Philip K Dick on Writing

I had a former student and Dick-head reader ask me recently if Philip K Dick ever offered any advice on writing. At first I drew a blank. Dick is not especially appreciated for his craft, but I remembered a letter that he wrote to an aspiring science fiction writer named Sandra Miesel (sorry I can't provide the date, I'm away from my PKD collection. I think it's in one of the final volumes, if anyone can find it, and scan the entire letter for us that'd be great). Dick's advice is to avoid flowery, purple prose.  Here's the part I quote for my students in the course reader:

"A citizen runs to the fire department yelling that he's spotted a roaring blaze from his car.
'Where is it?' the fire department asks, pen ready.
'It rises like some brooding, glaring trail of cosmic fury from..'
"WHERE? WHERE?"
"Oh. Well, it blazes up from a crimson-sheathed visage brooding darkly over haunted towers of impudent indignity, which, like melons hovering unhappily over the lifetime of empty meaning, which..."
'THE ADDRESS!'
'Oh. Oh I didn't notice. But look for a brooding, glaring trail of cosmic fury rising from a crimson-sheathed visage...' 
They lead him off, back to his car, and send him on."

Dick makes his point implicitly by creating a scenario in which the listener desperately needs information, which is obfuscated by the purple prose. Obviously, Dick sees his readers like members of the fire department: clearly interested in what's happening, rather than the prose used to describe it. I think this is good writing advice for any genre, but particularly science fiction, where the focus is rarely on the prose style (William Gibson and Samuel Delaney are excused from this generalization). "Melons hovering..." Seems like another one of Dick's patented breast references™I'm gonna write a post on that soon. 

The other piece of writing advice just recently surfaced thanks to the gumshoe work of Randall Radin who located a letter Dick wrote to Ron Goulart in 1965. If memory serves, it was one of the few things he wrote that year, a nadir in Dick's personal life, as he had just left Anne and relocated to East Gak-Ville from beautiful Point Reyes.

The letter offers what amounts to Dick's "formula" for novel writing. As he explains in the letter's final paragraph: "I an not saying this is how to write a book. I am saying this is how I write a book." (Dick uses the <> for emphasis which does something weird to the html in Blogger. Please to accept the italics instead.)

I've met many Dick fans who refuse to accept that Dick used any kind of formula when writing his novels. They prefer to imagine Dick as John Coltrane, improvising a plot by the seat of his pants. But once you read through this letter you will be able to spot this formula (which is very detailed) in almost any of his books. One of my favorite rules in the formula is that the low status character introduced in the first chapter has to have a single syllable last name. "Al Glunch" is the name Dick offers, writing, "or some other unlikely, short type name. What in reality the phone book is full of ...and for good reason; this is the other half of the world."

Submit your best PKD chapter one character name in the comments. I like Dan Shlurt. 

Hey, that's the two-syllable name guy from chapter two! 

If you want to read a really good book on writing, you just have to check out Ursula LeGuin's book Steering the Craft. It's fantastic. Did you know that Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said beat LeGuin's The Dispossessed for the John W Campbell award in 1975? I know we're all Dick fans here, but I hope we can agree that LeGuin was robbed. 

Ok, now I really want to plot out a novel using this formula. Who's with me. Here's the formula in its entirety (though we don't know whether there was ever a cover page for this letter): 

Click to embiggen

Sentient Gravity - by John Fairchild

I'm pleased to be able to publish here, for you Dick-heads, the paper John Fairchild presented at the Philip K Dick Festival earlier this month in Colorado. John had to give this talk outside on the gazebo instead of in the comfort of the library, and I know I had trouble hearing him at times over the roar of passing biker gangs, so I'm glad to be able to read this at my leisure. John has been involved with the PKD scene since the newsletter days and transcribed a number of the letters in the most recent edition of PKD's Selected Letters 1980-82. This is dense stuff and Mr Fairchild does us all a real service by breaking it down for us... There are seven parts to this essay and I'm going to post them one at a time, because I need to stretch out this wonderful free content while I busy myself with the first weeks of the Fall semester, and because I know if I publish something too long you guys won't read it. Now, without further ado,

Sentient Gravity

A talk on The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1980-1982

by John Fairchild

The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1980-1982 is the sixth and last volume of the Selected Letters. We’re going to be touching on just a few aspects of this last volume. We’re going to be looking mainly at the letters to Patricia Warrick. At the time, Patricia Warrick was a Professor of English at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Her major book on Phil is Mind in Motion, The Fiction of Philip K. Dick, 1987.

