Constructing a Science Fiction Novel
Shannar
Пишет Тимофей Корякин ([info]timofeikoryakin) в [info]zelazny_ru
@ 2005-10-14 00:12:00
*Constructing a Science Fiction Novel*
_*CONSTRUCTING A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL*_
Roger Zelazny
/Sylvia Burack asked me for an essay for The Writer, and I did the following
piece. A large chunk of it tells of the considerations which went into the
composition of my novel Eye of Cat. / don't believe I've ever recorded the
things I do and think in writing a book in such detail, before or since. Still,
it's a short piece, and for those of you who care about such matters I am
including it here./
The late James Blish was once asked where he got his ideas for science fiction
stories. He gave one of the usual general answers we all do-from observation,
from reading, from the sum total of all his experiences, et cetera. Then
someone asked him what he did if no ideas were forthcoming from these. He
immediately replied, "I plagiarize myself."
He meant, of course, that he looked over his earlier works for roads
unfollowed, trusting in the persistence of concerns and the renewal of old
fascinations to stimulate some new ideas. And this works. I've tried it
occasionally, and I usually find my mind flooded.
But I've been writing for over twenty years, and I know something about how my
mind works when I am seeking a story or telling one. I did not always know the
things that I know now, and much of my earlier writing involved
groping-defining themes, deciding how I really felt about people and ideas.
Consequently, much of this basic thinking accomplished, it is easier for me to
fit myself into the driver's seat of a fresh new story than it once was. It may
be the latest model, but the steering is similar, and once I locate the
gearshift I know what to do with it.
For example: Settings. For me, science fiction has always represented the
rational-the extension into a future or alien environment of that which is
known now-whereas fantasy represented the metaphysical-the introduction of the
unknown, usually into an alien environment. The distinctions are sometimes
blurred, and sometimes it is fun to blur them. But on a practical, working
level, this generally is how I distinguish the two. Either sort of story (I
never tire of repeating) has the same requirements as a piece of general
fiction, with the added necessity of introducing that exotic environment. Of
the three basic elements of any fiction-plot, character, and setting-it is the
setting that requires extra attention in science fiction and fantasy. Here, as
nowhere else, one walks a tightrope between overexplaining and overassuming,
between boring the reader with too many details and losing the reader by not
providing enough.
I found this difficult at first. I learned it by striving for economy of
statement, by getting the story moving quickly and then introducing the
background piecemeal. Somewhere along the line I realized that doing this
properly could solve two problems: The simple exposition of the material could,
if measured out in just the right doses, become an additional means of raising
reader interest. I employed this technique to an extreme in the opening to my
story "Unicorn Variation," in which I postponed for several pages describing
the unusual creature passing through a strange locale.
A bizarrerie of fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty
deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of
evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest
nature-swirl of black ashes assembled in prancing cadence to the lowing note of
desert wind down the arroyo behind buildings as empty yet filled as the pages
of unread books or stillnesses between the notes of a song.
As you see, I was careful to tell just enough to keep the reader curious. By
the time it became apparent that it was a unicorn in a New Mexico ghost town, I
had already introduced another character and a conflict.
Characters are less of a problem for me than settings. People are usually still
people in science fiction environments. Major figures tend to occur to me
almost fully developed, and minor ones do not require much work. As for their
physical descriptions, it is easy at first to over-describe. But how much does
the reader really need? How much can the mind take in at one gulp? See the
character entirely but mention only three things, I decided. Then quit and get
on with the story. If a fourth characteristic sneaks in easily, okay. But leave
it at that initially. No more. Trust that other features will occur as needed,
so long as you know. "He was a tall, red-faced kid with one shoulder lower than
the other." Were he a tall, red-faced kid with bright blue eyes (or
large-knuckled hands or storms of freckles upon his cheeks) with one shoulder
lower than the other, he would actually go out of focus a bit rather than grow
clearer in the mind's eye. Too much detail creates a sensory overload,
impairing the reader's ability to visualize. If such additional details are
really necessary for the story line itself, it would be better to provide
another dose later on, after allowing time for the first to sink in. "Yeah," he
replied, blue eyes flashing.
