Robin McKinley Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do you have a favourite of your own books?
RMcK: My favourite of my own books has always, so far, been the most recent, whatever it is. (No, wait, this is only true with novels. It's not that I don't take my short stories seriously, it's just that they're short and I don't quite disappear into them over my head the way I do my novels.) Then that most recent novel stays my favourite till a stage middling-late in the writing of the next one, when the new one has become its own individual self and we both know it, and I'm thundering toward the end of the final rewrite (what I hope is the final rewrite). And then it stays my favourite till some time middling-late in the writing of the next one....
Hindsight makes my attitude toward my books move around a little. I find Sword pretty embarrassing because my eleven-year-old self's fantasy of the perfect life is so nakedly exposed in it. (Corlath, by the way, looks a lot like Sean Connery from about twenty years ago, only with hair. I do not, of course, know if Connery's eyes turn yellow when he's angry. It wouldn't surprise me.) I don't mind revealing myself as a Romantic with a six-dimensional capital R, but I feel there are limits of taste and discretion which I ignored in that book. I have become defensive of certain books or certain scenes in certain books that I think are too often not read on their own terms: if one more person tells me, accusingly and aggrievedly, that The Outlaws of Sherwood isn't Howard Pyle, for example, I am going to hit them over the head with a quarterstaff. If it were Howard Pyle, why would I be bothering? If you want Howard Pyle, read Howard Pyle. Although the comments that really make me break out into a rash are the ones about the reprehensible presence of so many pushy women in Robin Hood's band. Everyone knows that Robin Hood's band is made up of merry men. (Everyone knows that medieval women stayed at home with their hands folded, just like women do now.) Yes, and I think the end of Howard Pyle's version is loathsome misogynist propoganda, and I was so glad suddenly to be old enough to think so, rather than to believe that it's just that women are natural betrayers. (Oh yes, and reverting to Sean Connery, Robin and Marian is not my favourite movie. Dressing up betrayal in a lot of smarmy modern psychobabble doesn't make it not betrayal. I didn't like The Lion in Winter either, for similar reasons: emotional melodrama straight out of afternoon TV taped over the fancy dress historical setting. It just didn't bother me as much because Henry II and his family aren't big personal idols.)
Unfortunately I think it's possible that part of the reason a nearly-and-just-finished book is my favourite till the next nearly-and-just-finished book is because as soon as it's out there with strangers reading it my feelings toward it get confused by what other people think of it. People not liking something — or disliking it for the wrong reasons, see above — is depressing; but people liking something too well is disquieting. Like being given a diamond necklace in thanks for a embroidered pillow-case. This doesn't make you happy, it makes you feel fraudulent. This makes me sound like a wishy-washy neurotic ('neurotic' is not without truth but I deny 'wishy-washy') but as I keep saying, a storyteller only functions if she's got an audience to tell her stories to. I can't change the story to please an audience — the story is the story — but I can try to tell it in a way that will reach as many people as possible. And so I listen to what people tell me about the experience of reading my books. But this system depends on people reading, as it were, cleanly. Reading what's there. Or at least being aware that if the heroine is reminding them of their second-grade teacher who almost put them off reading for life, that's a personal experience and not the book's fault.
Q: Have you always liked reading?
