There's actually a magazine, called The Account, that specializes in publishing pieces of fiction or poetry together with "accounts" of how people came to write them.
Writers tend unsurprisingly to be of two minds about this writing concept. Writers who spent their formative years among literary people who agree that "creative work" ought to stand on its own think the "accounts" are a sort of advertisement for the poems or stories. (If so they're not effective ones, since poetry, fiction, and memoir often appeal to three different sets of readers.) Writers who spent their formative years among unimaginative people who want to imagine that every "creative" idea is literally either a memory or a wish, however, like to do "accounts" to give such people a realistic idea of what actually goes into a piece of fiction.
Last month this web site displayed a short story that I wrote years ago, then sat on because I didn't want people thinking it was either a wish or a memoir:
The account is probably overdue...
More than ten years ago, the writer known as Suzette Haden Elgin (on her book jackets) and Ozarque (online) hosted a discussion at her blog/forum of a character in some of her fiction who's confusing, intentionally confusing, to Anglo-American readers. The character's name is Troublesome. The discussion is worth reading, if you like philosophical discussions about the obscure, alien philosophy that went into the novels where Troublesome appeared. It started at:
The Navajo philosophy seems out of place on Planet Ozark, except that Elgin believed seriously in the communication rule of "Assume--without necessarily believing--that whatever someone says is true of something, and try to imagine what it could possibly be true of." In real life this rule helps us understand people whose behavior may be a reasonable reaction to some (irrelevant) memory or (misguided) belief or (pathological) symptom they have. It is also a great way to write fresh and startling science fiction.
Anyway, in that philosophical system as it was explained to Elgin, good and evil can be imagined as a continuum that is circular. A certain amount of evil has to balance the goodness in the world. In the story, the fictional planet is almost a paradise until two foolish people start tweaking at its 'equilibrium" with just a few stupid pranks. From that point on the amount of human evildoing increases steadily until two very good people who have accepted the duties of contemplating good and evil, respectively, to maintain equilibrium, meet and work together. The evil on the planet has reached such a height that the good person who has the spiritual duty of meditating on, channelling, and thus regulating, the evil principle there is free, and obliged, to appear in public doing good.
I thought, "Interesting," and then a variation on the theme popped into my head. People wouldn't want to read a whole novel about someone who had the duty of immersing per mind in evil every day, but what about someone who meditated on the idea found in some schools of Buddhism that good and evil exist in balance?
I didn't consciously think, "The character would be Korean," before I thought, "As a clue the character's name might be, not Unity--too obvious--but Eun Ha T...Taylor? Tripp? Thomas?" Then I thought, "Then she'd have to have at least some Korean ancestry. Well, that would be appropriate; that is the country with the symbol of that Buddhist balance on its flag." Then I thought, "Well, bing goes that idea for a full-length novel unless I find a Korean collaborator," and set the idea away for ten years.
Then I wanted to submit a story to a speculative fiction contest I hadn't won in other years. Sometimes it's the speculative premise of a story the judges don't like. I'd tried a story from a long-term favorite alternative world of mine, the "More Peaceable World" where people are still mortal and sinful, like us, but they at least manage to reduce pollution and war, because they pay due respect to women and introverts. You can see why I like that concept, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to like it. I'd also tried a story from the alternative world that's developed on this web site, where current technological trends continue until they've produced the sort of world where they can work as intended--a wealthy, high-tech, but very sparsely populated world. Why not something different?
I read some work the contest judges had chosen to publish. Some of their stories were set in what seemed to be our world, or one very similar to it, only with some fantastic element in it. Magic, ghosts, telepathy...
I was walking along Route 23, thinking of ways to introduce a fantastic element into a story about the real world. A big truck, the kind known as a semi (sem-tractor-trailor) or artic (articulated lorry), passed by. The young man driving it blasted the horn, then slowed down, waved, looked at me, and drove on. Possibly he'd mistaken me for someone he knew. I think "trucking" is an honorable occupation for young men in today's world, but in my ideal world, a Greener world, it would not exist. I think drivers who blast their horns from behind, when people are walking a good healthy distance from the road and the drivers are not about to run off the road, are annoying people who deserve a good warning.
What if one of those annoying people got his wake-up call...maybe a man seriously trying to pick up a woman who was older and smarter than he was. Maybe not just "smarter" in the sense of "more sophisticated," but magical? Maybe a Mountain Witch! I chortled, so maybe the contest judges would chortle too.
In traditional Mountain Witch tales of the Ozarks and Appalachians, some of the witches are thoroughly bad people. Mostly they're women, and often their badness has something to do with adultery or sexual perversions; sometimes they're men, in which case they may be even worse. But some of them are mostly nice people. Their magic is unchristian and therefore seen as basically bad, but it's bad in a limited way. Sometimes their badness is mixed with goodness. They tap into evil powers to achieve legitimate goals...
At that point the character who believes in that balance and blending of good and evil, who spends her life meditating on it, popped back into my head. What if she not only contemplated a mix of good and bad things, but worked a mix of good and bad magic?
Korea has mountains too. A few Korean people, like the owners of a restaurant my husband and I used to frequent, have come to the mountains. Some Korean war orphans were adopted and brought up as Americans, some Korean war brides came in with their husbands, and some families legally immigrated after the war. Without consulting a Korean writer (the contest was not for collaborative work) I could invent a character whose long-gone mother or grandmother had been Korean, who'd been brought up American but was attracted to what she'd learned about Korean Buddhism.
