by Marge Piercy
Experiment and see what may work for you. These are all only suggestions, but try out whatever you think might do the job.
Exercise:
Pretend you are writing about the life of any particular minor historical figure—you want a minor figure so that you are not swamped in information. See what you can find out on the Internet; then compile a short bibliography and see how you can get the books you need.
Exercise:
Pick an incident in the history of your family. One that you have heard about but did not yourself take part in or witness. Interview family members one at a time, not together, about this incident and then compare your notes. See what is important to each person and what they have forgotten. Notice the different emphases and preconceptions each person brings to their account of the event.
11
A Few Genres: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, And Fantasy
Newspapers and other review media, as well as “serious” critics, often overlook genres, but the best writers of any of the genres we are briefly discussing are as good as any so-called mainstream writers. All of these genres can tackle important issues and create compelling characters. Often writers will use one of these genres to examine societal issues not often taken up in what is considered serious fiction, or to ponder human nature or the nature of good and evil, the nature of justice and the existence of free will. While there are specific concerns and problems you might encounter in each of these genres, what makes a detective story or a science fiction tale good is exactly what makes a so-called mainstream novel good—plus the special requirements of the genre. It is not easier to write in genre than it is to write a mainstream novel. Further, you had better like and be well acquainted with the genre. If you have only read five or six mysteries in your life, don’t consider writing one. You have no idea what the contemporary landscape of the mystery is. Study your field.
HISTORICAL FICTION
Historical fiction presents its own pitfalls. You don’t want your characters to sound like 21st century teenagers or housewives, but neither do you want to create authentic period language. Some writers become so entranced with their material, their research, that they have forgotten their readers. You want a flavor of the time—as we emphasized in the chapter on dialog—and you certainly want to avoid anachronisms. Slang dictionaries and the Oxford English Dictionary are your intimate friends in avoiding phrasing that is out of its time. Some slang goes back hundreds of years; some expressions and words will be dated next year.
Equally important, that someone wore hoop skirts or silk doublets does not mean that they were any less interested than people in your circle are in their family, their friends, the politics and gossip of their time, getting ahead, getting laid, finding Mr. Right, raising their children, surviving. Make your historical characters real by entering into their heads. Understand that some of their obsessions will be different but many will be yours in a different key. Do not make blanket assumptions that all Victorians were straitlaced or that all Puritans were scared of having a good time.
Research your period thoroughly. Especially pay attention to the minor and colorful details of daily life. John Adams was considered a very abstemious man because he drank no more than six glasses of hard cider a day. We’d judge that to be alcoholism. But what could people drink then? The water from their shallow wells was contaminated by human and animal waste. They had no refrigeration to keep milk. They couldn’t hold on to juices. Canning had not been invented. They drank coffee and tea, yes, but they also drank alcohol in quantities we would find alarming—but they were used to it and thought alcohol healthy. After all, it didn’t give them cholera or dysentery like their water did. Put things in their context and make a real effort to understand them.
Besides dressing your people in period clothes, feed them what they would eat, give them to drink what was likely and available. Give them the furniture appropriate to their class level and lifestyle and the fashion of the times, if they paid any attention to that. A peasant family in Normandy in 1780 would not furnish with Louis XVI furniture, while a leather merchant in Paris certainly would want to do so. Discover what jobs people really had in the social class you’re working with. Read about the period but also read as much as you can that actually dates from the period. If you can see the originals, that can be a big help. I knew of the gutter and rabidly political journalism of the French revolution when I was researching City of Darkness, City of Light—but somehow I never imagined that the most obscene and violent street paper would look like an academic journal: small type in grayish columns, no graphics, no big screaming headlines.
Look at the dishes, the crockery, jewelry, wigs: anything at all you can find from the time. Read about the favored scents and who used them. How did people recognize each other’s station in life? How would you identify a doctor, a bricklayer, a prostitute, a midwife? How did your characters get their water and food and what happened to their waste products? What were the walls, the ceilings, the floor coverings like? Did people keep pets? What kind? Fashions in pets come and go. How many servants would your character have; if they were a servant themselves, what was their life like? Where did they sleep? How did they wash?
But all of the time you are making your setting as real and vivid as possible, keep getting deeply into your major characters. If they do not capture the reader and provoke her interest, if they do not convince us they are real and lively, we won’t care how realistic your details of life in 17th century Amsterdam are.
Occasionally, of course, you reach a dead end. I was researching 1600 Prague and trying to find out what clothing Jews of various social classes wore. But there are no portraits. Unlike occasional examples of clothing from the aristocracy, none of their clothes survive. There were no fashion magazines for Renaissance Jewry. No one at the Jewish Museum in Prague had any idea. I had to pretty much fake it, guessing what they wore and avoiding much detail about dress. Sometimes you just have to guess. But mostly if you pursue your query, you can find out.