RMcK: Yes. I couldn't wait to learn how to read (I was totally disgusted with kindergarden and learning my letters: I wanted words and I wanted them now) and once I began there was no stopping me. But reading was also pretty well the one thing I was much good at. I was a complete loss at maths and nearly so at all the sciences with a slightly honourable mention for biology in high school (I then took beginning biology in college which was a disaster when I refused to pith my frog; why did a frog have to die so that I could write up a lab report?) and history had all these facts you had to learn to pass the exams (as I often tell school groups, no doubt to the dismay of listening teachers, there are, in my hierarchy, two kinds of facts. There are boring facts, which I merely wish to get away from as quickly as possible, and interesting facts, which I then wish to make up stories around and subvert as the plot demands. 'Learning' facts is not on the list). And phys ed, shuuudder. No, I certainly wasn't athletic. But by golly I could read (just so long as I didn't have to remember any facts). Up until fairly recently it was almost all fiction and a little poetry. It hasn't been till I've got quite old and boring and hardly ever wear black leather and rhinestones any more that I've begun to appreciate much non-fiction. Although I'm still not very good at facts. The answer to mental fact-loss is to own copies of all the books you want facts out of, dog-ear the pages (shock! Horror!), and then make notes to yourself in the margins (more shock! Worse horror!). Of course if you really can't remember anything about what you're trying to retrieve you may look at a lot of marginal notes, but it's a beginning. (People like me are also not much use at parties. 'I was reading this fascinating book the other day.' 'Oh? What's it about?' 'Er...' The answer there is to have the book or books you feel like talking about to hand in your knapsack, which helps explain why my knapsack weighs the way it does, since I often want to talk about the books I'm reading. Although not at parties. I don't go to parties: my mind goes so blank I can't remember what I'm reading even if the book is in my hand.)
And I still adore stories. I'm just fussier about them than I used to be, and will only suspend my disbelief if I'm having a good time. When I was younger I tended to believe that writers had to be obeyed, like teachers or the police, even if their pronouncements were nonsensical.
Q: Are you married? Do you have any children?
RMcK: I am married to Peter Dickinson, yes, the writer (there's at least one more Peter Dickinson, the composer; when they both worked for the BBC they used to get each other's cheques). Fortunately I had been passionately devoted to his books years before I met him so I can go on thinking they're wonderful and he's brilliant now. I am the sort of sad, mushy person who can no longer trust her literary instincts when she's reading something written by someone she likes personally. For a husband, feh, it would be impossible.
And now for the mega ginormous good news: Peter has his own web site!!!!! Gone live 1 May 2002!
I have no children but Peter has four, and six grandchildren. (So far.) I'm the one who remembers birthdays however.
Q: Do you have any pets?
RMcK: Three whippets and a 1965 cream-coloured MGB convertible. The whippets lie around in graceful, anatomically incredible heaps and assist in the Doing of Literature. They know the system, and if we aren't at our desks by 9 am they come round and stare at us accusingly. It's astonishing, the force of accusation beaming from the eyes of a creature that barely comes up to your knee. I seem to have had to give up horses for the moment so the MG is my horse equivalent: exhilarating and temperamental. With your eyes half-closed — especially if you privately think the old classic MGs are the most beautiful cars ever made — she actually quite begins to resemble the perfect, cream-coloured ponies of your distant childhood fantasies, the ones who might secretly be unicorns.
Q: What do you do with your spare time? Do you have any hobbies?
RMcK: I don't have any spare time, probably in part because I don't have hobbies, I have obsessions. I don't much like the word 'hobby' — as soon as you call something a 'hobby' it seems to me it loses all weight, all value, and becomes just something that sucks up some hours. Eating chocolate chip cookies or watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a hobby (not simultaneously however: the human nervous system can only bear so much stimulation); cooking and gardening and riding horses and running and bell-ringing and fencing — and reading — are something else. (I've even been known to embroider pillow-cases.) But can you have more than one, say, avocation? That sounds a little pretentious. So does Personal Enrichment Programme. Okay, so I do a lot of stuff with my time besides write books. A lot of the voluntary stuff (ie paying bills or going to the dentist are both necessary I suppose but not what I would call voluntary) I think also... feeds me. Feeds the person I am, which includes the writer who writes books and has a web site with a FAQ.
