How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (15 page)

A student story I read recently consisted of a long monologue by a man giving someone directions to a small town, but as he spoke, he constantly digressed, telling of memories associated with certain landmarks along the way. Only near the very end did we discover that this monologue was a telephone conversation; that the man knew the person he was speaking

to, and that they planned to meet. And the most important information of all was only implied in one of the last sentences: The person he was speaking to was his lover, coming for a rendezvous in his old hometown.

That sort of sudden surprise ending
(Ah!. That’s
what it all meant! ) rarely works, and for this reason: Because the writer had to labor so hard to conceal what was actually going on in the story, he was unable to accomplish anything
except
concealment. The entire story consisted of withholding from the reader every speck of information that would have made the story interesting. If he had begun by telling us that the man was giving directions to his lover, then he could have used that monologue to show us their relationship and how the man’s life led up to betraying his wife with this other woman; he could have shown us the pain and guilt-not to mention the ecstatic anticipation of the tryst.

In other words, it could have been a Character Story, in which the man was struggling to change his role and, at the end, either succeeded or failed; it could have been an Event Story, in which either his marriage or his love affair was a bit of disorder in the universe which had to be resolved; it could even have been a Milieu Story, in which he took his lover exploring through the back-country world he grew up in. But by structuring it as a mystery, he left himself none of these possibilities. Indeed, he couldn’t even write honestly. Because the author couldn’t tell us that the man was talking to his lover, it was impossible to have the man even speak as men speak to their lovers-the monologue was as impersonal as if he were giving directions to strangers in a passing car. There could be no reference to shared memories between them; no expressions of emotion that might give things away.

So as you look at your bogged-down first draft, look to see how much of your effort is spent on withholding information, and then examine whether your reader has any reason to care about what’s going on as long as that information is withheld. Most novice writers imagine that this is how suspense is created-by holding back key information from the reader. But that is not so. Suspense comes from having almost
all
the information-enough information that the audience is emotionally involved and cares very much about that tiny bit of information left unrevealed.

Usually the only information that you withhold is this: what is going to happen next. The climax of a story isn’t created by suddenly discovering what’s going on. The climax of the story is created by suddenly resolving

issues that have been causing the audience a great deal of tension throughout the story. There’s no tension without information.

If you find that all your stories are structured as Idea Stories in which the reader never knows what’s going on until the end, then stop it. Forbid yourself to use that structure again until you have mastered one of the others. You
only
use the Idea Story structure when the
characters
are searching for the answers to questions. When the characters all know the answers and only the audience is asking the questions, you are definitely using the wrong structure. Your story idea may be terrific-but your execution of the story is killing it.

What about plot-deciding which scenes to show, structuring those scenes, building from one minor climax to another? I told you from the first that I would concentrate on those aspects of writing that are peculiar to speculative fiction. Plotting is handled no differently in sf than in any other genre. If you feel you need help in that area, I recommend Ansen Dibell’s book
Plot,
a companion volume in the same series as my own
Character and Viewpoint.

Most of the things we’ve talked about so far-world creation, structure -I usually work on extensively before ever writing a draft of a story or novel. There are many other writers-perhaps more-who can only develop these aspects of a story while writing narrative drafts, and that’s fine, too. In fact, I continue creating my world and revising and clarifying my story’s structure while writing drafts, so I know that much of the best invention only comes while you’re actually telling the tale. Your order of working is entirely up to you-as long as you actually do all the work I’ve talked about in these chapters.

The unfortunate thing is that too many writers - though not very many writers actually making a career out of this-skip the entire process of invention and construction. Once they have the first glimmer of an idea they proceed immediately to writing a draft and spend all their effort on producing beautiful prose. Alas, they’re wasting their time. As William Goldman had a character say in
Boys and Girls Together,
speaking of a play that was in rehearsal, “Wash garbage, it’s still garbage.” It doesn’t matter how beautifully a story is performed if the story itselfwhat happens and why-is crippled with cliche or badly structured.

Still, after all your preparatory work, there comes a time when you have

to produce the draft that counts. The world is well invented, the structure is solid. Now you have to get this story from your mind into the minds of your readers. And that’s where your skill with stories must be matched by skill with communication. You’ve got to have the language; you’ve got to be able to write.

4. Writing Well

Good writing is good writing, no matter which genre you work in. But there are some areas of special concern to writers of speculative fiction. Don’t be misled by the fact that this is the shortest section of the book. It is brief because the basic information is simple; but the technique itself is difficult and requires practice-particularly the handling of exposition and you’ll get the best results from the chapter if you re-read it more than once, using the techniques shown here to analyze your own story drafts.
1. Exposition

One area in which sf differs from all other genres is the handling of exposition - the orderly revelation of necessary information to the reader.