Historical fiction works pretty much like any other fiction in its structure, characterization, use of dialog, and so forth. What’s different is that certain things happened historically so you have a specific framework into which you fit your story. All of my historical novels use actual events of the time. In many cases, I am using real historical people, so I am at the mercy of what really happened. I find that an advantage, often. There is a great deal of room for empathy and for imagination even when you are working with historical individuals like Robespierre and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, about whom a great deal is known. What you are bringing to the historical personage is your insight into the deeds that are recorded. The dialog, the inner thoughts, the emotions.
You are restrained by the facts. If you want to have Napoleon win at Waterloo, you are writing fantasy, not historical fiction. The “What If” stories—‘What If’ the Confederacy, or Hitler won?—are in that category. But with historical fiction, the British did burn Washington and Amelia Earhart’s plane was lost in the Pacific. Now since no one knows exactly what happened to her, in historical fiction you are free, as many writers have done, to invent her end. You can fill in the interstices of historical events, making them far more vivid to us than history texts can. But you must do it by creating characters we believe in and care about.
Be careful how you work in your details. Laid on too thick, excessive details can keep the pace sluggish and make us lose sight of our characters and their obsessions, their concerns, their problems and conflicts. A lot depends on what you are dealing with and how skillfully you can handle them. Details of a toilette are inherently less fascinating than details of judicial torture. But a good writer can make a hairdresser’s work on a lady of fashion absorbing to us.
Letters and journals of the time are especially valuable for giving a flavor of everyday life, as well as a sense of what people of a particular place and class worried about, depended upon, really did and said. Overvie
ws are a good place to start, but you want period details, and overviews and histories cannot give you that kind of richness.
Exercise:
In the chapter on research, we asked you to gather information on some historical personage, preferably a minor one so that you would not be overwhelmed with data. Now take that same person and put them in a scene from their lives, recorded or imagined. Make the period real and make the person vivid. Find a good action scene to sketch out.
SCIENCE FICTION
In the chapter on Beginnings, we talked about the need to seduce the reader, to get something lively or intriguing or mysterious or fascinating or peculiar moving and moving fast. Then you can go back and insert your necessary backgrounding and context. No, there’s no law against starting with description, of a place, a time, a character, but at the risk of losing the reader, it had better be an intriguing description. Since science fiction often involves the creation of an alternate world or reality, one that is completely new and confusing to the reader, it can be especially challenging to take a lot of time in the beginning to set up a convincing description of this strange new world. You may want characters, you may want conflict and things galloping forward, so that the reader has something dramatic to draw her into the confusing new world. It takes skill to do exposition subtly without stopping the forward pace of the story, but it’s absolutely essential. You have to create a convincing world or a future with enough connection to the present to persuade us it is a possible outcome of where we are.
The following excerpt is from He, She and It, and takes place in the year 2059. It describes the clothing styles of the time, in particular those favored by Yakimura-Steichen, the multi-national corporation that employs Shira, the novel’s protagonist:Y-S had fierce injunctions concerning what parts of the human body should be displayed in what circumstances. It went with rigid sex roles—not at work, of course, for no one could afford such nonsense, but in every other sector of living. Women dressing for dinner often bared their breasts at Y-S functions, but the legs were always modestly covered to midcalf. The back was usually bare; the standard business suit, with its deeply cut back, was designed to show both men’s and women’s musculature and fitness. However, it was the custom to keep ears and nape covered for women, who were required to wear their hair at least shoulder length, often artificially straightened. Malkah, Shira’s grandmother, had cut Shira’s to a sleek cap just last week. At Uni-Par, her friend Gadi’s multi, nudity was a sign of status. The higher you were on the pyramid, the less you wore, the better to show off the results of the newest cosmetic surgery performed on your body. At Aramco-Ford, women wore yards of material and short transparent symbolic veils.
You have to immerse yourself in the world you are creating. If your protagonists lay eggs instead of bearing live children, how does that change their social structure and their gender roles? What kind of social world would intelligent creatures with wings inhabit? If you have three sexes or, if like some aphids, you alternate many generations of asexual reproduction with an occasional generation of sexual reproduction, what kind of changes does that create for courtship, families—if there are any? They would certainly be quite different from ours. But the members of those clans would probably have just as many problems with members of their group as we do. They would be close to some and distant or hostile with others. They would experience conflict over direction and over resources. You have to put on that costume and find out through your imagination what the life of your protagonist is like.
The worst science fiction is usually that in which gadgets and pseudo-scientific babble are predominant. The characters are stock figures—heroic captain, mad scientist, macho weapons wielder, wise old explainer.