My main problem isn't that I'm an obsessive, however, it's that the stupid day refuses to be any longer than twenty-four hours, week after week and year after year. There are quite a few other things I would be obsessive about too if someone would invent the tesseract soon, please. Photography. Rose breeding (as opposed to just growing phalanxes of the things). I'd probably breed carnivorous plants too. I have several trays of carnivorous plants big enough to take on house flies, to which this big old ramshackle house is mercilessly prone, and one of my favourite sounds is that of trapped flies buzzing furiously in the throats of my pitcher plants as I walk along the upstairs hall. I'd take up sailing again, I'd take piano lessons again. I'd take voice lessons again if I could find a teacher with a fabulous enough sense of humor to take me on. I'd go to the opera more often. (The tesseract has to bring a larger bank balance with it.) I'd learn to work on the MG myself. I'd like more time for drawing and I'd buy some new watercolours, I suspect the last lot have shrivelled up solid. I might conceivably take French lessons, since it's French I theoretically learnt in school, and I am deeply embarrassed at being another of these self-centred English speakers who don't feel they have to learn anybody else's language. But I've never gotten very far doing anything on guilt and good intentions alone, so I'd have to turn out to like it, and I can't do grammar and conjugations (shuuudder) in my own language. I'd like to finish learning to knit. I'd like to learn to make clothes, with buttonholes and zippers and belt loops and things, but my inherited sewing machine was previously owned by someone who did know how, and I know it despises me. I'd like to be able to make an origami crane that didn't fall over. (I have it on excellent authority that origami is very obsessive.) I'd like to learn pottery-making and silver-smithing and how to polish and set stones. I'd like to learn farriery, for that matter, but my back wouldn't take it even if my tesseract would, and I would ride every day. I would certainly read more. A lot more.
Sigh.
My first serious discovery of life outside books was horses and horseback riding, when I was nine years old and living in Japan where my military father was posted. (Of course I'd been reading about horses for years.) I took my first riding lessons from some Japanese ex-cavalrymen who had set up a riding school for us occupying round eyes; in hindsight I wonder about this, since this was the very early sixties and WWII wasn't all that long ago, but at the time it all seemed friendly enough, at least until your horse refused the fence again because he knew you weren't so sure about it yourself, whereupon the air got, I think, pretty blue, but since it was in Japanese you didn't know for sure. The ex-cavalrymen belonged to the 'put them on a horse and make them jump things until they fall off and then do it again' school of learning to ride, which was exciting, but rather alarming, and I was a nervy, easily frightened child. Obstinate (I did keep getting back on) but nervy and easily frightened. (I am a nervy, easily frightened, obstinate adult). I do still have a poster of me at eleven jumping a horse named Shadow over a decent sized fence — which is to say I am somewhere on top of him and he is going over the fence and my hands could have released better and my hard hat is sitting on the back of my head and wouldn't have done me much good if I'd fallen off — which proves I got that far anyway. I didn't actually learn to ride until twenty years later, taking dressage lessons, but that's another story.
I started cooking pretty young too. I have always liked to eat, and once you figure out how, you can have exactly what you want by making it yourself (one of my better memories of an extremely unpleasant adolescence is making cakes and pies to Saturday morning cartoons), and you may find that half the fun is diddling around with a series of recipes till you get there via your own adaptations and evolving marginal commentary. Although despite the Betty Crockers and Joys of Cooking and Julia Childs and Delia Smiths and so on it still seems to me there's a huge credibility gap between the pages of most cookbooks and the hasn't-a-clue, um, boil water?, learner. Knead your bread till it's the texture of an ear lobe? A vivid image but not one I can recommend as practical. Bread making books go on too much about kneading anyway. (They can't all be in the pay of the bread-making machine industry.) Almost nobody points out that if you let your sponge do most of the work you don't have to. (Although I actually enjoy beating the bejazus out of bread dough. It's an excellent counterpoint to a long morning at your desk.) I love baking generally. My husband and I observe a strict turn and turn about in the bread making but all the cookies and desserts and puddings and sweets are my territory (he does usually make the Christmas pudding but then I'm busy making acres of Christmas cookies and moaning).
Gardening was an accident. The last summer I lived in Maine it had sort of semi occurred to me that there was, you know, um, earth out there and I could probably grow something in it. My little house was pretty heavily shaded by lilac hedges and an enormous maple tree, and the soil was the standard Maine granite bedrock with a few crumbly bits on top to mislead the unwary, but it still could be done. I put in a few snapdragons and carnations, bought from the straggly on-sale table at the local garden centre, and watched in fascination while it took them really quite a surprisingly long time to die. Maybe I was on to something here. Then Peter, my gardening mad husband happened unexpectedly, and I found myself plonked down over here in southern England in the middle of a one-and-three-quarter-acre southern English jungle. The longer version of this story is somewhere else on this web site — the essay on how I wrote Rose Daughter, which is a longer version of the afterword in the book itself (both leave out the fact that Peter's first fiance's gift to me was a pair of secateurs, so his protests about my not having to take on gardening to please him may perhaps be viewed with a certain benign suspicion) — but the point is there I was, sink or swim. I swam.
