A Dollop Of Reinforcement

     Every now and then, someone who’s read one of my books actually, demonstrably “gets it.” Note the “demonstrably” part. I’m sure there are other readers who “get it” but don’t bother to let me know. I cherish them equally. However, it’s the ones that express their revelations who provide me with the reinforcement a writer needs. One reported in just yesterday evening:

     [Porretto] attempts to ask questions along the lines of "what should a good person do in this particular situation?"

     Exactly. That is my reason for this enterprise, my answer to the question “At an age when you could justifiably declare yourself forever finished with productive work and dedicate your remaining years to relaxation, the enjoyment of the lighter pleasures, and chasing pretty women in short skirts and high heels downhill, why have you chosen instead to do this agonizing, time-consuming, monstrously difficult thing?”

     It’s to get the reader thinking.

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     Most people make the overwhelming majority of their decisions without thinking. I can’t fault anyone for that. Thinking is strenuous. It takes time and effort away from other things that might seem more urgent. Worst of all, it can lead you in the wrong direction. As Robert A. Heinlein wrote in Glory Road:

     Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won’t work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

     The wrong premises will lead to the wrong conclusions every time – and it’s remarkable how seductive certain wrong premises can be. As Arthur Herzog wrote in The B.S. Factor, a paranoid is just a logician with a fractured premise.

     Part of our inheritance is a vast trove of “pre-made decisions” that apply nicely to a great many known situations. The child’s learning process is largely about absorbing those lessons. Because those decisions have been tested against the situations they fit many times, we can rely upon them – something we often learn by attempting to “go our own way” in such a situation and getting our fingers burned in the process.

     But that inheritance covers only a portion of the human experience. There are infinitely more possibilities than any amount of received wisdom can cover. When such a possibility arises, it’s necessary to think.

     The Futanari Saga is the most challenging of all my fiction to date. It tackles situations many persons would recoil from considering, some of which are active elements in our current sociopolitical milieu. It embeds several speculative elements – the existence of genetically (rather than surgically) produced futanari; human cloning; Rachel MacLachlan’s desire-control technology; Fountain’s apparent miracle-working – but I wrote it principally in the hope that those speculations might help to illuminate some current, real-world controversies.

     Any light arises from the reader’s decision to think: to apply his premises and his logical powers to the unprecedented situations into which I throw my Marquee characters. Without that, the stories are merely transient entertainment, and perhaps not particularly satisfying entertainment at that. But the possibility, however slender, that I could get people thinking about current controversies from an entirely new perspective is why I decided the effort would be worthwhile.

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     At the completion of each novel I kick back for a few weeks, mostly to recover from the effort, but also to consider certain questions afresh:

1. Am I entertaining my readers or just pontificating at them?
2. What would make my stories more entertaining?
3. Am I “finished?”

     The answers are never perfectly certain. They can seem more nebulous after the release of a novel than before it. But I must face them squarely, for the reasons I outlined in the first segment.

     If, by contriving novel situations with a degree of relevance to real life and putting believable characters into them, I can get a few readers to think more actively and broadly than before, I’ll answer Question #3 above with a resounding “No!” I’ll keep going. Of course that compels me to face the question “If I’m not ‘finished,’ then what comes next?” But that can wait until I’ve emptied a few more bottles of Harvey’s.

What Do You Care About?

     This one is for the other fiction writers out there, whether already practicing or still just “loosening up.”

Why do you [want to] write?

     It’s a question many of us never face squarely.

     I’ve known people who were avid for what they imagined as the “lifestyle” of a writer. Seldom did their imaginings bear much relation to reality.

     I’ve known people who wanted to memorialize certain events through a fictional lens. They found those events to be supremely important, and they knew that fiction is better than exposition at expressing the underlying themes of human action and human nature.

     I’ve known people – including one of the most gifted writers I’ve ever met – who merely saw fiction as a way to augment their incomes. The great majority of them have been bitterly disappointed by the returns on investment.

     And I’ve known people who just wanted to see their names on the cover and spine of a book: the “now I’m somebody” syndrome that more often plays out in the context of one of the performing arts.

     But why do you want to write? Is it one of the reasons above? If not, then what?

     You really should know, and quite clearly, before you set your fingers to the keys. It will determine everything.

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     One of the foremost science fiction writers of the Twentieth Century, Robert A. Heinlein, said on several occasions that he wrote “to buy groceries:” i.e., simply for what he could earn that way. You sure as hell can’t tell from most of what he wrote! They’re replete with insights of all kinds: into government and politics, social structures and their evolution, religion and human speculations about the supernatural, human motivation, the limits of the achievable, and so on. A few of his books might seem lightweight at first. A couple of them, toward the end of his life, were self-indulgences (e.g., I Will Fear No Evil and The Number of the Beast). But by far the greater part of Heinlein’s oeuvre is rich with thematic content of the sort that renders them usefully instructive – intellectually durable – memorable for the best of reasons.

     I could name other writers, alive and producing, who claim to be “in it for the money” but whose stuff has the thematic heft and solidity of Heinlein. A dear departed friend who sought to make his living from fiction discovered that he couldn’t do it. He cared too much about the quality and thematic content of his stories to pour out saleable hackwork. And I will tell you something I’ve never told anyone before: I couldn’t do it either. My first agent encouraged me to “lighten up,” to write stuff she knew she could sell because it was already flying off the shelves. I tried...and gave it up long before I could produce even one novel-length tale.

     At this point I’ll stop circumnavigating the shrub and tell you baldly what you need to know, fellow storytellers and storytellers-to-be:

You’d better know what you care about the most, because that’s what you’ll write about.

     And there is not one single thing you can do about it.

