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Lies, damned lies... and fiction
Jan. 7th, 2010 08:30 amI'm currently reading volume 1 of what will eventually become a comprehensive 6-volume NESFA collection of the short stories, poems, and essays of Roger Zelazny. It's a lovely gift from Shoshanna, who knows how to take a hint.
Zelazny is one of my favorite authors (probably in the top 5), and it's fascinating reading his story notes (collected from a wide variety of sources) and the volume editor's delving into some of the allusions and other references in the stories. Some of the explications are nearly as long as the stories, and the discussion of the multiple recursive levels of allusion and literary and cultural and scientific references in his novella He Who Shapes runs nearly 10 (hardcover!) pages. I missed many (in some cases, most) of the embedded symbols and allusions, possibly because Zelazny can be such a beautiful writer that I was savoring the story rather than looking for them.
This first collection provides a fascinating example of how you can be literary and still tell a good story. Me, I'm just working on telling a good story. I'll worry about the deeper stuff once I've mastered the easier part.
I'm coming up on the end of volume 1, and will then take a longish break before moving on to volume 2. This collection was a treat I allowed myself to indulge in over the holidays, but like the holiday Brie, it's too rich to make a steady diet of.
One of the intriguing notions Zelazny offers is that fiction, of whatever genre, is the art of the lie: if it's fiction, then by definition it didn't happen. Ordinary literary writers lie about mundane matters we can see outside our window or inside our house. Writers of historical fiction lie about past events. Science fiction writers lie about science and technology, and use those lies to speculate about (usually) future aspects of the human condition. Fantasy writers lie about (usually) the past that never existed by taking even greater liberties with the truth (e.g., by invoking magic).
Those specific examples are mine; Zelazny had his own examples and did not propose a spectrum such as I've presented here. Neither did he examine the implications of these lies for fiction, other than elliptically, but it's a point worthy of exploration. In brief: good fiction is about telling believable lies. In more detail:
Literary fiction lies about recognizable people and situations, historical or otherwise. In one sense, that makes it both the subtlest and most sophisticated form of lying, because it must possess verisimilitude when compared with the world we can see with our eyes, and the easiest form, because we can see that world and pattern our fiction on it. Moreover, readers are not required to suspend disbelief. Because we can look around us and simply borrow examples from real life, the major challenge is to suitably distort those examples to ensure that our friends and family don't immediately recognize themselves in our fiction.
Historical fiction is considerably trickier. Most obviously, the social and cultural situation must change, and for readers who are not particularly literate about history, that requires conscious and difficult thought about how we can bridge the gap between the now of the reader and the then of the story so as to avoid throwing the reader out of the story. Less obviously, and trickier still, we must change the characters, since none of us is immune to the pressure of our society and culture on how we think and act. When historical fiction fails, it does so most often not because the historical facts are wrong, but because the characters are indistinguishable from moderns.
Science fiction adds to these challenges by attempting to speculate about credible science at some date in the future. (Smarter authors only drop hints about the date rather than nailing it down for you; technology always surprises us.) Not only does this require a good working knowledge of science, on top of the knowledge of history, sociology, and psychology required of literary and historical fiction writers, but it requires finding a way to make a largely science-illiterate public understand what you're saying. (Science fiction fans tend to be far more literate about science than most readers, but it's still tricky communicating what scientific or technological change you're proposing without creating so many infodumps that we disrupt the narrative.) It also requires a careful consideration of how technological development changes people and how they behave, a surprisingly difficult challenge.
Fantasy is perhaps the most difficult of the four genres. In addition to requiring all the knowledge required of authors in the other three genres, it requires the ability to create an entire world that probably could not exist. (One standard definition of fantasy is that it does not require the scientific rigor of science fiction, and indeed often throws away that rigor to propose things such as magic.) Creating a plausible lie under those circumstances becomes surprisingly difficult, and my experience both as an author and as a reader is that you almost never satisfy everyone: there's always some choice you make that displeases someone.
As writers of fiction, probably the first thing we need to do is learn how to lie sufficiently plausibly that our readers are willing to suspend disbelief and enter into the story without every noticing that we're stringing them a line. As in other forms of deception, the trick is to keep the vast majority of what we're saying true (or at least plausible), and hope that we can slip the untruths past the reader under camouflage of the truths. Not an easy trick to pull off, but if you've spent enough time observing and thinking about people, history, culture, and technology, and can resist the temptation to lecture your reader about what you've learned, you've got a decent chance of pulling the wool over the reader's eyes without them ever noticing.
