Write what someone knows

“Bad books on writing tell you to “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW”, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.” – Joe Haldeman

And yet Joe Haldeman’s novel The Forever War was heavily influenced by his experiences as a Vietnam vet. I’m nowhere near brave enough to disagree with Joe Haldeman but fortunately I don’t think I have to. We agree from different directions.

Five Lies Creative Writing Teachers Tell makes the same point. It’s good but often misused advice, and it’s the misuse that gets dealt with on that link: the advice being hammered in to the point where you’re not even allowed to use your imagination. As the writer points out, J.K. Rowling isn’t really a wizard, but “The good tutor will get to know you, and encourage work which is attentive to your experiences”.

I would take that further: “your or at least someone’s experiences”.

Because, yes, writing has to start with what is known. My most basic level of knowledge is knowing what it is to be alive. I’m a human being with a place in the world – sensory input going 24/7, human relationships, knowing what I like and what I don’t. A character on a page has to give the impression of a similar level of existence. If you can’t believe they existed before you opened the book, or that they will go on existing after you close it, then the author isn’t writing what they know.

But with that given, then it’s time to start making stuff up. Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity is told from the point of view of the native of a planet with a surface gravity 700 times stronger than our own, which is laughably petty compared to the world of Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg, where it’s 67 billion times stronger. Neither author can claim first-hand knowledge of such environments, but they too can start with the basic knowledge of being alive and take it from there.

My type of science fiction tends to be closer to home, with mostly human characters. I’ve never time travelled – but I have been in some fairly insalubrious third world slums, so if I want to imagine a European city of previous centuries, that’s what I picture. I’ve never worn a spacesuit, but I have scuba dived: I know the sounds and sensations and slightly claustrophobic feeling of being enclosed by your personal life support system, keeping you alive bare centimetres from an environment that could kill you, simultaneously giving you immense freedom and severely curtailing your possibilities. I’ve never been in a spaceship, but I’ve travelled by aeroplane, so I know that illusion of normality coupled with the ever-present knowledge at the back of your head that you’re in the belly of a fantastically complicated machine hurtling through the sky several miles above the ground and that isn’t normal at all.

Other things I have done: driven a car; sailed a boat; grown up in an army family; fired several types of gun; stood on the floor of an active volcano; walked up Snowdon, across Salisbury Plain and through an Indonesian rain forest (not all on the same day); flown an aeroplane under supervision; taken off, flown and landed a glider solo; been in unrequited love. I’ve never divorced, had a serious illness or died, but friends have and (sorry guys) you can bet I was paying close attention. And each of those experiences, or scenarios developed and extrapolated from them, has appeared in my published writing.

Ted, the titular teen of The Teen, the Witch & the Thief, has a stepfather Barry with whom he doesn’t get on. An unexpected pleasure of writing The Comeback of the King was being able to give new depth to Barry that was entirely consistent with what we learned of him in the first book, but which showed a lot more sympathy. The reason: between writing the first and second books, I became a stepfather of a teenager myself. I tip my hat to all Barrys everywhere.

Alumni of the Milford writers’ workshop have access to the Milford Skills List. Everyone who attends gets a chance to write down a few areas of expertise that they are willing to share with other members. And fantastically useful it is too. I was recently able to quiz a retired GP on the best kind of fracture to have, from a dramatic point of view, and how to perform a field amputation. I doubt she has any direct experience of the latter, but again, based on what she does know she was able to extrapolate.

So there you have it – write what you know, or failing that, find out what someone else knows, and write that. And then do something new with it.

Blimey, um, I mean, of course I got it right

Everyone likes to be right. When that rightness can be traced back to luck and a bit of intuition – or, if you like, pure accident – then it’s even better.

The contention of The New World Order, though its seventeenth century characters lack the vocabulary and scientific knowledge to work it out, is that around 35,000 BC the majority of a subspecies of the genus Homo disappeared through a wormhole into a parallel Earth. The few that remained soon died out in our world altogether, leaving only tantalising mythological hints, until in the nineteenth century some of their skeletons were discovered and identified in Germany’s Neander valley (or, in German, “Neander thal”). I see you’ve got it.

