The Poison Well: an Interview with Judith Berman
By Eric Cherry
Judith Berman’s novelette “The Poison Well” is a mini-epic of magic, mystery, lust, and obsession-which also sounds like what writers go through when they’re trying to craft and publish their creations. A talented professional with a keen eye for detail, Judith Berman goes on at wonderful lengths about the vision behind her story and the quest to get it out there.
Before Christmas 2004, I received my issue of Black Gate Magazine, no. 7, edited by John O’Neill. Black Gate is a fine quarterly market for fantasy and adventure stories, published out of Illinois. It contains more than two hundred pages of fiction, poetry, and reviews. Classic reprints grace each issue. The production quality is high, from the artwork to the binding. I cannot recommend a subscription to Black Gate strongly enough.John O’Neill himself has been to Twilight Tales, as part of the author development panel, “What Do Editors Want?” and our first Authors in the Hot Seat: Fantasy. He tells us that he reads cover letters, that he’s interested in the development of new voices, and he proves it in black-and-white with every issue of Black Gate.Excited about my fresh copy, I settled into my chair around midnight to read the first story, “The Poison Well” by Judith Berman. It blew me away. At once, I wished she were a regular at the show, so I could chat with her about how she’d written it. The magazine includes a bio of each author, which included online contact information. A minute or so later, I shot off an e-mail asking if she’d mind answering a handful of questions.Check elsewhere in this issue about my love for the real professionals out there. Add Judith Berman to that list of real pros. Not only did she agree, but she also came through with a fantastic amount of detail in her answers (and these aren’t simple questions).Soon after I received the interview questions back, I realized that spoilers might be an issue. Tina Jens suggested we might contact John O’Neill to see if he’d post the story on Black Gate’s Website. John checked with Judith and now, the story will be available online for you to check out. You guessed it: Engrave John’s name onto that precious list.So, here we are; for the next two issues, we’re bringing you our interview with Judith Berman about how she wrote “The Poison Well.” Check out the story on Black Gate’s Website, www.blackgate.com; you won’t be disappointed. Subscribe to Black Gate Magazine; it’s a steal. Get whatever back issues you can, while you’re at it.
Judith Berman’s story, “The Poison Well” can be read on the Black Gate web site.
Twilight Tales: First, let me say again that I enjoyed “The Poison Well.” Thanks for agreeing to an interview.When I read the story the first time, I knew that it was good, because my mind kept wandering further afield in the world you created. I’d stop, return to the paragraph or two above, and continue with the tale. Your text evoked a strong sense of place for me and sketched in a far greater world beyond the current scene’s stage.My first question for you is how much of the world did you build prior to writing?Judith Berman: I started thinking over ten years ago about writing something in the vein of the adventure fantasies I loved when I was a kid-Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton (especially the first few Witch World books). I began jotting down ideas for a setting in which such stories could take place, throwing in ingredients from the New World-especially from Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations-along with more typical pre-industrial adventure-fantasy elements. Around the same time, I began mulling over ideas for novel plots. In these, the character who became Manvayar began to take shape as an important but secondary character. Overall, the world-and character-building was a process of slow accretion while I worked on other projects.I always worry over how societies, ecologies, and economies work, on the local, as well as the national level. And I need the geography-meaning the people as well as the landscape-fairly clear in my mind before I can write the story action, even though much of it may never appear on the page. Of course there’s a back and forth-as I’m writing, I’ll discover another piece of the world that needs to be imagined, or re-imagined.TT: While “The Poison Well” is a mystery, there is a lot more going on in the course of the story. The conflicts and tension within the family are clear, but the inner turmoil of the detective is no less important. Manvayar, the protagonist, is a complex bundle of attributes: an aristocrat, psychically sensitive, haunted and broken, dedicated to (or obsessed with) the cause of his church, and more.
What sort of methods did you apply to building and writing Manvayar?
JB: I have trouble writing until my characters come alive for me, and they come alive and grow as I find (or create) internal tension-or alternatively, to continue an engineering metaphor, compression-in them. This means discovering internal conflicts and contradictions. Power has to be offset by vulnerability, talent, or brains by incapacity in another facet of life, appearance must in some way be at odds with inner life. And so on. One of the things that makes me a genre writer, I suppose, is that I want both physical (external) and psychological (internal) stress. But external stress is, in a way, cheap. Something is endangered-say someone wants to kill the protagonist. Or the protagonist has to do something difficult. What makes that endangerment or difficulty truly stressful and involving, at least for this reader, is the stake the characters have in it, and how much I’ve identified with them and so, in turn, have a stake-and that takes you back to inner life.
