The Night Watch: Author's Notes
The Process
When I started out to write this book I had just begun a new day job. I had a 2-week vacation on the small island where my in-laws have a cottage, and I felt under terrible pressure to start a new book during this time, because once you're working 9-5, if you don't have something going it's terribly hard to start from scratch. So I borrowed a portable computer and took it to the island To Start The Next Book.
It was awful. Really, without doubt the most horrible experience I've had as a writer: day after day under this terrible pressure to Come Up With Something. I thought until my brain melted like a cheese-ball in a toaster, but no coherent story would come.
I had read an account by someone who had gone to Indonesia about watching a wayang kulit performance, one of those 11 hour long shadow-puppet plays based on the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, and the strange otherworldy feeling of it going on and on while villagers talked and pigs snuffled into the area and children slept and woke and cried and slept again and the story played and played in this world of gods and ghosts and demons, and then the final battle and the triumph of Right just as the sun came up and the shadows broke and paled and it was morning and it changed his life -- and I thought, I want to write that.
But that urge didn't come attached to a Story or a plot or anything. Just ... write a 21st century urban animist epic about ... ?
After 10 days of imagining scenes, plots,structures, characters, writing a few sample chapters, throwing out countless ideas (examples: 21st century versions of Beowulf or King Lear) I was at the point of teary breakdown. Finally I said, So, what would be the animist thing to do? So I went out late that night to a campfire pit, and I—and this was an amazingly hard thing to do—I tore out every page of notes I had made without looking at them again, and I put them in the bottom of the pit and piled kindling over them and lit the fire and watched it, and waited for a Sign.
The wind was blowing very hard, and the sparks left these streamers in the night, and flew around my fingers until the fire embered and went out after about an hour. And then I went inside, and wrote the most meticulous description of that fire that I could, the most closely observed piece of writing I had ever done. And that 2 pages of description turned out to be the lodestone for the whole 620 page novel, and whenever I was trying to decide whether something fit or not, I held it up against that scene in my mind and tried to decide if there was a harmony there.
Why the title, anyway?
Oh, I don't know. That long epic night, so different from daylight. The soldiers on the battlements who see Hamlet's ghost. And of course the great painting by Rembrandt. This is a book with a lot of paint and painting in it. The 'Night Watch' is a quintessentially Baroque piece, full of turbulence and energy, dark shadows and dazzling light and such a throng of characters. It's one of our equivalents to those wayang kulit crowd scenes.
Tu Fu
I and this book both owe a great debt to fantasy novelist and Vancouver resident Sean Russell, who introduced me to David Hinton's superb translations of the poetry of Tu Fu. Widely regarded as the greatest poet in Chinese literature, Tu Fu was roughly a contemporary of the Beowulf poet. Now, I like Beowulf ... but having said that, one has to admit that if, say, bears wrote poetry, it would probably look a good deal like Beowulf.
Contrast that to Tu Fu! Witty, tragic, lyrical, urbane, wholly civilized and wholly in touch with the heart's most primal fears and longings, Tu Fu displays a literary sensibility comparable to that of Shakespeare in its breadth of feeling and sensitivity. I highly recommend David Hinton's wonderful The Selected Poems of Tu Fu (New Directions Press, 1989).
Literary Side Trip: Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Flaubert, & Maureen McHugh
Rembrandt doesn't often paint things in a photographically realistic way. In a lot of ways his technique is very similar to that of Shakespeare (who died about 30 years before Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' was painted.) If Rembrandt's concern is with 'inner,' rather than 'outer' truth, you might be able to make a similar statement about Shakespeare. His characters aren't real people: but they talk about things which are very important to real people. They dramatize the fundamental issues. Writing characters who are a really like actual people isn't something that was much done for a very long time. (In fact, it starts getting more and more the thing at about the time the camera is becoming more and more the thing too, which makes you wonder, doesn't it?) Of course, there are lots of realistic bits in bunches of characters. But, in my possibly very idiosyncratic opinion, not until Flaubert's Madame Bovary does anyone get really excited about attempting absolutely honest psychological realism.
Now, I tend to write characters in manner #1; that is, characters who have some life to them, and talk and think and act, I hope, on issues important to actual people. This kind of characterization is pretty much de rigeur in genre fiction. In fact, that's one of the quick-and-easy ways you used to be able to tell genre books from 'real' ones: mainstream authors in the 20th century have put a very great deal of time and effort into learning how to accurately present actual, real people. Genre writers, um, haven't.
The nearly sole exception to this rule in science fiction is a woman named Maureen McHugh. Alone among the writers in our field, pretty much, she has the audacity to write books about actual real people like people you know—really. And, cheekily, they don't single-handedly save empires, overthrow tyrannical overlords, or do any of the other things self-respecting sf heroes do. Let's face it: part of the appeal of this kind of book is that someone nerdy and outcast and under-appreciated—i.e, like many of us felt at 16—turns the tables, comes through the secret entrance to the Bad Guy's Castle and whomps the living daylights out of the Oppressors.
Except in a Maureen McHugh novel; where the actual real person would love to do this but of course can't, for the same reason you and I never did; the real world doesn't work that way.
Check her out. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, was a New York Times Notable Book and deserved all the great attention it got. Her second book, Half the Day is Night, is like an sf version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. I've seen a bit of her new one, Mission Child, and it looks to be the best yet.
When I look around at my cohort of SF writers, Maureen seems to me to be the best of the bunch.