Again, in this context, you must find a language that convinces us that these are not people from our time or our world without obfuscating meaning or annoying the reader with impenetrable fudge. You might drop in an occasional made up word for some object strange to us or some alien ritual. You make the meaning clear by context. You don’t go:
“Xpldnik waved his tentacle at the merkplod, the viewing window of his floating house.” Much better to say, “Xpldnik slithered over to the merkplod to stare out at the fast approaching object, which looked at first glance like an asteroid but was pursuing an erratic path, now up, now down, now to this side and then to that.”
In spite of Gene Roddenberry’s optimism about the future, it is unlikely that all our societal and personal problems will have been solved. In human history, every solution breeds new problems. The invention of agriculture meant far more people could be fed, but also that people used up land, often ate a less varied diet that gave them deficiency diseases and came into conflict over arable land with other groups wanting the same croplands. Often in interesting science fiction, one variable is changed, and we see how everything changes—but we see it through characters that we can identify with, no matter how different their bodies, experiences or social structure may be. Remember that the fiction part is what makes the speculative part function: believable characters, hard working and interesting dialog, good pacing, incidents that move things along, a vivid setting, actions that reveal character and draw us into the story.
Loosening the Imagination
The line between science fiction and fantasy is blurry. Some novels, such as sword and sorcery tales, are more clearly fantasy, while tales that depend upon changes in technology for their variable are obviously science fiction. But lots of works fall somewhere in between. The borders overlap and labeling doesn’t teach us that much. Isaac Asimov, father of science fiction, said that all such works fall into three categories: What if? If only ... and If this continues! The first is more speculative, the second more utopian and the third, dystopian.
Many writers are afraid of fantasy. However, it can be liberating to your imagination to move beyond the mundane and the realistic. As a child, you probably entertained yourself or consoled yourself with stories in which you had all the powers of a superhero. Of course the best comic book superheroes, such as Spiderman, have problems as well as powers. Recently DC Comics decided to introduce real character-changing tragedy into the sagas of its trademark heroes, like Superman, Batman and the Elongated Man. They wanted their heroes to grow in a grim time. Nowadays even Superman gets depressed.
We have all felt like aliens at times—dreamed we were adopted by our birth family while our true parents—much superior and more sympathetic and loving in every way—were elsewhere. We had been switched at birth or stolen away from our proper family. Our true family has far more of everything we desire and will simply adore us instead of being disappointed by our gender, our looks, our ability to excel in school or at athletics. Similarly, we have all at times felt out of place—that we did not or could not fit in with a group whether at a job, in school, socially. Introducing an alien into the contemporary world is a frequently used way to indulge in social criticism. Why do we behave as if we were the slaves of mechanical beings who consume petroleum products and excrete toxic gasses? Why do we walk around wearing advertising logos on our clothing? Are we paid for this? We pay them to advertise their products? How peculiar. Why do we pay those who care for our children so little if we truly value our children and pay a thousand times as much to men who toss a ball through a small hoop mounted on a backboard? There are many observations an alien can make about the habits, mores and values of a culture. There is an inherent pathos in being out of place or out of time that can make such a character sympathetic. But such a character must feel vivid and well defined and not merely be a mouthpiece for the author’s opinions and observations. She or he should have foibles of their own.
At times we have all experienced suspicion of those normally our nearest and dearest, our family, our friends. We have all at times suspected that somehow people were ganging up on us or talking behind our back or not what they have always seemed. Here is a source of horror fantasy that you might want to develop. Sometimes these feelings o
f suspicion and mistrust are best explored in such a genre.
Sometimes we can more easily write about very intimate things by transferring the situation and transposing it to another time, another place, another type of being. It might be too painful to deal with incest or abuse, but not if the character is a slave in South Carolina or a child prostitute in Victorian London or a captured sentient feline on another planet. Perhaps it is easier to deal with some traumas in fantasy, where the father-perpetrator is an ogre or a warlock, a monster to the child supposedly under his protection. Many writers have commented on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer in which Josh Whedon used vampires, werewolves and demons as metaphors for the emotional violence that so many of us experienced in high school. Indeed, we felt lucky to survive it somewhat intact. Some people never do get out of high school but spend their lives trying to get in with the right clique or win the popularity contests that are high school elections. I can imagine a short story in which young people literally cannot escape or graduate from high school but are trapped in it not for three or four years, but for an eternity of boredom, shame, ostracism, meaningless competition.
Fantasy and science fiction both offer alternate ways of exploring experiences that you may not wish to tackle baldly or head on. You might as a writer come at science fiction or fantasy from the viewpoint of exploring alternatives to various aspects of our society. You might feel that something very bad is going to develop from a particular trend of technology or social control or use of resources. Maybe you want to make global warming and its effects real, as I did in He, She and It. Maybe you want to see what would happen to an information dependent world if some solar or asteroid phenomenon knocked out all computers. Whatever, you need research but you need imagination even more. Suppose fundamentalist Christians took over the United States and could create the kind of theocratic society they long for: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.