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     Fiction writing is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort. It’s frequently frustrating, too. No one can dedicate himself to something as prolonged, arduous, and intermittently maddening as the creation of a novel unless he’s getting exactly what he wants from the process and its products.

     Storytelling can be like mining coal, or it can be like searching for diamonds. The market for coal is much, much larger and steadier than the market for diamonds...but you must be willing to accept the grime and the drudgery of coal mining to reap the profits available from that market. And what you get for your labors is weariness, black fingernails, and coal. There’s no kidding yourself about that.

     So know, clearly, explicitly, and beyond all possibility of self-deception, what you care about sufficiently to embrace the labors of the storyteller. I’m here to tell you: storytelling is the hardest work I’ve ever done.

     I have no doubt that you’ll feel the same.

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     You might be wondering why I chose this topic for today. Simple, really: I’m serving as a countervailing voice to a writer I like personally who apparently feels otherwise. Sarah has a lot of books available. I haven’t read most of them, and most of the ones I’ve read have failed to affect me. However, Sarah is a respected figure, at least among speculative-fiction writers and fans. For that reason a lot of aspiring writers and newly fledged ones will take her sentiments to heart. That makes it important that other perspectives are available to them.

     This one is mine. Make of it what you will.

From The “Why Am I Doing This?” Files

     Well, apparently Black Friday isn’t a choice day for a book promotion. Nor has Experiences set the world on fire just yet. But then, the stories I tell are pretty outré, so I shouldn’t expect them to be popular, right?

     So why do I write them?

     It’s a question I’ve asked myself before. I’ve also answered it before. However, owing to the amount of effort my novels demand of me, there are days the answer doesn’t pop out of the usual slot. So I compel myself to think about it afresh.

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     On average, completing a novel-length story takes me about a year. That’s not a “standard,” 2000-hour work year typical of wage employment; it’s just the elapsed time from inception to release. I do other things during that time, of course, or I wouldn’t have a properly stocked larder, clean clothes, and an orderly house (and you wouldn’t get these sententious essays). My estimate for the average number of “labor hours” I put into a novel is about 700. I seem unable to speed up the process.

     That’s an average, Gentle Reader. Love in the Time of Cinema took fewer hours of effort; Which Art In Hope took far more. Each novel, however, has required an emotional commitment of a sort virtually every artist or craftsman will recognize: a dedication to the story as worthy of the effort regardless of how it will eventually be greeted by the reading public.

     In other words, the story must strike me as being worth telling in and of itself.

     I’ve occasionally lamented the fall-off in originality that’s afflicted fantasy, science fiction, and horror: the three “speculative” genres. But originality has its costs. One of them is the eschewal of trend-following: i.e., “getting on the gravy train.” Another is a near-constant state of self-questioning: the “why am I doing this?” of the title.

     Even the most dedicated creator will doubt himself. (Not the Creator, mind you; just us fleshbound types.) “Why am I doing this when I could be simulating traffic patterns / jumping my wife / finishing Rise of the Tomb Raider? Where’s the return on investment?”

     The return on investment must come from the work itself. The tangible ROI, for a typical indie writer, is likely to be paltry. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m terrible at promotion.

     That’s why I emphasize the importance of theme.

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     Every worthwhile story speaks of the nature of Man.

     The previous sentence is a slight misstatement for purposes of impact. In a more accurate formulation, “Man” would be replaced by “personhood.” There are ineluctable consequences to personhood. The requirements:

• Delimited existence;
• Individual consciousness;
• Limited powers;
• Inescapable needs;
• Individual wants and priorities;

     ...give rise to everything else: what philosopher Loren Lomasky called the nature of the “project pursuer.” They also give rise to the moral and ethical laws that bind us. Tom Kratman has called these properties “the eternal verities.” It’s the right name for them, for as Thomas Carlyle once wrote, they are “fixed by the everlasting congruity of things” and are not alterable by any artifice.

     The theme of a worthwhile story must perforce be the illumination some aspect of the nature of Man and the laws that flow from it.

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     Just in case you’ve been reading this half-asleep – I know, a lot of my tripe reads better that way – this is a fiction writer talking about fiction from an existential perspective: a “why bother?” sort of inquiry. It’s inherently opinion rather than exposition. However, it explains – to my satisfaction, at least – why so much fiction is inherently forgettable:

A poor story illuminates nothing of importance to us.

     Please don’t mistake me. It’s not that we don’t know our own natures or the moral and ethical laws that flow from them. Our knowledge of those things is built-in, installed by God and communicated to us through our consciences. So it’s unlikely that even the best story will tell the reader something he never knew. It’s more likely to remind him of something he’s always known, though he might have temporarily mislaid (or overlooked) it.

     The desire to dramatize elements of that knowledge is why I write. A factual-logical argument for a baldly stated abstraction, no matter how imperative, doesn’t capture the allegiance of the listener nearly as well as a dramatic demonstration of how it would work among characters the reader cares about. Ayn Rand inspired more freedom advocates with Atlas Shrugged than the thousands of purely factual and logical arguments for individual freedom that came before her.

     The great persuaders have all known this. Start from Jesus Christ and work your way forward.

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     My futanari stories have had several different principal themes. Innocents is about the importance of justice to the just and what it can compel them to do. Experiences dramatizes the power of the need for acceptance. I have a third novel-length story percolating as I write this – working title The Wise and the Mad — in which I intend to address the supreme question of our time: what is tolerable, what is not, and how to distinguish between them. (I think of this as the “one idiot allowed per village” problem.)

     Perhaps we already know the answers to the questions above. Perhaps, if pressed, any man could articulate the answers. But there’s more juice – more power to motivate – in a story about such things than in any dry academic argument about them.

     And with that, it’s back to my labors. Keep the faith.