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 archaeolo
gical 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.
THE BANDS OF TITAN
I once accepted a guest of honorship for a convention in Toronto and was later informed that one of the requirements was that I write them a story for a booklet to be sold to raise money for their favorite charity. This struck me as the equivalent of inviting a painter to dinner and then asking him to paint your wall in a charitable spirit. I make my living this way, and my writing time is also my income. Fortunately, I suppose, I had a short, light idea about then. And very visual.
* * *
It was like a midnight rainbow—the sunside half of Saturn’s rings as viewed from our position above the golden planet’s pole. It also sort of reminded me of something else, but metaphors are not my forte and the rainbow had just exhausted my abilities along these lines for a time.
As the great grooved plate with its dark subdivisions rotated beneath our observation vessel and a black band swam through the northern hemisphere of the world below, I heard Sorensen say, above the eerie sounds from the receiver, “We’ve pinpointed the source now, sir.”
I turned and regarded him—young, light-haired, enthusiastic—as he manipulated a paper accordian decorated with machine grafitti.
“Where is it located?” I asked him.
“Near to the inner edge of the C Ring,” he stated, “and it’s rather small.”
“Hm,” I observed. “Still no idea what it is, though?”
He shook his head.
“Nope.”
There was a kind of strange asynchronous beat behind the wailing, stringy effect coming in over the receiver, and an occasional burst which sounded like a French horn being played in a cave. It was broadcast at an odd frequency, too. In fact, we’d only caught it accidentally, when a micrometeoroid striking an unmanned flyby had thrown the machine’s receiver out of whack for a time. Later, we tuned for it. We’d been picking up the sequences for years since then and we were never able to correlate them with any natural phenomena in the vicinity. Running down their source, therefore, had been added to the already lengthy list of experiments and investigations to be conducted on this, the first manned visit to the area.
“McCarthy,” I called to the navigator—a short, dark-haired, unenthusiastic man. “Find us an orbit that will take us close enough to this thing to get a good camera fix on it.”
“Aye, aye, captain,” he said, accepting the papers.
Later, as we jockeyed for the proper plane and accelerated toward the necessary velocity, Sorensen remarked, “Some sort of disturbance on Titan, sir.”
“Storm? Ice volcano?” I asked.
“Hard to say,” he answered. “I’m only picking it up on visuals. A strong focus of atmospheric turbulence.”
I shrugged.
“Storm, probably. Check on it periodically. Let me know if it turns into anything really interesting.”
It was the source of the sounds we were tracking which proved the next interesting item we encountered, however. I was dozing on my couch after checking the crew’s alcohol rations for spoilage when McCarthy shook me awake.
“You’d better come and take a look at this, captain,” he told me.
“What is it?” I mumbled.
“We seem to have located a genuine alien artifact,” he said.
I got to my feet and crossed to the viewscreen, where I beheld the thing in full focus. I had no idea as to the scale, but it was a dark metallic satellite; it looked like two squat cones joined together at their bases. It hovered above the ring plane, and its nether vertex glowed with a brilliant light which flashed downward into the ring itself.
“What the hell do you make of it?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s in synchronous orbit—we’re matching it now—and that’s coherent light shining out of it. It is definitely the source of the broadcast.”
I listened again to the sounds, which seemed to be rising to some sort of crescendo.
“Captain!” Sorensen called. “There’s more activity on Titan. It’s in the upper atmosphere now and—”
“Screw Titan!” I said. “Are you taping this thing?”
“Yes, but—”
“Are you monitoring everything that can be monitored concerning it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. We’ll talk about Titan later. An alien artifact is infinitely more important than a methane storm.”
“Very good, sir.”
We watched for hours, and our diligence was rewarded by our witnessing a sudden peculiar maneuver on the part of the device. It was preceded by an abrupt cessation of all broadcast sounds. I had had the stuff pumped into the control room for days, hoping that immersion might stimulate some ideas as to its nature; also, it was not unpleasant in its rising and falling, its unexpected runs and glissandos. When it stopped, I was momentarily overwhelmed by the silence. My attention was quickly taken elsewhere, however, as the light beneath the satellite—which had now advanced itself within the orbit of the C Ring—was suddenly extinguished.
Simultaneous with our remarking upon this, the satellite shot upward—that is, it accelerated in a direction perpendicular to the ring plane.
“Keep a fix on it!” I shouted. “We can’t let it get away!”
McCarthy and Sorensen rushed to comply.
Could we ourselves have triggered some damned warning device in it? I wondered.
“It’s changing course, sir!” Sorensen yelled.
“Don’t lose it, for God’s sake!” I cried.
“It seems to be heading in-system,” he said later.
“That’s something, anyway,” I replied. “Once you’ve established its course, plot one of our own to follow it.”
“Right, captain. By the way, Titan—”
“Shove Titan! Follow that satellite!”
This proved less difficult than we had feared, for once the device had crossed the ring-system, it set itself into a new synchronous orbit just beyond the tenuous, braided F Ring. As we tracked and followed, I finally turned to Sorensen and said, “All right. What’s the story on Titan?”
He smiled.
“Something in the nature of a large vessel rose above its atmosphere some time ago, sir,” he told me. “It is even now headed inward toward Saturn’s northern hemisphere.”
“What?”
“… Further,” he continued, “it appears to be towing a large, flat, circular object of a metallic nature.”
“You have a fix on it?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been monitoring it, also—on the auxiliaries.”
“Let’s have a look.”
He moved to a sidescreen and began typ
ing at its keyboard.
“There’s a particularly good sequence along about— here!” he said, as images swam by. He jabbed a key suddenly, and the blur settled into normal time. “There.”
I saw the wedge-shaped ship above the streaked and mottled gold of the planet. Behind it was the enormous disk of which Sorensen had spoken, turning slowly. Several seconds later, the light fell upon it so as to reveal—
Sorensen’s finger stabbed again and the picture froze.
There was an image on the disk. It was that of a gigantic four-eyed face, a pair of short antennae jutting from its high forehead.
I shook my head.
“What is it doing right now?” I asked him.
He switched from the tape to the vessel’s real-time position, spiraling in, far nearer to the planet now.
We waited for a long while as it fitted itself into the proper orbit, achieved the altitude it apparently desired. We waited. It waited.
Much later McCarthy announced, “Something’s happening!”
A fresh surge of adrenaline drove us near to the screen again. The disk had been disengaged from the ship, and as it drifted planetward, the vessel accelerated. Fascinated, we monitored its progress as the disk descended in such a fashion as to disappear entirely into the dark band we had noted earlier. The band narrowed and vanished shortly after that, and the vessel orbited the planet and later cut a course back toward Titan.
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