When I’m planning out a story, plot, and character go hand in hand. The types of external stress will affect what kinds of internal conflicts a character suffers, just as the kinds of internal tension characters are under will determine to a significant degree where the plot will go, what kinds of crisis the protagonist(s) will face, and how the crises will be resolved.
I find pure “idea” stories very hard: “The Fear Gun” [in Asimov’s, July 2004] is about the only one I’ve finished. The idea-dogs scavenging alien carrion and becoming disease vectors-came before any of the characters. It was difficult creating characters as accessories to the plot, who weren’t, then, mere narrative conveniences.
I’m describing the process analytically to you now, but it only becomes conscious when I run into trouble building characters and moving plots along. When it’s working well, often-contradictory traits come to me as a sort of yin-yang pair. The idea that Manvayar is the son of a patriarchal aristocrat blossomed at the same time as the notion that he, in various ways, has exiled himself from his own class. The fact that he’s a powerful mage even as a young man came accompanied by the notion that he’s always searching for the real wisdom-the old and nearly vanished Nariyo wisdom that forever lies just over the horizon and forever seems denied to him. He’s attached himself to the court of inquisition, and is obsessed with hunting down necromancers, yet he has no interest in religion, with religious observance or dogma, per se. He’s very smart, but, in a number of ways, clueless.
I’m not sure when I conceived of the notion that Manvayar was-was trying to be, believed he should be-celibate, but I do know it was at least, in some part, a response to how commonly female characters even in speculative fiction are sexually reticent for one reason or another, while male characters tend to be more sexually experienced and adventurous. The old conventions persist. And I thought, as a writer-godling not averse to torturing my creations, that it would be interesting from the perspective of story dynamics to have a young, healthy, male character who is relatively inexperienced, and who is trying to rid himself of sexual desire. Naturally, that won’t be easy. In fact, it’s going to be impossible. And since he grew up among aristocratic men valuing heterosexual conquest, he’s going to have a lot of angst about his choice, which includes anxiety about his sexual identity. But because he believes celibacy is something required by the magic, and he knows that he’s a mage before anything else, and that his magic can destroy him, he persists in the effort. Whether he’s correct in his belief is a subject for another story.
TT: How did your development of the other characters compare to the methods regarding Manvayar?
JB: I built up the other characters along the same lines, although with less complexity and depth. Because of this, and because they spend much less time on stage, the contradictory attributes I imagine in them don’t necessarily show up on the page.
Certainly where the lord and his family are concerned, the conflict between appearance and truth is crucial. Seppan, the inquisitor, is caught between desires for comfort and customary procedure, and his growing suspicion, based on experience, that-Manvayar aside-there will be no comfortable solution to this case. Seppan’s very irritated by Manvayar, even while part of him is empathetic, and he realizes that, like it or not, he’s got the job of mentoring the young man.
Aleid was in a way both the first character to be constructed after Manvayar, and the last. I knew that for her the conflict between appearance and reality was so extreme that it’s torn up her psyche at very deep levels, especially because she was a person only able to live at the level of superficial appearance. These things obscure her true self to the extent that it has become nearly invisible, even-especially?-to her. As a consequence, she was hard to write from the point of view of someone, i.e., Manvayar, very distracted by her surface beauty.
TT: When you wrote the story, how conscious were you of the structure of the puzzle? How did you handle the drafting and writing of the events? Were you focused on the puzzle, on Manvayar’s struggles (internal and external), or was there a different focus altogether?
JB: Before I could start writing, I had to work out the structure of the puzzle, at least in a general sense. At a certain point in the writing process there is, if I’m lucky, an alchemical change that starts ideas for a story growing into an actual story. For “The Poison Well,” the first ingredient to go into the mental beaker was the world-building, followed by the character of Manvayar and some ideas about the inquisition and the Temple of Judgment. But those ingredients just sat in the beaker doing not much of anything, until the catalyst dropped into the mix and made them strike sparks off each other.
