When Analog regular Jerry Oltion was writing his novel The Getaway Special, he tiffany spent an afternoon in a septic tank. (Not a used one: a new one, at a sales lot.) The story involved an easyto-make hyperdrive that could turn any airtight construct into a spaceship and Oltion drought a septic tank might make an inexpensive hull. But if his characters were going to spend time in it, he had to do the same. Not because it had anything to do with the science, but because he needed to know what it feltiike.
In another novel he had a scene in which people who’d never before been outdoors went for a walk in the woods. “I wanted to get the feeling of being afraid of every sound, ” he says, but as an experienced backpacker, he was far too comfortable in the wilds. “So I deliberately hiked a trail that had had recent grizzly sightings. I told Kathy [his wife] to put ‘He died for verisimilitude’ on my headstone if things went badly.”
Most science fiction writers would rather not risk dying for verisimilitude. Most writers in any genre, for that matter (except maybe adventure travel). But a lot of stories could use more realism. As Oltion puts it: “You really do need to spend the time in the tank.”
Fiction is about merging fantasy with an Ulusion of reality. Even the most mundane mainstream fiction works that way; however “real” the characters may seem, they are, after all, nothing more than ink on a page.
So how do stories create and maintain that illusion?
Partly it’s by foUowing the oldest adage in the book: write what you know. This is particularly key rings important when it comes to the science. If you don’t know a quark from a quasar, there are topics you’d better keep away from. I’m unlikely to write about any of a number of fields (string theory, for one) because I’d be pretty certain to screw them up.
A corollary is to be utterly paranoid. When I’m nearing the end of either a story or nonfiction article, I go through it carefully, highlighting everything about which I have the sUghtest doubt. Then I get on Google or hit my reference Ubrary, trying to find two independent sources to back up each highlighted item. It’s a reporter trick, and an old one, because it’s axiomatic in reporting that the things most likely to trip you up are the ones you’re “sure” you know. IfI can’t verify it, I try to find a way to dodge having to know it.
Occasionally I run into something I’m sure is right but which readers might not beUeve. Analog editor Stanley Schmidt and I once had an entertaining back-and-forth over whether an ordinary human, fueled by adrenaline, could kick through one of the passenger windows of an automobUe if he was trapped inside. I thought it likely, since I’d twice had windows broken by car-stereo thieves armed with tire irons. But if Stan wasn’t sure, there would be readers with the same problem. Sometimes, being right isn’t enough.
So I compromised. I knew for certain that you can break into a car whose windows are partially necklaces rolled down. All you have to do is hook your fingers over the top of the glass and give it a good yank. (This is why leaving windows “cracked open” is a bad idea if you have valuables in the car.) So, in the pubUshed version of the story, the hero’s car windows weren’t tightly roUed up, making it a lot easier for him to kick his way out. A tiny change eliminated a potential stumbling block.
Sometimes it’s not that easy. Recently, a sports magazine reprinted one of my stories. Three editors looked at it and got to debating whether an Olympic distance runner, having made the team at the U.S. Olympic Trials, would run any other races between the Trials and the Olympics.
I’m a distance-running coach and sports writer. If I were coaching them, the answer would be “no way. ” And whUe I was pretty sure most Olympic-level coaches would agree, there’s a critical difference between “pretty sure” and “one hundred percent confident.”
This is where fiction writers have to think like reporters. Unlike Oltion in the septic tank, I can’t try my hand at being an Olympian. But as a sports writer and coach, I know a few Olympic distance runners. So I emailed the one most likely to reply quickly and said, more or less, “Help!” Within hours, I had the answer. Nobody she knew had done any extra races before the Beijing Olympics. Sprinters do that; distance runners don’t.
In the ideal world, I’d have found a way to acknowledge this tidbit in the story, but the prose didn’t aUow it without producing a duU exercise in coaching theory. The lesson: no matter how right you are, you can’t guarantee everyone wiU agree.
