MegaMiscellanea

My own writing lately has been a broad adventure story, hopefully of novel length and hopefully better than some of the junk I’ve been writing lately. Part of the process of writing a science fiction or fantasy story of any kind is to do what’s called world-building. For some people, it’s the most fun part of writing and it’s all they ever really do – these people often become game designers.

But I’m interested in telling a story about a particular kind of character best served by the genre of adventure genre fiction. He’s a character that has been gnawing at my brain for almost two decades and I think I finally have the skill to write a story about him.

But rather than just write about the character I also have to build a universe around him, or at least create a universe in which that character can live and thrive and suffer and succeed and and fail and all that exciting drama stuff.

Here’s the next layer: a genre universe must operate on a definable set of rules. The rules are what mark the boundaries of drama – there’s no point in mentioning the rules if the characters aren’t going to encounter them. These rules can be outlandish and ridiculous, but they must always be internally consistent. If these rules are broken then the tension is hopelessly broken, not because of a resolved dramatic moment (which is how the author wants to break tension), but because the tightened band suddenly has too much slack. If I tell you that the only thing that can kill a werewolf is silver and then depict a werewolf being killed by a golden bullet, then what was the point in telling you the rule in the first place? When another werewolf appears and the character has nothing made out of silver within reach, then any tension created by that drama is practically nonexistent.

The question facing me tonight is how much of the world to build before I write the narrative. I know that the world and its rules will have a bearing on the narrative – I know that the characters will operate within and encounter the edges of what their universe allows, but I am hesitant to establish too many of those rules in advance.

Creating the universe first is supposedly what Tolkien did before writing the Lord of the Rings. it’s also the legendary origin of the Star Wars universe – fans often reference the three-ring binder that held all of George Lucas’s ideas for a vast, multi-trilogy series of movies and of which the two trilogies we have are all he saw fit to make.

The result is the appearance of a handful of characters crawling across the surface of a massive history. The stories read more like nonfiction than anything else, which is precisely what the authors had in mind. The universe becomes more important than the story, which is fine for a multipart franchise, but it doesn’t matter as much as the story you’re trying to tell in the moment. It’s hard to keep an audience’s attention when you’re teaching them history.

This isn’t what I’m going to do because I can spend days or weeks making a universe and lose sight of the story I was trying to tell in the first place – a story about characters and plot rather than the universe around them.

So, I’m thinking I’m going to do it the fun way and just create the world as I go.

The fun part is doing it like one does improv theater – the “Yes, and -”

Improv theater is ostensibly a bunch of performers adding to a collective narrative. One person adds one aspect, another person adds the next, etc. You never say “no,” to someone’s input. It’s the piling of one incongruous element on top of another that makes it fun to do and fun to watch.

A good example of how not to improv is illustrated perfectly in this clip from 30 Rock:

In the context of a fully-realized narrative, you have the luxury of not being forced into anything – instead of the above example, you can have Sling Blade meet Darth Vader, or have them fight or whatever. Writing is a solitary effort, and completely independent of the wishes of anyone but the author.

My wishes are that I’m going to make a whole, big universe around my characters and hope the whole thing makes sense when I’m done.

Neal Stephenson wrote a book called Anathem. You can buy it from Amazon or you can read about it on Wikipedia. I really enjoyed it, because it’s dense and full of interesting ideas and wonderful writing. Stephenson is a master of science fiction, and like all good writers in any genre, his craft surpasses it.

The bits about Anathem that matter to what I’m writing are these:

- it takes place on a world a lot like Earth but it’s not exactly earth and it evolved completely separately from our planet (which is to say, it’s not a long-lost colony in the future)

- the larger culture has the run of the place. They’re a lot like our worst vices – obsessed with television, movies, fantasy, escapism, money, sports, competition. Their world is called “extramuros” by the other group of people on the planet, who call themselves the “mathic.”

- there are a bunch of little colonies called “concents,” that are like a combination of cloistered monastery and university. The people in them are like monks who have only their clothes as their possessions. Their chief features are 1) they are largely self-sufficient 2) they have very limited contact with the outside world.

This contact is restricted depending on what kind of avout you are – the “unarians” open their gate to the outside world once a year. The “decenarians” open their gate to the extramuros world (and to the other avouts) every ten years, every hundred years for the “centenarians” and every thousand years to the “millenarians.” These groups mostly recruit from the newly-born and lower maths. This is to say, the Millenarians are only seen every thousand years, so most avout never see one! And because they have so much time for self-reflection and really detailed, slow, long-view studies that they’re said to have amazing, secret powers.

Well, there are all different kinds of “concents” (it’s a kind of convent, see?). Some of them even have legends about each other. One of those legendary concents is the Ringing Vale concent, known for their apparent study of “vale lore,” or martial arts.

So get this – these guys have been studying martial arts for thousands of years, mostly uninterrupted and with very little polluting contact with the fly-by-night saecular world. They don’t have a huge role in the book but it’s pivotal.

One of their central concepts is the idea of an “emergence.” The main character who hears the word spoken in context thinks the Ringing Vale avout means “emergency,” but she explains it further.