Why would the boor keep his foot on the brake after he'd had a good look at the character? Well, of course she'd be a mixed breed who looked White, except that her hair stayed thicker and blacker longer than White people's hair usually does. She'd have an "American" first name. Eun Ha would be her middle name. Most of all, of course, she'd have the magical power to charm and attract people. Her first name might even be Suzanne, after the woman whose almost magical charm Leonard Cohen so famously couldn't forget. Suzanne would take him down to her place by the river. Pretty Suzie, from another old song, would charm the birds from the sky, the fish from out of the bay, or river, as the case might be.
So there was my little Mountain Witch. Other people see her as youthful and cute, but not to the extent that Bill the boor does. She's nice, for a witch. She uses her powers to tame animals, rescue them, or at least keep them comfortable before somebody eats them. She communes mystically with rocks and trees, too. She heals and protects but annoying her is still a very bad idea. Her powers have the full range of real people's emotions, only amplified, the way infantile magical thinking makes us wish for a few minutes that they were.
What are her intentions with regard to Bill? Who first reaches out with selfish intentions toward whom? Do we have to know? In real life it's often hard to tell. Bill, in hindsight, wants to believe Suzanne was controlling the whole thing. A more realistic understanding of the way some women "behave like witches" in the most pejorative sense of the phrase, in their personal relationships, would be that Bill's boorish attitude taps into a reservoir of resentment that all women have. She didn't choose to attract this boor's attention, or that of any other boor she's ever met, bit she mindfully chooses what to do with it as things go along. She considers some sort of sacrifice of Bill to rescue someone she thinks deserves better things. (How that would have worked, the story didn't require me to know.) Then her better self, or spirit guide, whoever, advises her not to do that and she ends up helping Bill become a better man, instead. But she's unpredictable, inscrutable, and not to be messed with. That's built into my working definition of "witch."
If her story were going to be a full-length novel, would I want Suzanne to become a Christian? I would. A Korean and/or better writer might have thought of a way that might happen. I have no idea. I've known Buddhists in real life; some of them appeared to be better practitioners of kindness, mindfulness, right occupation, and so on, than others, just assome Christians do. I've not known a Buddhist who became a Christian. Amy Tan, the Chinese-American Presbyterian, could probably write a splendiferous novel about a Chinese Buddhist becoming a Christian; I find it instructive that so far she's not written one. I take that as an indication that Suzanne is likely to die unbaptized, unless she was baptized as a baby and doesn't let that count.
I don't believe that good and evil balance in the equal way they do in the ying-yang model. I believe human beings are a mixed bag of good and evil impulses; eventually, after our lives end, it will become apparent which of us have done more good or evil, but only God has access to that information now and even God may not necessarily choose to make any use of it.
"But if she never becomes a Christian and repents of practicing witchcraft, doesn't that mean she's evil, in the end?" God knows. If God had chosen to create a world where witchcraft actually worked, there'd be valid reasons for people to have recourse to it, probably believing that God wouldn't have given us magic powers if God hadn't wanted us to use them. Witchcraft would be seen the way technology is seen in our world. There are moral issues about trucking, too. It does make moral judgment easier that in our real world the kind of "witchcraft" that relies on fraud, gossip, deception, hypnotism, or poisons is possible, but the kind of "pure" magic Suzanne works is not.
Anyway, from that point, about all I had to do was write out the story. Details fell into place, as they often do, once I had the outline and started writing. I woke up remembering disconnected dream images, as I sometimes do: an animal had been run over, its hind legs crushed, and then in another image that seemed to have come later the animal was alive and well. The dream hadn't even seemed to connect the two images but connecting them fitted into the story.
It fitted, too, to mention that someone else who annoyed Suzanne in a more intentional way gets away less easily than Bill. One form of harassment I'd encountered, as a pedestrian, was being offered a lift by someone who didn't seem violent, didn't seem hard to subdue if she'd become violent, and had no reason to threaten me with anything worse than boring conversation...but the person was in fact hostile and chose to act out her hostility by telling a blatantly false story about me to other people. Nobody took her story seriously and even she didn't try to take it very far; still, I thought that was worth throwing into a story about harassment of pedestrians.
So we have a trucker harassing a pedestrian, a truck sliding down a cliff into a river, a car sharer harassing a pedestrian, and an animal being injured by a car, which adds up to quite an anti-car story. I am not, in real life, altogether anti-car but I do think North Americans have abused God's gift of the ability to build motor vehicles. Most of us need to drive less and walk more. I did not consciously sit down to put together four bad things about motors and motorists, but if I'd sat down to skewer our car culture in the way Ruth Ozeki does with our beef industry in My Year of Meats, I could easily have put in forty bad things about motors and motorists. I don't think banning all use of motor vehicles is feasible now, or even desirable in the future. Some combination of foot and solar power must eventually replace the internal-combustion engine, and the emphasis must inevitably be on the foot power, but "ordering and forbidding" is not the best approach to any desired change in human behavior.
I do think we all need to be mindful about how much use of motor vehicles we can avoid. There are situations in which I think using motor vehicles is ethically justified, but it pays, even just in terms of money, to sit down and think about how we can avoid those situations. Suzanne is harassed on the way to and from the local college, probably a five-mile walk, not too long for a healthy little old lady to plan on walking regularly but long enough for anyone to appreciate a lift in unfavorable weather. I was harassed on the way to and from my local college, which was closer to a thirty-mile walk; I refused to be discouraged by the harassment but, after noting how car sharing arrangements and cell phone signals inevitably broke down in the most unfavorable weather for walking, and how narrow the shoulder of the road is along the steep cliffs in Lee County, I did decide that it made more sense not to try to work there regularly. I don't imagine that God is any more likely to throw people out of Heaven for driving too much, in this life, than an indignant witch is to crumble a cliff around their heads. I do believe that God is pleased when people mindfully work out ways to avoid using motor vehicles when possible.
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