When No Real Locale Will Serve

Stephen King has Castle Rock, Maine.
Scott Turow has Kindle County, Illinois.
William Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
And I have Onteora County, New York.

     There are no such places, of course. Yet quite a lot of interesting stuff – headline-making, really – happens in each of them. I have no idea whether King, Turow, or Faulkner’s ghost is ever asked this, but one of the questions I get most frequently from readers of my fiction is “Why did you have to invent a fictional county to site your stories in?”

     Well, sometimes no real place will serve. Sometimes the general knowledge readers bring to the fiction they select is just too great – too likely to undermine what every storyteller must get from his readers: the willing suspension of disbelief. I know I’d be lost without it, because of the strangeness of my tales and the larger-than-life heroes I prefer to depict.

     It’s best to avoid the use of real places if your aim is to speak of world-class intellects and men of unprecedented moral courage. There’s a shortage of both varieties. The problem intensifies if you intend to create a whole lot of them – which I did.

     In part this is an aspect of the prevailing cynicism: the “people just aren’t like that” / “no real person would take such risks or make such sacrifices” attitude that’s endemic to our time. Yet it’s my firm conviction that people need heroes. We need to admire their deeds and hope someday to rise to their level. It’s why good parents still tell the great myths of Greek legend to their youngsters...and why far too many youngsters who never hear a heroic story grow up admiring sports figures and entertainers.

     But if you need a place where a gaggle of heroes can germinate and blossom into national or global stature, a fictional place will probably serve you better than any real locale.

     There are variations on this practice that ought to be compared. For example, consider the current trend in romance toward the employment of a very rich male co-protagonist: a multimillionaire or billionaire. There are a slew of such books out there, and from what I can determine they’re very popular. Yet how many ultra-rich persons are there really, and how many of them make it into their thirties and forties without being securely mated, pre-nuptial agreements and all, and thus romance-proof?

     I’ve used that motif too. However, I “flipped the script” in my short romance Love in the Time of Cinema, by making the girl the multimillionaire. That’s certainly a valid approach...but candidly, it’s even less realistic than the prevailing tendency, in which the male protagonist is the rich one. (“You can’t do anything the usual way, can you?” – my wife. Heh, heh, heh! Just wait till she reads Love in the Time of Capitalism!)

     Of course, the “extreme” pole of this practice occurs in the outright speculative genres of fantasy (The Warm Lands), science fiction (Which Art In Hope), and horror. Some things require whole new worlds – even whole new universes. That’s the case when you want to break a few of the laws of physics, not just those of Congress. And once again, the great ones, the Tolkiens and Benfords, do what they must to make it work.

     As I wrote above, it’s about the willing suspension of disbelief: getting the reader to accept the premises of the story. If you can’t win that from him, he won’t get full value from your tale. But this is a special case of the much larger subject of the rules of storytelling: doing what you must do to please the reader with the tale you hope to stell him. Ultimately, that’s the one and only absolute rule. All the others are useful guidelines. The aspiring writer must absorb and respect them, but as he matures he will learn that each of them, like all rules for doing anything practical, has a proper domain of application. Outside that domain – the regions on the storyteller’s map marked “Here there be dragons” in Gothic Blackscript – he may sometimes set them aside to his advantage.

     If he has a hero’s courage, that is. For that, too is an essential of the good storyteller. Why else would it be “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” eh, hero?

The Centrality Of Story

     This one is for the “writers” who think all that matters is a profusion of the trappings of their selected genre: ray guns and rocket ships in SF, elves and magic items in fantasy, werewolves, vampires, and zombies in horror, and so forth:

     I do see a lot of scripts where the “message” of the movie is given more importance than the story, and those scripts are predictable and boring. The heart of movie-making is story, no matter the issue you are attempting to address, and if you don’t make the story work, your message will flop anyway. -- Nick Searcy

     Bravo, Mr. Searcy. That needed to be said. But it isn’t just “message” that can deflect the creator from his proper aim.

     I recall a missive I received long ago from an agent. He described a novel he’d been sent in which protagonist “Bart Preston” had holstered his “proton blaster” and set forth in his rocket ship to head the villain off at the Horsehead Nebula. There was more (and equally ludicrous) detail, but that should be enough to clue my Gentle Readers into how that tale had emerged. The writer had taken a piece of inane Western drivel and substituted space-opera paraphernalia for those of the Western genre, hoping to get a foot in the door his Western had previously been denied. Needless to say, it didn’t have the desired effect.

     A worthwhile story is about people changing in response to some problem or problems. It’s why a good book takes time to conceive and to write: The author must live with his protagonists, and often with his antagonists, long enough to feel how they’ll develop in response to the stresses he plans to impose on them. There is no eluding this requirement, or the time it takes to meet it.

     The just-churn-‘em-out types that simply keep pushing mountains of genre gingerbread, without bothering to address character development in a setting that features significant challenges for those characters to surmount, are nothing but hacks. No matter how many books they sell to semi-adolescent readers of whatever age, I will never respect them.