I’d like to start off with just one definition. Most of you are familiar with VALIS; Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Phil had a change in preferred nomenclature during this period. He preferred to talk about the macrometasomakosmos. The macrometasomakosmos is VALIS, the Logos, the Cosmic Christ, Plato’s Forms, and Pythagoras’ kosmos.

I The role of Dialectic

Dialectic comes up many times in this last volume, often in ways that are not immediately recognized. We usually think of dialectic in terms of Hegel— thesis, antithesis, and synthesis creating a new thesis. This will show up as a model of how information gets arranged conceptually in the universe. However, there are numerous examples of more complex concepts that take dialectic as their basis. Some of these are hierogamy, enantiodromia, and homeostasis—these are all related.

(1) Hierogamy: Greek; “holy marriage.” These were symbolic rituals where human participants represented a god and goddess. It is the harmonization of opposites. It shows up in Jungian psychology, per Phil. “And it is the psychological hierogamy, the unification of the opposites in the collective unconscious, that produces psychological wholeness, according to Jung.” (p. 38) (All page numbers here are from the Letters.)

(2) Enantiodromia: Greek; the process by which something becomes its opposite, and the subsequent interaction between the two. “…(E)nantiodromia is the primary instrument by which the structure of the macrometasomakosmos is achieved and preserved.” (p.66)

(3) Homeostasis is the self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival. Homeostatic responses can be observed in all levels of life—atom, molecule, cell, organ, organism, population, and community—and in a wide range of time intervals—from a fraction of a second… to hundreds of years for community changes. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, hereafter referred to as EB.) Phil says the macrometasomakosmos self-corrects to its own map. (p. 132)

Phil’s use of the term dialectic relies more on fusion than building on contradiction. His dialectic usually consists of A reaching the highest state it can reach, then B growing or leaping out of A yet containing the best of A. From there, C makes a quantum leap and supersedes A and B yet is still a fusion of the two.

Two New PKD Sources Hit Bookshelves

Dick-heads have been waiting for years for the final volume of PKD's letters. After some false starts, it looks like the 80-82 volume of letters is finally available from Amazon.com. At almost $50, it ain't cheap, but will most likely be a very useful resource. Buy it here. If you buy enough copies through my links, maybe I'll be able to afford this volume:



Also recently released is another PKD Overview-type book by Eric C Link:



Umberto Rossi says of Link's book:

"It's way more readable than those excerpts from Rickels. Clear, well-documented, competently written--though, as I had surmised, it mostly says things we know.

Yet there are some interesting bits here and there.

He starts discussin' Dick as a novelist of ideas by reading"

Merry Christmas To Me!

It seems I was a very good boy this year; my wife bought me three volumes of Dick's Selected Letters, partially filling the last hole I had in my collection (and adding no less than six inches to my overall Dick length). In fact I'm mulling over writing a book, but have been putting it off until I had access to these letters.

These volumes are known to be ridiculously expensive and/or hard to get; what can I say? I lucked out. My wife got them pretty reasonably (I'm told by her) from lwcurrey.com.

So far I'm about 100 pages into the 1972-73 volume (all grading has been put on hold) and the letters are extremely interesting and shed a lot of light on that particular time in Dick's life: he's just moved to Fullerton from Vancouver; he's broke, alone, and emerging from the darkest year of his life. Letters to lawyers, friends and family, chicks, agents, all delve at length into Dick's problems, interestingly, in almost equal detail whether he's chronicling his troubles to life long friend Ray Nelson, or the snuff vendor, settling up after a check bounced. The writing is incredibly good, in places as funny and as devastating as any of his novels.

As a scholar I think these letters are a bit dangerous (as is any piece of evidence however small and seemingly innocuous in the Case of Philip K Dick); as they are the 'Selected Letters' I wonder who selected them (that's probably in an introduction I skipped), what was left out, and why. I have lots of questions, like why does Phil refer to Tessa in one letter as Leslie? Who exactly is 'Kathy'? And why in the world did PKD write that letter to the FBI about Disch's Camp Concentration?

Don't expect answers to these questions (that's my silent mantra), but I will write up a more thorough post about this volume when I'm done. How many of you have these? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section.

Update: TDH buddy Palmer_Eldritch has, coincidentally, recently posted quotes from the 72-73 volume of the letters here.