he is. But what really sets this book apart is the manifestation of, and wielding of magic. Magic/spells are written in human muscle and often appear as tattoos on the skin before being cast forth. Every magical language has a special name and properties, (Magnus, for example). Spells can take hours to write and one slip can have terrible consequences. Hence, Nico's major conflict: he has the ability to produce great amounts of text, but his ‘disability’ prevents him from achieving his dreams. As the book progresses, those dreams become nightmares.

Welcome to The Specusphere, Blake. Your bio reads like a fantasy in itself. Severe dyslexia kept you from reading fluently until you were twelve. Because of this, everyone – yourself included!—believed you would never attend college. So all involved were a bit shocked when ten years later you graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University. You are currently studying at Stanford Medical School and teaching creative writing to medical students. Obviously, your own experiences with dyslexia have found a voice in the protagonist, Nicodemus. Reading some of the passages in which Nico mis-spells give glimpses into the jangled world of dyslexia. Would you care to tell the Specusphere a little about dyslexia and your own struggles with it and how you overcame it?

 

BC: First up, let me say a very sincere thank you for the opportunity to be here. It's a real honour. Regarding dyslexia, I’d be happy to chat about it. One of the goals I hoped to achieve with Spellwright was to provide a fun, accessible examination of what coping with disability or chronic disease can do, good and bad, to someone's character.

 

Regarding dyslexia specifically, I think it's important to start by recognizing the condition for what it is: a mismatch between a brain and a language. This fact was illustrated in a study that examined the prevalence of dyslexia in populations that speak and write different languages. Some languages have very illogical orthographies. English is a Germanic language and yet it gained an alphabet from Latin and a vocabulary from all over the world. It easy to demonstrate that English spelling makes not an ounce of sense. Consider the sound “fff” which we might signify with an F or a PH or even an –OUGH (as in ‘enough’). For this reason, English has a high number of dyslexics. French and German don't do so well either. However, languages with logical orthographies, such as Italian, have nearly one third fewer dyslexics. So you can see, dyslexia like almost all disabilities is a mismatch between capabilities and environment. Realizing that there was something inherently wacky with my environment—in my case, that means the English language—and not me, went a long way towards dealing with the many emotional issues that arose for coping with the disability.

Of course, that still leaves the problem of actually learning how to read and write. There I have to hand the lion's share of the credit to my parents and to fantasy literature. My parents read to me often when I was young, hoping to pique my interest in books. Nothing much spoke to me until they started reading fantasy books. Terry Brooks was the first, Robert Jordan later became tremendously important. My parents noticed how much I was interested and began reading less and less each night. Often they would stop at the most exciting point… but would leave the book in case I should like to read on my own. Of course, I was driven insane with frustration and focused my every desire onto reading faster. Soon enough, I began sneaking Jordan into special ed study hall, then Ursula LeGuin, Tad Williams and Robin Hobb, and so on and so on until suddenly I was a bookworm.

AC: One of the most spell-binding (dare I say it?!) moments in the book is when Nico and Shannon and others infiltrate the library, activate an artefact known as “the Index” and produce a spell that takes hours to write – it manifests itself as a cone of luminous writing, almost becoming virtual reality when one magistra takes the writing and wraps it together. (I realise this reader's digest version of the scene will not make much sense to readers of the Specusphere.) The Index scene has shades of computer IT, but from a perspective of magic. How did you begin this book – with a concept, or with the character? Was it a ‘what if…?’ moment?

BC: The concept came first, but only by an hour.
This all happened ten years ago. I was then an undergraduate, studying chemistry and English literature. In biochemistry class, I was struck by how much the nucleotides of DNA and polypeptides of proteins behave like written languages. It takes a bit of metaphorical thinking, but if you squint at these biopolymers in the right light, you see that they consist of letters and words that might be translated or transcribed. More importantly, they might be rendered useless or harmful by a misspelling—a mutation.

Then, when sitting in a dull English seminar on the similarities of Shakespearean and Ancient Greek tragedy, I was taking notes. Back then, I wrote mostly in phonetic script, especially for words I had never seen spelled. Next to me sat another classmate with whom I would often argue. We had a something of a rivalry going. I disliked but grudgingly respected him. On this day, he had stopped listening to the lecture and was reading my notes. “Wow,” he said and tapped on my phonetic shorthand, “you really did ride the short bus to school.”

I think I said something inane like “Tell me about it,” when in my mind I had this image of pulling my misspelled words off the page and using them like a boxing glove to punch him in the face.

After the class, I was still steaming and I began to walk around my college. Yale University is built to look like Oxford or Cambridge: complete with gothic arches, tall spires, and colourful gargoyles. When I was walking about and grumbling, I began to wonder what the world would be like if I actually could have peeled the words of the pages. This got me thinking about the similarity of nucleotides and polypeptides to written language, and the little I knew of computer programming languages. From there I began to ponder a set of questions: What if written language were more like molecular language? How would physical language shape culture, technology, history? Tolkien created Middle-earth for his languages; could I imagine a world built by—not around— its languages? More importantly, could I find a character whose story was intertwined with this world?

