The Surprising Cooperation and Competition Between Science and Fiction in Science Fiction

Good science fiction requires good science.  That seems axiomatic.  So I figured my scientific training would expedite my science fiction experiments.  Turns out I was right…or at least as right as I could be as I also discovered I was entirely mistaken. 

I believed making science would prepare me to make fiction, but writing science would hurt me when writing fiction.  I’ve found mostly the opposite.

It turns out that the words I logged writing science, telling evidential stories about the counter-intuitive processes in our world, prepared me to tell stories about other worlds.  But I’ve uncovered cognitive tools, so basic to the scientific enterprise I scarcely notice them humming under the hood, that I had to unlearned before I could write modern fiction. 

More specifically, I’ve learned three things about the symbiosis and conflict between science and fiction in science fiction. 

   

   1.  Technical writing makes excellent training for creative writing.

I used to think my technical writing and my fiction were both mediocre because they required antagonistic skills.  I thought the subverted each other.  I thought technical parsimony undermined the florid description that populated good fiction.  I believed that the adjectives I piled into my fiction contaminated the linguistic economy of my technical prose, and sparse scientific descriptions, which scorn not only adjectives but even synonyms, built unhelpful habits for fiction. 

This was mistaken. 

My writing wasn’t mediocre because I dabbled in genres with different conventions.  My writing was bad because I couldn’t write.[1] 

Both conventions reward linguistic economy.  Unnecessary adjectives[2] are equally unnecessary whether I’m describing an experiment or a setting.  Adverbs generally beg to be verbs or to simply disappear whether I’ve added them - copiously - to technical reports or novels.  Extra words clutter text about worlds real or imaginary, and artfully crafted sentences are as welcome in a journal as a novel.

Two of the leading contemporary, speculative-short-fiction authors started their careers[3] as technical writers.  This is not a fluke.  Learning to communicate clearly, make verbs work, maintain subject coherence, construct sentences that brains can parse, and make stories flow, are important whether they they describe this universe or another.  

Every hour I spent taking the proverbial sawed-off to zombie nouns, selecting precise, slightly onomatopoeic verbs, simplifying sentences, until the technical prose had something of a cadence, was an investment in my fiction.  And as I learned the art of right branching sentences, considered the psychology of clause storage,[4] and added other tools in the fiction quiver, my technical writing improved.  

Science writing doesn’t have to be Hemingway.

   

   2.  Science is Generalization but Fiction is Incarnation… and those are, like, really different.

So I started writing fiction with a few of my million words already littering rarely accessed tomes[5] in science libraries and obscure academic journals.  But my science training did ingrain skills I had to unlearn.  One of the most important science making skills stands opposed to one of the most important literature making skills.  In fact, you could say, they are opposite skills.

Science coalesces particular observations into generalizations.

Literature embodies generalizations into particular observations.

Science is generalization, moving from details to system, from observation to hypothesis to theory which may or may not prove resilient under a thousand Poparian assaults. 
  

Fiction embeds the general in the particular.  It incarnates theory and idea into observation, sense, setting, dialogue, and detail.[6]   It evokes a common sense, a shared human experience, from a unique, novel, detail.

Science moves from detail to paradigm.  Science distills data into organizing principle, or at least heuristic.  So, when a scientist writes fiction, it stings to leave things at the level of observed detail.  I want to interpret.  I want to distill detail to paradigm.[7]  A novel is like a thesis that only includes methods and results, leaving the synthesis of the discussion to the reader.

    

    3.  Science and Literature both Build With Careful, Novel Observation

But there is at least one way science helps the fiction.  

Both science and fiction are built on formal, rigorous, apprenticeship in careful observation. 

Science requires careful observation, noticing details that escaped generations of better observers.  You cannot do good science without re-examining data, looking at them one more time, for the eighth, ninth, fortieth, or four hundredth time, until you see that one distinctive detail that tells the story anew.  I wall paper my office with huge posters of data, and stare at them, and sometimes swear at them, until they tell me a story that I’ve never heard before.  

If you can apply that skill to social worlds, both contemporary and imagined, the scientific apparatus can help fiction.  The author searches reality for moments, gestures, phrases, and reactions that are such startlingly familiar instances of a general human experience that they will even feel familiar in another world.

