No matter what kind of writing you do, if it is going to be real writing it must relate to the real world. The farther you plan to venture from reality, the more real your writing needs to be. Every good piece of writing has a dialogue with reality going on. It connects back to the real world and to the writers’ place in that world. Or it should.
Those of us who write speculative fiction know that better than anyone.
But all writers need to be able to produce the illusion of reality. We can’t assume that our readers are going to accept what we tell them. Indeed if we want them to take in our story, the first step to reaching them is to build a world they can believe. This involves understanding that the world created will be an illusion, not actually a world. Like the street in a movie may not be a true street. It can be a set constructed to look like a street or part of one real street and the end of another in another country. It can be lit to look as if a storm is coming or given sound effects to suggest an army is approaching. It can be set up with props to suggest the distant past or future. In all of these cases, reality is an illusion created by suggestion and a few props. Even if the story happens in a simple ordinary house, your house, say, you must understand that it is still an illusion your story will offer a reader. You will not tell them every detail within the house, or even in a room. If you do try to exactly reproduce your house, I will take a book to tell it faithfully and you will bore your reader to death. They know what a house is. You need only a few things to suggest it, and then a few more things, perhaps only one, to suggest this is a particular house, room, place.
If you are a fantasy or science fiction writer, and wish to set your story in a place that does not exist, and which you have created, it is still an illusion. You cannot wholly recreate the world you have imagined, as some exhausted world builders do, only to discover they have no energy left for writing the story. You cannot be so enamored of your imaginary world that recreating it for an audience becomes more important than the story of their characters. The world is merely the setting for your story, though in some cases, a setting can also be a character. Look at the Australian writer Peter Corris whose detective novels are set in Sydney. In his books, the city is a character. I fell in love with the sentient city of Fork in Billy Thunder and The Nightgate and The Winter Door, and it truly became a character for me. The brilliant British writer, China Mieville makes the city a fabulous, vivid, meaty character in his truly brilliant science fiction fantasy novel Perdido Street Station. But in all cases, these books do not simply rely on faithfully recreating an imagined world. The writers know they are the background for their stories.
So, how to create an illusionary world that works as a background, whether is a mirroring of the real material world, or the evoking of an entirely imaginary world? The first thing is to know that not everything needs to go in. The wonderful Diana Wynn Jones, who died recently of a long and terrible illness, wrote a marvelous book called The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, in which she mocks the makers of imaginary worlds who force their characters to actually go to and do something in every single place on the imagined map. Since we do not visit every place on the map in the real world, why on earth would be do so in an imaginary world. In reality, we go where our life choices take us, and in an imagined world, we should only see the world through the eyes of the character, which is pursuing the story you have set up for them. The glimpses of world should be vivid and evocative enough that the reader will use each clue or detail to actually recreate your world, whether it be imaginary or based upon material reality, in their own imaginations.
You must always leave room for the reader to imagine. Let me say that again so you remember it. You must ALWAYS leave ROOM for the reader to imagine. If you tell too much detail, you leave out the gaps that will allow the reader to enter into your story. A few details about a room or a street or whatever our setting is, will work better if the reader is forced to do some of the work for then the setting moves from being your creation to something the reader is invested in. Leaving room means not telling everything. It means choosing what to tell, to evoke the room or space where your story happens. In the first blog in this series, I talked about place, and now I am talking about it again. This is how important it is.
The best way to select the detail that will work on your reader is to be observant and to collect exact detail. By collect, I mean that quite literally. A location scout for a movie will hunt around for the write places to set the story. You can do the same thing with your mental camera. Chances are if you are reading this blog series, you write and that probably means you are a natural observer, even if you write speculative fiction. But even if you are not a natural observer or if you feel you are not very perceptive, you can train yourself to be better.
The best way to train yourself is to practice. The mind is a muscle that can be trained to work better like any muscle in your body. You just need to focus on it and use it.
One great training exercise is what I call Impressionist Writing. This is a very simple and interesting idea which occurred to me after I heard – maybe overheard, now that I think of it- this story about a woman, an artist, who sometimes followed strangers for a little while, observing what they did, and writing it down. Sound a bit too much like a stalker? Well she was certainly an eccentric and of course you don’t have to follow people like an amateur detective to observe them. In fact you would probably get arrested if you tried it. What you can do is to station yourself in a place where a lot of people pass by. Somewhere people might linger for a bit is best – a train station, a bus stop, a café and airport, a school cafeteria, a library, a museum, a zoo, a shopping mall, a movie theatre. All of those places, incidentally, are places you might go in the course of your own life, and so it would be no big deal to go half an hour earlier to do a little Impressionist writing.
All you need is to sit somewhere alone, with a pen and paper or a little tape recorder or your electronic notepad, and simple observe what is going on around you and write it down. It is not a story but an observation exercise in which you are trying to absorb as much detail of the world as you can, and not it down. Since you are stationary, people will pass you by, so you will only have a short time to note clothes, mannerisms, snatches of conversation, actions. You will hear drifts of music, a few words; you will read graffiti, book titles, and part of the headline on a newspaper being carried by a man. Do not write in full sentences- this is very important because as soon as you do that, you will not be able to help yourself trying to link things to make a story.
Resist!
Write a list of observations. Be specific. Don’t say a man walks past talking. Tell me what he says. I don’t need all the words or even to understand. A few words will do. The fragmentary nature of the details you note would work brilliantly in a story because they will force a reader to embroider meaning, and once they do that, you have them in your grasp. Write down the things that will be the sort of clues that allow a reader to guess where you are, what time of day it is, what time of week it is. A mall on Christmas Eve will be a totally different place to a mall as seven am on a Sunday. As with the first blog, use your senses and note what they are taking in- the things you smell, see, hear, taste, touch/feel. Take in what will help you to establish place, and what will help you make that place vivid and unexpected in your story. Look for things that seem out of place. And write down the random thoughts you have about people and where you are, write down the snap judgments you make, fairly or unfairly, in the silence of your mind. The guesses and little mental stories you devise without even thinking about it. Do not censor or pretty up your thoughts. Do not make them ideologically sound or clever or deep. Just say it like it is, bluntly- after all you are the only person who is going to read it.
A writer must always be naked and vulnerable in front of himself or herself.
Note down memories that are sparked off by things you see and random thoughts of your real life that intrude- try to write them down exactly as they happen. Resist explaining your thoughts- this is not for a reader, this is an exercise to help you notice what you are noticing and how you are noticing. At the end of the exercise, you will have what will feel like an urban poem- read it out to yourself and relish the detail you have noted down. Relish it, and do it again and again until you do it automatically when you are anywhere alone for more than five minutes. Then do it again.
Despite having written so many books and short stories, I often undertake this exercise myself on a long tram ride. I get on a tram and simply ride it to the end, and then come all the way back. Sometimes I take it all the way to the other end, and then come back to my original stop. Occasionally I take my daughter with me- she is thirteen now, but I used to take her when she was eight as well. She would sit a little way from me and make her own observations. I was always enchanted and fascinated by how different her observations were, from three seats ahead on the other side of the tram. And when we observed the same things- and of course we did when something interesting or striking happened, as it invariably did, (the world is full of tiny strange dramas and mysteries- ask Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple) her thoughts and judgments and the memories the event sparks in her are always amazingly different to mine. Maybe you can try it with a friend, so you can compare notes after, but make sure you don’t sit together.
A real writer is a loner- at least when they write.
Isobelle carmody
