The Grasshopper #4: Ground Level
I’m not a flyover writer
image copyright martin Edic 2022
“I have a dictum: ‘The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.’ I do not want to explain it any further.”
Filmmaker Werner Herzog
When I select a theme it feels like a foreign exercise to think about it. Any time you create, even when you have no idea where it is going or even what it is, themes emerge. I learned from my first cross country train trip that there is far more to be seen at ground level than there is from high above, in the rarefied air.
You realize how big things are and how little they are at the same time. And that, in a country as large as mine, people live in strange places and their lives are as incomprehensible as mine would be to them.
When William Shatner, the Star Trek icon, actually went to the edge of space with the silly cowboy hat guy, he was visibly disturbed when he reached the ground again. He was terrified by how utterly empty and cold space was, how devoid of possibility. I had the distinct impression he was very happy to return to the ground.
In sci-fi we never hear how rarely those in space regret their loss of familiar ground. I think it is because so few have spent much time there.
Balancing Reality in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing
image copyright 2022 Richard Edic, Classical View
Getting the reader to suspend disbelief
I grew up reading fantasy and sci-fiction novels. It was the beginning of a movement in writing that started with the monumental acceptance of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a massive three volume creation of another world that sucks you in and makes you wish you could really go there and experience the place and people.
Fantasy writing is huge right now, but some things have not changed since the first trickle of paperback fantasy started gaining momentum. What has not changed is how bad most of it is. Writers pile magical events into each chapter, using them to move plot lines and characters forward when the writer has run out of breathing room.
Is your guy stuck in a dead end with an ogre behind him? I guess he is going to die, right? But then a magical glowing rock appears in the darkness, named after some exotic myth. Your hero can live to fight another day.
This is where I always sigh, throw the book into a corner, and curse myself for having hopes that a book might do something original that I can relate to, even if it is in an unknown place or dimension.
The writer used his or her omnipotent POV to save the day by randomly making up a magical solution out of the blue.
This is lazy writing and about 90% of fantasy writers are guilty of it (I’m being generous here, it is more like 99%).
“People tell me 90% of TV is crap. I tell them 90% of everything is crap.”
Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.
Damn I love that quote.
Let’s look at the 1% of these genre novels that actually work, that take the reader deep into another world where they suspend judgment because the story is so compelling. Lord of the Rings is an obvious one with superlative world building and writing.
But Tolkien was a maniac, in a great way. His worlds have history, languages (he was a philologist who studied and taught ancient languages), and geography via detailed maps. It was natural that he built his huge backstory before he even started The Hobbit, precursor to LOTR, as the epic is known to fans.
The speculative fiction that stands out has this level of reality building, with rules like those in our world. For example, in the real world, I can’t recite a spell, grow wings and fly away from my obligations. Like paying rent.
Dune. Blade Runner. The sci-fi trilogy that starts with The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. His three volume story of an attempted alien takeover of Earth actually freaked me out and still does because it was just probable enough to have me looking over my shoulder.
Why do these stories work, while those sword and sorcery things make me gag? Because they are grounded by characters who are actually out there dealing with the unknown and rarely having an easy way out, like the magical rock I mentioned earlier.
Magical realism is a big trend for writers, but it is incredibly difficult to pull off. Writers like Haruki Murakami, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, and the granddaddy of the genre, Gabriel Garcia Marguez, work real magic and as readers we let it suck us into the story. There is no temptation to stop and think, this makes no sense.
That’s because if a cat talks in a Murakami story, or a character finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on shore with a diary in it (Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being), it feels right in the context.
The writer is pulling something off that is not easy to do. The cat, who has been silent, feels he must say something to the clueless human, so he breaks his silence. And somehow it seems realistic.
These writers, who are not generally lumped into genres like sci-fi and fantasy, still take us into unknown worlds.
Their stories, fantastic as they are, retain their connection to reality most of the time. Your character is a normal person in the world they have always lived in, waking up to a wider view that bypasses their beliefs.
This happens in real life if you keep your eyes and ears open. Write fantasy if you want, but ground it in something we can relate to. And please don’t let your publisher put a musclebound huge guy with wild hair, a maiden, and a glowing magical sword on the cover.
Gag me.