It may seem that in the last chapter I told you two bits of conflicting advice. First I warned you against using prologues with Event Stories and said you should only reveal information about the disorder in the world as it becomes available to the viewpoint character. Then I told you not to withhold information, but instead to let the readers know at least as much as the characters do about what’s going on.

It’s not a contradiction-but it is a balancing act. It’s like watering a plant. Too little water and it dries up and dies; too much water and it rots and drowns. Information is to your audience as water is to a plant-it’s the life of the story, and yet you have to keep it in balance. Too much raw information up front and the reader can’t keep it all straight; too little information and the reader can’t figure out what’s happening. The result in either case is confusion, impatience, boredom. The audience quickly learns that you don’t know how to tell a story, and you’ve lost them.

Instead, information must be trickled into a story, always just enough

to know what’s happening. If the audience must know a fact in order to understand what’s going on, then you must either present the information at that moment, or make sure that the information was available-and memorable-earlier in the text. In particular, if the viewpoint character knows a fact that gives a different meaning to an event, then the audience must also know that fact-though if the viewpoint character
doesn’t
know, it’s perfectly all right for the audience to share his ignorance.

This balance is especially difficult to achieve in science fiction and fantasy, because our stories take place in worlds that differ from the known world. We not only have to introduce characters and immediate situations, we also have to let readers know how the rules of our universe differ from the normal rules, and show them the strangeness of the place in which the events occur.

In the early days of science fiction, when the genre was still being invented, key information was given in huge lumps, often by having one character explain things to another. This was often badly handled, as when one character explained things to another who already knew it:

“As you know, Dr. Smith, the rebolitic manciplator causes the electrons of any given group of atoms to reverse their charge and become anti-electrons.”

“Yes, Dr. Whitley, and of course that will cause an immediate explosion unless the rebolitic manciplation is conducted inside an extremely powerful Boodley field.”

“And the only facility in Nova Scotia that is capable of maintaining a Boodley field of sufficient power is-”

“That’s right. Dr. Malifax’s lab on his houseboat in the Bay of Fundy.”

I hardly need to tell you that this is no longer regarded as a viable solution to the problem of exposition.

Exposition is even more complicated today because of the development of an extremely tight third-person-limited point of view, in which the only information given is what the viewpoint character sees and thinks, with no obvious intrusions on the part of the narrator. Most professional fiction today uses this viewpoint because of its great advantages. But the disadvantage is that you generally can’t “notice” anything that the viewpoint character doesn’t notice, or “think of” anything that the viewpoint character doesn’t think of.

This is particularly challenging for speculative fiction writers. If your viewpoint character is a participant in the strange society you’re trying to

reveal to your audience, he wouldn’t suddenly start noticing things he’s taken for granted all his life.

So you have to reveal information very carefully, and usually by implication. The best way to tell you what I mean is to show you, by going through the opening paragraphs of Octavia Butler’s novel
Wild Seed.
(I’ve chosen this book because nobody handles exposition better than Butler-and also because it’s a terrific novel that you ought to read for the sheer pleasure of it.

Let’s start with the first sentence:

Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what
was left of one of his seed villages.

You have just been given an astonishing amount of information-but it has been done in such a way that you probably aren’t aware of how much you already know.

Naming.
First, we know the name of the viewpoint character: Doro. Later we’ll learn that Doro has many names, but Butler gives us the name by which he thinks of himself-and whenever we’re in Doro’s viewpoint that’s the only name used for him. Bad writers keep changing the name of their viewpoint character, thinking they’re helping us by telling us more information: “The starship captain walked onto the bridge. Bob glanced over and saw the lights were blinking. ‘What’re you thinking of, Dilworth?’ said the tall blond man.” Is Bob the starship captain? Or is Bob Dilworth? And is it Bob or the starship captain who is the tall blond man? One tag per character, please, at least until we know them better. Above all, don’t coyly begin with pronouns for the viewpoint character and make us wonder who “he” or “she” is-give us a name
first, so
we have a hook on which to hang all the information we learn about that character.

Second, we know that Doro will discover “the woman,” and we assume that this discovery will be important to the story. Because Butler is a firstrate writer, that assumption is correct-she would never mislead us by putting a trivial character so portentously in the opening sentence. Yet she doesn’t name the woman yet. In part this is because naming two characters immediately is often confusing. Too many names at once are hard to keep track of, and we aren’t always sure which is the viewpoint character. Another reason for not naming “the woman,” however, is because at this

exact moment in the story- as Doro goes to see what is left of a village he doesn’t know her name. The narrator knows her name, of course, but at this moment Doro does not, and so it’s right not to give that information to the reader.

Abeyance.
What else do we learn from these three sentences? Doro didn’t intend to meet the woman. His purpose at the time was to see what was left of-what? A “seed village.”

What in the world is a seed village?

