Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (11 page)

What is science fiction for? One might as well ask what a window in a jail cell is for, or what a magic mirror in a wizard’s cell is for.

Here is the John C. Wright patented one-session lesson in the mechanics of how to write fiction.

A word of explanation:

I wrote the following to a friend of mine who is a nonfiction writer of some fame and accomplishment, who was toying with the idea of writing fiction. We batted around some ideas and I have been encouraging (read: pestering) him to take up the project seriously.

He wrote back and said that while putting the logical format to a work of nonfiction was clear enough, he was not big on this artistic and poetical stuff. I took it upon myself to show him the logic behind the stuff that dreams are made of.

So here is what I wrote to provoke him to write, and I share it with any and all comers who wish alike to be writers.

For my part, I am eager to share my trade secrets. I do not fear competition. Unlike every other field, my value as a writer goes up, not down, the more competition I have, because more science fiction writers means more science fiction readers, a larger field, and more money in the field.

So I think everyone should try his hand at writing. I cannot read my own work for pleasure, after all.

__________

Let me try to encourage you. First, get that book I recommended,
Writing The Breakout Novel
by Donald Maass. Second, actually set aside time to write your novel, time when you are not allowed to do anything else or find any other distractions. Sit and stare at the blank page for four hours. The tedium will either break your brain or break open any writer’s block.

I am so totally not kidding: if you want to learn kung fu, you must learn to break bricks with your head. If you want to be a fiction writer, you must learn to stare at a blank page with nothing but your name on the top without flinching, without weeping, without getting up to get a beer to fortify your faltering courage.

How it is done? How does one fill in the horrid pallid blankness of the blank paper, as monstrous as the whiteness of the White Whale sought by Ahab? Good question. There is a craft to it, a certain mechanic.

Let us take an example of a hypothetical first chapter of a hypothetical book. Let us pretend the book is called
Old Men Shall Dream Dreams
.

CHAPTER ONE: THE NIGHTMARE OF NOTTING HILL

At first, I thought he was carrying the corpse of a child.

My professor of Applied Military Theology, Colonel MacNab, came walking slowly into my little room in southeast London, the little oblong box on his back, and a cold and grim look on his features. I stood up and pulled off my cap, and MacNab scowled. “Not to worry. 'Tis not human. We think. Clear a space and give us hand, there’s a good lad.”

It was dark except for the moon, and the streets below had been cleared of traffic. The only noise from outside was the clatter of an anti-aircraft gun being pulled by a team of horses up the lane toward the churchyard, and the swearing of the teamster.

I pushed the papers I was grading to one side, and the pint of bitter to another. This unfortunately put it within the Professor’s reach, and while I was hauling the small coffin off his shoulders to the table, he helped himself to a long swig at my drink, which I thought most unsanitary of him. “You have terrible taste in ale, lad!” he exclaimed, wiping his mustache on his sleeve and raising my mug for a second long pull. “When are you going to stop drinking this penny-shop swill? Did you make it in your bathtub?”

I drew the blackout curtains and lit a lamp from the fireplace. He bent to open the casket lid.

Whatever I was expecting, it was not this. I crept slowly closer, raising the lamp, and the yellow light spilled over the little body. It was no bigger than three feet, dressed in a bright green jacket, complete with folded cuffs with brass buttons, a waistcoat with knee breeches. It looked like a gentrified yeoman or squire from the last century.

The hair on its head was dark and curly, as was the thick hair on its bare feet. There was some stubble on its cheeks, enough to prove this was no child. The eyes had not been sewn shut, and one of them was open, showing a milky white slit behind, watching me sardonically. The body had been packed in little fragrant leaves, so there was no smell. The decomposition was not advanced: the skin was colorless and dark, and pulled back slightly from the lips.

“Was this what the German agents were trying to smuggle out of Notting Hill?” I asked MacNab. “A circus clown? Why did they bury him in costume?”

MacNab snorted, “Clown! The Oldfoots of Southfarthing are not a large clan, but their roots go back to the origins of the Shire. He is Odro son of Otho. Or so the letter we recovered in his vest pocket says. The fairytale languages department translated it.”

“Who is he?”

“An imaginary being. And not one the author had in the forefront of his mind. It comes from some background material he toyed with and never wrote down. At first I thought it was another Oompa-Loompa, but Dahl over at the Home Office says it comes from a world even more divorced from Mundane Earth than his. Look at how solid, even after death! This is the third complete manifestation. You recall how much trouble the second manifestation gave the Department.”

“Are you sure this is a manifestation? It looks so… normal. Not dangerous a bit. Are you sure this is not a midget?”

“A midget who can vanish through a hedgerow without stirring a leaf, who can throw a dirk across a crowded street and through the mailslot of a door to hit a brownshirt in the leg, and who can talk to birds and cab horses and get them to do what he says? Oh, he led us and Jerry a merry chase indeed. He was talking to someone or something in the river before the German agent did him in.”

“German agent?”

“Or the agent of a darker power. We did not recover any bodies, and there were at least three on the team. The motor launch the villains meant to make their escape upon was pulled underwater by some powerful creature, a giant squid or something, and was lost with all hands. The police are dragging the river now.”

“A giant what? There is nothing like that in the Thames!”

“And nothing like Mister Otho Oldfoot of Southfarthing. We think he comes from a completed universe, not a fragment. I asked doctor Smithwork to come by and do an autopsy, but I will wager a whole evening of drinks that Smithwork will find no cause of death. There is no bullethole, no stab wound.”

“Poison?”

“Spiritual poison. He was slain by the Great Fear.”