Another maxim is that details bring stories to Ufe. Unfortunately, it’s easy for science fiction writers to equate that with technical information – details that merely demonstrate that they’re good at research. “That’s often the downfall of a hard-sf story,” says Oltion. “Too many writers think [scientific] details equal believability.”
What works best in science fiction is the same thing that works in other genres: detaUs that make people Tiffany Accessories think they’re being given special insight into the world the characters inhabit, whether it’s ours or planet Crypto.
Jane Kurtz is an award-winning author of children’s books. In writers’ workshops, she likes to ask people how they would write about winter in Minnesota. Most come up with the type of details anyone could find on the Internet: The snow can be knee-deep; a lot of people cross-country ski; it’s kind of cold. Minus twenty degrees is common, -40掳 is possible, and wind chiUs can hit -80掳. But those are facts, not details. There’s better stuff, if you really know Minnesota or spend enough time talking to someone who does. On a January ski outing near the Canadian border, a member of my party once announced: “Singledigit temperatures are the best. Plus or minus doesn’t matter. ” In other words, in the pantheon of “cold” he saw no difference between 9掳 and -9掳. It’s hard to imagine a statement that says more about the Minnesotan attitude toward winter.
On the same trip, we drove a remote twolane at night, more slowly than seemed necessary. “Sorry,” the driver explained, “you have to watch out for moose. They like to get down on their knees in the middle of the road and lick the salt, and they’re hard to see because their eyes don’t reflect like the eyes of deer. ”
These are the types of details that bring stories to life. “You have to surprise your readers,” says Kurtz. “Remember how it was as a child, when your parents told you the same things over and over? Well, readers don’t like it [either] when you tell them the same things over and over. ”
Her own description of cold? Try this, from her book Jakarta Missing (Green willow/ HarperCollins 2001):
Dad was right. Anyone would have to be crazy to want to live through this kind of winter. I know now about days when the hair inside your nose freezes and you feel like someone stuck a toothbrush up there. I know about days when the wind hits you in the face so hard that you gasp for breath and think you must still be asleep and dreaming of Antarctica. The snow squeaks like Styrofoam when you walk to school, and you can see die breath of every car that passes.
I’ve lived in Minnesota. When I read this, I see three critical details that tell me she’s nailed it:
* The freezing hairs inside your nose.
* The squeaky snow.
* The exhaust plumes of the cars.
You don’t have to have lived in the frigid north to know all of this . . . but you do have to have done more than superficial research.
So we now have three basic rules:
1 . Write what you know.
2. Know what it is that you do and don’t know.
3. Make good use of details.
Let’s look a bit more at the third. How can you use vivid details if you’re writing about remote star systems, exotic physics, or alien ecosystems?
I think the answer often lies in the non-science-fictional parts of the story. Elsewhere in this issue is a story I set partially on Naiad, a moon of Neptune. Obviously, I’ve never been there. All the facts I had I got from the Internet. But I know the Naiad I depict because I have decades of experience in the stark landscapes of the American Southwest, sitting on cliff tops and staring at the distant play of light and shadow. These are vivid, emotional memories and I drew on them to get a feel for what it might be like to watch Neptune from an airless vantage point that zips around it every seven hours. I took it a step farther by letting my protagonist, Floyd, know the same deserts I do. He’s not me, but I know where he’s been and I know the details diat make up his background. Those I can Tiffany Keys bring into the story with absolute certainty. If my Naiad works, it’s because the reader senses my certainty about Floyd and his deserts and grants me leave to present a Naiad about which nobody actually knows much.
At heart, this is the same thing as Oltion putting in time in the tank. But instead of going out and finding a tank to sit in, I was recalling tanks I’d experienced long before I knew there would ever be a story. It’s the lazy man’s form of research.
Here’s another example. I don’t have to do any special research to know what it’s like to be around grizzly bears. Once, in Alaska, hiking through eight-foot-tall grass (yes, there is such a thing as eight-foot-tall grass; that’s an interesting detail in itself), I found a spot where something had smashed flat a circle of grass about a dozen feet in diameter. A bit later, I found steaming bear droppings in the trail.