The other thing that has to be said is that I am a dilettante obsessive, which is probably the worst kind. I didn't need any more interesting occupations to bore my friends and loved ones with (Peter, so far as I can tell, cannot be bored with conversation about gardening and gardens, although I'm still trying) but my butterfly mind will keep flapping. Fortunately there isn't much to say about running except that it suits me. I crawl out of bed as early as I can bear to, poke the contact lenses in and tie the running shoes on, and stagger out the door. By the time I get back I'm ready to face another day at my desk (usually). We live in the country so I get the sun rising behind the hedgerows or the huge old beeches looming through the mist and skylarks (this planet's best birdsong: nightingales are all very well, but give me skylarks) all spring and summer long, as well as ankle-snapping mud and rutted slog about nine months of the year and the miasmic aroma of acres and acres of carefully laid cowshit when the farmers fertilise their fields, which I sometimes think happens about twice a month. Nonetheless I do some of my best thinking while I run: thinking about my life and what I think I'm doing with it as well as about whatever story I'm trying to write, and also I do a fair amount of running (with spiked racing shoes) over the supine bodies of whichever people are currently top on my hit list, especially on cold rainy mornings when I haven't had enough sleep and I need something to get me going.
I started fencing only recently (as I write this) so I can't drone on about foibles and froissements yet because I don't know what they are. I wish I had the nerve to try and take the price of the gear off my taxes — of course a writer of fantasy needs fencing lessons, you'd think even a tax accountant could see that. Anyone but a tax accountant could also see that the gear is irresistable, the way cool padded jacket, the knee breeches and tall socks, the enigmatic mask... although the standard dopey generic sports shoes, anything so long as they're white, let the image down rather. I'm sure Basil Rathbone never wore generic sports shoes. Basil Rathbone is kind of where I came in — Errol Flynn never did much for me, but Rathbone could fence. Lingering images from my childhood. And then Peter and I saw the film Le Bossu and it was now or never — this happens to you in your forties, I think, I started running a few years ago the same way, now or never, kiddo, you're getting old. The fencing has been great fun since the first bad moment when my instructor, having arranged me in the Very Peculiar Fencing Posture, which is a kind of T-shaped half squat, said 'now lunge and hit Meg', Meg being my friend and sparring partner, whereupon all those years of playground indoctrination flooded back and I said, or rather wailed, But I don't want to hit Meg! Our instructor looked at me a little blankly and said, It's a bit late for that now. So I lunged and hit Meg. And have been hitting Meg ever since, except for when she hits me, which is more often.
But I could drone on for a very long time indeed about bell ringing. That I got started on this at all was another accident. (Yes, many of the important decisions in my life have been made by accident.) Peter and I went to visit a garden in a neighbouring village on its open day. When we got there it turned out that it was not just a garden but fourteen local gardens and a change ringing demonstration at the local church. Well I'd read Dorothy Sayers' The Nine Taylors at an impressionable age so I had been primed way back in the days when I was a mere tourist over here to love change ringing at first listen, and this had already happened: it's a shouting, jubilant, waterfally sort of noise (at least when the ringers know what they're about; if they don't, it can be really awful, especially if you live near the church). So I had to go to the demo because while I've heard plenty of change ringing — this area of southern England is thick with bell towers — I'd never been up into a change-ringing belfry. I have the usual human craving to enter forbidden territory, and the stairs or ladders that lead to bell towers are deeply intriguing. You expect Merlin (or Nimue) to be lurking on the other side of your average English ringing chamber door. At the top of this particular ladder there were a group of (anticlimactically ordinary-looking) people standing in a circle pulling on these heavy ropes, each rope curiously adorned with a fuzzy striped hand grip, which are a bit dizzying to watch as the ropes bob up and down as the ringers pull and the bells go 'bong'. There was a poster on the wall saying 'we can always use ringers'. And I went away with my ears still full of the lovely hypnotic noise of change patterns, and thinking 'hmm'. (It was Peter who finally made the first phone call to discover the bell secretary's name. He was tired of listening to me wandering around the house going 'hmm'.)