The catalyst was a traditional Irish ballad performed by Planxty, among others, called “The Well Below the Valley.” (The song also shows up in the 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters.) It’s about an encounter between a mysterious “gentleman” of “noble fame” and a girl whom he asks for a drink from the eponymous well (”green grows the lily-o, right among the bushes-o”). When she balks-”if I were to stoop, I might fall in”-he starts telling her things about herself that no one should know, and, verse by verse, this accumulates into a horrific picture of infanticide and incest at the hands of her male relatives. Her last question to him is, “What will happen to mesel?” And when he tells her, she protests, or pleads, that surely God will save her from Hell.
Delia Sherman has described traditional ballads as stories with the motives left out, and when I hear them I often find myself wondering, “Who are these people and how did they come to this crisis?” What stuck in my head from “The Well Below the Valley” was the mysterious figure who has this uncanny, rather terrible insight into something hidden and (literally) buried.
There are similar encounters in traditional folk music in which the mysterious stranger is Jesus. In “Jesus Met a Woman at the Well,” the woman exclaims at the end, “This man, he must be a prophet. He done told me everything I’ve ever done.” Another, similar ballad suggesting the Christian mythos is “The Maid and the Palmer.”
JB: But I found nothing internal in “The Well Below the Valley” to suggest a particularly Christian interpretation. So I began to think about how the mysterious gentleman came by his insight, whether it was his by nature, or whether it perhaps came from the well-from a drink he might have taken from the well, in spite of the girl’s refusal to draw it for him. The significance of the lilies snagged my attention. Lilies in European sources often represent purity, but there are lilies and lily-like plants all around the world with other meanings. The root of the lovely camas lily is an important traditional food for Native Americans of the inland northwest-but another lily similar in appearance, now popularly called death camas, is a deadly poison. Another New World member of the lily family, so-called Indian or green hellebore, contains powerful and potentially very toxic alkaloids. Native people used it medicinally for many different ailments, but they knew to be extremely careful with dosage. Somewhere, I read that hellebore can render poisonous the water it grows in. These associative jumps led to datura, peyote, amanita, and the numerous other hallucinogens used to induce visions, and communicate with the supernatural, by indigenous peoples of Central and South America.
At some point I thought, “Aha, the mysterious stranger is Manvayar.” He’s at the well because of his-and his old master’s-obsession with old ruins, the old civilizations, the old Nariyo wisdom. He did not drink from the well on purpose, but was poisoned with the vision. So, all the pieces began to come together, including the two plot strands, the one revolving around the ruined temple and the other the mystery at the manor. And then it was clear that the routes Manvayar followed toward discovery of the two crimes, past and present, would have to be intertwined, and that the crises and solutions of each plot thread would have to happen at the same time and place.
Obviously the whodunit and detective story models were prominent in my mind while planning out the plot. But my focus was on Manvayar’s obsessions and conflicts, and on the way he’s going to discover how truth, judgment, and justice are quite distinct things, and how all three are potentially at odds with his own substantial-if not always acknowledged or welcome-capacity for empathy.
What I had to think and re-think while writing the story was A) the number and nature of scenes, and B) what I think of as “choreography” of scenes-who is where, how did they get there, and the timing of their coming on stage and going off stage. And finally, of course, I had to consider over and over, and over, how I was C) parsing out clues and information to the reader.
TT: Something that I didn’t focus on until my third pass through “The Poison Well” is the writing style, itself. I couldn’t help noticing the first time that you used a variety of sentence structures, yet I didn’t acknowledge until my third pass the strong presence of an active voice. In the first three pages, for example, there aren’t more than five passive constructions-and one of them occurs as an independent clause in a sentence that starts off active.
How conscious are you, as you write, about this style?
JB: I do try to use strong verbs even while writing first drafts, and when rewriting, I look for any weak ones that need replacing. By weak verbs, I don’t just mean passive verbs. There are plenty of active verbs that don’t do very much for a story. For example, “went,” “got,” and “did” are often very bland. “He went up to the mysterious stone.” Even such innocuous verbs as “walked” or “stepped” can give that sentence more zing.
On the other hand, sometimes you want a passive construction-to keep the emphasis of a sentence in the right place, or to avoid an otherwise awkward construction. And I wouldn’t want characters “striding” or “stumbling” every time they move. Sometimes your character does just have to “get” or “do” something.
