Scarlet Ribbons

Suzy McKee Charnas

Part II

People loved "The Ancient Mind at Work"; also, they complained. They complained that while they loved the story and were intrigued by my take on the idea of the vampire, they felt I cheated, just a tiny bit.

Why?

They said, "Because you never let us see him drink."

I said, "That's right, that was the idea; see, I thought it would give you this nice little frisson of surprise and delight to read the story and then realize that the only blood you see is the vampire's blood."

They said, "But — you never let us see him drink."

I said, Groan.

But I had an idea.

Of course people wanted to see Weyland drink; that's the thrilling, sneakily delicious and exciting thing about vampires. That's what everybody wants to see. They would pay to see it (and do, regularly, when they — myself included — pay cash for tickets to movies about vampires).

So — why not use that? Why not give readers a story in which they, the readers, find themselves part of a voyeuristic crowd? Let them see what it's like for someone to be the object of their (our) kinky lust to see vampirism performed before our greedy little eyes. So how about a further adventure of Dr. Weyland, in which he is captured, in his weakened and wounded state, and privately put on display for money by unscrupulous types eager to exploit him?

Now, how this next-story thing works is in knots and skeins; remember the talk I gave at Skidmore, back before the first story got written? That was arranged by a former student of mine, a rather solemn young fellow now in college. Having seen him again at Skidmore opened a door in my mind to memories of the private school where I taught for three years or so in the mid-sixties. Suddenly that student, as the boy I remembered from my teaching days, became the armature, as it were, on which I could shape a character. My vampire was a teacher by profession; if he's going to be locked up, he needs something to do besides just sit in his cell.

I could give him someone to teach; so my real-life student became, mixed with several other kids from those and other days, Mark, the boy in "The Land of Lost Content" who is the imprisoned vampire's keeper, student, confidant, and finally rescuer. Another former student of mine, this one accelerated to the adulthood I extrapolated for him from what I had seen of him in my classroom, became the armature for Mark's uncle Roger, who buys the injured vampire and hides him away in his apartment (a setting adapted from a garden apartment I had visited one night to attend a party) where Mark, taking a break from a homelife marred by quarreling parents, becomes entangled in Roger's schemes.

Then, to provide the threat that would raise the stakes, I added a cult leader who becomes a slightly crazed threat to Weyland's very existence.

Here I commited an act of vengeance, the kind of vengeance especially accessible to writers: I wrote my late, unlovely stepfather into the story as the aggressive, ambitious bully, Reese (his occult proclivities I added for the purposes of the plot). So there he is, the pompous, overbearing so-and-so, for all to see: rather as I saw him when I was in my teens and he joined our household for a while, with his heavy-handed sexism and his endless psychoanalysis (well, it would have been endless, but after fourteen years of apparently fruitless work with him his analyst up and died — of frustration, probably).

But enough gloating; it's so unbecoming.

(And so delightful...)

As for Weyland, here was my chance to actually demonstrate what I had had people say of him in the first story: that he was a good teacher. Strict, but good (most of us have had someone like this in our school background, if we were lucky). I had a wonderful time writing the scenes in which he exerts his exacting standards to improve, for example, the paper Mark is writing on A.E. Housman's famous poem (from which my title is taken).

Then I had to work out the logistics of the story, to enable Mark to rescue the monstrous captive; and I made a couple of decisions of the kind that do not come from "within" the character but from the author's direct intention. One was to see that although attacked by Weyland, Uncle Roger does not die. This was because of the kind of impact I wanted these events to have on Mark, both at the moment — I wasn't about to traumatize him into catatonia or hysterics by having him witness a brutal and horrifying murder of his uncle — and in the future.

Yes, a fictional character can have a future, if the character is written as a fully-rounded person, not a two-dimensional spear-carrier (stories need those too, I am not disparaging them). Thinking forward, thinking about how Mark would deal with all this later on in his life, was part of determining his reactions now, in the moment of the story. I was also thinking that perhaps he might show up again later on in the saga of Dr. Weyland, and I didn't want to foreclose on his reactions then by creating an event of such powerful negative significance as the death of his uncle at Weyland's hands.