Bells are alive. You logic crunchers can sneer all you like, but they are. Our tower's bells — as I'm beginning to appreciate as I ring elsewhere — are a very nice bunch, good-natured and well-mannered and gorgeous to listen to (if you don't have too many beginners going 'clank'). You know where you are with our bells. But they all still have individual personalities, and when you 'take hold' you know it. One of the cliches about learning to handle a bell-rope is that it's like feeling your horse's mouth with the rein against the bit; and every horse is different. But somehow this is more acceptable in a creature that eats and breathes and runs around than in cast metal that lies veiled in the dark of a belfry. So the stolid may explain it in terms of the fact that bells are individually cast and each one is physically a little different from every other one, even one of precisely the same weight; and it won't be precisely the same weight anyway after it's been tuned to its ring (its group of bells) since tuning is done by shaving bits of metal off. A ring is also always a range of sizes; the littlest (called the treble) of our ten bells is about 370 pounds, and the biggest (called the tenor) is a few pounds over 2000; so you could also say, if you have not a quarter-ounce of romance in your soul, that the varying personalities in a group of bells are just the variation of weight against your hand when you take hold. The stolid will always be with us. None of the rest of my band of ringers writes fantasy for a living, so probably none of the rest of them imagine low chiming conversations under the tower roof when there are no humans around; but I would expect them in their heart of hearts not to be surprised if the bells were careless one evening and we heard them.
I am, still, sadly, a beginner; I can ring treble, erratically, on the most basic change patterns; I'm supposed to be learning to ring 'inside' on the most basic change pattern of all that even the deaf and the brainless could learn; but it's still pretty appalling, and on Sunday morning, when we ring for services, which means when we are supposed to sound like we know what we're doing (practise nights are full of clanks and crashes; this is quite a good thing on a practise night — it means we are working hard — except perhaps for those who live too near and had splitting headaches before we started), I tend to go stupid from stage fright and ring worse (fortunately since I am not a Christian I can sneak out the side door when the service starts and not meet the congregation's reproachful eyes). I have this theory that the old guard among bell ringers are self-selected for unnatural patience with the endless tides of idiot beginners; this is actually bad news for me since I have unnatural patience about nothing, but I don't have to worry about this for a few years yet. Or perhaps many years yet. Change ringing is fabulously complicated. When you go in for your first lessons in How Not to Strangle Yourself or Others in Your Bell Rope they don't waste much time warning you what you're getting yourself into — a few months later when you are initiated into the mysteries of leading, which means you are at last approaching the Holy Grail of your first real change pattern, the gates of the Castle of Carbonek will suddenly open and a bright light stream out and ZAP you are either gloriously transformed into a dedicated ringer (unfortunately this splendid vision doesn't seem to improve your practical ability any) or you realise that you are out of your mind and you go home and take up knitting. (Actually one of our old guard told me his wife picked up change ringing very quickly because she was good at knitting patterns. Maybe I should take up knitting again. Sigh.)
At this point I hived off a lot more paragraphs about bell ringing (I am a Bell Bore) and may or may not stick them somewhere else on this site.