See, in the confines of a concent, you can’t really test martial arts. Sure, you can throw each other around and maybe do some hardcore sparring, but in the end it’s still nothing like real combat.

So, when some of these guys go out into the real world (which, again, is rare), they consider opportunities to test their knowledge in real-world circumstances as an emergence. It’s when they find their purpose in life – an emergence is like a hadj, a pilgrimage.

When it happens in the book, a small group of Valers (as they’re called) turn back an entire riot, in the kind of crunching, surgical, kinetic fight scene that few writers can do and Neal Stephenson can always do.

It makes me think of my own moments of emergence, and how those are what we work for.

Stay tuned for further reflection.

If these things were true:

1) I have an illness that is not easily treated and that requires hospitalization
2) I have a lot of money and nothing to spend it on

Then I would do the following:

1) Pay Hugh Laurie a few million dollars to act like Dr. House
2) Pay a writer for House to write snappy dialogue for him
3) Pay the best doctors in the world to diagnose and treat me

Everything the doctors have to tell me they will tell Hugh Laurie instead, and then he will limp into room with fake reluctance and tell me that I was going to die but then come back after a few hours, pretending that he had reached some kind of epiphany and do something clever to cure me and then tell me that I’m going to be okay.

I would even spring for a cardboard cutout of Lisa Edelstein to stand in the hallway, making this face:

With a few rare, sad, tragic exceptions, the people in my family tend to live a long time with relatively few health defects, only to spend most of their lives in utter misery, punctuated at the end with a large, delirious question mark. So, while I should have little fear of diabetes, cancer, schizophrenia or heart disease, the nature of the preceding sentence is such that I do anyway. I’m not a hypochondriac – they always think they’re sick. I’m a catastrophic – I don’t get sick very often, but when I do it’s like Starbucks coffee – far more unpleasant in practice and almost certainly lethal.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about the middle part of my thesis – the part about utter misery.

We aren’t miserable for any tangible reason, but the misery comes and we throw a blanket over it and write a name on it, like “MY JOB” or “MY RELATIONSHIP” or “THE CERTAINTY OF A LONELY DEATH.” My generation is lucky, because we have ways of dealing with it rather early in our lives. These methods include stuff like drugs and therapy, items that allow us to use our natural faculties to rip the blanket off and see that the thing underneath it isn’t a thing at all, or that it’s actually a part of us, or something else metaphorical.

I keep using “we,” but I’m only speaking about myself.

I had an appointment with my psychiatrist the other day, as people like me sometimes do. I was filling him in on some of my thought processes and some of my problems. He nodded and shook his head and and leaned forward and said, in an exasperated way: “Jim, you’re really hard on yourself.”

Yeah. I know.

But not as much as I used to be.

A pair of middle-aged women showed up at my door the other night. They had clipboards and they were wearing blue buttons. They didn’t have to say it, but they did anyway: “We’re talking to people about voting for Barack Obama,” she said, in the passive, indirect way that a therapist would tell you to talk to somebody who disagreed with you.

An aside: I live on the outskirts of one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest suburbs. Many of my friends grew up here, and they all agree that a democrat in this area is extremely rare.

My first instinct is to try to get rid of them. I don’t want to have a conversation with strangers about something as personal and potentially explosive as politics. Someone I used to know went door-to-door as a child, for religious reasons. She said that the only guaranteed way to get rid of their particular branch of the big X was to say you’re an atheist. Because their church so adamantly rejected independent thought, a person who didn’t believe in God was the biggest threat to an impressionable child’s supple mind.

I admire these two ladies for what they were doing. I sure couldn’t do it, and I’ve tried. My friend Becky ran for Magistrate one year, and all my ex and I had to do, as part of her street team, was go up to peoples’ homes and knock on their doors and ask them to vote for Magistrate, and then ask them to vote for Becky, who happened to be the only girl on the ticket. It was easy. We even had pink pens to give out.

Becky didn’t really have a chance, as we discovered later. The guy who won was a local cop for a long, long time and basically already knew the whole town. She might as well have been running against everybody’s cousin.

So I understood how hard it was for them to come up to the front door of somebody with an undermowed lawn and a talking Darth Vader on his car’s dashboard and ask him to vote for Barack Obama. Maybe they thought it was a slam dunk. The Apple sticker on my car probably got their hopes up.

“Do you know who you’re voting for?”

The first thing I did was apologize.

“I’m sorry. Yes, I do.”

“Oh?” they said, pencils raised.

“Probably Bob Barr?”

Long, pregnant pause.

“Well,” said the leader. “We’ll be sure to write that one down.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. I’m still not sure. She made no move to write anything at all. Did she think I was making a name up?

“Well, I’m a Libertarian,” I said, adding a period to the end of the conversation.

“And you’re voting with your party,” she said, nodding. “Thanks for your time!”

“Thank you, and uh, well, um, good luck,” I said, and closed the door. Carriage return.

I don’t know if I would have gotten an argument if I had said I was a Republican, or if they would have tried to sway an admitted independent. Most folks don’t really know what to do with a Libertarian, because we probably agree with a lot of the things they believe, but with different priorities and different reasons.

It gave me an idea, though. Maybe the quickest way to get rid of door-to-door campaigners is to say you’re a Libertarian?