Tag: games writers play

Knowing Where You Are

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Every now and again, I have a week where all the days feel seriously off-sync.

If I were living in a science fiction novel, I would blame waves of time disjunction passing over the landscape. Alas, I fear that I am, at best, a character in a piece of realistic prose fiction about daily life in a small New England town . . . and not even the steamy, rip-the-lid-off-simmering-scandals subgenre, at that.

Knowing what form and genre you’re currently living in is always vital, of course; what might be an appropriate reaction during time spent in an action/adventure story would be inappropriate in a domestic drama. And I totally agree with whoever it was who said, when asked about truly useful superpowers, “I’d like to be able to hear the musical soundtrack for the movie of my life.” Think about it — with a superpower like that one, you’d never have to ask yourself, “Was the muffled noise I just heard only the cat knocking something off the shelf in the laundry room, or was it an evil housebreaker of dark intent?” All you’d have to do was listen for the sinister notes of the English horn and the rumble of timpani in the percussion section, and you’d know.

Other People’s Endings

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When it comes to works in a series — novels, films, television, it doesn’t matter which — I like playing the how-would-I-end-this game.  It’s the fiction-writing equivalent of that improvisational drama exercise where you have to construct a skit around four or five random objects drawn from a grab bag (an argyle sock, a popsicle stick, an outdated guidebook to Tblisi on Five Dollars a Day, and a fishing lure with the hook snipped off…you have ten minutes to brainstorm with your group and then we’ll begin) –the idea is to get from where you are to an acceptable victory condition in five moves or less.

It’s an amusing game; but while I’m playing it I have to keep a firm grasp on the fact that the story I’m ending in my head is, despite any surface resemblances, a different story than the one the author is ending.

The One-Third Principle

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On the days when I’m wearing my editor hat, I write revision letters.  On the days when I’m wearing my writer hat, sometimes I have to read them — and having read them, have to do something about them.

On those days, I spend a lot of time dealing with what I think of as the one-third principle of editorial commentary.  The way it works is this:

In any given set of editorial comments, roughly one third of them are going to inspire sentiments along the lines of “Oh, thank God you caught that before I ended up looking like an idiot in public!” or “Yes, that is absolutely true and insightful and every writer should be so fortunate as to have someone like you for an editor!”

Another third of the commentary is going to cause a reaction more along the lines of “Well, maybe . . . I’m not saying that I buy it, but it isn’t worth arguing over, either.  I might as well save my energy and make the changes.”

And the final third of the commentary is going to be the cause of neck-cracking double-takes and exclamations of “Say what?!” and “Over my dead body am I changing that!”  Which is, of course, where the saved energy  gained by not arguing over the middle third ends up getting spent.

When I put my editorial hat back on, I try to remember these things.

Tristram Shandy Saves the World

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Playing with alternate histories is — if you’ve already got the sort of mind that likes extrapolations and what-ifs — a great deal of fun, and it’s not surprising that science fiction and fantasy writers in particular (because they do have that sort of mind) have turned alternate-history into a viable subgenre all on its own.  The fun of the game is muted somewhat when it’s played for money, however, because for the story to work the historical turning point has got to be one that a sufficiently large number of readers will recognize — which is why we’ve got “what if the South won the Civil War? novels by the cartload, but not a lot of “what if Mexico had never sold the Gadsden Purchase to the US?” stories, even though the resulting history of the American Southwest, and of Mexico, might have been a great deal different in a number of interesting ways.

I suspect that most writers who dabble in alternate history have got one or two “what-ifs” that they know will never make it commercially.  My personal favorite:

What if Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, instead of being a weird outlier in the early history of the English novel, turned out to occupy the position of genre-prototype that in our history was filled by the works of Richardson and Fielding?

When I’m feeling particularly energetic, I can make a good-enough-for-fiction argument that Sterne’s interest in free-associative internal monologue, if allowed to influence the fiction of the next several generations, would have led to the development of psychology and psychiatry at least a century earlier than actually happened, and in a climate of Victorian optimism rather than turn-of-the-century anxiety.  And when I’m really on a roll, I can argue that the earlier development of psychoanalysis would have done a great deal to alleviate Kaiser Wilhelm’s mental problems, especially his need to overcompensate for his physical inadequacies by building battleships.  And thus, ultimately, Laurence Sterne would have prevented the Great War, and by extension World War II as well.

Of course, there’s no easy way to make a scenario like that into a novel, because for one thing, a depressingly large number of potential readers are going to say, “Tristram who?”, and for another, it’s hard to come up with the conflict necessary for a good story when you’ve got an alternate history that consists of a lot of unpleasant events not happening after all.