Another time, also hiking in Alaska, a friend and I came upon a man and three young children in a meadow above an alder thicket. Stopping to talk, we found they’d been awakened that morning by a grizzly sniffing at their tent, near the alder thicket tiirough which my friend and I had just hiked. As the father gestured toward the woods, right on cue, the bear emerged, sniffing again at the t茅nt and hesitating as though trying to figure out if it was worth ripping it open to see what was inside.
All interest in hiking lost, the six of us waited, comforted by the presence of the father’s very big gun (a slug-breech 12-gauge for those with an interest in such things). Eventually my friend escorted the kids back through the woods while the father and I packed up his tent, frighteningly close to the alders, and carried it back through the woods.
How would I draw on this for a story?
Well, to start with, packing isn’t the best verb to describe what we did with that tent. It was more like rolling it up like a giant cigar, sleeping bags inside. The whole process took about thirty seconds. Nor did we simply “carry” it though the woods. Scurried is a better verb. All the while we were talking randomly, because the thing we most emphatically did not want to do was startle the bear, which still had to be somewhere in the vicinity. “Hi bear. Good bear. Go away bear. ” That type of thing.
Then there was the stream at the base of the woods, whose crossing bought us a few yards of precious open space. “Cold” was an understatement. It was 32.00 1-degree water that made my shins feel as though they crinkled as I waded through. Once across, there was the silent agony of doubling over for endless seconds . . . dozens of endless seconds . . . waiting for my shinbones to forgive me: a soundless scream that only those who’ve waded through ice water can fully comprehend- all compounded by the overwhelming desire to get back to town now to buy my own very big gun.
You cannot invent details like this.
“Writers have good powers of observation,” Kurtz says. “That’s more important than imagination.”
So we can now add a fourth rule: draw, when possible and appropriate, on your own experience. You are the world expert on yourself so this is something nobody else knows better. Obviously, you can’t base the entire story directly on this, or it won’t be fiction, let along science fiction. But you can use some of it directly and more, indirectly. I may never write about grizzly bears, but if I ever need an alien predator, I know what memories I’ll draw from.
I can almost hear the objections that most people haven’t waded through ice water, carrying cigar-rolled tents. But everyone has done something.
One of my day jobs is writing profiles. (Analog Biologs are only a few.) I also write essays. People often tell me their lives are too boring either for profiles or for writing their own essays, but I’ve never met an adult without at least one interesting experience. The trick is recognizing tiiem in yourself. Or, if you really don’t like digging into your past, learn to be a good interviewer (another way of being an observer) so you can draw on other people’s stories.
A related skill is one a family member used to refer to as collecting “rat facts.” (Think pack rat.) Writers accumulate trivia. You have to be careful how much of it you stuff into any given story because it’s easy to start showing off, but these factoids are a magnificent library from which you can often borrow just the right detail.
So we now have five rules. To recapitulate:
1. Write what you know.
2. Know what it is that you know.
3. Make good use of details.
4. Look for details in experience (yours or other people’s).
5. Collect information. You never know what will someday be useful.
One final bit of advice comes from an Icelandic proverb Kurtz likes to cite: “Keen is the eye of the visitor.”
A related aphorism, in journalism, is that the best reporters are often introverted outsiders: people who like to watch life rather than participate more directiy. I’m not sure if this really is true – I’ve known a lot of reporters who are enthusiastic, outgoing people. The “fly on the wall” may be more archetype than reality.
But the truth in the archetype is simple. The best writers observe things. Sometimes these are details about the universe. Sometimes they are grand visions that instill the sense of wonder about which science fiction fans wax lyrical. Other times, the observations take the form of details about people or the lives we live: overlooked realities that ring true as they float across the page before us.
When writers do this, their stories feel authentic. They come to life, even when they’re about star drives, black holes, alien worlds, or things that go bump in the night. And that’s when readers remember them.