“But—then why ask Dr. Smithwork to come here? Surely the campus laboratory…”

“I see you still have your little statues and trinkets hanging up all over your flat. Virgin Mary. Saint George. Saint—who the hell is that with the dog?—and I’m sure you said your beads. We might have need of all that superstitious fa-de-la before the night is through. You have a crucifix? Put it on. You have any holy water, holy oil, sanctified communion cookies? We may need something to throw at the shadow when it materializes here.”

“Laymen are not allowed to carry around the blessed Host to throw at people.”

“Who said anything about people?” Professor MacNab grunted and took another swig from my mug, scowling. “Ach! You drink swill. Can’t you afford to buy something better?”

I took my crucifix from a drawer, crossed myself, and donned it.

“Do you have anything—a cross, a bible?” I asked him.

“Course not! I’m a man of science.”

“And if the shadow that wields the Great Fear manifests here?”

“I’ll hide behind you and cry like a girl, as befits a man of science.”

There came a knock at the door.

If you notice what I did in this short scene, you can learn to do the same

The first thing to make up when writing is a conceit, a pretend thing, a false to facts idea that the reader will accept for the sake of the story. It has to be pretend, because if it is real, you are writing nonfiction.

The conceit it is actually the easiest part of the writing process: everyone has ideas for good stories. Every professional writer I have ever met carries a notebook in his back pocket (or her purse) to jot down story ideas as they come to him. Conceits for stories occur to most bookish people between once a week and once a day, but only pros write them down and remember them. That is why we are called “conceited.” That is also why pros react with snorts of scorn when amateurs ask us where we get our ideas. In the first place, no one knows where ideas come from, and in the second, they are commonplace, and in the third, ideas are insignificant. The significant thing is the execution of the craftsmanship in carrying out the idea.

The conceit for the hypothetical novel
Old Men Shall Dream Dreams
is that the Inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams) were secretly involved in a British project to investigate Nazi interest in the occult, and that some of the material in their famous books was, of course, a reflection of some real things their work for the government ran into, but which they were not allowed to reveal due to the Official Secrets Act.

Now every book has a beginning. The same story can start in one of two places: in
medias res
, like
Paradise Lost
by Milton, which starts in the middle of the action, rather than from the beginning, like
The Book Of Genesis
by Moses.

The second thing is the basic technique for revealing the plot. If you have ever performed a striptease act in stiletto heels atop a sleazy bar and gotten drink-besotted yet lustful customers to thrust large denomination bills through the g-string barely covering your swaying shapely hips to brush against the luscious tickling smoothness of your warm yet naked velvety skin, you already know the technique. But (ahem) since I am a grossly overweight middle aged man, and the visual image involved here requires we wash out our brains with Listerine, you might need the technique explained in a more step by step fashion.

It has to do with showing just enough onstage to create in the mind of the audience that something more, something interesting, is next to come. The writer lures the reader into turning the page.

The first line is the “hook.” By mentioning an arresting image, the corpse of a child, but saying that something, whatever it is, is not the corpse of a child, the paragraph automatically provokes the reader to wonder what it is. What is not a child’s corpse but would be mistaken for one?

Curiosity is the most powerful and simplest of the lures to trick the reader into turning the page. Whole books and whole genres, called Mystery stories, entertain a large segment of the reading world just with the lure of curiosity and nothing else.

The exact same number of words could indeed put across the exact same information, but if the answer is given the reader before the reader has time to wonder about the question, the paragraph provokes no curiosity, and will seem oddly flat. Consider the same story opening with, “A dead Hobbit from Tolkein’s universe was brought by MacNab to my flat in London during the Blitz.”

The second sentence contains a second hook: the phrase “Professor of Applied Military Theology” is comical, but interesting, and it tells the reader what kind of story this is. The reader now knows he is not in our real world, and he wonders what kind of world he is in. A science fiction reader, in particular, will automatically start to wonder what the laws of nature and unreal conditions of that unreal world might be, that there would be such a class as Applied Military Theology.

The line “Don’t worry. It is not human.” is another pure negative lure. The reader automatically wonders, if it is not human, what is it?

The “Don’t worry” is there partly for ironic effect, since most people would find the presence of a dead nonhuman humanoid more disturbing rather than less. Humor, particularly dry humor, acts as a lubricant to make it easier for the reader to slip further into the story. You as a writer are trying to cast a spell like a hypnotist, trying to make the reader forget the real world for an hour and believe in the make-believe world as if it were as real. Everything that lubricates and makes the process easier is a plus.

The “Don’t worry” is also partly for character development. MacNab sounds unsympathetic about the death of the nonhuman he is carrying, or perhaps he is merely so hardened by war as to be unsympathetic to any death.

The second paragraph establishes the time and place, not by saying “Dateline: London, during the Blitz” but by including details specific to that period. There are many periods in history where teamsters drive horses, and many where there are anti-aircraft guns, and blackouts, but none where there are all three together. The reader makes an unconscious act of imagination, and fills in details of scene and setting.

It is especially important in a science fiction setting, where the reader assumes that the setting is not our world, to establish immediately that the setting is very much like our world. By the second paragraph, the reader knows this story takes place not far from real history, but that it differs from our world by the introduction of one abnormality: a small corpse that looks like a child “but it is not human.”

The third paragraph is character development. A first person viewpoint character needs very little; the reader will automatically assume the viewpoint character is like him unless told otherwise. The other character in the scene is given a single personality quirk—he both steals a drink and complains about it, and he does not have particularly drawing-room manners. This is meant to be funny and endearing rather than annoying, and to portray in one stroke a brusque or absent-minded fellow.