How do you create an alternative world?

I've been reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam (the third installment of the trilogy), and marveling at how complete her post-apocalyptic world is--how thoroughly thought-out, how detailed, how true to its own internal logic. How the hell, I ask myself whenever I encounter such a world, does a writer accomplish this?

For Bigfoot and the Baby, I did end up creating a somewhat alternative world, mostly but not entirely like Southern California in the 80s. Apart from providing a sort-of habitat for a sort-of real Bigfoot, that world differs from ours by containing a domed city in the Mojave Desert. So I had to posit a technology to do that, though I don't explore the technology's plausibility in any great detail (it's not that kind of book). Other than that, I don't remember setting out to build an alternative world as such; it just sort of arose, over time, from the needs of the narrative.

I don't know if that's how Atwood proceeded. And I really don't know how, say, China Mieville created the far more alien world of Embassytown, or how any number of so-called "hard" science fiction writers do it. You probably have to know more than I do about ecosystems, architecture, ancient civilizations, high tech, low tech, organizational psychology, and everything else besides.

One strategy I've heard of, which I suspect came from the Poets and Writers writing prompts page, is to consider a world exactly like our own, except with one difference. That difference, I suppose, could be big or seemingly small--an entirely different government in the US, or people walking on four legs rather than two, or trees having black leaves instead of green. This difference becomes a seed that, as it grows and sends tendrils throughout your story, changes almost everything in subtle or enormous ways.

You could probably go really small-scale with this, too. Say, imagine the room you're in, with one thing different. My God, what if this very room were ... clean?




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Empathy vs. justice for characters

I just finished reading Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History.* I found it almost insanely absorbing. The characters felt realistic and compellingly distinct.

Yet I did not care about them in the same way I care about, say, Ivan Karamazov or Oscar Wao. Yes, I cared what happened to them, but what I wanted to happen was comeuppance. While feeling some sympathy for their plight--which was entirely of their own making--I also wanted them to be caught or at least punished somehow. This seems rather different from the awkward situation of rooting for an anti-hero to get away with a crime, which can also be an interesting reading experience.

I'm not exactly sure how Tartt creates this sort of double-consciousness in the reader. I suspect it has to do with her precise attention to detail in every aspect of the story. We know quite clearly what the characters look like, which is often not the case in literary fiction. We understand the social milieu, its arcane hierarchies, its dangerous gray areas. We see, feel, and breathe the Vermont setting, the crushing winter and the hopeful--and then also, suddenly, crushing--advent of spring. These elements, rather than any aspect of the characters' (including the narrators') almost entirely self-serving behavior, draw us into the story. I really did feel, at every single moment, like I was there.

At the same time, I, at least, take some satisfaction in knowing--knowing--I would not fall into the particular trap the characters find themselves in. Often, fiction makes me wonder what I would do when faced with some extreme moral dilemma. Not in this case. These people are vivid and palpable, but they're really and truly not like me. Maybe it's just good old class resentment at work. I can't deny there's a certain pleasure in seeing fictional rich preppies and wannabes doing stupid, violent things to each other.

Several years ago I wrote a post about "altruistic punishment," which is the scholar William Flesch's term for a particularly satisfying plot formula. Readers, according to this theory, love seeing wrongdoers discover the error of their ways. They much prefer this outcome to virtue rewarded (sorry, Pamela). However, they also want justice meted out, well, judiciously. The punishment can't be too severe, or readers begin to feel sorry for the punishee. In fictional practice, this means "just" endings have to somehow feel a little ambiguous; a simple eye-for-an-eye won't do. I won't give away how, but Tartt mainly succeeds in striking this balance.

What's my point here? I suppose that we don't always have to empathize with characters in order to engage with them. We can stand very near them without actually stepping into their shoes. And we can care what happens to them by rooting against them rather than for them.

So this is just another permission slip to create unlikable characters. You have other, powerful mechanisms for engaging your reader.

*No, I haven't read The Goldfinch yet. I attribute this to two factors: 1) The Secret History, not The Goldfinch, was under the T's at my favorite used bookstore. 2) Frankly the plot of TSH appealed to me more than that of TG; at the time of purchase, I strongly wanted to read a story about preppie killers at a second-tier liberal arts college. In fact, I only wanted to read stories about preppie killers at second-tier liberal arts colleges. That desire more or less continues today. Any suggestions?

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For the love of the flawed novel

From Emily St. John Mandel's review of Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker on The Millions:

[I]t seems to me that there’s something magnificent about sprawling and ever-so-slightly flawed novels.

