With so many genre writers making a concerted effort not to be pigeon-holed, it's refreshing to meet one who is happy with her status. "All I ever wanted to be was a science fiction writer," says multi-award-winning SF writer Connie Willis, as she sits in the living room of her 1920s, Spanish-style home in Greeley, Colo. At just under six feet, Willis is a tall woman. Her auburn hair is cut in a short shag, and her blue eyes brighten behind her spectacles when she speaks. "[Interviewers] always ask me if I resent being in the ghetto and not being able to break out," she continues, with a roll of her eyes. "But this is where I want to be." She smiles to let PW know she takes it all with good humor. Willis's house isn't far from the University of Northern Colorado, where her husband, Courtney, is a physics professor. Since their daughter, Cordelia, moved to California, they share the place with two cats and a bulldog named Gracie. In Willis's office, next to a fairly spartan work desk and some overcrowded bookshelves, a table holds most of the awards given to her by the science fiction community, honoring stories such as "Even the Queen," "Last of the Winnebagos," "A Letter to the Clearys" and "The Winds of Marble Arch," and novels Doomsday Book (Bantam, 1992) and To Say Nothing of the Dog (Bantam, 1998). At the moment, Willis is the only writer of science fiction to have collected six Nebulas and eight Hugo Awards.
With the publication this month of Passage (Bantam; Forecasts, Mar. 12), a new novel that deals with near-death experiences, she will no doubt have to find room for a few more plaques and statuettes. Death? Personal responsibility? Parenting? These aren't the usual themes and issues of science fiction, but Willis is used to mixing the everyday with the exotic. "I was very lucky that Have Spacesuit Will Travel [by Robert Heinlein] was the first science fiction book I ever read," she says. "So much of SF that I don't like has to do with people going out and saving the world. In Have Spacesuit Will Travel, the ship lands, and for the rest of the book the protagonist is trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and where he is, and how to stay alive. My characters are always trying to figure out the world, and they never have enough information. Everything depends on their understanding the situation; yet it's a situation much too big and complicated for them to understand. That, to me, is the human condition in a nutshell. The world is too big and complicated for us to understand with our pathetic little primate brains. And, yet, that's what we have to do. That's where man's nobility lies."
The force of destiny became evident to Willis early on in her writing career. Born in Englewood, Colo., she was adopted by her stepfather at a young age, and knew nothing about her biological father until she was 25 and already a published writer. That year she discovered that he was a writer, too, and the editor of a newspaper in California. What's more, like his daughter, he sang in a choir and had a beautiful voice. "When I found out about it, I was furious," says Willis. "I wanted to feel that what I did was something I did as an individual, not something programmed into me." Eventually, she calmed down, and found herself fascinated by genetic predisposition. "As a writer, I explore that issue sometimes. It just really intrigues me. What are we? Who are we? How much of what we think is choice, is really choice? I'm not a person who likes to believe in predestination. I was raised as a Presbyterian, and that's the one part of that theology I could never stand: the whole idea of predestination. I want to believe that we have absolute free will."
It was sheer will power, it seems, that propelled Willis's writing career at first. While teaching at public schools in Colorado, she wrote and sold stories to confession magazines and submitted her science fiction stories to various magazines. Nearly 10 years went by before one was accepted for publication. And it was two or three years later before stories like "Firewatch" and "All My Darling Daughters" grabbed readers' attention and garnered award nominations.
Free will plays a big role in Passage, which explores the nature of near-death experiences (NDEs) and whether or not there is actually an afterlife. "I told my agent, Ralph Vincinanza, that I thought I might have written the perfect novel," she says, half-facetiously. "The anti-NDE stuff will irritate the NDE people and the mystical [parts] will irritate the hell out of the scientific community. I could end up making everybody in the United States mad. I would feel very successful then, I guess." When asked if she is a believer, Willis scoffs. "I don't believe in ghosts, and I don't believe in communications with the dead, and I don't believe in Ouija boards. I really wanted to write a story in which I did not lie to the reader about that. Or give any indication that, in fact, it was possible to communicate from beyond the grave. That shaped the whole plot. When you write a book, you're trying to tell the truth. Even though you're making up all this stuff, you're still trying to tell the truth. One of the things that I believe most firmly is, if there is anything after death, there is no proof of it. There is no connection between the living and the dead. Except the emotional connection. They live in your heart. That connection is real."
As a girl, Willis already understood more about death than most adults. "My mother died when I was 12," she says. "She died very suddenly. Since that moment, I have not thought about anything else, basically. It's probably what made me a writer. I do think it gave me a different perspective. I'm not saying it made me clinically depressed, it just made me look at the world differently. The rest of the world, I find, to my horror, goes blithely along thinking nothing is ever gonna go wrong. And they're shattered when it does. Never for a moment have I believed that." After her mother died, Willis was raised by a grandmother who, like many of her generation, sometimes told unexpurgated stories of friends and family who died suddenly, keeping the dark subject on the front burner.