You mentioned variety of sentence structures. I try to be attentive to the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs, and even whole scenes. Part of this is varying sentence length and complexity, but also, for example, trying to match short declarative sentences with points in the narrative that need emphasis or distinctness, or a different tempo. Action scenes require a different rhythm from lyrical descriptive scenes-shorter sentences, more violent verbs, and so on.
TT: Getting away from the nuts-’n'-bolts material, what can you tell me about how this story went from your typewriter (or whatever serves) to my copy of Black Gate? Are you a longtime reader of the magazine, did you find it in a market list, or was it recommended from elsewhere? What was the cycle of submissions on this one, and how much (if any) editing went into it between acceptance and the version I read?
JB: It’s amusing, in a grim sort of way, that you should ask this. “The Poison Well” has had, by far, the longest and most complicated career in and out of editorial inboxes of anything I’ve written. I’m not sure if it’s an example of how you have to keep submitting rejected stories, or of how dependent a story can be on finding the right editor-and by “right editor,” I don’t just mean right in terms of editorial taste, but in terms of willingness to work with the story, and with its writer. It’s certainly an example of how your stories will see print far more quickly if you are swifter than I was to A) rewrite after an editor asks for revisions, and B) query when a story has sat at a market for months on end.
I actually have to go back to my file drawer to answer the question. I completed the initial “final draft” of the story in 1997, and submitted it to Realms of Fantasy at the very end of December 1997. Note to writers starting out: Having previously sold to a particular market does not guarantee speedy replies or personal rejections. The story was at ROF for a long time-my recollection is nearly a year, though I have no query letters in my file, and the rejection letter is undated. That, when it arrived, was a “thanks but no thanks” form that had been paper-clipped to my cover letter. Upon the latter, someone, slush reader or editor, had scribbled in pencil, “nice but too long and unfocused in end.”
The story sat in my drawer for several months-I may have fiddled with it-before I submitted it to Weird Tales in August 1999. There the turnaround was pretty quick: I got a personal rejection from Darrell Schweitzer dated September 1999. It basically didn’t interest him enough.
Next, in October 1999, off to Adventures of Sword and Sorcery, where the story sat for many months. Meanwhile, I heard various rumors about the magazine going on hiatus or ceasing to exist at all. I queried the editor March 2000 and some time after that received an undated form reply. One of the checked boxes included: “Lacks closure.” In my defense, one reason behind that particular querying lag was the birth of my son in late-October 1999.
Now, there just aren’t that many markets for 17,000-word dark fantasies featuring a magician with a sword. Fortunately, Black Gate had by now appeared on the scene. It was, as yet, no more than a market listing-the first issue hadn’t been published.
I submitted “The Poison Well” via snail mail in mid-August 2000. Before the end of that month, I received an enthusiastic reply from Dave Truesdale, then Managing Editor. This was the speediest transaction in the whole long process.
Dave told me he was forwarding the story to Editor and Publisher John O’Neill. In January 2001, John sent me a revision letter. The letter praised the story but said, “The story breaks down very near the end.” “Unfocused in the end,” “lacks closure,” “breaks down near the end”-I was beginning to sense a continuing theme!
John willingly engaged in further e-mail correspondence about points in his letter that weren’t initially clear to me. But I was in the middle of a number of other academic- and fiction-writing commitments that were consuming all my time, and I wasn’t able to jump on the revisions until half the year passed. I didn’t finish and send back the revised draft until early September, and then . . . there it sat.
Once again, I should have queried after the first three or five months had passed, but I had in the meantime sold my unfinished first novel (Bear Daughter) and my energies were now entirely focused on the race to complete it more or less on deadline. But I did occasionally check the Black Gate newsgroup, with its regular slush and issue updates, and, at last, in May 2002 I queried John regarding the status of the revision. He had, it turns out, sent a reply in February that evidently had gone astray.
Now he wanted a second rewrite. This I completed shortly after handing in my novel, and I submitted it in mid-August 2002. Again I kept an eye on the newsgroup and I queried John when I knew he had started reading again. It was now April 2003. I heard back from him in May 2003: He’d buy it if I could clear up “some” details-roughly a dozen of varying complexity and importance.
Oh, no, a third rewrite. . . !