Both science and fiction build out of a careful collection of surprising detail. 

Fiction just leaves synthesis on the table, letting readers pull the observations together into their own world and conclusions.

This post was written while listening to the Alexisonfire Pandora Station

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[1] A problem I recognize I’ve only partially rectified.  But you’ve got to write abysmal words you edit into bad words before you can write mediocre words you edit into good ones.  And a blog is a good place to practice.  Sorry.

[2] Note: I reject Hemingway.  Adjectives and adverbs are tools, powerful if used well.  The key here is “unnecessary.”

[3] And in Cheng’s case, continued his day job…at least until he sold Stories of Your life for $25 million.  I have so many mixed feelings about that.  I am thrilled to see Chang get paid.  And I like the team associated with this project.  But I also think that the very things that made Stories of Your Life one of the greatest pieces of modern short science fiction, are the things that will make it difficult to convert to film.

[4] Clause storage sounds a little grisly, like a Christmas Saw film.  Saw XII: Clause Storage

[5] The similarity of tomes to tombs is surprisingly apt when considering the black binding gestalt of the shelved thesis.

[6] Fictions instantiate class.  The whole Platonic form thing is passé, replaced by a better metaphor from object oriented software development. 

[7] I have four pieces of paper on the wall and a recurring pay check telling me that’s what I’m supposed to do.  Ok, I don’t have my science diplomas on the wall.  I don’t actually know where they are.  It’s a metaphor…or, um, an allusion.  I’m still bad at this.  Also, I’ve never spelled metaphor correctly on the first try.  It’s like restaurant and colleagues.

Nanowrimo Part 3: Writing Fiction – 10 Things I’ve learned so far

NANOWRIMOPart 1: Why I stopped writing
NANOWRIMOPart 2: How I started writing again

So, I did it.  I managed to put together almost 60,000 words (50k this month) that in another 20K and with another 20 drafts, might actually be a novel.  The plan is to work the text over the next 8 months (while I read a bunch of books about how to actually construct a sentence and show-not-tell[1]) and give it to my reading group and my friend Tiffany to read at the end of summer.  But over the course the month I’ve been keeping some notes about my process and stuff I learned.  So, here are 10 things I learned.

I didn’t plan it this way, but these start with ‘things I learned’ and moved progressively to ‘things that I seem to be confused about.’

1.    Character maps

One of the best bits of writing advice wasn’t writing advice.  It was this:

http://xkcd.com/657/  [2]

(Seriously, click the link. I don’t even care if you come back.  I mean, I care, I just think your experience of the link will be superior to your experience of the post.)

I mentioned last time that the primary thing I enjoy about writing is discovering characters personality, background, motivations, and choices.  Characters need to be free entities.  Writing is discovery.  But like with almost everything else in human life, freedom happens best on a backdrop of constraint.  Structure allows freedom to flourish.  And I found these temporal, interpersonal charecter maps to be the best way to conceptualize the narrative structure.

Apparently the opposite of outlining in fiction lingo is ‘panting.’  I assume the etymology of that is ‘flying by the seat of your pants’-ing not gleefully pulling the birches of outliners down to their knees whenever possible.  Being a Pantser sounds like more fun than being an outliner…but my experience is otherwise.   And that is because I am only capable of…

2.    Non-linear writing

Maybe somewhere there is someone who starts at the beginning and writes sequential sentences until the end[3], but I have never done that…ever.  Not in thousands of pages of technical reports, not in journal articles, not in talks, not in stories, not even in this post.  The sentence you are reading was crafted after 1,170 words of this post had already been written.  Having a character map allows more freedom because I can write any part of the story at any time.  And if you write yourself out of a character map…you get to draw another one, which is a delightful way to spend 15 minutes.  And part of the reason I have to write non-linearly is that I…

3.    Write to an ending

I hate accidental endings.  Bad endings hide behind ‘non resolution is like artsy and realistic and stuff.’  Whatever.  Until you have an ending, you don’t have a story.  So I don’t put serious work into a project until I at least have an idea for an ending that is promising.

