Last
week, I explained how some ideas can be very difficult to express,
comparing them to the fictional butterfly, Americanus
Exoticus,
elusive and dead once you pin it down. We looked at some data on
bestsellers and found that neither popularity nor critical acclaim --
nor both together -- will guarantee that a work has lasting value.
Writing
good fiction is hard. I've been working at it seriously for four
years, and I've tried a number of different approaches:
make-it-up-as-you-write, experimental, minimalist, outline-based,
hero's-journey-based, etc. I'm not enough of an authority to tell
you the best way. In my make-it-up-as-you-write phase, I let a short
story I was trying to write grow into a novel. The premise? It was
probably too obscure: Europe of the 52nd century is descending into
its third dark age, and a ecology-defending order of knights is
slipping into civil war as their leading Council of Sages is split by
philosophical disagreements that cannot be rationally worked-out.
I
think it turned out like most first novels or novel-attempts: a story
that meanders superficially from one colorful idea to the next. The
unifying theme was weak and too-easily forgotten as I wrote. I fell
in love with my characters and setting, and lost my objective view of
the story, to the point where everything I wrote seemed interesting.
When
I would describe this 52nd-century knighthood to people, with its
devotion to ecology, political freedom, and logic, and the way its
warriors rode in giant, self-replicating machines called "steeds,"
they tended to say, "I'm excited to read the novel!" But
after reading my draft they tended to say, "I'm sure there are
people out there who will like it."
The
setting was too complex for the theme. It was too difficult to convey
in a way that could move people. I don't think there is anything
wrong with a complex setting: Dune
is
the bestselling science fiction novel of all time, and probably one
of the most intricate. But Dune
delves
deeply into universal philosophical themes: the nature of knowledge
and wisdom, courage, heroism, power, corruption, decadence, and the
two-sided nature of civilization itself.
My
theme was that some disagreements can't be decided rationally. It
was too weak. There is no reason to set a story 3000 years in the
future to make this point. Dune
is
set 10,000 years in the future, but that's because Frank Herbert had
no other choice. He was asking, "What if human beings developed
their physical and mental capabilities to the farthest imaginable
limit? What kinds of tyrants and heroes might you see in such a
world?"
In
my case, I had a bunch of knights who were well-trained, and heroic
enough. They were the type of warriors you might encounter in your
typical fantasy novel. The exceptional things about them was that
they cared about the environment, they had sworn off wealth and
power, and they rode around in giant spider-like machines. Kind of
cool, right?
With
the number of books being published today, fiction should never
settle for kind of cool. It's fiction.
You're making it up. You have the freedom to make it extraordinarily
cool, so cool it goes off the charts into deep.
Why the hell else are you writing? You might as well tell about your
experience working in a cubicle today and cross your fingers that
some critic will praise your story for "accurately portraying
the real America."
By
the time I set aside my first novel (this was late 2012) I had read
or re-read a good number of classic sci-fi novels: Asimov's
Foundation
series,
1984,
Childhood's
End,
K. Dick's The
Man in the High Castle,
Cat's
Cradle,
A
Canticle for Leibowitz,
and Glass
Bees. I
also started becoming familiar with in-house authorities like
Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, and Larry Niven. I decided to do what most
science fictions writers traditionally do to get their start: publish
short stories. Almost no one reads sci-fi shorts except sci-fi
writers. It is a sort of professional club.
The
problem with seasoned sci-fi professionals is that they are bored of
sci fi. Let me explain. I've read a lot of sci-fi short stories. The
best thing about the ones being published today is that each one is
utterly unique. One's about the member of a race of
genetically-enhanced space-faring soldiers with a pacifistic streak
and family issues that lead him to commit suicide. Another is about
an astrologer who settles a distant planet to find that all the
constellations she relies on have changed. Another is about a man who
is working with his ex-wife to understand an alien race that is
landing, and as the dark skeletons of his past infidelities and
alcoholism are exhumed, so is the terrible truth about the aliens:
they have already conquered earth, uploaded the human race, and the
two of them are merely reliving the events the led up to the
conquest. Thus the protagonist is doomed to be, eternally, a cheat
and a drunkard.
Maybe
you understand already the worst
thing about contemporary sci fi short stories: each one is utterly
unique. The only thing unifying them is the craft. And with all the
experimentation going on with plot & character (and
experimentation is only getting more flamboyant as sci-fi editors get
more bored) even the craft itself maintains only the barest of unity.
The problem isn't that there aren't good writers out there, the
problem is that if you take the sum total of a million brilliant,
disharmonious visions, it is merely chaos. I'm not talking the
healthy, complex chaos of a jungle ecosystem. I'm talking about a
massive compost heap that's on the edge of spontaneous combustion --
a place where dreams and values go to die.
Nobody
reads sci-fi shorts but sci-fi authors. I've submitted a couple of
stories about cultures where machines do all the work and humans
spend their days in virtual reality, where the humans' values, and
eventually their bodies are absorbed into the giant mechanism and you
have nothing but self-replicating machines. "It's been done a
million times," I'm told. To me my idea is a world apart from
the Matrix
movies, for example, where machines took over by violence rather than
human choice. But the Matrix movies aren't even on the radar when
you're talking to a seasoned sci-fi professional: they will have the
name of a Heinlein novel at the ready that parodies the subgenre of
science fiction based on the idea that you thought was unique.
