IGMS Issue 9 (29 page)

Helen in the myths is abducted at a very young age by Theseus. She is about twelve years old, and in studying this I learned some kind of creepy (to modern sensibilities) facts. In one of the stories, by the time Helen has been rescued by her brothers from Theseus, she has borne Theseus a child, and that child is Iphigenia, who was sacrificed on the altar by Agamemnon, because Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, adopted Iphigenia and raised her as her own daughter.

So I am sitting there saying, "Twelve years old. May have been all right then. Creepy now."

SCHWEITZER:
A little early even then. They could have waited a couple more years.

FRIESNER:
Yeah, still pretty creepy. So I wrote a story about Helen of Troy as a girl being abducted to Athens. I thought, well, you know, she's not a classical Spartan. She's not of the era of the Three Hundred. She is pre-classical. She is a Minoan-Mycenaean era Spartan. But I thought that maybe the whole thing of educating the daughters in throwing the javelin, the whole physical fitness thing, training them almost as much as they trained the boys -- almost; the boys had it much harder. Maybe that didn't come out of nowhere. Maybe there was a tradition of giving the girls some kind of physical training. So I had Helen be beautiful, but why can you not be beautiful and smart? She's smart. She's got some idea of how to take care of herself physically. So instead of waiting for her brothers to rescue her from Theseus, she rescues herself.

This story was in the
Young Warriors
anthology from Random House, and I got a letter back saying, "We really liked the story. We'd love to see a novel." And now I have two novels about young Helen of Troy's backstory. One is called
Nobody's Princess
and the other is called
Nobody's Prize.
That's coming out this April. [2008 -- DS] And I've just had so much fun playing in the field of Greek mythology with Helen, giving her something more to do than just sitting around being beautiful and a pawn. She is an intelligent young girl and she has adventures.

SCHWEITZER:
Are you going to take her into adulthood and retell the classical story?

FRIESNER:
These are YA books, so nope, we stop it before she becomes an adult, before she gets married to Menelaus. But we did have Clytemnestra's first marriage, because I found, reading deeper into mythology, that Agamemnon was not Clytemnestra's first husband. She was first married . . . this gets into a very complicated thing. Let's just leave it at that before I tell the whole darn myth about the House of Atreus, which is definitely not YA material, a lot of that. It's bloody, scary stuff.

SCHWEITZER:
There's the spike through the head --

FRIESNER:
Not even that. There is the killing, cooking, and serving the sons of one of the two brothers [Thyestes and Atreus, who was the father of Menelaus and Agamenon] to their father. Thyestes is fed his own children and he doesn't know it until his brother tells him, "Oh, guess what you just ate." Not exactly your functional family. I think even Jerry Springer would be hard-pressed to deal with the House of Atreus.

SCHWEITZER:
You could do another series, unless you're becoming typecast. I could see it happening that, from another publisher, you did an adult, bloody account of the House of Atreus, but there might be concern that the readers of the YA books or the librarians of the YA books might find the adult version and put it on the same shelf. Is this an actual concern when you become a YA author? You are known as "the Queen of Silly," I'll have you know. [Friesner laughs.] So, if you made such a departure, would you have to use another byline?

FRIESNER:
My reputation seems to still be very much about the comedy. And yet I have almost a shadow-reputation of being able to write very dark things, or certainly serious, if not dark things. Both of my Nebula Award stories were dark stories, especially "A Birthday." That was super-dark. It was also about dealing with a social issue. I think that the whole worry about librarians putting a dark, scary, inappropriate book next to the rest comes down to the individual librarian. If the librarian is paying attention -- I know they don't have time to read every single book that comes in -- but if they just take the time to look at the precis of the plot that comes with the material, they'll make the right decision. I know they can do that. I trust the librarians.

Also, I don't think I'm getting typecast because I am doing another YA series about Nefertiti. Helen of Troy, I have written a story for YA. I have written a story for the general populace. I have written two YA novels. Now I want to do something else. I am moving on. No one can typecast me but me.

SCHWEITZER:
All writers should agonize over the terrible nightmare that begins when somebody says, "Here's a half a million bucks. I want another one just like the last one, and another, and another." [Friesner laughs.] And it keeps going on. It is possible to be trapped by success. Perhaps both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank Herbert were.

FRIESNER:
True, but you mention the nightmare of being trapped in the millions of dollars . . . well, look at J.K. Rowling. She said, "I'm going to be done at number 7." Now, granted, we don't know what will happen within the next ten years, but, so far, she seems to be sticking to her guns.

SCHWEITZER:
She can't be tempted by a mere half million the way many of us could be.

FRIESNER:
It really comes down to the personality and also the financial necessity of the author. One of my favorite things about D.H. Lawrence, and perhaps my only favorite thing about D.H. Lawrence was a little poem he wrote:

He found the formula for drawing comic rabbits.

The formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.

So in the end he could not shake the tragic habits

the formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

I think I'd get bored if I had to do the same thing. Yes, I'd like to have a half a million dollars. I'd like to have a million dollars. I could have an awful lot of fun with that kind of money. But if I am not enjoying what I am doing, it will show in what I am writing. If I am not having a good time, the reader will not have a good time. The reader will not buy the book and the next time they come around they're not going to say, "Here's a half a million dollars, or a million dollars. Do it again." Readers should be given credit for being smart. They know what's good. They know what's bad. People do not really want junk food. Sometimes they want a little candy, just a totally relaxing thing to read, no need to put in any critical input, but they don't want to be talked down to. They can
tell
when the author is just phoning it in, like "Here's the slop, give me my check." I don't want that done to me and I don't want it done to the readers. I'm a reader too.

SCHWEITZER:
I am sure you would never never allow your books to be franchised out. That's when the tired hacks show up.