Zelazny is one of my favorite authors (probably in the top 5), and it's fascinating reading his story notes (collected from a wide variety of sources) and the volume editor's delving into some of the allusions and other references in the stories. Some of the explications are nearly as long as the stories, and the discussion of the multiple recursive levels of allusion and literary and cultural and scientific references in his novella He Who Shapes runs nearly 10 (hardcover!) pages. I missed many (in some cases, most) of the embedded symbols and allusions, possibly because Zelazny can be such a beautiful writer that I was savoring the story rather than looking for them.
This first collection provides a fascinating example of how you can be literary and still tell a good story. Me, I'm just working on telling a good story. I'll worry about the deeper stuff once I've mastered the easier part.
I'm coming up on the end of volume 1, and will then take a longish break before moving on to volume 2. This collection was a treat I allowed myself to indulge in over the holidays, but like the holiday Brie, it's too rich to make a steady diet of.
One of the intriguing notions Zelazny offers is that fiction, of whatever genre, is the art of the lie: if it's fiction, then by definition it didn't happen. Ordinary literary writers lie about mundane matters we can see outside our window or inside our house. Writers of historical fiction lie about past events. Science fiction writers lie about science and technology, and use those lies to speculate about (usually) future aspects of the human condition. Fantasy writers lie about (usually) the past that never existed by taking even greater liberties with the truth (e.g., by invoking magic).
Those specific examples are mine; Zelazny had his own examples and did not propose a spectrum such as I've presented here. Neither did he examine the implications of these lies for fiction, other than elliptically, but it's a point worthy of exploration. In brief: good fiction is about telling believable lies. In more detail:
Literary fiction lies about recognizable people and situations, historical or otherwise. In one sense, that makes it both the subtlest and most sophisticated form of lying, because it must possess verisimilitude when compared with the world we can see with our eyes, and the easiest form, because we can see that world and pattern our fiction on it. Moreover, readers are not required to suspend disbelief. Because we can look around us and simply borrow examples from real life, the major challenge is to suitably distort those examples to ensure that our friends and family don't immediately recognize themselves in our fiction.
Historical fiction is considerably trickier. Most obviously, the social and cultural situation must change, and for readers who are not particularly literate about history, that requires conscious and difficult thought about how we can bridge the gap between the now of the reader and the then of the story so as to avoid throwing the reader out of the story. Less obviously, and trickier still, we must change the characters, since none of us is immune to the pressure of our society and culture on how we think and act. When historical fiction fails, it does so most often not because the historical facts are wrong, but because the characters are indistinguishable from moderns.
Science fiction adds to these challenges by attempting to speculate about credible science at some date in the future. (Smarter authors only drop hints about the date rather than nailing it down for you; technology always surprises us.) Not only does this require a good working knowledge of science, on top of the knowledge of history, sociology, and psychology required of literary and historical fiction writers, but it requires finding a way to make a largely science-illiterate public understand what you're saying. (Science fiction fans tend to be far more literate about science than most readers, but it's still tricky communicating what scientific or technological change you're proposing without creating so many infodumps that we disrupt the narrative.) It also requires a careful consideration of how technological development changes people and how they behave, a surprisingly difficult challenge.
Fantasy is perhaps the most difficult of the four genres. In addition to requiring all the knowledge required of authors in the other three genres, it requires the ability to create an entire world that probably could not exist. (One standard definition of fantasy is that it does not require the scientific rigor of science fiction, and indeed often throws away that rigor to propose things such as magic.) Creating a plausible lie under those circumstances becomes surprisingly difficult, and my experience both as an author and as a reader is that you almost never satisfy everyone: there's always some choice you make that displeases someone.
As writers of fiction, probably the first thing we need to do is learn how to lie sufficiently plausibly that our readers are willing to suspend disbelief and enter into the story without every noticing that we're stringing them a line. As in other forms of deception, the trick is to keep the vast majority of what we're saying true (or at least plausible), and hope that we can slip the untruths past the reader under camouflage of the truths. Not an easy trick to pull off, but if you've spent enough time observing and thinking about people, history, culture, and technology, and can resist the temptation to lecture your reader about what you've learned, you've got a decent chance of pulling the wool over the reader's eyes without them ever noticing.