Willis's life-long obsession with mortality, coupled with a seemingly innocuous recommendation, led to the writing of Passage. "This friend of mine forced me to read Embraced By the Light, saying you'll love it. I loathed it. I thought it was a wicked, wicked book. I felt that—just like the old-fashioned spiritualism—it preys on people's wishes and fears. And that it panders to them in the most shameless way, saying: 'Don't worry. Not only will you not die, but you'll still be you, and your loved ones will be there. And there's nothing terrifying about death.' It's all sort of reduced to Hallmark card level. To me, whatever death brings, it's huge, it's major, it's terrifying! And it's awesome (in the old-fashioned sense of the word)."
Old-fashioned is definitely a tag that comes to mind when describing Willis, or at least her tastes in reading. Her favorite writers include Robert Heinlein, Dorothy Sayers. P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, whom Willis calls "one of the most brilliant plotters. I shamelessly copy all of her techniques. The way she misdirects the reader, the way she 'reveals' the mystery half way through the story, which completely confuses the reader and throws them off." Willis halts the conversation for a minute to stop one of her cats from chewing on a table cloth.
"I should have been born in the 19th-century. I hate 20th-century literature. I'm not in tune with it at all. I have not been in tune since Fitzgerald. He's just about the end of where I feel any affinity at all. I look at Saul Bellow and John Updike and Norman Mailer, and I think, 'Not my area.' " If many of her women characters seem possessed of a sharp wit like that of Jane Austen's protagonists, it is probably no coincidence. "She's a huge influence," says Willis. "She's basically an observer who realizes that the world can't be changed. Her characters aren't out there pitching so much as observing. Their observation and insight is how they fight the world."
Though she loves 19th-century fiction, Willis has never been of the mind that books can change social mores. "I'm not a social writer. I write some social commentary, but I don't write social reform fiction like Dickens. I don't believe in it. I adore Dickens, but I think that's the weakest part of his fiction. I don't think literature is about abolishing the slums; I think it's about something else. I liked Trollope much better. He basically looks at the same situations, takes a typical social do-gooder situation like Dickens has in his novels, and shows you what would really happen. Trollope has got it down cold."
Willis is also rather old-fashioned in her choice of writing tools—she prefers Red Chief tablets and a pen or pencil. Although she has an office, she prefers to write in the local library or at Margie's Java Joint. "A great place," she says, "great caffe lattes and discussions of the latest political and/or social flaps." When asked if Margie's is the place where her muse resides, Willis laughs and says, "I've never had a muse! I haven't been inspired since 1953. My stories have a really long stewing period. This guy I had lunch with referred to it as 'the compost pile.' That's the perfect metaphor for writing: it's not stew, it's compost. All the potato peelings go in there, and you just hope for the best. Let it steam for a long time, and let it smell really, really bad. I think about it and think about it for a long time, putting all the little pieces together, taking notes all along so I don't forget what I'm doing. Then, eventually, I sit down and plot out the entire thing, work out the whole story before I actually start writing. That doesn't mean things don't change as you go along. But basically I know where I'm going. I know the ending, and I know the whole basic story outline, and follow it pretty faithfully. I hate these writers who are always saying, 'Well, my characters… half way through the story they just took over! They just rebelled! And I'm thinking, 'What are you talking about? Aren't you in charge of your own writing?' "
Willis admits to one quirk. "I never write in order. I wrote the middle of Passages last. I wrote all the end chapters quite early. Except for the very last one, which I couldn't quite get right, so I rewrote it over and over and over until I finally figured out what I wanted to do. I very rarely write in order. I tend to work on a part I know how to write, or that I've figured out, and then piece it all together. I have never written a story at one sitting. I have never written a story front to back. Ever! That isn't how I work. I usually write the ending first. Because that's the part that has to be right. If it's not right, nothing else will work. In my books, I want everything in all of the chapters to fit into the ending. And I do go back and put in a lot of foreshadowing; I want it all there. I want every conversation to echo very differently for readers the second time through; I want it all to have been in place but invisible the first time."
For now, after the long haul of a nearly 700-page novel, Willis is happy just to think about what she'll write next. The actual words will come later. There's the "amnesia novel" that will be set in the same "universe" as the popular Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. "It will have Mr. Dunworthy in it," says Willis. "But I don't know of anybody else for sure. I'm toying with bringing back some older characters. But it will be set in the blitz. 'Firewatch' was set during the London blitz, but I never got to talk about it in the detail that I want to—it's my favorite period of history. It will be the third and final book in that world, or whatever you want to call it. Then, the other thing I'm thinking about is a comic novel about Roswell and alien abduction. My husband and I spent our anniversary in Roswell last summer. Which is a great place for a wedding anniversary. Talk about a perfect metaphor!" Asked which one she'll begin first, Willis shrugs, smiles, and says, "I don't know which one will ripen first in the compost pile."
Shindler is a regular contributor to Book, the Dallas Morning News, the Denver Post, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and The Writer.
