Not specifically spy-related this time, but something I’ve been thinking about lately and wanted to share.

When I was in my youth (well, youth-adjacent at least), I went to Clarion.

If you’re not familiar, Clarion is a workshop for writers of science fiction and fantasy. It’s quite prestigious in that field, and I was super excited to get in. It’s held in the summer on a college campus; it’s called Clarion because it was originally held at Clarion State College in Pennsylvania, though it’s moved around a few times since then. About 20 students live in dorms for six weeks, and established writers come in for a week at a time to lead and mentor. You write and workshop stories at a furious pace and learn from the pros.

The year I went, there was one writer I was especially looking forward to meeting and working with. I won’t name him. We’re not talking a household name like Stephen King or Tom Clancy, but he was well known and respected in the genre. If you’re a serious reader of sf and fantasy, you’ll have heard of him. I’d read several of his books and liked them a lot.

When his week came around, he showed up with his wife. She was a charming woman, they obviously adored each other, and we were pretty much immediately taken with both of them. At one point - I don’t remember how it came up - he told us a story about her.

They lived in Los Angeles, and one night they heard something going on outside. He went out front and discovered a group of four or five teenage gang types messing with the cars parked along their street. He told them to cut it out, but he was one middle-aged writer, and they were a pack of gang kids. They were not intimidated. Kind of the opposite.

They were starting to get aggressive with him when, as he told it, his wife suddenly appeared on the front porch with a shotgun and chased them off.

We loved that story. In his telling, it was a swashbuckling tale of adventure. Bad guys moving in, then his wife appearing on the porch, doing that thing where you rack the shotgun with that unmistakable sound, telling them to leave her husband alone and get the hell out of there. If we had been charmed by his wife before, now she was our heroine. She was Anne Bonny, queen of the pirates. She was Xena, Warrior Princess with a shotgun. We retold the story to those students who hadn’t been there to hear it and made him tell it to them again as only he could. Her boldness and daring became a legend around that year’s Clarion.

Until we were all invited to dinner at their place one night (the writer guests stayed in faculty apartments so had more room to host) and we all told his wife – busily being the perfect hostess while her husband held court - how awesome we thought she was. And then she told us her version of the story.

The facts were the same, but through her eyes it became a completely different story. She was not the swashbuckling warrior woman of her husband’s version. Not Xena with a shotgun. She was scared to death. Was her husband going to be stabbed? Was she going to have to shoot someone, maybe kill them, and face the consequences of that? Were their lives about to be shattered forever? And what happened after the gangbangers went away? Was their house marked for payback some night? It was a terrifying, harrowing experience that didn’t end with her triumphantly seeing off the bad guys but stayed with her.

Well, that put a different spin on it for us. As I said at the top, there were two lessons from that experience, though the first one flew right over my head and didn’t occur to me for many years.

The obvious moral: think about who’s telling your story. The same story might come off completely differently if told from another character’s perspective. I got that one and I’ve used it ever since.

As for the second moral, consider: when I met him at Clarion, this man had been steadily publishing novels for two decades. He’d won awards. He was widely known and admired in the field. He had the very career that I aspired to. And yet he and his charming wife had to live in a neighborhood where gangs roamed the streets starting trouble. A place where they felt the need to keep a loaded shotgun near the front door.

The second moral, then, is this: Don’t necessarily take your dreams at face value. Interrogate them a little. See if they hold up. Be sure they’re going to lead you somewhere you want to go.

As I said, it took me a while to work that one out.