PRACTICAL THINKING. — Two essays about writing fiction.
「Thoughts about writing fiction」
Often we speak in order to listen to ourselves and find out what we think. — Some thoughts about writing fiction grew out of my habit of replying with a rather longish comment.
「Learning theory and text structure」
. . . practical thinking . . .
Yes. Mouths are mostly for telling something to others. For teaching. For communicating. Ears are for being told, listening, learning what others tell us. We might think that we learn primarily by listening more and speaking less.
Very true. We do learn by listening more and speaking less, but up to a point.
We really have less introspection than we assume.
Often we speak in order to listen to ourselves and find out what we think.
That, and to develop our thoughts.
(So there exists this middle position between talking and listening to other talk. Us scientists are often in that middle position. Donald Hebb often wrote about this. He was the man behind neural networks.)
Karl Pribram and other showed that it's often biologically easier to pass the information back through our nervous system to process it, than for one part of the brain to "send" it to another part. Most parts of the brain are actually very loosely connected, and with many entirely parallel fibers.
Learning recursively is one of the most powerful methods for achieving clarity.
That's why scientists are always arguing. Not primarily to convince each other. Nor primarily to communicate to each other. (Which surprises many people, who think we write to communicate primarily to others, rather than ourselves. Most of mathematics, for example, would not exist if it were written for others . . . but that may be rather obvious.)
A lot of apparent speaking is elliptical or an intermediate product. It would be nice if everyone read everything completely. But self feedback is one of the several primary ways of learning. It's a habit, sometimes a good one.
I would say, don't be too bothered by it.
Indeed, one thing a writer can do is learn to anticipate this phenomenon, and use it.
At 1/3 through a text expect the reader stopped reading and started thinking.
At 2/3 they would respond.
So break at 2/3, as opposed to what you'd have written otherwise, and respond to what the reader is thinking.
Then repeat the previous 1/3.
Then continue.
Then the readers find you inside their head very naturally, as a friend.
Furthermore, you can write the opposite of what you think for the first 1/3, have the reader reply with what your position would be, and continue from there as if you began with your own position, and the reader thinks your idea was really their own idea, and you're agreeing with them, rather them with you. Which makes your writing more persuasive, for obvious reasons.
EXAMPLE : RECENT SHORT FICTION 1
EXAMPLE : RECENT SHORT FICTION 2
「What about worldbuilding?」
. . . practical thinking about practical thinking . . .
Contrary to my usual habit, I'll be doing a worldbuilding post sometime. Sometime in the near future.
A: Gentlemen, world building seems great fun. I, too, might try it out sometime soon.
B: Wait a minute.
A: What?
B: You've already published your thing.
A: Yeah.
B: You've published several things.
A: Yeah.
B: You mean to say that . . . you didn't bother think about the world? I mean, before you began writing the text?
A: . . .
B: All that stuff, those details, the stories behind the characters, how they mesh neatly . . . you didn't write that out first?
A: Yeah. I mean, no.
B: So.
A: What?
B: You kept all that in your head?
A: No, that's almost as much work as writing it down. I didn't write it down. I'm also not gonna try and remember it.
B: . . .
A: Relax, don't try too hard. If you try too hard, goes an old joke, the shit just comes out. That's not your desired outcome, I'd bet.
B: What the fuck! — Is that really what you should be telling people?
A: No . . .
B: Then —
A: But it's true. — It's true. Ttttrrruuueee.
. . .
I write a pitch, when I sit down to write a story.
I write a pitch. This is the most important part of the story.
If you can't create scenes that people will remember, not only is it harder to market, but the story is harder to write.
These scenes, or gestures, are generally straightforward.
Cavaradossi is not mock executed. He really dies then. Tosca sees it. He dies for no fault, but only because Tosca loves him and is known to love him. Therefore he suffers for the same reason he has to be happy. Chased by soldiers, she kills herself by jumping from a balcony.
That's it. (Now go write all the rest of the story. Finish the rest of the story. Send it off.)
I have some idea about the outline. Maybe I write the outline. Maybe. If I feel like it. If I don't, then I don't.