Instantly, I thought of how someone with a disability similar to mine might fare in such a world. From that came Nicodemus: someone who had certain aspects of my character magnified, others greatly diminished. One of the most fascinating parts of writing this book occurred when I was ‘researching’ the disabled characters who are not Nicodemus. I did this by questioning classmates and colleagues who also have learning disabilities or medical conditions (e.g. blindness, epilepsy) about how their conditions shaped their own characters. Those who have read Spellwright will recognize the fictional characters that arose from this research.

AC: In an interview you said that the two rules of writing you were given: ‘Write about what you know’ and ‘write about what you love’ would possibly render the writing into a warm, fuzzy mush. Your advice that one should ‘write about what you fear’ is profound and struck a deep resonance with me (as a writer). How more powerful is fear! Would you care to elaborate on this concept, in terms of your own writing, career and Spellwright?

BC: Certainly. In writing this trilogy, I had to connect with three major aspects of my life: my dyslexia, my medical vocation, and my inner linguistics geek. The relevance of two of those is perhaps obvious. As a dyslexic, I fear nothing so much as disability. As a linguistics geek, I love big flashy ideas about language and science. The medical student side of my life might stick out until you consider that health care professionals live and work in environments that strive to prevent pain and disability. Medicine is, in its largest sense, the science and art of preventing and ameliorating disability. For this reason I love medicine. And yet, for all that modern medicine is able to do, it still has a woeful number of failures and limitations. It is an endlessly demanding and often-less-than-romantic discipline; as such, is also a focus of many of my fears.

The Spellwright Trilogy is a series that seeks before anything else to entertain. It's got a classic quest, wizards and dragons, and a mega-watt magic-system that provides plenty of fireworks. But hopefully along the way it tackles some of the larger issues of inescapable disability and how that affects the ability to heal both oneself and others.

One of the reasons I think it's so productive to write about what you fear (in addition to what you know and love) is that when you do so, you are required to put yourself into danger. Your fiction is going to cut close to a nerve and maybe even through it. Your fiction won't be, purely, a calculation. It will be personal. There will necessarily be an element of autobiography about your writing. For that reason, you will have to go to lengths to make sure that your protagonists are differentiated enough from you to avoid being carbon copies of yourself. But once you do that, you’ll be playing with literary fire. I believe readers are very aware of when authors put something of themselves at stake. If an author doesn't, the work comes off dry. Critics often fuss about being “unique.” And, that's a wonderful thing to be. It's intellectually pleasing. But I’d rather read an author whose prose and characters are heartfelt. And, of course, I believe the best way to be heartfelt is to tell the story at the intersection of what you know, love, and fear.

AC: Spellwright also weaves threads of druidic lore, quantum physics, medicine and philosophy to create a multi-layered, entirely believable (thought at times, uncomfortable) reality for the reader. How did you keep all these threads from tangling?

BC: That was actually one of the most enjoyable parts of writing the book! One of the things I most love about a good fantasy or science fiction book is consistency and derivation of the book's speculative elements. It really bothers me when an author creates a magic (or technological) system that breaks down in certain parts of the world or in parts of the story. In particular, the use of multiple, disparate magic systems to increase wow-factor and/or get the plot out of a tight spot irritates me. Of course, story and character are much more important than any “world building” element, but a complete and consistent system makes it all seem much more real and believable. I greatly admire fantasies that have something like a “unified field theory” to their magic system, that is to say every aspect of their magic is derived from a few fundamental rules of magic that may not be broken. Brandon Sanderson is perhaps the current captain of this movement, which I’ve heard named as “hard fantasy,” akin to “hard SF.”
Regarding Spellwright, once I had worked out the fundamental rules that governed the text-based magic system, I could then use that system to reinvent many of the common fantasy tropes (e.g. druids, wizards, gargoyles, etc). In essence, deriving the fantasy elements from a few hard laws helped me explore many different areas—such as medicine, philosophy, etc.—while trying to keep the whole world consistent.

AC: I found that Nico's discovery of the ‘Language Prime’ to be one of the most moving moments in the book (seen through the example of the moth): that every life form has its own song and that the song is simple, yet strong, fragile and precious. It is a belief that resonates in many philosophies. Is this something that you ‘discovered’ in the course of your life, or the writing of this book, or through some other medium?

BC: My professors of synthetic organic chemistry were very poetic fellows. They went in big for the “molecules as language” metaphor I allude to above. It helped that they were both English and would wax poetic about their science. The idea was that the different organic molecules were the words to a new language, the chemical reactions the grammar, and organic synthesis the resulting creative prose. “A chemical poem!” one of them would declare after working out a complex synthetic pathway on the board. This idea of a ‘chemical poem’ became even more intriguing when we studied the macromolecules of DNA and proteins. That all living creatures consist of chemical poems (or song as you phrase it) written in the same language—in many ways the world's first language—fascinated me. So much of what we are comes directly from our genes, and a misspelling within those genes can cause disease. As you say, there are many philosophies and religions that share an analogous idea of a central, vital force that can animate us or, if out of proportion, harm us.  It was the realization that the language creating us is a source of not only wonder but also pain that inspired Language Prime.