Making Unreality Ring True: Writer’s Tricks for Bringing Stories to Life
When Analog regular Jerry Oltion was writing his novel The Getaway Special, he tiffany spent an afternoon in a septic tank. (Not a used one: a new one, at a sales lot.) The story involved an easyto-make hyperdrive that could turn any airtight construct into a spaceship and Oltion drought a septic tank might make an inexpensive hull. But if his characters were going to spend time in it, he had to do the same. Not because it had anything to do with the science, but because he needed to know what it feltiike.
In another novel he had a scene in which people who’d never before been outdoors went for a walk in the woods. “I wanted to get the feeling of being afraid of every sound, ” he says, but as an experienced backpacker, he was far too comfortable in the wilds. “So I deliberately hiked a trail that had had recent grizzly sightings. I told Kathy [his wife] to put ‘He died for verisimilitude’ on my headstone if things went badly.”
Most science fiction writers would rather not risk dying for verisimilitude. Most writers in any genre, for that matter (except maybe adventure travel). But a lot of stories could use more realism. As Oltion puts it: “You really do need to spend the time in the tank.”
Fiction is about merging fantasy with an Ulusion of reality. Even the most mundane mainstream fiction works that way; however “real” the characters may seem, they are, after all, nothing more than ink on a page.
So how do stories create and maintain that illusion?
Partly it’s by foUowing the oldest adage in the book: write what you know. This is particularly key rings important when it comes to the science. If you don’t know a quark from a quasar, there are topics you’d better keep away from. I’m unlikely to write about any of a number of fields (string theory, for one) because I’d be pretty certain to screw them up.
A corollary is to be utterly paranoid. When I’m nearing the end of either a story or nonfiction article, I go through it carefully, highlighting everything about which I have the sUghtest doubt. Then I get on Google or hit my reference Ubrary, trying to find two independent sources to back up each highlighted item. It’s a reporter trick, and an old one, because it’s axiomatic in reporting that the things most likely to trip you up are the ones you’re “sure” you know. IfI can’t verify it, I try to find a way to dodge having to know it.
Occasionally I run into something I’m sure is right but which readers might not beUeve. Analog editor Stanley Schmidt and I once had an entertaining back-and-forth over whether an ordinary human, fueled by adrenaline, could kick through one of the passenger windows of an automobUe if he was trapped inside. I thought it likely, since I’d twice had windows broken by car-stereo thieves armed with tire irons. But if Stan wasn’t sure, there would be readers with the same problem. Sometimes, being right isn’t enough.
So I compromised. I knew for certain that you can break into a car whose windows are partially necklaces rolled down. All you have to do is hook your fingers over the top of the glass and give it a good yank. (This is why leaving windows “cracked open” is a bad idea if you have valuables in the car.) So, in the pubUshed version of the story, the hero’s car windows weren’t tightly roUed up, making it a lot easier for him to kick his way out. A tiny change eliminated a potential stumbling block.
Sometimes it’s not that easy. Recently, a sports magazine reprinted one of my stories. Three editors looked at it and got to debating whether an Olympic distance runner, having made the team at the U.S. Olympic Trials, would run any other races between the Trials and the Olympics.
I’m a distance-running coach and sports writer. If I were coaching them, the answer would be “no way. ” And whUe I was pretty sure most Olympic-level coaches would agree, there’s a critical difference between “pretty sure” and “one hundred percent confident.”
This is where fiction writers have to think like reporters. Unlike Oltion in the septic tank, I can’t try my hand at being an Olympian. But as a sports writer and coach, I know a few Olympic distance runners. So I emailed the one most likely to reply quickly and said, more or less, “Help!” Within hours, I had the answer. Nobody she knew had done any extra races before the Beijing Olympics. Sprinters do that; distance runners don’t.
In the ideal world, I’d have found a way to acknowledge this tidbit in the story, but the prose didn’t aUow it without producing a duU exercise in coaching theory. The lesson: no matter how right you are, you can’t guarantee everyone wiU agree.