The ones who left develop a civilisation parallel to ours, in fact slightly ahead, so that when in our seventeenth century they find a way back to this world, calling themselves the Holekhor, they are at what we would call an early twentieth century level of technology.

At the time of writing I couldn’t get a definitive answer on whether our ancestors and Neandertals could interbreed, but it was necessary for the plot that (a) they could but (b) rarely did, at least, successfully. For a lark, I declared as fact some purely theoretical, off-the-cuff New Scientist speculation that they were the source of our genes for blue eyes and red hair (both mostly found in Europeans or their descendants, and Neandertals do seem to have been most numerous in Europe). But Sir George Monk does the maths:

“The existence of Master Matthews showed that English and Holekhor could interbreed, and reports from certain quarters of the garrison towns indicated that interbreeding was frequent … Yet the fact that the same towns were not crawling with little red-haired bastards showed that successful interbreeding was rare … Given a fixed population of Holekhor, still very much a minority in England, Monk could see that within a couple of generations they would have all but vanished, absorbed into the main body of the English.”

So, reader, imagine my joy at reading “Modern human females and male Neandertals had trouble making babies. Here’s why“. I was right! As Sir George couldn’t possibly have told you, it’s all down to wonky genes – DNA analysis shows that male Neandertals “had mutations in three immune genes, including one that produces antigens that can elicit an immune response in pregnant women, causing them to reject and miscarry male fetuses with those genes.”

So there you have it – “facts” about the Neandertals devised purely for authorial convenience, turning out to be true anyway. For your jobbing sf author, it doesn’t get much better.

 

Why everyone should be a science fiction fan

Ten years ago Giles Coren‘s first and so far only novel was published. He got a £30k advance, it was slated in reviews, it won a Bad Sex Award, and combined hardback and paperback sales barely nudged the 1000 mark. He retired hurt, not to mention baffled, and stuck to non-fiction.

Ten years later he felt brave enough to make a documentary about it, which I caught on Sky last night. It was really quite touching as you saw the penny begin to drop. He spoke to the reviewers. He listened in on a book club tearing it apart. He took the first chapters to a creative writing course workshop. He tried rereading it himself and found it unbearable. (He couldn’t get through the Bad Sex Award-winning passage without breaking down into laughter.) He listened in awe to the likes of David Mitchell and Jeffrey Archer as they described their highly disciplined writing habits, and admitted to the latter that he had basically been lazy.

And he came to the conclusion that this was the first novel everyone has – the one that should be written and then spend the rest of eternity in a trunk in the attic. Only, because he was Giles Coren, his got sold for a £30k advance. You sensed that even he felt the injustice of this. No one likes being done a favour.

But here’s the thing. Coren is in his late 40s. I can’t imagine his discoveries and revelations being news to anyone past their late twenties or even late teens. I came to the conclusion that I’ve been spoiled by growing up in the science fiction community, where expertise and experience flow like milk and honey. I read Dave Langford’s columns in 8000 Plus. I went to Milford. I jostled with the large crowd trying to get through the narrow doorway of Interzone acceptance. I knew it took hard work. I knew that if you didn’t think this was your best yet then you didn’t send it in. How did anyone not know that?

Conclusion: everyone should be an sf fan.

One thing Coren didn’t do was confront his agent or his editor of ten years ago to ask what the hell they thought they were doing, letting it be published in the first place. They must have known it was rubbish. Sadly, we can probably guess the answer: he was Giles Coren and they assumed it would sell. You can’t blame them for the commercial realities of life.

The programme ended on a high note with Coren talking to William Nicholson, who is in his late sixties, the winner of many awards, and who thinks he’s just about getting the hang of it now.

The one drawback of the entire show was that for a terrible five minutes I found myself warming to Jeffrey Archer.