Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

me keep writing all these years:

—my long-suffering secretary Laura Lewis

—and my even more long-suffering family

—my miracle-working agents: Patrick Delahunt, Ralph Vicinanza, and Vince Gerardis

—my extremely patient editors Anne Groell

and Sheila Williams

and Gardner Dozois

—my EXTREMELY patient readers

—and my friends,

my fellow soldiers in the trenches,

who’ve kept me from getting discouraged

and more than once talked me out of quitting altogether.

All my best moments in science fiction I owe to you guys—

—staying up all night after that first Nebula Awards banquet with John Kessel and Jim Kelly,

eating chocolate chip cookies and red pistachio nuts

and getting red-stained hands that didn’t fade for weeks

—sitting in workshops with Ed Bryant

and Cynthia Felice

and Mike Toman

and George R.R. Martin

—driving to Portales to see Jack Williamson

with Charlie Brown

and Scott Edelman

and Walter Jon Williams

—gossiping with Nancy Kress

and Ellen Datlow

and Eileen Gunn

—laughing at something

Michael Cassutt

or Eileen Gunn

or Howard Waldrop said.

—laughing at something Gardner Dozois said so hard I snorted a piece of lettuce up my nose, nearly killing myself.

You guys are the wittiest, smartest, nicest people in the world, and I would not have lasted five minutes in science fiction without you.

But most important,

I need to thank

Robert Heinlein

and Louisa May Alcott

and Kit Reed

and Damon Runyon

and Sigrid Undset

and Theodore Sturgeon

and Agatha Christie

and Jerome K. Jerome

and Daphne du Maurier

and Philip K. Dick

and Rumer Godden

and L. M. Montgomery

and Ray Bradbury

and Shirley Jackson

and Bob Shaw

and James Herriot

and Mildred Clingerman

and P. G. Wodehouse

and Dorothy L. Sayers

and Daniel Keyes

and J. R. R. Tolkien

and Judith Merril

and Charles Williams

and William Shakespeare.

Which brings me to the subject of this speech.

You’re supposed to talk about something significant in a guest-of-honor speech—

global warming

or the coming Singularity

or space travel

or tougher sentences for parole violators.

Or world peace.

But I want to talk about something completely personal.

I want to talk about books and what they have meant to me.

Which is everything in the world.

I owe books my vocation, my life, even my family.

I’m not kidding.

You probably don’t know this, but I only got married because of a book.

And, no, I’m not talking about love poems.

And, NO, not Lolita .

I got married because of Lord of the Rings .

To quote Kip Russell in Have Space Suit, Will Travel , “How it happened was this way.”

I was flying out to Connecticut

for the express purpose of breaking up with my boyfriend

and I bought this set of three paperbacks to read on the plane

and by the time I got to New Haven

I was so worried about Frodo and Sam

that I said to my boyfriend, “It’s awful. They’re trying to sneak into

Mordor and the Ringwraiths are after them and I don’t trust Gollum and…”

and I completely forgot to break up with him.

And, as of yesterday, we’ve been married thirty-nine years.

I owe my daughter’s name to a book, too. We named her after the good daughter in King Lear

and she has lived up to her name in absolutely every way.

And I owe all the books I’ve written to books.

They taught me how to write.

Agatha Christie taught me plotting

Mary Stewart suspense

Heinlein dialogue

P. G. Wodehouse comedy

Shakespeare irony

and Philip K. Dick how to pull the rug out from under the reader.

Books also gave me all sorts of good advice on how to cope with everything,

from following the rules—

“There are three rules for writing a novel,” W. Somerset Maugham said. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

to the stupid questions people ask writers—

Heavens! [Harriet Vane thought.] Here was that awful woman, Muriel Campshott, coming up to claim acquaintance. Campshott had always simpered. She still simpered… She was going to say, “How do you think of all your plots?” She did say it. Curse the woman .

to coping with the pressure to write what your publisher—or your readers—want—

“The only thing you can do,” Dorothy Sayers said, “is write what you want to write and hope for the best.”

to feeling like you’ve made a hideous mistake in your choice of career—

“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing,”

Robert Benchley told me, “but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was famous.”

They even showed me what to write and how to write it.

When I went to England for the first time,

I remembered that book about the Blitz Mrs. Werner had read out

loud when I was in the eighth grade,

and it made me go to St. Paul’s,

where I found the fire watch and Oxford’s time-traveling historians

and my life’s work.

Above all, they taught me what it meant to be a writer.

“Storytellers make us remember what mankind would have been like had not fear, and the failing will, and the laws of nature tripped up its heels,” William Butler Yeats said.

And books—

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me begin at the beginning.

I loved books from the moment I saw them, from before I could even read.

And as soon as I did learn,

I read everything I could get my grubby little hands on.

You couldn’t get a library card till you were eight years old when I was a kid

(These were dark, benighted times)

and you were only allowed to check out three at a time

(Really dark and benighted times).

So the day I got my library card,

I checked out three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.

Rita Mae Brown says, “When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.”

Mine, too.

I read all three Oz books that night

and took them back the next day

and checked out three more.

And then I checked out all the other Oz books

and all the Maida’s Little Shop books

and all the Elsie Dinsmore books—

possibly the worst books ever written—

and all the Betsy, Tacy, and Tib books

and the Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, and Violet fairy books.

No one else in my family liked to read,

and they were always telling me to “get my nose out of that book

and go outside to play,”

an order which had no apparent effect on me

because I went right ahead and read

all the Anne of Green Gables books

and all the Nancy Drew books

and all the Mushroom Planet books

and Alice in Wonderland

and A Little Princess

and Cress Delahanty

and The Water Babies .

When I was in sixth grade,

I read Little Women

and decided I wanted to be a writer like Jo March.

When I was in seventh grade,

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

and decided to read my way straight through the library from A to Z

like Francie does in that book.

When I was in eighth grade,

my teacher Mrs. Werner read us

An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden, a book about an orphan who plants a garden in the bombed-out rubble of a church, and I fell in love with the Blitz.