I’m playing with the gift economy.
If you buy me a coffee, I’ll pass along the favor to another writer.
“But kick the world, break your foot.” As they said in Kamchatka, Russia
“Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.” Kevin Kelly
The Seed of a Novel
Where do stories come from?
It’s the oddest thing. I’ve got a third novel in me and I can feel it approaching. This is not a minor thing- committing to a story is a big commitment, a long project that you know might possibly suck too much to finish. I’ve had a few of those, the stories where the writer (me) gets bored or they just don’t have the depth.
After managing to finish two long stories I’ve found that the original seed of the story is critically important. If it lacks enough potential, you may find yourself in a dead end. But I’d like to think that my experience has finally taken me to a spot where I recognize a beginning or source that can go all the way.
Long form fiction writing is meditation
Sitting down, typically during the same time of day for each session (morning works for me), and writing to a predetermined word count, is my method. That word count may vary by the intensity of the story. With my first novel it was around 600 words. With my second, closer to 450.
In either case the process took about an hour. And I have ground rules. This writing is not an intellectual process. I know it sounds weird, but you do not want to be thinking too much. You put down the words as they come, spinning sentences and dialog. Oddly enough, this works best when you try not to think about where it’s going.
No immediate reading of what you just wrote, no editing till later. When you reach a good point to stop, stop. The only thing I do at that point is get a word count for the day and write it at the end of each session after the last sentence I’ve written. Interestingly, once I get a rhythm going, when I stop I am almost always very close to my word count goal.
For me writing is a job, not unlike painting a room when I was younger and had a painting business. Once I had developed my painting skills, with help from a good teacher, painting a room did not require much thought. There is an order to it so you start at the top of the order and knock things off.
Fiction writing (and please remember, this is simply my experience, not some kind of rule) for me is a meditative thing. Like meditation, you focus on simply writing scenes that each propel the story forward, without too much thought. The key here is that each scene, which could be a sentence or several pages, must move the story along. Even if you find yourself writing a more static scene, like a character gazing out of a train window crossing the Midwest, that scene has a purpose.
It might tell you that she is exhausted by events earlier and can no longer think clearly. The long flat scenery requires little thinking, it simply glides by. But the next scene must interrupt this reverie, possibly in an unexpected way. A dozing stranger sitting across from her wakes and offers to get her a coffee from the cafe car.
They talk, and he shows her a video about the kind of work he does.
Those two scenes, among my favorites in my story Trespass Strike, were completely unplanned and they turned out to be pivotal later on, two moments she would remember years later when much of the context had blurred.
I could see that view out the train window because I had experienced it, though my context was nothing like my character’s. But all of us have an internal library of experience that we can draw things from, often finding something useful when it enters a different context.
The seeds of my two novels were a man walks a woman home at dusk and finds himself in a neighborhood that cannot exist in his reality. The second seed is a woman entering an empty apartment in an unfamiliar city where she has moved to get past a tragic event, the unexpected suicide of her husband two years earlier.
The new seed, as far as I know right now, is a character walking down a sidewalk when a couple walks by in the other direction. The man in the couple gives the character a look that gives her chills, because it is so characteristic of a friend not seen for years.
But that friend had died several months earlier in a car wreck. And then my character starts seeing other things that have her questioning a lot of things about her life. She has entered an alternate state.
To make things like this work, you as a writer must use whatever ritual you use to get the work done the same way any ritual is used. Rituals are designed to help us enter that alternative state where the writing comes from.
I realize this all sounds so mystical and foo-foo, but that has been my experience so far. Until I saw it as a sort of mystical, non intellectual experience, my writing was too calculated. It was well-constructed, but lacked that flow that pushes a story and a reader to the next page, and eventually to a conclusion.
That’s the way it has worked for me and I’m ok with it personally. The seeds of the stories that interest me are seeds for plants whose final appearance is as yet unknown, their growth and unfolding unpredictable, yet with every leaf and flower serving a purpose.
That’s it for this issue. Thanks again for taking a few minutes to see if there is value here!
You need to add Ishiguro to your list of "go to" writers...and the grandmothers, Ursula LeGuin...Octavia Butler. But I do like your chosen few...Ruth Ozeki is a particular favorite. Yes, there is value....