It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its author, genius as he is, is just barely in control of his material. His writing often has the feel of a man trying to wrap his arms around a large bag of demonically possessed squirrels. The source of his novels' grandeur is struggle, reflected in his characters' existential anguish. His greatest success, like theirs, is not in overcoming anguish but in giving it voice--sometimes seemingly by accident, as in convoluted prose, rushed scenes, and characters who appear and disappear for no evident reason. I suppose if the whole novel was nothing but these kinds of accidents, we'd call it a promising first draft, or simply a mess. But these flaws coexist with clearly defined conflicts with stakes even larger than life and death, masterful set pieces, and characters whose flesh and blood we come very close to actually touching. The flaws, in fact, make these successful parts even better: they roughen the edges of the masterpiece, making it a visceral experience.

In contrast, I love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in a very different way. As my previous commentary on it shows, I experienced it as a Work of Art that more or less drove me to my knees. It inspired awe, and had the heft of cathedral tunes. As an artistic achievement, I think it deserves mention in the same breath as Brothers Karamazov, but on an emotional level I'm less drawn to it, because it is not flawed. There is no badly worded sentence, no misstep in the (admittedly much simpler) plot. The artist is in complete control, and there is something vaguely off-putting about that. Maybe because I suspect I can never achieve that level of mastery myself. Or maybe it's because consciousness itself is messy and surprising. As Annie Murphy Paul explains in Sunday's NYT editorial, a recent analysis of MRI data

concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers. 

With its irruptions, dead ends, and coffee and blood stains, the map of Dostoevsky's mind looks far more like mine than Robinson's does. Hard to believe, since her work is set in twentieth-century Iowa and Dostoevsky's in tsarist Russia. But there you go.

Where the real resides

From the Paris Review's interview with Ann Beattie:

The interplay between character and external world is something that realist writers always dealt with conscientiously, and it started to drop out with minimalism. Hemingway dropped it out, too, but even in his stories there tends to be a volley going on between the environment and the character. Carver won’t say what the volley is. None of us will.

I guess you might say that minimalism resides in certain omissions, in trusting, à la Beckett, that if you give the sparest sort of context—two people in a trash can, a road at night—it will be like a dreamscape for people’s projections.

This is very well said, and something I've been wondering about for quite awhile. What makes literary characters seem real to us? What forms the boundaries around character? What delineates it; what processes build it up? I've always thought the "volley" was an important component, and that squares with my being somewhat averse to minimalism. But Beattie's right; minimalists like Beckett (whom I love) trust the reader to supply the "dreamscape." To put it another way, the characters' interior depictions are strong and suggestive enough to inspire that dreamscape.

So who's to say which is a more realistic depiction of character or "the world"? We don't come across people in trash cans calmly discussing life every day, but for many readers and playgoers, that psychological reality is fully recognizable. Perhaps it's more so, because they're creating their own context to a larger degree.

Jess Row is getting at this same issue in his recent Boston Review piece. His point, well worth remembering, is that our sense of "realism" is culturally determined. In part, anyway. (There's quite a dust-up going on in the comments to this article. By God, people do care about literature.)

Another California

Eric Puchner, my former teacher and author of the great novel Model Home, tells a personal story of California dreams gone wrong.

Pop culture in fiction: a ticket to obscurity?

Matt Zoller Seitz has an interesting post up on Salon today about pop-cultural references in TV shows. Recently he noticed that a classic episode of The Simpsons from the early 90s relied on cultural references (to Arnold Schwarzenegger's action-film persona and the Hollywood Squares) that his kids completely missed. He wonders if popular TV shows today, which rely heavily on current references, are sentencing themselves to obscurity in the near future.

I've often wondered the same thing when writing fiction. Should I refer to, say, Justin Bieber or Twitter, if, by the time this piece is published, those phenomena will have gone the way of flip phones? I use the phone example because, in editing some stories for upcoming publications, I noticed a definite lag in their depictions of cell-phone technologies. The stories were originally written a couple of years ago, when human beings other than I still used flip phones and thought they were pretty neat. Of course, this update will only hold for another six months or so. After that, those phone references will likely slide into the worst possible crack of datedness: recent enough to be recognizable, but with that whiff of mustiness that tells us the story (and writer) are just a tad behind the curve.

