Creativity and Gene Wolfe

About thirty years ago, I wrote a book on business creativity with my friend Paul Birch. We wanted to make the book format itself innovative - part of this involved incorporating sidebars with many asides, further reading, suggestions and more. But also we finished each chapter with a short piece of fiction, because we both believed that reading fiction was important to help business people be creative.

This didn't work for everyone. The British Airways chairman at the time, Sir Colin Marshall, who gave us a cover quote, told us that he didn't like having the stories. But some did appreciate them.

Some of these stories we wrote ourselves. Others were out of copyright - for example wonderfully witty extracts from Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, where she breaks the fourth wall delightfully. But I also wanted to include a short story by my favourite fantasy writer, Gene Wolfe - and knew just the one, a short short called My Book, where the apparent author explains how he decided to write his book backwards, first writing the last word, as that's the most important word in the book. He chooses to end with 'preface', then before that 'begin' to emphasise the process (technically there's a 'the' between them, but artistic licence) - and, beautifully, the story itself ends this way.

After a little time discovering the right person to write to (this was before the internet was any help), I received two letters from Gene Wolfe, which I would like to reproduce here. They are both typewriter carbons - I was writing on a PC but, at this stage at least, he was still old school. The first was his very polite response to my request:

And the second was when he was in receipt of a copy of the finished book:

I know he was just being polite, but I treasure those letters.

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