I run that by a few people. Then I design the characters. I may illustrate a few of the them then and there. It helps me come up with what my description of them should be. Characters matter. People connect with them. Give them something interesting to connect with.
People meet boring people every day. Let them meet somebody interesting.
If you get bored anyway, your character can always later wade into the ocean. ``And that was the last time I saw him. Had I know this at the time, things would have been different.''
Of course they would've. And now you have melancholy, great, plus you got rid of your character the minute he got tedious, yet the pitch is coming closer to being realized.
What about the world? The world should be living and breathing. (This takes a lot of revising.)
The world itself, however, I make up as I go along, from the pitch, possibly making corrections in earlier chapters as necessary. That almost totally randomly.
Revisions can add depth. That, too, randomly.
Let's learn from John Wheeler, that great physicist.
Consider the game where a person comes in, and poses a series of questions to a sequence of people.
Each one answers yes or no. He who comes in later tries to guess the word.
Wheeler asked, Does it make any difference whether the group predetermined the word, agreed upon what it is in advance, or if each person randomly answers yes or no, but does so in a way consistent with the random answers of all the previous individuals? After all, they heard all the previous questions and answers. (While predetermined nonlocality is possible, determinism does not require it. Yet participatory indeterministic aspects of reality are nearly synonymous with nonlocality.)
The result, the word guessed, is indistinguishable; thus the appearance of determinism and predeterminism in our quantum mechanical, indeterministic world. The same in writing.
Is the man Tedd a) a man (Y or N, flip coin), b) a woman (Y or N, flip coin), c) a microwave oven (Y or N, flip coin), d) a whole chicken bought at the local supermarket defrosting on a countertop (Y or N, flip coin)?
Y,Y,N,Y.
Fine. Artemis who lives on the moon descended to buy whiskey. She saw the beautiful Theresa buying whiskey, worse it was the last bottle in the store of the kind Artemis wanted. Artemis confronted her, and transformed Theresa into Tedd. Artemis, however, muddled up the programming on her wand. The result was a whole frozen chicken on the floor. Let nothing go to waste, thought the grocer. He took it off the floor, figuring kids has played with it, packaged it up, and sold it to WooJin. The chicken defrosts and lo! there's Tedd. Woojin sees him transform. Theresa decided she likes Woojin. Problem is she's currently a man. Artemis is back on the moon, but surely she'll descend to go shopping again. The good news is that Woojin offers to help out. He'll crack into the smart city cameras and hook up the feed to Theresa/Tedd. They'll spot Artemis and confront her; meanwhile the smart city automated personalities detect the hack.
The original pitch only had Artemis being captured in a high tech environment.
Then, try to display the tips of icebergs that suggest the masses underneath. And then leave many loose ends, so that the world seems living and breathing. In reality loose ends are rarely tied up from any given character's perspective, therefore let it all be the same in a story. (Bodhisattva Toge, the old novel, made rather extreme use of that.)
This gives the appearance of a very carefully built up world constructed in advance. Phrase repetition completes the appearance. The world is detailed and everything has a backstory, many things are happening, and they are all connected, but it was not constructed in advance of writing the final text.
Marvin Chester: ``Write down the answer, then do the computation is how you calculate in quantum mechanics.'' Maybe that also works in fiction . . . Everything has a backstory in the sense that it will have a backstory. Everything has a backstory, and the backstory has a backstory, like everything has a past, but the author, like nature, doesn't know what that is until they're asked about it.
ABOUT ME
I'm a scientist who writes fantasy and science fiction under various names.
The magazines which I most recommend are: Compelling Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Writers of the Future.
WISE GUYS — practical thinking
FISHING — thinking about tools and technology
TEA TIME — philosophy
BOOK RECOMMENDED — fiction and nonfiction reviewed
©2017 tibra. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This is a work of fiction. Events, names, places, characters are either imagined or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real events or persons or places is coincidental . . . . Illustrations, Images: tibra.
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Excelente post felicidades
Thanks.
Good Post. Well thought.
Thanks.
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Well written :)
Thanks for these wonderful articles. I found them both informative and entertaining. As a writer myself this really appealed to me.
I have included this post in this weeks The Library. Thank you.
Thanks for the inclusion. Glad that you liked them.