4.    Write your way into inspiration.

Maybe the biggest surprise is how much my disciplines of non-fiction writing (journals articles, scientific reports, talks, blogs and sermons) are exactly the same disciplines.[4]  Mainly, don’t write when you feel inspired, write until you feel inspired.  Almost every author I have read on the craft says something like this, but my favorite was a Nano pep talk by Malinda Lo:

Inspiration is like that hot girl or guy you met at a party one time—and when you talked to him or her, it seemed like you totally clicked. There was eye contact; there was flirting; maybe there was even a bit of casual brushing of your hand over theirs, right? I know. I’ve been there. At the end of the night they asked for your number and said, “I’ll definitely call you. We should hang out.”

But then they never did, and you were left waiting for a call that never came, feeling increasingly like a fool. [5]

Inspiration is not a reliable consort.  She does not call often enough to sustain a relationship.  But if you keep showing up to where she hangs out (for me, every morning at Pete’s between 6 and 8 am), she’ll eventually come over and sit with you most mornings (when she’s good and ready).[6]

5.    World maps

Turns out, consistent world building is hard.[7]  It seems like every time I fix a problem with my world’s realism, it causes another one.  I think that is why so many fictional worlds are so thin.  Because if you burrow down too far, they rest on a turtle which rests on an elephant who answers to the name ‘suspension of disbelief’. 

I have had to change many things about my world because when they played out, they didn’t.  But about 20,000 words in, I was ready for a map.  And that made a huge the difference in the spatiotemporal flow of the narrative.  No more ‘hold on, the elves, totally don’t have time to march on Helms Deep’ embarrassments.  Time and space solidified, and world building gets 20% easier.[8]

 

6.    My characters are chatty…and lazy (..and have potty mouths).[9]

I find that my characters are really chatty and not particularly ‘do-ey’.  They would rather talk, to each other or even just listen to their own inner monologue than do things.[10]  Don’t they know that it is their job to generate plot for me.  It is LITTERALLY the purpose of their existence.  I need them to explore, discover this totally unique world I have created for them[11], pick fights, create conflict.  But they would rather buy another round of drinks and spend another 2000 words growing relationships.  They seem way more interested in the conversation in the car than the place I am taking them or what will happen there.  This seems like a problem.[12]

Oh, and they do not appear to be constrained to my adopted social conventions regarding evocative language.  The three page chapter I wrote on the first day of Nanowrimo has no fewer than 13 F-bombs.   But I can’t seem to imagine a dystopic society with vice based economies where everyone uses PG language.  My characters are evocative people and use evocative language, sometimes artfully and sometimes artlessly, and don’t seem to care that I, personally, tend to shy away from naughty words.[13]  The upshot of this is that I am writing a novel that my mother will not enjoy (which means I have alienated my only reliable fan).  One the upside, I won’t get questions about it being a ‘Christian novel.’[14]

7.    Write the novel I want to read

This is what people say to do.  So I’m doing it.[15]  But I am peculiar.  So I’m still not entirely convinced this is a good idea.[16] 

8.    Negotiating a word count challenge

I was skeptical about the Nanowrimo’s focus on word count.[17]  Writing is editing.  You may have noticed, my biggest liability as a writer[18] is overly complex sentences.[19]  The first thing I do with any creative or technical draft is to play the ‘can I say that in fewer words’ game.[20]  Usually I can.  This is not in the spirit (or the incentivization structure of Nano).  I refuse to not-edit.  Not-editing is stupid.  Editing both improves your past writing and invites you into your world to put you in the framework to generate new story.

But I was saved by a technique that would be familiar to anyone who has read this blog for more than say 6 minutes.  Footnotes.  If I hate a paragraph or remove a phrase, or find a particular bit of evocative content too evocative but want to ‘count’ the words… Into the footnotes it goes.  This gets the benefit of Nano (create a bucket of narrative raw material and promising if currently unusable sentences that you can shape into something later) while getting a start on the actual work of editing.