It was at this point that I, at last, had an epiphany about the eternally problematic story climax, an epiphany that I would never have reached without John’s willingness to comment upon each draft of the story in detail. I had set up the story so that the final scenes had to accommodate two almost mutually exclusive story functions-the revelation of the story mysteries, which required a quite a bit of new information and explanation, and the climactic action sequences, where my instincts were to strip out everything extraneous to the action.
Note to self: Never, ever do this again.
It was also at this point that John gently suggested that I mark on the outside of the envelope, rather than merely in the cover letter, that I was sending a requested revision. John had no slush reader to open submissions as they come in, and my story had been going into the slush pile each time.
I revised and re-subbed the story in June 2003. Finally, on June 18th, John accepted the third revision. I was extremely pleased to hear that it would be the lead story in issue no. 7, the next but one! As it happened, Issue #7 was delayed . . . and delayed . . . and delayed again. But happily it did appear, and my longest-wandering story has at last come to rest.
Twilight Tales : The mystery plotline itself is carried on the backs of the other characters. I can see how this entire story could have been written without an inquisitor at all. There is, in the setting itself, the premise that the truth is as active and potent a force as a powder keg. Aleid’s suffering at the hands of her family, the deaths of her potential suitors-or saviors?-and the prolonged suffering of the dead at the ruined temple all create their own kind of tension. Like any family, modern or not, it couldn’t help but self-destruct at some point-the necromantic manifestations are the proof of this.
Aleid, by one view, could-well be the protagonist. She has a problem and she is acting to deal with it, however inefficiently. The constraints placed on her by her world-being the daughter of a lord, having precious few rights (the bulk of them violated, anyway), and so on-have nigh destroyed her. It’s not an understatement to say that the most necessary character in the story is Aleid.
Judith Berman : It’s interesting to, as you suggest, re-imagine the story with her as the protagonist. In Akira Kurosawa’s movie Ran, a re-telling of King Lear with three sons instead of three daughters, the central villain turns out to be the wife of one of the sons. But the villain is the only character whose story evoked any sympathy from me: Her husband’s family killed her family and conquered their domain, and now, she’s out for revenge. I couldn’t help but end up seeing her as, in some way, the hero of the movie.
My problem with re-imagining Aleid as the protagonist, though, is that her story as it stands is a tragedy without redemption. The only exception is possibly her final, fleeting moment of connection with Manvayar, whom she senses at some level values her, or wants to value her, more highly than she, herself, is capable of doing. Manvayar’s own experience is grim, but at least he’s acquired something of value by its end: He’s learned something; he’s grown up somewhat; he’s made an important human connection that he lacked before. He now calls Seppan his “master.” He has a future that’s less dark than where he’s come from.
TT : Was it a tough choice to write in third-person as opposed to first-person?
JB : I’ve used first-person but, for whatever reason, I’m most comfortable writing in the third-person limited POV. I guess I need a specific reason to choose first-person. Except in short segments inside other works, I’ve never done third-person omniscient, where the author can skip from one character’s head to another, or pull back to view them all. Instead, if I need more than one viewpoint, I tend to write a series of segments each with a separate limited POV.
TT : One of the ways in which you use the active voice to establish descriptions has powerful side effects on character-evocation and world-sketching. An example:
Manvayar urged raven down the bank of the high road and onto the lane, into the green shadows of the forest. He noticed that the country folk had done some cutting and coppicing along the edge of the lane, but further in the wood was an impenetrable tangle. The lord of this place had not even fired the brush for hunting.
The job of tending a lane as described demands more than one countryman-it requires folk, which slips in the information that there are lots of people at hand. The lord of the place had neglected more work than this; the folk act as directed, perhaps, or would obey if commanded. More important for the character-evocation side, these are all assumptions made by Manvayar: All he can say with certainty is that the lane has been cut and coppiced, that the brush hasn’t been fired, and yet, he tells me what he figures is true.
This isn’t the only example in the story where you’ve done something similar. Is this a conscious tool? What else do you do to achieve these effects?
JB : If I understand these questions correctly, you’re asking about two intertwined processes relating to viewpoint-conveying information about the external world, and conveying characterization.
