The Very Best of Tad Williams

MEMORY, SORROW AND THORN

The Dragonbone Chair
(1988)

Stone of Farewell
(1990)

To Green Angel Tower
(1993)

The Burning Man
(1998)

OTHERLAND

City of Golden Shadow
(1996)

River of Blue Fire
(1998)

Mountain of Black Glass
(1999)

Sea of Silver Light
(2001)

The Happiest Dead Boy in the World
(2004)

SHADOWMARCH

Shadowmarch
(2004)

Shadowplay
(2007)

Shadowrise
(2010)

Shadowheart
(2010)

THE ORDINARY FARM ADVENTURES (Co-written with Deborah Beale)

The Dragons of Ordinary Farm
(2009)

The Secrets of Ordinary Farm
(2011)

THE BOBBY DOLLAR BOOKS

The Dirty Streets of Heaven
(2012)

Happy Hour in Hell
(2013)

Sleeping Late on Judgment Day
(September 2014)

STANDALONE NOVELS

Tailchaser’s Song
(1985)

Child of an Ancient City
(with Nina Kiriki Hoffman, 1992)

Caliban’s Hour
(1994)

The War of the Flowers
(2003)

COLLECTIONS

Rite: Short Work
(2006)

A Stark and Wormy Knight
(2011)

COMIC BOOKS

Mirrorworld
(1998)

The Next
(2006)

Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis
(2007)

Ibis the Invincible: The Helmet of Fate
(2007)

W
here do stories come from? That’s a question I hear a lot. Here’s the truth, at least as I know it: they don’t come from anywhere. They’re already there and they just need to be recognized. Stories are all around, infinite in their numbers. They’re in every word, every experience, every object.

Let’s take a rock, for instance. Just a nice, smooth stone, about the size of your closed fist—not a gemstone, nothing so easy. Just an ordinary stone. What’s the story there?

Well, Cain picked up a stone like that and killed his brother Abel. That’s a pretty famous story right there, if a trifle on the brutal side. And David killed the giant Goliath with a stone, too. But we don’t even need to deal with the homicidal aspect of stones to find stories.

What if you were the size of an ant? That simple stone is now something quite large. It might be blocking your path in the middle of an important journey. It might be an object of worship. It might have rolled down a hill and killed your entire family. (Oops, I said I wasn’t going to do murderous stones.) As an ordinary-sized stone, it might be the key to a mystery—perhaps it has a bit of important DNA on it, or a few scratchings of a forgotten race of humanity—but it’s lost among thousands of nearly identical stones. How do you find it? Will it be found in time?

A rock can be a paperweight on the desk of an old, cruel man. Why does he keep it? What can it mean to him? A rock might be the toy of a child who can’t afford any better ones. It might used to keep a door from slamming shut so someone doesn’t get locked out of her house—until the day the rock rolls a few inches too far and the door slams, and she can’t get back in. There’s a story there. I can tell.

And if there’s a story in every rock—lots of stories, as I’ve just shown— how many more stories are waiting out there, disguised as pigeons, or a flyer somebody dropped on the sidewalk, or masquerading as your mail carrier, or a strange wisp of cloud in an otherwise blue sky? How many stories are riding on the train next to you, reading their newspapers and wondering why you’re inspecting them so strangely? How about the stories lying piled in your garage, posing as old clothes waiting to go to the Goodwill? Or the story pretending to be the neighbor’s noisy dog? Did you step over a story in the gutter today because it looked like nothing more than a broken bottle, the label worn away by water and weather? Who dropped it there? What did that person do next?

That’s the world I live in. If I suppress the expectedness, the ordinaryness of things and allow myself to look around a bit more carefully, I start seeing and hearing stories everywhere around me. Nearly every story in this book started that way, as a little something that caught my attention, perhaps a dream that clung for a moment after I woke up, or an unexplained aside in a history book, maybe as something as simple as a few words in the conversation of passing strangers, stripped of context and thus wonderfully inexplicable.

Like I said, stories don’t just show up. They’re not traveling salesmen, rapping at your door with a suitcase full of Romance and Mystery and Science Fiction. No, stories are already there, but you need to
look
for them. Maybe the story you want isn’t in the salesman’s briefcase with all that other, obvious stuff, but rather in the scuffed shoes he’s wearing, or the slightly desperate smile on his face that suggests he hasn’t made a sale yet today. Or maybe it’s in the lies he tells on the phone when he calls home to say he’ll be late. Maybe it isn’t anything to do with the salesman, but instead comes from the elderly man across the street, who looks out his window and realizes that after living in the neighborhood for forty years, he doesn’t know any of the neighbors the salesman is visiting.

Anything can be a story, because a story can be anything, any idea. Then the work starts. You have to pick up whatever set you thinking and really look at it, examine it from all angles, think about where it’s been and what’s happened to it and what might not have happened to it but could. You have to think about what would make someone else want to know the story. And then you have to take that rock, that conversation, that cloud, that salesman, whatever has caught your imagination, and work with it. You must shape it and expose its inner elements, bring them to light so that everyone else will see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt when you noticed that story.

Stories are all around. You don’t have to look very far. They’re in the room where you’re reading this, in your life, in your memories, and there are lots more just outside your door. These are just a few that
I
found. You’re welcome to share what I made of them, and I hope you enjoy them, but I left plenty of stories out there if you’d like to find some for yourself. They’re a resource we’ll never exhaust—one of the few. And the most important thing you have to understand is this: until they’re found and shared, they’re wasted. So even if you don’t want to make any of your own, I’d love to have you take a look at mine.

Tad Williams

Santa Cruz, California

October 24, 2013