Another maxim is that details bring stories to Ufe. Unfortunately, it’s easy for science fiction writers to equate that with technical information – details that merely demonstrate that they’re good at research. “That’s often the downfall of a hard-sf story,” says Oltion. “Too many writers think [scientific] details equal believability.”
What works best in science fiction is the same thing that works in other genres: detaUs that make people Tiffany Accessories think they’re being given special insight into the world the characters inhabit, whether it’s ours or planet Crypto.
Jane Kurtz is an award-winning author of children’s books. In writers’ workshops, she likes to ask people how they would write about winter in Minnesota. Most come up with the type of details anyone could find on the Internet: The snow can be knee-deep; a lot of people cross-country ski; it’s kind of cold. Minus twenty degrees is common, -40掳 is possible, and wind chiUs can hit -80掳. But those are facts, not details. There’s better stuff, if you really know Minnesota or spend enough time talking to someone who does. On a January ski outing near the Canadian border, a member of my party once announced: “Singledigit temperatures are the best. Plus or minus doesn’t matter. ” In other words, in the pantheon of “cold” he saw no difference between 9掳 and -9掳. It’s hard to imagine a statement that says more about the Minnesotan attitude toward winter.
On the same trip, we drove a remote twolane at night, more slowly than seemed necessary. “Sorry,” the driver explained, “you have to watch out for moose. They like to get down on their knees in the middle of the road and lick the salt, and they’re hard to see because their eyes don’t reflect like the eyes of deer. ”
These are the types of details that bring stories to life. “You have to surprise your readers,” says Kurtz. “Remember how it was as a child, when your parents told you the same things over and over? Well, readers don’t like it [either] when you tell them the same things over and over. ”
Her own description of cold? Try this, from her book Jakarta Missing (Green willow/ HarperCollins 2001):
Dad was right. Anyone would have to be crazy to want to live through this kind of winter. I know now about days when the hair inside your nose freezes and you feel like someone stuck a toothbrush up there. I know about days when the wind hits you in the face so hard that you gasp for breath and think you must still be asleep and dreaming of Antarctica. The snow squeaks like Styrofoam when you walk to school, and you can see die breath of every car that passes.
I’ve lived in Minnesota. When I read this, I see three critical details that tell me she’s nailed it:
* The freezing hairs inside your nose.
* The squeaky snow.
* The exhaust plumes of the cars.
You don’t have to have lived in the frigid north to know all of this . . . but you do have to have done more than superficial research.
So we now have three basic rules:
1 . Write what you know.
2. Know what it is that you do and don’t know.
3. Make good use of details.
Let’s look a bit more at the third. How can you use vivid details if you’re writing about remote star systems, exotic physics, or alien ecosystems?
I think the answer often lies in the non-science-fictional parts of the story. Elsewhere in this issue is a story I set partially on Naiad, a moon of Neptune. Obviously, I’ve never been there. All the facts I had I got from the Internet. But I know the Naiad I depict because I have decades of experience in the stark landscapes of the American Southwest, sitting on cliff tops and staring at the distant play of light and shadow. These are vivid, emotional memories and I drew on them to get a feel for what it might be like to watch Neptune from an airless vantage point that zips around it every seven hours. I took it a step farther by letting my protagonist, Floyd, know the same deserts I do. He’s not me, but I know where he’s been and I know the details diat make up his background. Those I can Tiffany Keys bring into the story with absolute certainty. If my Naiad works, it’s because the reader senses my certainty about Floyd and his deserts and grants me leave to present a Naiad about which nobody actually knows much.
At heart, this is the same thing as Oltion putting in time in the tank. But instead of going out and finding a tank to sit in, I was recalling tanks I’d experienced long before I knew there would ever be a story. It’s the lazy man’s form of research.
Here’s another example. I don’t have to do any special research to know what it’s like to be around grizzly bears. Once, in Alaska, hiking through eight-foot-tall grass (yes, there is such a thing as eight-foot-tall grass; that’s an interesting detail in itself), I found a spot where something had smashed flat a circle of grass about a dozen feet in diameter. A bit later, I found steaming bear droppings in the trail.
