Writing Right with Dmitri: The Universes we Make
Created | Updated Nov 13, 2011
Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.
Writing Right with Dmitri: The Universes We Make
What kind of universe are your characters living in?
Captain Picard: Computer! Freeze program! Computer, this isn't what I wanted at all. Much too violent. I'm here to relax, not to dodge bullets. Reconfigure! – Manhunt, Season 2 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation
I'm not talking about science fiction here – or at least, not just about science fiction. The thing about writing fictional worlds is that you, the writer, are in essence defining the rules of those worlds. For instance, if you're writing noir, you and you alone decide exactly how important the gat1 is to your plot, and how high the body count has to be. (Yeah, I know, the publisher's going to have something to say about that, too.) If you're writing fantasy, you have to choose whether your wizard can change the ontological nature of reality simply by waving his arms, or whether there's fasting and meditation involved. Like that.
What you personally believe about your fictional world is going to set the parameters. You're going to indicate these parameters to your reader by the way you describe persons, events, and setting. Take this story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, her famous 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. After intriguing us with the statement, 'It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer,' the narrator goes on to tell us about herself and her husband:
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and PERHAPS – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) – PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do? – >'The Yellow Wallpaper', by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This is going to be one of those universes, you can tell right away. The kind where the husband gets the blame for whatever goes wrong. We don't know if the house is haunted yet – but we know that John can do no right. It's that kind of universe. As writers, we are moral arbiters of our characters' behaviour. In Cujo, Stephen King seems to be saying that women who cheat on their husbands deserve to be attacked by rabid Saint Bernards. In Joshua: Then and Now, Mordecai Richler seems to favour win-win outcomes, even for crooks from Odessa. They do these things, as most writers do, without a word of apology to their readers. After all, if you don't believe in the writer's view of the world, you can go elsewhere.
Writers are always doing that, you know, taking the way they see the world for granted. This is a fine thing to do, as long as you play fair and let the reader in on your particular tinfoil-hat perspective. It helps to be a bit subtle about it. Let the reader figure it out, because that's part of the fun2. Take Philip K Dick (always, and forever, he's one of the greats). In the story 'Beyond the Door', Dick tells us about a man who buys a cuckoo clock for his wife. He got it wholesale. Dick doesn't seem to like either marriage partner – the man is an insensitive cheapskate, and the wife is a passive-aggressive adulteress – but that's not the weirdest thing about the universe they're in. Of course not, because we are in Philip K Dick-land:
In the weeks that followed after Doris left, Larry and the cuckoo clock got along even worse than before. For one thing, the cuckoo stayed inside most of the time, sometimes even at twelve o'clock when he should have been busiest. And if he did come out at all he usually spoke only once or twice, never the correct number of times. And there was a sullen, uncooperative note in his voice, a jarring sound that made Larry uneasy and a little angry. – 'Beyond the Door', by Philip K Dick
Read the whole story, I double-dog dare you. Personally, my sympathies are with the cuckoo.
Not only do we decide the rules of our fictional universes in terms of acceptable behaviour for characters and household appliances, we decide what our audience is supposed to think of the décor (wallpaper, for example), weather (re-read the descriptions in The Shining), and locale. Some places are romantic, some are not, right? How dare those people set The Guardian in Pittsburgh! Nobody thinks Pittsburgh is romantic unless they come from McKee's Rocks3.
Once upon a time, O Henry took umbrage at Frank Norris' comment that only certain US cities were suitable settings for interesting fiction. We know he took umbrage at this, because he quotes Norris at the beginning of his short story, 'A Municipal Report'. What Norris said was, 'Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee!' Aha, said O Henry, the Southerner. We'll see about that.
'A Municipal Report' is all about the fact that expectations and prejudices can be wrong, wrong, wrong. To start off this heart-warming (and heart-breaking) tale, O Henry takes a literary agent to unromantic Nashville. Remember, this place was a genteel backwater until the 1970s. In the period O Henry is describing, these people were living in the aftermath of a war they had lost. Tennessee at the time was sort of like Thuringia in 1950:
I stepped off the train at 8 P.M. Having searched the thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in the form of a recipe.
Take a London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.
The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soup; but 'tis enough – 'twill serve.
I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression for me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. – 'A Municipal Report', by O Henry
'A Municipal Tale' is an amazing piece of observation and an absorbing story. It takes place in a universe in which individuals are often much, much better than they seem to be. In other words, this Nashville is situated firmly in O Henry territory, a land which makes us hopeful about humans.
What kind of world do your characters inhabit? Is it one in which cuckoo clocks sulk if you don't talk to them nicely? Is it a universe in which good triumphs over evil? Or where people get to talk to each other for a change?
How many gats do you allow per page?
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