I've mentioned settings and characters as typical examples of the development
of writing reflexes, because reflexes are what this sort of work becomes with
practice- and then, after a time, it should become second nature and be
dismissed from thought. For this is just apprentice work-tricks-things that
everybody in the trade has to learn. It is not, I feel, what writing is all
about.
The important thing for me is the development and refinement of one's
perception of the world, the experimentation with viewpoints. This lies at the
heart of storytelling, and all of the mechanical techniques one learns are
merely tools. It is the writer's approach to material that makes a story
unique.
For example, I have lived in the Southwest for nearly a decade now. At some
point I became interested in Indians. I began attending festivals and dances,
reading anthropology, attending lectures, visiting museums. I became acquainted
with Indians. At first, my interest was governed only by the desire to know
more than I did. Later, though,
I began to feel that a story was taking shape at some lower level of my
consciousness. I waited. I continued to acquire information and experience in
the area.
One day my focus narrowed to the Navajo. Later, I realized that if I could
determine why my interest had suddenly taken this direction, I would have a
story. This came about when I discovered the fact that the Navajo had developed
their own words-several hundred of them- for naming the various parts of the
internal combustion engine. It was not the same with other Indian tribes I knew
of. When introduced to cars, other tribes had simply taken to using the Anglo
words for carburetors, pistons, spark plugs, etc. But the Navajo had actually
come up with new Navajo words for these items-a sign, as I saw it, of their
independence and their adaptability.
I looked further. The Hopis and the Pueblo Indians, neighbors to the Navajo,
had rain dances in their rituals. The Navajo made no great effort to control
the weather in this fashion. Instead, they adapted to rain or drought.
Adaptability. That was it. It became the theme of my novel. Suppose, I asked
myself, I were to take a contemporary Navajo and by means of the time-dilation
effects of space travel coupled with life extension treatments, I saw to it
that he was still alive and in fairly good shape, say, one hundred seventy
years from now? There would, of necessity, be gaps in his history during the
time he was away, a period in which a lot of changes would have occurred here
on Earth. That was how the idea for Eye of Cat came to me.
But an idea is not a science fiction novel. How do you turn it into one?
I asked myself why he would have been away so frequently. Suppose he'd been a
really fine tracker and hunter? I wondered. Then he could have been a logical
choice as a collector of alien-life specimens. That rang true, so I took it
from there. A problem involving a nasty alien being could serve as a reason for
bringing my Navajo character out of retirement and provide the basis for a
conflict.
I also wanted something representing his past and the Navajo traditions,
something more than just his wilderness abilities-some things he had turned his
back on. Navajo legend provided me with the chindi, an evil spirit I could set
to bedeviling him. It occurred to me then that this evil spirit could be made
to correspond with some unusual creature he himself had brought to Earth a long
time ago.
That was the rough idea. Though not a complete plot summary, this will show how
the story took form, beginning with a simple observation and leading to the
creation of a character and a situation. This small segment of the story would
come under the heading of "inspiration"; most of the rest involved the
application of reasoning to what the imagination had so far provided.
This required some tricky considerations. I firmly believe that I could write
the same story-effectively-in dozens of different ways: as a comedy, as a
tragedy, as something in between; from a minor character's point of view, in
the first person, in the third, in a different tense, et cetera. But I also
believe that for a particular piece of fiction, there is one way to proceed
that is better than any of the others. I feel that the material should dictate
the form. Making it do this properly is for me the most difficult and rewarding
part of the storytelling act. It goes beyond all of the reflex tricks, into the
area of aesthetics.
So I had to determine what approach would best produce the tone that I wished
to achieve. This, of course, required clarifying my own feelings.
My protagonist, Billy Blackhorse Singer, though born into a near-neolithic
environment, later received an advanced formal education. That alone was enough
to create some conflicts within him. One may reject one's past or try to
accommodate to it. Bill rejected quite a bit. He was a very capable man, but he
was overwhelmed. I decided to give him an opportunity to come to terms with
everything in his life.