But back to Bieber and Twitter. If you're writing a story set in present day America (or any number of other countries, really), and it involves kids and/or parents of a certain socio-economic set, you're going to have a heck of a time steering around these things. By consciously trying to avoid topical references, you might tie your story into such knots--or make it so implausible--that it's better just to go through the Bieber, not around it. Still, when Justin embarks on his inevitable decline--not that I wish this upon him or his fans by any means; I'm sure the prospect is still many months off--will he take your story or novel down with him?

One consoling thought is that if your story or novel is around in twenty years (and I'm sure it will be!), those references to Justin Bieber may no longer seem musty. They may actually help root your piece in place and time. That's assuming a) Bieber has reached a sufficient critical mass of fame now that his name will evoke an "oh, yeah, I've heard that name" response in your as-yet-unborn-college-student reader, and b) without making your current readers scream out "Duh!," you've provided enough description and context for Bieber that future readers will at least gather he was a young, cute singer whose haircut sent shockwaves around the world.

In other words, if you're using Bieber in a winking, we-all-know-who-this-is kind of shorthand--as The Simpsons used Schwarzenegger--it will likely be a problem in the future. But if he's not just shorthand, if his presence makes a substantive contribution to the story, you'll be forced to spell that out at least somewhat. That should cut down on the "huh?" factor. Presuming shared knowledge, or shared "knowingness," between writer and reader (or viewer) may be the real ticket to obscurity--as Matt Zoller Seitz suggests.

Here are a few other ways I've thought of to use pop culture references in fiction while ensuring your story doesn't seem dated:

• Set the story in the past. This can be the very, very recent past. I remember talking to a guy in a writing class who said he was writing a "historical novel" set in 2007. It was 2008 at the time. Folks, 2010 is now a setting for historical fiction. Heck, so is March 7, 2011. So is the last minute. My point is, I think this mindset will just slightly shift the way you talk about "current" cultural phenomena--enough that you'll feel compelled to put it in a context.
  
  
• Create a realistic but alternative world, in which Justin Bieber is, say, Jason Beebler. You then can--and must--explain who he is and why he is loved by zillions. Most future readers will probably get the echo, but if they don't, it's no big deal. You've created your own character, who may prove more useful to you anyway, and more interesting.
  

Should writers cut back on scenery?

Laura Miller's Salon column yesterday got me thinking, again, about the relationship of setting to character. This is a particular concern of mine, because I've often worried that my own fiction lacks a sufficient sense of place. But how do you work a detailed sense of place into the narrative without bringing it to a grinding halt while you describe every highway, byway, lake, lawn, and tree?

Miller argues that one of the biggest problems in literary fiction today is, in fact, the overuse of description. Using Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife as her primary example, she quotes a paragraph of scenic description, and then says,

Zdrevkov is godforsaken, but this fact is amply conveyed in the following four paragraphs describing the town itself -- most of that bit is quite good, although still a shade exhaustive. Obreht has said in an interview that she wants to write about "the influences of place on characters," but the passage above is too flatly reportorial to suggest that this woman feels anything but overheated.

By way of contrast, Miller approvingly quotes Alias Grace:

Margaret Atwood writes of a suffocating Victorian parlor, "all possible surfaces of it are upholstered; the colors are those of the inside of the body -- the maroon of kidneys, the reddish purple of hearts, the opaque blue of veins, the ivory of teeth and bones."

The distinction I believe Miller is getting at is that Atwood's description reveals both the parlor, and the state of mind of the character viewing the parlor. Grace (who will later be accused of murdering the parlor's owner and committed to an asylum) is clearly, shall we say, unsettled in this setting. The "influence of place" on this character is indeed stifling--though Atwood, I would point out, leaves open the possibility that someone else (the rich owner of the house, for instance), would see these same items very differently.

In other words, places definitely influence characters, but the reverse is also true: characters influence settings, at least in terms of how the reader sees and interprets them through their eyes. Atwood's description is singular enough that we come to see both the parlor and Grace as singular. And throughout the novel, Grace and her setting will continue to interact and shape each other in surprising (and specific) ways. It seems to me this notion is crucial--the setting doesn't just "contain" the characters, but is continuous, and contiguous, with character. Setting and character are all part of the same fabric, the space-time of the novel (to rip off both Bakhtin and Brian Greene at the same time).

Still, this is much easier to realize if you are writing in the close third-person point of view. I haven't read The Tiger's Wife, and so don't know what point of view Oberht uses overall. Miller says her style is "subtle" and her main character mostly "opaque," which suggests a more external, even omniscient point of view. If you believe in or at least want to explore the possibility of omniscience (even a sort of blocked omniscience, which can't see inside people very well), some descriptive passages would have to originate from this point of view. This would seem to preclude the red-in-tooth-and-claw type of description we get from Atwood. But does that mean that such description would always end up being "flat" and "reportorial"?