The second authorial decision was to make it Roger, not Reese, whom Weyland has to best in order to escape. Because by the time I was working on the third or fourth draft of "The Land of Lost Content" I knew that there was going to be more to Weyland than these two tales, and I wanted to keep Reese in reserve — alive, that is — in case I wanted him on hand as an added threat, one that would help the reader reach back with memory and tie all Weyland's episodes together, at a later point.

By this time, it was clear to me that "The Land of Lost Content" was going to bring a different complaint from readers interested in the character and destiny of my vampire: "But you haven't let us see him have sex."

This is part of the fascination of the creature, after all, isn't it? It's the peculiar proximity of sex (or at least sexyness) and death that makes the vampire so compelling. I began thinking of how this chilly-hearted predator of mine might be seduced into physical intimacy. It seemed to me that since he is himself a creation of art (the art of the many writers and film-makers who have taken up the concept) that ought to happen through the power of art, somehow. So I started thinking of doing a fourth story about Weyland and an artist, a woman painter (to get sex in there too), living in his building in New York.

But I was also getting a sense that it was time for us to get inside his head — "But you haven't let us see him think," whine, whine, I could hear it already. A major character seen only from the outside does not live as completely for the reader as one whose thoughts we can get inside of. And Weyland was looking pretty major to me.

I had two stories from the viewpoints of people Weyland interacted with and had powerful effects on; the third one was shaping up to be told from the p.o.v. of the lady painter. At some point, if I meant to play fair and offer the reader complete gratification as a reward for sticking with me through all these chapters in Weyland's life, I was going to have to tell part of the story (probably the end) from Weyland's own point of view.

Well, what the Hell was his point of view?

I was shocked to realize that didn't have a clue as to what went on in his head. Well, how could I? I am not a two- or three-thousand-year old vampire, male, and non-human. Point of view is by its nature grounded in a character's previous experience and set of opinions. I had conjured a few opinions of Weyland's here, and a brief slice of very recent history, but what about the rest? I was facing the need to spend at least a chapter's worth inside his head looking out, and that meant I would need to know what kind of furniture he had in that alien brain of his.

Remember that little play, "The Passion of Dracula," at the Cherry Lane Theatre? In it there had appeared a female disciple of Freud who had actually said, at some point, a line like, "I would love to psychoanalyse you!" She had not — the play had gone off in a different direction — but so much the better. What they had dropped, I could pick up and use. I could send Weyland into analysis and listen in — listen to him talk about himself.

I had one big problem here: I had never been in any sort of analysis myself, apart from a two week session of "Sensitivity Training" when I'd been a teacher, which had been a sort of group game of self-exposure. Apart from that, all I knew about psychotherapy was what others had told me or written for me to read. This being America in the 20th century, most of that had a Freudian cast, and frankly I wouldn't inflict that reductive crap on anybody even if it were suitable for use in a story, which it isn't.

First, beyond the vague and often inaccurate public notions of ideas like "ego," "superego," "id," etc., Freudian theory is convoluted (well, it has to be, to somehow manage to find the root of every single possible human thought, feeling, or behavior in sex). That would mean spending immense amounts of story-time somehow explaining Freud's theories to the reader, assuming I could survive ingesting all the details myself. Now, why (in terms of the story itself) would my fictional therapist — who had now formed up in my mind as another version of the woman painter I'd been thinking about for this story — go around explaining her thereapuetic processt?

Secondly, in my opinion most of Freudian theory is bunk, a highly subjective non-science that was made over into a religion complete with hierarchy, heresy, and schismatics by the old man's fanatical successors. It is the best-known of psychotherapies in terms of common familiarity, but it is also desperately misogynistic and therefore dangerous and demeaning to both women and men, and destructive, I believe, of the health of personality. Take "penis envy," for example — Freud's projection of male fears of castration onto women. What a load of arrogant, nasty, self-serving baloney (and thank gods for recent efforts to cut the old Fraud down to size! See the site called "Burying Freud ," for a glimpse of what's going on out there these days).