9.    Multiple POV

I once read a book that said in no uncertain terms, that your first novel (and probably all the rest of them – or at least all of them until one of them is published) should be single perspective.  This seemed sensible.  Until I tried to write an ensemble piece from a single POV.  And then I read a bunch of George RR, and saw multiple POV done well.[21]

So I added a second POV.  In addition to my initial male POV I started writing a woman as well.  There is a problem, though.  I like writing the woman better.  She is more interesting and more observant and smarter[22] and more sympathetic.   I feel like I am only keeping the male POV I started in as a way of moving the plot along in her absence (without going all omniscient) and because I don’t trust my female voice (and think it might even be a little offensive).  Which leads to…

10.                       I am very nervous writing non-white or female…

I feel like I should be.  I feel like it is preposterously presumptuous for a white dude to try to write black or Asian or female[23] if you are not those things.

But this has a deeply unfortunate result.  All of my main characters are white,[24]  and most of them are dudes.[25]  But my city is supposed to be a cosmopolitan confluence of cultures. [26]  I have one really interesting[27], morally complex character who is part antagonist, part protagonist, who is an African man, and I am having a lot of difficulty[28]  writing him. But I already have white villains and it subverts my premise that all the antagonists would be western.[29]  I’m not really sure what the answer is to this.[30]  By writing another culture I am presuming to understand.  In one sense, writing is a good exercise in ‘imagining the other complexly.’  Writing is an exercise in attempted empathy.  But in another sense, if I am trying to tell a story and not just experience one, I am claiming a perspective I don’t have and can’t truly imagine. So, um, that is not something I’ve learned…unless maybe it is something I have learned is hard.

This post was written while listening to Radical Face's The Family Tree

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[1] And most importantly, work my way all the way through the archives of the ‘Writing Excuses’ podcasts (http://www.writingexcuses.com/).  Without a doubt my favorite discovery in this process that wasn’t actually something I discovered about my imaginary world or characters.

[2] The first thing I did after this…was watch Primer.  Which I highly recommend, with the disclaimer that I spent more time looking at internet charts explaining the film afterwards than the run time of the project.  Also, a $7,000 budget.  Not a typo.

[3] Actually, my friend Bronwyn writes talks like this.  Not me.  I call it the ‘inductive method’ – I write a ton of fragments, find the best ones with a theme through them…and then fill in connective tissue.  This is very similar to how I write fiction.  But to write the scene I am most tuned into, I need to know what scenes are in play.

[4] There are a few new ones.  Like in fiction, if you are hopelessly stuck, I have found 15 minute brain storms helpful.  This is a pen and paper (no typing) exercise where you write down every possible plot development you can think of for 15 minutes…absolutely every one.  No thought can cross your mind without getting at least one word in the notebook.  This is not encouraged in science or exegesis.  But both of those have data you can constantly go back to.  Fiction has no data, so in a sense, these exercises are Monte Carlo data mining instruments to make ‘observations’ and test ‘hypotheses’ about your fictional world and characters.  Oh, and by the way, science and exegesis might progress faster if we did a little more hypothesis brain storming to avoid paradigm bias.

[5] One of the fun parts of Nano is that they mail out ‘pep talks’ from established authors.  My favorite line was from one written in the voice of your novel.  Best line: “All novels have abandonment issues.”

[6] Still, always carry a notebook, because when she does feel like picking up the phone, you want to be ready, because it is usually special.

[7] I’m not sure why I was surprised by that.  I guess it shows that after 2 science degrees and 2 engineering degrees I still don’t intuitively appreciate the complexity of social and environmental feedbacks.  A fictional world is an ecosystem and anything you change echoes through the rest of it.  Turns out creating a world is hard.  I feel like a kid who just tried to do something his dad made look easy and suddenly realized ‘Dad is pretty freaking awesome’.

[8] I started out with the story playing out on a canvas “About the size of Lithuania” before I realized that was way too big and compressed it to a city “about the size of Moscow.”  Which means that even in really bad traffic I can still get any two characters together in 90 minutes.  And yes, the character who sets the spatial context is Russian.

[9] And think and talk a lot about sex and God.

[10] I have one character that literally spent 600 words looking at herself in a mirror.  I tried to pare it down, and ended up ADDING two paragraphs.  This morning I sent my characters on the longest possible point to point drive in my city and was much more interested in what they would talk about on the way than what they would find when they got there.  I think I’m doing this wrong.