Conveying information with both first- and third-person-limited viewpoints can be a tricky thing. For the most part you’re confined to what that character knows, although you can have your POV character observe something that the reader will understand even while the character does not. But the limitations of these POV types are also among the most important tools you have to convey character. People notice things, and understand things, as a function of personality and life experience and so on.
To a degree, conveying characterization through viewpoint is a conscious process for me. As I write-and rewrite-I try to observe the story landscape through my POV character’s eyes and make the kinds of judgments about it that he or she would make. But the more I internalize a character, the less conscious the process becomes. Until you pointed it out, I hadn’t noticed the ideas implicit in this passage about class hierarchy and about how land and people ought to be administered, and who has what roles in the process. Yet, they are very much the ideas Manvayar’s character would have-the ideas of an aristocrat’s son who doesn’t question the class system that created him, even if he no longer fully identifies with his own class. So, if I do viewpoint right, a lot of the details of character- and world-building won’t be the result of conscious attention at all. Which I suppose is what you could say about writing in general.
There is a way in which the more you use viewpoint to convey character, the more your narrator becomes potentially unreliable. As long as this is under the writer’s control, it’s not a bad thing. That is, it’s one thing to have a narrator who is in a sense professionally unreliable, a purposeful liar, and quite another to have the narrative lose trustworthiness because you haven’t managed to keep clueing in the reader as to when and whether the narrator is an accurate observer. There have been many times when I’ve had a protagonist who, because of character issues, wasn’t a reliable observer of this particular event or that other story character, and yet the viewpoint was so deeply inside his or her head that I’ve had to think very hard how to give the reader adequate clues as to the real state of affairs.
Fortunately, Manvayar is a fairly reliable observer, with a couple of blind spots: He can’t see himself in other people’s eyes, and he doesn’t yet understand Seppan very well. Both of those are a necessary outgrowth of how I envisioned his character. The narrative does convey some idea of Manvayar through his own un-self-conscious perceptions and actions, and through other people’s responses to him. But, in this story, Seppan remains rather opaque to him. If and when I write more stories about these two, Manvayar will get to know Seppan better.
TT : There are two occasions when a necromantic beast appears in the story, apart from the events that took place prior to the opening scene. The first time, you devote twelve paragraphs to Manvayar’s fight with the monster. The second time, six-and only two of those are of the monster itself and its destruction. Manvayar spends one other scene displaying his martial skill.
Combat can be a tough thing to write. Manvayar’s nature comes through clearly enough: He sees an active danger and he rushes to face it directly. How did you compose these two fight scenes? What sorts of fight scenes have you tackled elsewhere, and how were they different?
JB : I’ve read fight scenes with page after page of detailed descriptions of each thrust, parry, and foot movement. To me, that approach isn’t visual or dramatic. I lose interest after a while and skim until “something happens.” Also, speaking as a martial artist (over twenty years in doshinkan aikido, where we do a lot of sword, staff, and knife work), it seems to me that no one, never mind an expert swordsman, would experience a life-or-death confrontation in that way. Your body is what responds to the situation, not the verbal, analytical part of your brain. You might not even be aware of what technique you’re using.
As a reader, what I want to feel in a combat scene is the rhythm of the fight, the ebb and flow, the fear or excitement. There should be enough detail at crucial points to make me believe in it, but not so much that it interferes with the forward momentum of the narrative. So that’s how I try to write.
I’ve written other battle scenes-for instance, the military engagements in “The Fear Gun.” In my forthcoming novel [ Bear Daughter, Ace Books (September 2005)], the protagonist is literally a “bear-serker.” In the space-opera-ish novel I’m working on right now, the main character is a young woman who’s been raised as a martial artist. She’s modeled in part on some of the children of martial-arts masters I’ve known, who-like children of trapeze artists-have been training practically since infancy and whose bodies are capable of astounding feats. But I’ve put her in a situation where most of the time she can’t use her abilities. Manvayar is the first character I’ve written where the sword, and using it, is an intrinsic part of how he goes around in the world.
Judith Berman’s most recent story, “The Fear Gun,” appeared in the July 2004 Asimov’s. Her fiction has also shown up in Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and the anthology Vision Quests. Asimov’s has praised Lord Stink and Other Stories, her chapbook collection from Small Beer Press, as “evok[ing] the best of Ursula LeGuin.” Ace Books is publishing her first novel, Bear Daughter, in September 2005.