But what other theory was familiar enough to the reading public for me not to have to go into even more explanation in order to use it? I was faced with the science fiction author's perennial problem: how to gracefully and without clogging up the action explain to the reader the necessary but unfamiliar elements of the story (a virtual reality future, an alien ecology, a therapy system).

I did what writers often do when they are flummoxed: I turned to a good friend of mine, a fellow teacher who was studying to become a therapist, for help.

She said, "Go read Fritz Perls."

Fritz Perls founded a school of therapy called Gestalt, and anyone who wants to know more about it is also advised to "Go read Fritz Perls." His books are quick, absorbing, entertaining reading; I loved them. I even found some techniques familiar, having seen them used in that Sensitivity Training workshop I had attended. Encouraged, I read further afield (books by Shelly Kopp are still on my shelf). Then, when I felt comfortable enough to work with a therapist-character whose methods were at least based on Perls to begin with, I sat me down to write.

But I immediately struck another problem, and it stymied me for months.

The fun of this story was going to be in seeing the therapist grappling with the vampire concept, first seen as a "delusion," then as the basic, horrifying, fascinating truth of Weyland's being.

But since his actual nature was still a secret (otherwise he'd be in jail as a serial killer or in locked up in a government scientific facility), how was she ever going to get to this? It sounded like a whole book, and kind of a draggy one at that: he deploys his whole false personality, the eminent professor afflicted with a nervous breakdown, and behind that she finds his vampire "mania" by skillful but time-consuming digging. Only then can she go on to discover the truth, so that she has to confront it and deal with it somehow — which is the place the reader (and, to tell the truth, the author) really wants to get to all along.

Oh, dullness! Who would stick with me that long? How was I going to hang in through such a painstaking course? I was dismayed: it was going to be too much work, first for me as a writer and then for readers trying to follow along. I was stumped.

So I forced myself to type a story-opening, just to see how bad this was going to be. I started with their initial conversation at the intake interview. Floria, the therapist, asked Weyland what was wrong.

And there on the page came the words Weyland himself offered to describe the problem that had (supposedly) made him run away from his job and hide out (while he was really locked up in "Lost Content"): "I seem to suffer from the delusion that I am a vampire."

Wow.

In one stroke, this vampire character laid out a) the situation and b) his own immediate strategy: he meant to deploy his vampirism as his neurotic problem at the outset instead of making her dig for it, so that the therapist could be led sooner to believe that she was curing him of it (he was just as impatient as I was!). He would then pretend to "get better," and she would send him back to his job restored to his performance of being a normal, functional human being.

I sat there staring at the page and grinning like a fool. My problem was solved — thanks to the character himself.

This is the kind of thing authors mean when they talk about the character "taking over." Characters do not "take over"; they are not real, they do not commit real actions in the real world. The author is ultimately responsible for weighing, judging, directing, cutting, and shaping the character's every act, thought, and word. But there is a way of letting a part of your mind shape itself into the illusion of a real personality and giving that "person" the autonomy, in the body of the story, of a real person, so that they can demonstrate what they are made of in the story's terms.

That's your raw material, your unprocessed creativity, whacked out onto the page as fast as you can put it there, without thought or judgment: you let the characters take their own natures and run with them.

Then it's your job to rewrite, revise, and rework, shaping your story with your authorial skills and instincts, editing ruthlessly. Where the buck stops is with your final responsibility to rein the character in again, making him fit what the story has become under the influence of all the contributions of all the characters.

It's a form of willed, creative schizophrenia, really: you allow your consciousness to split itself into these pretend-people whose doings you record, and then you cut and polish them to better fit the story that they have spun out of themselves and their interactions.

I am also of the opinion that authors doing this draw on not only their own current and childhood experiences of the world, but on buried memories of previous lives here. We are storehouses of experience and wisdom, and fiction is one of the arts that allows us to breach the necessary barriers to our previous lives in order to bring forth useful, valuable bits to work with.

Just my opinion. I bet there are plenty of artists out there who accept it, though, because they know in their bones that it's true.

As for the ones who know it's balderdash, why, the Hell with them.