I
will admit that my craft is still being perfected -- I do not grudge
my dozen rejections from magazines like Analog and Asimov's. They
get more submissions that than they do subscriptions; they're
gateways to an exclusive club.
Almost
all professional sci fi authors were rejected dozens of times at
first. Only Heinlein, it is said, an ex-military intelligence agent,
sold his first submission and never looked back. He's most famous for
the story of a hermaphrodite who had a sex change and went back in
time to sleep with herself and become her/his very own father/mother.
Be
that as it may. Last Christmas Emily and I stayed up late with a
couple beers and watched the Lord of the Rings movies. (This has been
our little Christmas tradition.) I realized that here we have a story
written by an author who overcame all cliche by overcoming his fear
of
cliche. Contrary to popular opinion, fantasy had been thriving as a
genre for over a hundred years by the time the Fellowship
of the Ring
was published. Tolkien never avoided cliche, instead he researched
each cliche, found its roots in ancient, classic, or romantic
literature, saw its value, sharpened it, and made it into a theme.
Fairies become the ancient and nature-loving races of Elves and Ents,
the everyman hero becomes the Hobbit, the wise sage becomes Gandalf,
the magical item becomes the One Ring to Rule them All.
So
I went back to my original inspiration for writing: an apocalypse
where stale values fall away, and out of the chaos comes a hero who
must fight to put virtue back in its place. None of the stories I
had written so far had had a central hero (except my future-version
of Perceval, which had avoided making Perceval the view-point
character out of fear of cliche). I decided to write a story with a
hero, and thus the character of Jack Young was born, an elite soldier
who returns from defeat at Washington D.C. to find his home state,
Montana, under the rule of neo-fascist militias.
It's
a cliche that in the apocalypse neo-fascist militias will take over.
So instead of avoiding neo-fascists militias I put together the most
atrocious one I can imagine. It is a cliche that a hero with a gun
will rise to defeat them, so instead of avoiding it I make Jack the
most daring, most heroic bastard you'll ever meet.
Tolkien
makes his cliches themes by making them real. Gandalf is more like a
grandfather than a wizard, the Ring is a nondescript band of metal,
and the elves are good with a bow but are a little more arrogant,
petty, and sometimes also more cowardly than your typical immortal.
So
I took my ideal of Jack and made him flawed. He wants a peaceful
solution, but he's perhaps too idealistic and too daring and it gets
him in trouble. He has a tendency to fall for the wrong women. As
long as I give him the basic premise that makes Jack Jack -- a desire
and ability to protect the weak from violence -- he can be flawed in
other ways, and he will be forced to overcome himself again and again
on his way to the throne.
It's
important that Jack doesn't want to be King. He just wants peace. He
hates politics and soldiering and wants to go back to farming. But
the land is being ravaged by nihilists and -- what is worse --
violent idealists who will fight each other to the death for money,
power, glory, democracy, truth, or justice. And out of this chaos
and violence, the partisans of ideology and politics will meet their
appropriate tragic fates, and the one leader who is willing to remain
faithful friends with anyone
-- nihilists, religious fundamentalists, and hippie-ecologists alike
-- will have the most allies and will be the last one standing when
the dust settles.
This
is a basic idea. There's also a love story, central to the plot, not
only because it's cliche, but because it's my favorite way to deepen
the human aspect of a story, to sharpen the tragedy and sweeten the
adventure. It's time-tested: the modern romantic aesthetic has its
roots in the Shakespearean tradition. I figure that if I spend as
much time developing romantic tensions as I do politics and war, I
might save my story from becoming as hopelessly grim, hollow, or dark
as your average fictional apocalypse.
Which
brings me to another cliche: post-apocalyptic settings. Typically
you've got a vast desert almost void of life, and some grungy humans
with guns duking it out. It's nonsense. If there's no farmland, what
do they eat? If they're all fighting, how's anyone still alive?
Where do they get their guns and bullets? Realistically, most
of the survivors of the apocalypse won't
be violent idiots. They will be people who are equipped to grow
their own food without any help from technology. But is there anyone
out there like that? Sure there are: in the U.S. you've got the
Amish, and in Mexico you've got millions of Mayans. These ethnic
groups have managed to preserve traditional ways of self-sustaining
agriculture, and their birth rates are high enough than in 200 years
you could see them spread throughout North America. So now I also had
a unique post-apocalyptic setting: pacifistic Amish and traditional
Mayans struggling to cultivate a depleted landscape, in need of a
leader who can protect them from the wealthy ex-military men who've
become tyrants.
I'm
almost 200 pages into my first draft, and I'm currently refining a
complete, scene-by-scene outline. I probably have another couple of
years before I have any sort of presentable draft. Unlike my previous
stories, the title of this one was easy to come up with: "The
First King of Montana."