Or maybe this really means that in literature (if not in life) no setting can exist outside of perception. That perception might be a character's, or it might even be the author's--more specifically, that of the author's persona, which we might call the voice. The author may or may not create a specific narrator for the story, but there is always a presence that the voice embodies. And it would behoove us writers to always be aware of that presence, what it is doing, and what its agenda is at any given moment in the narrative. Perhaps it's even in a tug-of-war with a character, vying (quietly or not) over whose description of reality is more true. You would then see layers (or striations) of perception in the landscape, which could make the scene very rich indeed--even if those layers are subtle.

Anyway, I can't decide whether I think Miller's right in telling authors to cut back on description. Elmore Leonard's advice to take out the boring parts is, of course, always correct--whether they are descriptions of setting, or dialog, or anything else. I suspect that boredom often ensues when the reader's sense of a human presence flags.

The Turn of the Screw: Why you sort of have to be an architect to write fiction

I've said in the past that writing fiction is a great deal like acting. As the author, you have to inhabit your characters, to look out at their world from inside their bodies, much as an actor does. Like it or not, you also are the director, set designer, and lighting designer. Also you have to produce the thing and sit alone in the box office 24/7, but never mind that part.

What I am getting at is the importance of blocking in fiction, which I see I've written about before. By blocking, I mean figuring out exactly where your characters are in space, at all times. A tall order? Yes, especially if you do not have a clear picture of that space in your mind.

Years ago I bought a book called The Writers Journal, which, not unexpectedly, showed actual pages from writers' journals. One of them (I can't remember who) had created elaborate floor plans for the house in which his characters lived. At the time, I thought that was just pure OCD. Some writers might enjoy that sort of thing, but that level of attention to detail wasn't for me. And as a result, I think my characters have done a fair amount of floating.

In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James's characters have no such problem. I've already talked about the architecture in the scene where the first "visitant" appears: the way the apparition places his hand on the crenelations as he moves along the roof specifically situates him in both space and time--which makes him all the more extremely creepy. This week, I'm more convinced than ever that James had a complete sketch somewhere of Bly and its grounds, including plans for all the floors. Whether he did them himself or enlisted a friend who was an architect, I don't know. It's possible he just used a real house with which he was extremely familiar. In any case, his detailed knowledge of the space enables him to create scenes that we, the readers, can feel ourselves inside of. And that is what makes them so scary.

In this scene, the governess observes one of her young charges, Flora, looking out from her bedroom window onto the lawn at night. She's obviously "engaged" with one of the "visitants" (I just love that word) the governess has been seeing inside and outside the house. The governess immediately wonders what's happening with Flora's brother, Miles, who seems to be of particular interest to the apparition of Peter Quint.

While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her brother's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS window?—what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter of my boldness? This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pause again.

I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds—a figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice. There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the lower one—though high above the gardens—in the solid corner of the house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared—looking, that is, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person above me—there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn—I felt sick as I made it out—was poor little Miles himself.

James not only knows the distance (ten paces) between Flora's room and Miles's, he has also located and envisioned this unused room down the hall, from which the governess can get an unimpeded view of who is looking at whom looking at whom.* Thanks to these spatial details, the reader sees what the governess sees, and feels what she feels. I admit, I got a little impatient as she conducted her "transit" (just tell us where Miles is!!). But the architectural passage (pun there) increases the suspense, and more than that, it reinforces all the characters (human and not) as specific physical presences in a specific space.

So I am going to suggest a writing exercise in which you actually sketch out the physical space in which your story or novel is going to unfold. You might not even have a story in mind yet--I think you might actually come up with a story from this exercise. It's OK to look at photos or drawings, but I think you have to make the space your own by redrawing and revising it. It seems like a lot of work up front, but down the road it will make your job easier because you won't have to wonder just where the hell your characters are. You will know. But you have to also remember to tell your reader.

*This kind of 3D visualization is a real weakness of mine; I still have chill-inducing memories of some kind of IQ test I had to take in, like, first grade. It included 2D drawings of 3D objects, and we had to rotate them in our minds, say, 45 degrees clockwise, and then pick the correct 2D representation that rotation would produce. I imagine I cried, and was thereafter discreetly funneled into a profession requiring orientation in two dimensions or fewer.