Despite the name, science fiction isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) all about science and technology.

Sure, you need some of that stuff in there - in varying degrees, from each writer according to his or her individual preference. But first and foremost, the second part of the name is the important bit: science fiction. It’s just stories, first and foremost. And because of the way human psychology works, good stories - the ones that engage the most readers the most effectively - are about people.

Well, maybe it’s better to say characters, because in science fiction some of the ‘people’ aren’t necessarily human people, but the point still stands - and it is made successfully by Ian Hocking’s essay for Concatenation’s twentieth anniversary issue:

“When the story is put on hold for attention-stretching paragraphs, even pages, you place your fiction into the category that justifies the response of those who hate science fiction: ‘I’m not interested in all that space stuff’. You shouldn’t have to be interested in the space stuff to an enjoy an SF story any more than you need to have an intrinsic interest in African territorial jurisdiction to enjoy Casablanca, Russian history to enjoy Dr Zhivago, or time paradoxes to enjoy The Terminator…”

Reading that reminded me of one of Jeremiah Tolbert’s recent posts (that I was sure I had linked before, but can’t seem to find in the archives). He’s talking about reaching the same character-over-gimmicks realisation Hocking discusses above, and mentions that Ted Chiang’s anthology of short fiction was the catalyst for this epiphany:

“What I thought I had realized was a pattern in his collection. Each story seemed to be an idea story, only he had two ideas that he had connected at an interesting intersection. But what he was doing that I had not yet learned how to do was taking a character’s life and figuring out where that idea intersection impacted them most.”

Wise words, I think. As Tolbert’s parting shot mentions, this probably isn’t news to many readers here at VCTB. But to someone struggling to learn the basics of the craft, it’s a crucial revelation, and it’s certainly changed the way I think about writing fiction.

Lots of good free advice for fictionistas in the RSS feeds today; the greatest chunk of which comes from Jim van Pelt’s Livejournal, a resource which I only discovered recently, but am already very found of.

Mr. van Pelt first looks at character creation, and the methods of showing rather than telling the reader what a character is like:

“For me, actions trump both appearance and speech.  The soldier who talks about how he will run when faced with the enemy, but throws himself on the grenade at a key moment reveals more about himself through his actions than his words.”

He then shares an exercise that he gives to his students, which sounds like the sort of thing I’d have really enjoyed, had my teachers in English ever set such tasks - go into another classroom and take observational notes about the teacher!

Next, he looks at situations where the canonical rules of writing can be broken, on the proviso that the writer knows what they are doing. For example:

“Don’t shift point of view.   In general, this is good advice.  A writer who slips around willy nilly with point of view just confuses the heck out of the reader.  I responded to a story the other day that dipped into the cat’s point of view for a sentence, and then, catastrophically, into a house plant on the fireplace mantle for another sentence.  The better advice, at least to stronger writers, is Control point of view.  If you know what you are doing, a story that shifts point of view can be the only way to tell the story, if it works.”

Following on neatly from that is Carol Berg’s response to a reader enquiry about shifting POVs at the DeepGenre blog:

“There is certainly nothing technically wrong with multiple first-person narrators. It is no more “incorrect” than using multiple third-person points of view or present tense or omniscient POVs or whatever else. For those of us who love first person done well, multiple narrators can alleviate the biggest downside of writing first-person narrative, which is getting only one character’s view of the action.”

Ms. Berg goes on to list a number of techniques she uses to make sure her first person viewpoints work: making it clear to the reader ‘whose head they are inside’; minimising the use of ‘I’; and avoiding navel-gazing episodes, to name but a few.

Lastly comes a slew of advice on techniques for writing descriptively - thanks to the way Livejournal works, I can’t put a name to their supplier, but their LJ user handle is bg_editor - which were posted in response to the van Pelt material above:

“I look on description as my camera. If I am analogous to the director of the film my readers watch, then description controls many of the aspects of that story experienced by the reader. That camera is critical for conveying pacing, setting, character, and plot.

Description does not sit statically—it has a purpose. Like makeup, it is applied sparingly to highlight or emphasize what we wish to show, to draw attention away from what we do not. It cues the reader as to what is critical to the story and ensures that a tale maintains momentum.”

Lots of quoted examples from well-known writers in there, too; an excellent chunk of advice.

The only problem I have is that, the more writing advice I read, the more intimidated about sitting down and attempting to actually accomplish any writing I become. That golden first rule (writers must, y’know, write) has always been my biggest stumbling block.

Thanks to the magic of marketing, artistic talent is often seen to be the province of the gifted, those ‘born with it’. While there are undeniably people who fit into this category, I think (and indeed hope) that the vast majority of artists, musicians and writers were not born under a special star. Continue reading “The myth of creativity”