FRIESNER:
Oh my gosh, I never even
thought
of that.

SCHWEITZER:
In the World of Esther Friesner . . .

FRIESNER:
Or even worse, can you imagine I'm dead and I'm V.C. Andrews. I'm dead and still the books come out. When you said being franchised, I was sitting there thinking, "Oh I'd love to have McDonald's toys and happy meals from one of my books," which probably wouldn't happen if I wrote the Dark House of Atreus. You wouldn't want to be eating any hamburger that came with the House of Atreus.

SCHWEITZER:
I think a certain number of twelve or thirteen year old boys might go for that.

FRIESNER:
And you're going to be wanting to watch those boys. Really watch them. But I think it would be great fun to see what they would do with a book of mine if they translated it to the screen. When
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
came out, I went to see it. I bought the book. The book was quite different from the movie, and the author said he was really pleased with how they changed it. It was a good movie, different from the book but still good. I like happy surprises. I realize I might sit there and see one of my books up on the screen and it's just "What did they do to that?" or it could be, "Wow, that's pretty cool. I didn't know Johnny Depp could do that."

SCHWEITZER:
Have you ever had any Hollywood interest, with or without Johnny Depp?

FRIESNER:
I have had a couple of books optioned, but so far nothing has happened. But that's how it works. You get someone who says, "Hey, let's put on a show. My uncle has a barn," and then the uncle doesn't let them have the barn. I don't know all about how it works, but it's nice to think somebody thinks one of my books might make a good movie sometime.

SCHWEITZER:
If you were to radically change direction again, have you any guesses as to where you might go? I can just imagine you as a hard-science writer. It would be interesting. [Friesner laughs.] How do you think Esther Friesner the
Analog
writer would be?

FRIESNER:
Pretty much impossible. I'm not saying this because I'm a girl and I'm a blonde and as blonde Barbie girl says, "Math is
hard,
" but I have so many things in my background that I already know about, and I never did very well in school in the hard sciences. I could see myself writing an
Analog
story in one of the so-called "soft" sciences, and I have done books using biology. But chemistry and physics . . . I never took physics and in chemistry I managed to blow up the impossible-to-explode oxygen-making setup experiment.

SCHWEITZER:
I saw somebody do that when I was in high school.

FRIESNER:
Oh
really?
This was great . . .

SCHWEITZER:
The guy I saw do it brought down the overhead lights with the force of the blast and hurt himself.

FRIESNER:
Wow. I didn't do that, but we did have flames shooting out of the mouth of the test tube and the teacher came over and said, "It appears you've had an accident here." That was when I thought, you know, I don't think I'm going to like chemistry very much. And I never took physics. My husband has despaired of me. He is very much into the hard sciences. "But . . . physics is
fun! Physics is so cool!"
You know, he said the same thing about calculus. I don't believe him very much.

SCHWEITZER:
Maybe the approach to writing about science, and the way into
Analog,
would be satire.

FRIESNER:
Really.

SCHWEITZER:
Analog
has always run funny stories, particularly in the Probability Zero department.

FRIESNER:
I have found funny stuff in science before. Some of it is pseudo-science. When I get my hands on it I can get that science to pseudo up so fast it would make your head spin, as in the first thing I ever sold. Well, there's a device here. That's the core of the story. Granted, someone will never be able to come up with this technology, but you can't say we
never
will, can you? And it was a funny story.

I never know where I am going to go next, so maybe I would do a science story, although right now my latest reading for pleasure project, which is usually where I wind up getting my ideas from, is alternating between reading Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past
in English translation -- my French is good but not that good -- and finally reading through the entire Bible. I have decided to read a chapter a day and really pay attention to some of the things that are said. Since I've never done it. I've read spottily through the Old Testament and
very
spottily through the New Testament. Now I am going to read the whole thing, including all of those "And so-and-so begat so-and-so . . ."

So far I have actually come up with the idea that if they can calculate the date of creation, as Bishop Usher did, then they can certainly calculate the date on which the Ark finally landed. Why don't we celebrate Ark Landing Day? And somebody said, "Yes, that would be May 5th." So happy Ark Landing Day, everybody. It's just full of ideas. It's wonderful. So, I'm not reading anything in science that is inspiring me at the moment. Marcel Proust and the Bible.

SCHWEITZER:
Which is funnier?

FRIESNER:
I'm the girl who found a comedy moment in
Moby Dick.
And it was supposed to be a comedy moment too. I wasn't just pulling it out of thin air. The chowder scene. It's pretty funny. In
Moby Dick
it is all by itself and very sad and lonesome, but it is a comedy moment. So I really don't know. I am going through them both very, very slowly. But it's rich reading. I'm enjoying it. I think that's the key to what I do. I enjoy what I do. I like writing even when it's hard. It's like solving a puzzle. I don't consider it to be a chore. I don't consider it to be a stern duty. It's fun.

SCHWEITZER:
What are your actual writing methods like. [Friesner laughs.] I collect them as a hobby . . .

FRIESNER:
Not particularly anything fancy. I will sometimes get an idea out of a weird title. A title will pop into my head or present itself to me by the strangest means. The first time I won a Nebula Award it was for "Death and the Librarian." I got the idea for the title because Terry Pratchett gave me two little pewter figurines. They were about an inch and a half high, from Diskworld. One was of Death and one was of the orangutan who is the Librarian. And I go, "Ooh! Death and the Librarian! Thank you!" And then I sat there and the words just echoed. I thought, that's a good title, "Death and the Librarian."

The story that I wrote couldn't have anything to do with Diskworld; but it was not dark, but an emotional piece. It was the sort of story where when I stop reading it in public and look up, there are people weeping. So it does what it is intended to do. But my method is that sometimes I start with a title, and decide, "Well, what can I hang off this title?"