I watch Deep Space Nine as well as Buffy with rapt attention (except when the story line goes all stupid and then I throw popcorn at the screen and shout 'Hire me!', which the whippets, who are lying on me lying on the sofa, don't care for at all) although I can't be bothered with TV generally, even the noble and the intelligent and the good-for-you stuff, which does exist on TV, somewhere, probably on cable, which we haven't got. (I would probably watch Xena Warrior Princess if we had cable so it's just as well. Oh, and I gave up on X Files when all the stories seemed to be about evil galactic conspiracies in cahoots with the American government and a lot of very short-sighted businessmen. I find conspiracies, especially solemn conspiracies, a total bore. Besides, I think Skinner is cuter than Muldur, and I get tired of Skinner caving under pressure so that Muldur can be the lonely misunderstood hero.) I go to the movies occasionally (where I try to restrain myself from shouting and throwing popcorn), and live theatre occasionally, where I do behave because the oppression of ticket prices weighs me down. (Although Peter and I share the useful ability of being able to walk out at intermission if we aren't having a good time, feeling that wasting money on a bad show is not worth compounding by wasting hours out of our lives too. One of our great early bonding experiences was back in Maine when we went to see Thelma and Louise because we were curious about what all the hoopla was about, and walked out in disbelief after the smart one goes off to spend some time with her boyfriend leaving the dumb one behind in the hotel room with the cute hitchhiker and the money. I've always hated plots where when you have a hostile alien hiding somewhere on your spaceship who's already proven it's faster on the draw than you are, you split everybody up and go looking for it, having thoughtfully turned all the lights down really low first.)
Generally speaking my attention span is not of the longest for stuff on stage — one of the reasons I am not a Shakespeare fan is because he goes on so — but there is an exception to this rule. Opera. I adore opera, especially the vast wallowy Verdi operas — Verdi would be my desert island composer, no contest (and I'll take his Otello to Shakespeare's Othello any day, although even Verdi can't save Falstaff for me. I loathe the play and can just about listen to the opera on CD in Italian where I can pretend I don't know what's going on and concentrate on the tunes). Other composers have their moments — Mozart for The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Rossini for The Barber of Seville and La Cenerentola (well, I would like an opera about Cinderella, wouldn't I? And, speaking of fairy tales, a very honourable mention for Dvorak's Rusalka), Donizetti for Lucia di Lammermore and L'Elisir d'Amore, Puccini for Tosca, Gluck for Orfeo et Eurydice, Bizet for Carmen — but Verdi's the man. I don't get along with the Germans much — except for Beethoven's Fidelio — Wagner makes my eyes cross (and he is neck and neck with Shakespeare for culpable going-onness) and Strauss, well, I don't know why I should choose Strauss particularly to gag at, but I can't stick the plot of Der Rosencavalier any how. I want to tell the Marchellin to lighten up, and I want to drown both der Rosencavalier himself and the ghastly Sophie. That last scene where the Marchellin is handing over her young lover to his even younger true love makes me feel ill. I wouldn't know how glorious the music is, I've never been able to notice. I have the same plot-obstructs-music-appreciation reaction to Cosi fan tutte — yuck — and even more so The Magic Flute (which is even in German), all that grotesque business of yielding up your life and will into the hands of some unknown dad who obviously has serious control freak issues — although the dad figure for reasons that escape me is supposed to be all wonderful and all good and mom for reasons which equally escape me is all vindictive shrew.
All that said, I have no idea why I completely adore that old war-horse La traviata. Violetta is surrounded by such smucks, that brat Alfredo, and — speaking of control freaks — his father. But to my ear if people in love were by it given voices to sing it, they would sound like Violetta and Alfredo singing over the camellia she's just given him to bring back to her tomorrow. And — this is kinky, I know — I don't think there's anything anywhere more romantic than Aida creeping into the sealed-up room to smother to death in the arms of Rhadames; and I feel exalted, another deeply kinky moment, every time Gilda knocks on the door of that inn, and you know and she knows she's about to die, and the music soars off with her and her assassin and his sister and the despicable duke singing away with the storm in the background — whew. Throw some cold water over me, now.
We go to the opera kind of a lot. Peter has the odd failing, here and there, barely worth mentioning, but he would be forgiven some quite serious vices for going to the opera with me as faithfully and uncomplainingly as he does. He is not an opera person. And every now and again he gets really bent out of shape over the libretto — I admit I think that Verdi was not very well served by most of his librettists — and if he's not being rude about one of my sacred cows on the way home we will do a rewrite. Our version of Don Pasquale (neither a sacred cow nor Verdi) is hugely better than the original.
If I'm really desperate for something to do I may do housework. But I'm not that desperate very often.
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