[11] Another spiritual analog.  Dorothy Sayers says that the Imagio Dei…the image of God that the creator bestows on people in Genesis 1, has to be something we know about him in those first few verses.  And the only thing we really know is that he creates good things and enjoys it.  So, she argues, creativity is the image of God, the thing that makes humans special.  Therefore, just like with parenting, I am unsurprised to find theological insight in the practice of creation.

[12] Also because I am obstentiably (I’m just going to go ahead and leave that misspelled because I have never in my life spelled it close enough to correct that Word gave me options) writing a ‘science fiction’ novel and using science to build a strange and surreal world, where ordinary people basically talk and have human relationships.  Is that really science fiction?

[13] I am not blaming imaginary people for my choices here.  It is my choice to use language as an aspect of characterization.  But language is an aspect of characterization.  Our selection and use of evocative language is one of the ways we signal to other people what we are about before they know us very well. 

[14] Because caution with evocative language is the primary social signal of Christian fidelity in our culture…which is absurd. 

[15] I actually really enjoy re-reading the novel, particularly the parts I’ve edited 6-10 times.

[16] Hmm, I don’t see an agent on the list under the key words “Christian themes” and “Parental Advisory”…I must not be using this search engine right.

[17] The challenge is to write 50,000 words in a month.  If you do, you ‘win’ and get a pretty icon.  Brains are funny.  You can get them to do amazing thing by deceiving them with surprisingly transparent tricks.  And if you think I am somehow above being motivated by ‘winning’ and acquiring a few pixels next to my name, we have not met.

 
 

[18] Technical or creative, fiction or non.

[19] And I think I need some sort of brain procedure that will help me hear and fix passive voice.

[20] This is a blog.  There are no drafts.  So you get my terrible sentences.  Actually, that is a bold face lie.  I edit the heck out of blog posts, which is why the blog is pretty quiet.  I have 6-8 posts that are on a non-first draft but I’m not willing to post them.  But that is the problem.  My sentences are still far too convoluted after several drafts.  Editing is the real work of writing.  At least for me.

[21] In additional to Martain’s multiple POV’s I feel like Duncan’s muti-genre fiction has given me a really effective tool in story telling.  Duncan uses ‘found literature’ (e.g. a story one of the characters wrote in 4^th grade, letters they exchanged, journals) to move the stories forward.  This also allows him tell a story in the POV of a character without revealing if they survive (and, in fact, suggesting they don’t since the document fell into the hands of the story teller(s)).  I am more than influenced by Duncan.  I have copied him.  I love Martian but I don’t want to write like him.  If I could chose a contemporary mentor, it would be Duncan.

[22] Is it weird that one of my characters is smarter than another, when if you ask me I’d say they were of about equal intelligence and they are both extensions of my brain.  But she is. 

[23] And my one experience writing gay was so terrifying that it lasted about 25 minutes.  I actually really loved the character (and his story), but didn’t trust my ability to write him.

[24] Don’t worry, one’s from England. DIVERSITY!!

[25] I have even developed a running bit about this, developing a social category called WiDAPs (White Dudes Alienated by Privilege)

[26] Its cultural properties are a direct result of its physical properties.  And yes, I’m being super vague.  I actually love my world so much that I don’t want to describe it on the internet, because it is the projection of actual physical processes and in the hands of a better writer it would make an amazing story. 

[27] To me.

[28] Not technical difficulty, moral difficulty.  He might be the easiest character to write.  Which makes me even more nervous.

[29] In fact, my collection of protagonists can just be a failure of small sample bias or self sorting.  But to make all of my villains white suggest that only white people were clever enough to raise to positions of power which is itself offensive.

[30] Though after writing this I listened to the ‘Writing Excuses’ episode on writing across gender and they had some insight including: “you can get away with mistakes because individuals break gender stereo types in several ways.  But you can't do a lot of them that way.”

And “Learn what the gender stereo types are then don't do them.”  Or as one of them said “What wouldn’t Alan Sorkin do.”  Ouch.