AC: Can you describe a typical day in your life?

BC: Sure. I’ll actually give you two days. For the past two years, I have been completing the ‘pre-clinical’ years of medical school. So, I would wake up around 8AM attend lectures until noon. In first year, those lectures focused on biochemistry, genetics, basic pharmacology, and anatomy. In the second year, they tackled physiology, pathology, and a bit of treatment. I would then write for the lunch hour and return for afternoon laboratory. First year this consisted of dissection of a cadaver or hours peering through a microscope in histology. Second year we moved on to small groups of ‘clinical reasoning’ in which students reviewed a medical case with a professor. Finally, we began practicum, in which began to see real patients, to take their histories and physical exams, and to report back to a physician. Most days, I would get back to my apartment around five or six. I would go for my customary four mile run while listening to either an audiobook or a lecture loaded into my iPod. In the evening, I would skim though the notes for the next day, write for two hours and then pass out somewhere around 1AM. During weekends and vacations, I got much more writing done.

This year I have been awarded a research fellowship from the Stanford Medical Scholars program. As such, most days I wake up around 8AM and write (mostly fiction but also academic medical articles or self promotional stuff, like interviews) on my couch until 1PM or so when I have to hightail it into the med school to meet with my mentor or research partners. Afterward I’ll write in the library for a while and then head out for run. After dinner, I’m back on the couch writing until somewhere around midnight when I stop making sense and get into bed.

AC: I notice that you teach creative writing to medical students – is this something that helps doctors in their practice? How? Would you care to share any anecdotes from the classroom?

BC: I teach medical students in their first two years, so they aren't practicing yet. But I also belong to a writing group of practicing physicians that meets once a month. As I see it, both groups use writing as a form of much needed exploration and creativity. Medical training and practice, especially in America, is a funny intellectual shift. Early on in our lives, we are educated in a way to make us think in similar ways: we must all learn to spell the same way, to calculate the same way, etc. There's no room for originality in the multiplication tables. Then somewhere in high school, all that changes. Education becomes about making one's mind as original as possible: writing a paper about Hamlet that reveals something no one else has yet revealed, providing a more elegant geometrical proof or simplification of an integral. This push to become original is then fostered even more strongly in college when we are asked to write original theses or participate in original research. Then, at the beginning of medical school, the push for creativity is completely extinguished. There's more to memorize than possibly can be memorized: anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, signs, symptoms, illness scripts, treatment regiments. All of it must be swallowed and reproduced as faithfully as possible. Creativity and ingenuity (I am told) play an increasingly larger part of medical practice as one progresses through medical training, but in the beginning, one is obsessed with being able to provide the same diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plan that the majority of doctors would agree with. We are all trying to think alike again. For those with creative impulses, it can be a jarring experience. And the chance to create among others working in the same environment can be a Godsend.

AC: Blake, Spellwright (book one) has been praised by readers and reviewers, deservedly so! How many books are in the series, and when will they be released?

BC: Thank you for the kind words! After ten years of work, it is a wonderful feeling to see the book in actual existence. Spellwright is the first of a trilogy. I’ve learned in medical school that a premature prognosis can get one into as much or more trouble as a faulty diagnosis, so I’m very conservative with predictions. I can say that at the time I’m writing this I have 95,000 words of Spellbound (book two) and expect it to be about 135,000 words. Though book tours and the necessities of promotion have slowed me down a bit, I’m very enthusiastic about this book and the writing has gone very quickly. Also, in the good news category, I have just received the green light to take another year “out”—this time as a research assistant—so that I can finish the final book in the trilogy, Disjunction. Thereafter I will have a year of medical clerkships in which I will not be able to write a longer work. My fourth year I plan to produce a book, not likely in the Spellwright world, more likely to be a standalone book incorporating my experiences on the medical wards.

AC: Do you plan on coming to Worldcon in Melbourne this year? Or a tour to down under at any time?

BC: Very sadly, no. I am dying to get out there for Worldcon but the cost is just too high. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the future.

AC: Is there anything else you would like to mention about yourself, your writing, future books …?

BC: Only that I’d like to thank you again for this opportunity to chat. It's been a lot of fun!

AC: Blake, we at The Specusphere wish you all the success with your books and career. Thanks for taking the time to ‘be-spell’ us.
Spellwright is due for release in Australia, April, 2010 by HarperCollins (Voyager) Trade Paperback, ISBN: 9780007332755.

For more information, interviews, and all things spellbinding, go to: www.blakecharlton.com

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