We don’t know what a seed village is. And Butler doesn’t tell us-because Doro, who knows perfectly well what a seed village is, wouldn’t stop and think about that information right now. But in due time we will find out what a seed village is. So we hold that question in abeyance. We have a hook with the label “seed village” over it; we trust that the author will let us know in due course what information should be hung on that hook.

This principle of abeyance is one of the protocols of reading speculative fiction that makes it difficult for some people who aren’t familiar with the genre to grasp what’s going on. Experienced sf readers recognize that they don’t know what a seed village is, and that the author doesn’t expect them to know. Instead, this is one of the differences, one of the things that is strange in this created world, and the author will in due course explain what the term means.

But the reader who is inexperienced in sf thinks that the author expects him to already know what a seed village is. He stops cold, trying to guess what the term means from its context. But he can’t guess, because there isn’t enough context yet. Instead of holding the information in abeyance like a small mystery, he is just as likely to think that either the writer is so clumsy that she doesn’t know how to communicate well, or that this novel is so esoteric that its readers are expected to know uncommon terms that aren’t even in the dictionary.

This is one of the real boundaries between sf and non-sf writing. Science fiction and fantasy writers handle exposition this way, by dropping in occasional terms as the viewpoint character thinks of them, and explaining them only later. The sf reader doesn’t expect to receive a complete picture of the world all at once. Rather he builds up his own picture bit by bit from clues within the text.

Implication.
Butler is not being obscure; she is being clear. While “seed

villages” goes unexplained, we
are
told that this is merely one of them, and that Doro thinks of more than one seed village as “his.” Furthermore, “seed village” is not a wholly obscure term. We know what a village is; we know what
seed
means when it’s used as an adjective. Seed potatoes, for instance, are small potatoes or parts of potatoes that are planted in the ground to grow into larger ones. By implication, Doro is somehow using villages as seed-or perhaps he has the villagers growing seeds for him. We aren’t sure, but we do know that Doro is working on growing
something
and that he has more than one village involved in it.

This, again, is one of the protocols of reading sf. The reader is expected to extrapolate, to find the implied information contained in new words. The classic example is Robert Heinlein’s phrase “The door dilated.” No explanation of the technology; the character doesn’t think, “Good heavens! A dilating door!” Instead, the reader is told not only that doors in this place dilate, irising open in all directions at once, but also that the character takes this fact for granted. The implication is that many-perhaps alldoors in this place dilate, and that they have been doing it for long enough that nobody pays attention to it anymore.

The sf writer is thus able to imply far more information than he actually states; the sf
reader will pick
up most or all of these implications. Indeed, this is one reason why you must be so rigorous about creating your worlds to quite a deep level of detail, because your readers will constantly be leaping past what you actually say to find the implications of what you’re saying-and if you haven’t thought things through to that level, they’ll catch you being sloppy or silly or just plain wrong.

Literalism.
The protocols of abeyance and implication, which give you a great deal of power, also remove one of the tools that mainstream writers rely on most heavily: metaphor. Especially at the beginning of a speculative story, all strange statements are taken
literally.
“Seed village” isn’t a metaphor, it’s what this village actually is.

I think of a story by Tom Maddox that appeared some years ago in
Omni.
In the first or second paragraph he had passengers taken from their airplane to the terminal on what he called a “reptile bus.” I was teaching an sf literature course at the time, and my students were pretty evenly divided between those who had been reading sf for years and those who had never read it before that semester.

The majority of the experienced sf readers reported the same experience

I had: At least for a moment, and often for quite a way into the story, we thought that Maddox wanted us to think that reptiles were somehow being used for airport transportation. We pictured a triceratops with a howdah, perhaps, or an allosaur towing a rickshaw. It was an absurd sort of technology, and it would have strained credulity-but many sf stories use such bizarre ideas and make them work. Maddox might have been establishing a world in which bio-engineers had created many new species of very useful but stupid dinosaurs.

Those who had never read sf, however, were untroubled by such distractions. They knew at once that “reptile bus” was a metaphor-that it was a regular gasburning bus with several sections so it snaked across the tarmac in a reptile-like way.

This is one of the key differences between the sf audience and any other. When confronted with a strange juxtaposition of familiar words, both groups say, “What does the author mean by this?” But the sf audience expects the term to be literal, to have a real extension within the world of the story, while the mainstream audience expects the term to be metaphorical, to express an attitude toward or give a new understanding of something that is part of the known world.

When an sf writer says, “She took heavy mechanical steps toward the door,” there is always the possibility that in fact her legs are machinery; the mainstream writer assumes this metaphorically expresses the manner of her walking, and would regard that word usage as a grotesque joke if she
did
have artificial legs.

This doesn’t mean that you, as an sf writer, are forbidden to use metaphor. It
does
mean that early in a story, when the rules of your created world are not yet fully explained, you have to avoid metaphors that might be confusing to experienced sf readers. Later, when the rules are firmly set, your readers will know that terms that imply things that are not possible in your world should be taken metaphorically.