Another time, also hiking in Alaska, a friend and I came upon a man and three young children in a meadow above an alder thicket. Stopping to talk, we found they’d been awakened that morning by a grizzly sniffing at their tent, near the alder thicket tiirough which my friend and I had just hiked. As the father gestured toward the woods, right on cue, the bear emerged, sniffing again at the t茅nt and hesitating as though trying to figure out if it was worth ripping it open to see what was inside.
All interest in hiking lost, the six of us waited, comforted by the presence of the father’s very big gun (a slug-breech 12-gauge for those with an interest in such things). Eventually my friend escorted the kids back through the woods while the father and I packed up his tent, frighteningly close to the alders, and carried it back through the woods.
How would I draw on this for a story?
Well, to start with, packing isn’t the best verb to describe what we did with that tent. It was more like rolling it up like a giant cigar, sleeping bags inside. The whole process took about thirty seconds. Nor did we simply “carry” it though the woods. Scurried is a better verb. All the while we were talking randomly, because the thing we most emphatically did not want to do was startle the bear, which still had to be somewhere in the vicinity. “Hi bear. Good bear. Go away bear. ” That type of thing.
Then there was the stream at the base of the woods, whose crossing bought us a few yards of precious open space. “Cold” was an understatement. It was 32.00 1-degree water that made my shins feel as though they crinkled as I waded through. Once across, there was the silent agony of doubling over for endless seconds . . . dozens of endless seconds . . . waiting for my shinbones to forgive me: a soundless scream that only those who’ve waded through ice water can fully comprehend- all compounded by the overwhelming desire to get back to town now to buy my own very big gun.
You cannot invent details like this.
“Writers have good powers of observation,” Kurtz says. “That’s more important than imagination.”
So we can now add a fourth rule: draw, when possible and appropriate, on your own experience. You are the world expert on yourself so this is something nobody else knows better. Obviously, you can’t base the entire story directly on this, or it won’t be fiction, let along science fiction. But you can use some of it directly and more, indirectly. I may never write about grizzly bears, but if I ever need an alien predator, I know what memories I’ll draw from.
I can almost hear the objections that most people haven’t waded through ice water, carrying cigar-rolled tents. But everyone has done something.
One of my day jobs is writing profiles. (Analog Biologs are only a few.) I also write essays. People often tell me their lives are too boring either for profiles or for writing their own essays, but I’ve never met an adult without at least one interesting experience. The trick is recognizing tiiem in yourself. Or, if you really don’t like digging into your past, learn to be a good interviewer (another way of being an observer) so you can draw on other people’s stories.
A related skill is one a family member used to refer to as collecting “rat facts.” (Think pack rat.) Writers accumulate trivia. You have to be careful how much of it you stuff into any given story because it’s easy to start showing off, but these factoids are a magnificent library from which you can often borrow just the right detail.
So we now have five rules. To recapitulate:
1. Write what you know.
2. Know what it is that you know.
3. Make good use of details.
4. Look for details in experience (yours or other people’s).
5. Collect information. You never know what will someday be useful.
One final bit of advice comes from an Icelandic proverb Kurtz likes to cite: “Keen is the eye of the visitor.”
A related aphorism, in journalism, is that the best reporters are often introverted outsiders: people who like to watch life rather than participate more directiy. I’m not sure if this really is true – I’ve known a lot of reporters who are enthusiastic, outgoing people. The “fly on the wall” may be more archetype than reality.
But the truth in the archetype is simple. The best writers observe things. Sometimes these are details about the universe. Sometimes they are grand visions that instill the sense of wonder about which science fiction fans wax lyrical. Other times, the observations take the form of details about people or the lives we live: overlooked realities that ring true as they float across the page before us.
When writers do this, their stories feel authentic. They come to life, even when they’re about star drives, black holes, alien worlds, or things that go bump in the night. And that’s when readers remember them.