I saw that this was going to be a novel of character. Showing a character as
complex as Billy's would require some doing. His early life was involved with
the myths, legends, shamanism of his people, and since this background was
still a strong element in his character, I tried to show this by interspersing
in the narrative my paraphrases of different sections of the Navajo creation
myth and other appropriate legendary material. I decided to do some of this as
poetry, some original, some only loosely based on traditional materials. This,
I hoped, would give the book some flavor as well as help to shape my character.
The problem of injecting the futuristic background material was heightened,
because I was already burdening the narrative with the intermittent doses of
Indian material. I needed to find a way to encapsulate and abbreviate, so I
stole a trick from Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. I introduced "Disk" sections,
analogous to his "Newsreel" and "Camera Eye" sequences-a few pages here and
there made up of headlines, news reports, snatches of popular songs, to give
the flavor of the times. This device served to get in a lot of background
without slowing the pace, and its odd format was almost certain to be
sufficiently interesting visually to arouse the reader's curiosity.
The evolving plot required the introduction of a half dozen secondary
characters-and not just minor ones whom I might bring in as completely stock
figures. Pausing to do full-scale portraits of each-by means of long
flashbacks, say-could be fatal to the narrative, however, as they were
scheduled to appear just as the story was picking up in pace. So I took a
chance and broke a major writing rule.
Almost every book you read about writing will say, "Show. Don't tell." That is,
you do not simply tell the reader what a character is like; you demonstrate it,
because telling will generally produce a distancing effect and arouse a ho-hum
response in the reader. There is little reader identification, little empathy
created in merely telling about people.
I decided that not only was I going to tell the reader what each character was
like, I was going to try to make it an interesting reading experience. In fact,
I had to.
If you are going to break a rule, capitalize on it. Do it big. Exploit it. Turn
it into a virtue.
I captioned a section with each character's name, followed the name with a
comma and wrote one long, complex, character-describing sentence, breaking its
various clauses and phrases into separate lines, so that it was strung out to
give the appearance of a Whitmanesque piece of poetry. As with my "Disk"
sections, I wanted to make this sufficiently interesting visually to pull the
reader through what was, actually, straight exposition.
Another problem in the book arose when a number of telepaths used their unusual
communicative abilities to form temporarily a composite or mass-mind. There
were points at which I had to show this mind in operation. Finnegans Wake
occurred to me as a good model for the stream of consciousness I wanted to use
for this. And Anthony Burgess's Joysprick, which I'd recently read, had
contained a section that could be taken as a primer for writing in this
fashion. I followed.
Then, for purposes of achieving verisimilitude, I traveled through Canyon de
Chelly with a Navajo guide. As I wrote the portions of the book set in the
Canyon, I had before me, along with my memories, a map, my photographs, and
archaeological descriptions of the route Billy followed. This use of realism, I
hoped, would help to achieve some balance against the impressionism and radical
storytelling techniques I had employed elsewhere.
These were some of the problems I faced in writing Eye of Cat and some of the
solutions I used to deal with them. Thematically, though, many of the questions
I asked myself and many of the ideas I considered were things that had been
with me all along; only the technical solutions and the story's resolution were
different this time. In this respect, I was, at one level, still plagiarizing
my earlier self. Nothing wrong with that, if some growth has occurred in the
meantime.
From everything I've said, it may sound as if the novel was wildly
experimental. It wasn't. The general theme was timeless-a consideration of
change and adjustment, of growth. While science fiction often deals with the
future and bears exotic trappings, its real, deep considerations involve human
nature, which has been the same for a long time and which, I believe, will
continue much as it is for an even longer time. So in one sense we constantly
seek new ways to say old things. But human nature is a generality. The
individual does change, does adapt, and this applies to the writer as well as
to the characters. And it is in these changes-in self-consciousness,
perception, sensibility-that I feel the strongest, most valid stories have
their source, whatever the devices most suitable for their telling.
End
=*= Cut ===
http://livejournal.com/~zelazny_ru/15546.html