FULL BLEED: THE LAND OF FAKE BELIEVE

I suppose I should start this with a disclaimer that there’s no wrong way to write or to tell a story. That you can do whatever it is that you want. They’re your words. They’re your stories. They’re your worlds, even if that world is supposed to be a replica of this one. That being critical to understand because fiction simply isn’t reality. Even when it’s pretending to be, maybe even particularly when it’s pretending to be. Fiction isn’t bound by gravity or the square cube law or oxygen concentrations in our atmosphere as opposed to that of the time of the dinosaurs. Unless you want to pretend it is, I suppose. But then that ends up being what the story is about. Just like having characters understand that they’re in a zombie apocalypse but then they argue about fast or slow zombies or whether they’re Romero zombies from Night of the Living Dead or Land of the Dead and suddenly nobody cares but zombie fans. And they’ll only care until you make the Wrong Decision then they’ll run off to social media to talk about how you’re wrong wrong wrong.

So, fiction is not reality. It only pretends to be.

This should be obvious and something that everyone knows. But like Neko Case said, sometimes things are so clear to you that they become almost invisible. And it’s not that readers should be thinking about how they’re reading a piece of fiction and that Laura Palmer couldn’t have time to be volunteering for Meals on Wheels and attending her classes and seeing Bobby and James at the same time and having a drug problem and working at the Roadhouse and still warm the sheets at One-Eyed Jack’s. It’s fiction. It’s a series of things said to present the story.

The trouble begins when all these things that didn’t ever happen are held up as how it works in reality or treated like real events. But wait, aren’t we supposed to be telling a story through events and we all agree that they happened or didn’t happen (unreliable narration aside.) So they did happen or the story itself is meaningless. Unless you’re watching say a soap opera or reading X-Men comics in which case yeah, events happen and get wiped out all the damn time. The only way to win is not to play, y’know?

Characters who don’t exist have these thoughts that aren’t real and perform actions that all made-up and these stories pull something out of us that is real. Goddammit, how does that work? It’s not real but it is. Fiction, where we allow ourselves the possibility of feeling these things or having these experiences that didn’t happen but will still break your heart. So these feelings are real and therefore the books or movies are. And how things happen in fiction can be ported right out to reality and… yeah, that’s trouble.

I won’t even talk about the gap in the creation of fiction, particularly via staged productions, and what the reader/viewer experiences and then spins off of. Let’s just say there’s a scene where it ends that two characters who started hating each other end up in the same window frame, close but not touching, looking out at a lovely sunset. Is it that the writer intended this to portend some future enemies to lovers relationship or just that the director liked the shot and didn’t think about it and included it even though it played against type. The viewer doesn’t know, but they’ve maybe begun to make up a reason for it. And then they go to war in the forums about it.

Now I’m probably mixing stuff up a little too much for most any sane reader’s tastes. The warning about taking fiction literally and readers putting more into the text than was there in the first place. Yeah. Might be a bridge too far. Mea culpa.

But when you’re dealing with writers, you’d best be on your toes. Maybe take some things with a grain of salt. Don’t be quite so literalist (fundamentalist maybe, but the things about fundamentalists is that even they’ll argue over what the actual meanings of the sacred and unimpeachable words and how dare you differ in your view from what they think). And if a writer is talking about How The World Really Works and they’re expressing it in fiction, well, run. Because they get to control every single element and of course their thesis is going to be proved. Look, I like Steve Ditko as much as the next guy, but his parables of morality in Mr. A all fall apart when you point out “Hey, man. You’re just making it happen like this” and then he disappears in a puff of Objectivist glitter. You’ll never get that out of your hair, either. Smells like rancid coffee and cigarette ash.

Unless you like that sort of thing and then read away, I guess. And yes, even the best most nicest book with the gentlest view of the world is gonna be the same way. So’s the most hard-nosed realist. Neither can be trusted. And if you nod your head saying “Yeah, that’s definitely how things work,” well okay then.

“But the book is so realistic!” Only it’s not realistic. It’s words represented by shapes on a page in a sequence. You’re making it real in your head. You’re being convinced it’s real. It’s a convincing fiction. The gag worked.

You all know the “gag” terminology, right? For a short time, I was an animator working on a kid’s show about a toy line. Not one of the famous ones. And these shows are a series of individual shots, that being a cut, could be anywhere from half a second to ten or twelve maybe. Each shot all lived or died on it being convincing and then meshing into the rest. Oftentimes there were things that were cheats or tricks, where the animators couldn’t build everything or had to make hair wave in the wind (in 1999, this was a goddamn pain). These were done by way of tricks or hacks or shortcuts. The VFX business would call them gags. Not a joke as in funny, but a trick as in the animator convinced the viewer or producer that this happened.

A book ain’t nothing but a very long series of different gags. Is the author keeping these character voices consistent? Does the setting work? Are the actions that the characters undertake within what is expected of them? If it isn’t, did the author fuck up or is this leading to something else? Did this one goddamn scene work or do I have to rip it out and start all over again? Gags. You’re being tricked into making it real. Not a mean trick, but a series of actions to make the reader do the work of making it breathe. You might think the author did (and authors would love for you to believe this of them) but it’s all on the reader. And sure, the author has to do a lot of work, but nothing compared to what the reader ends up doing.

Not realism, but being convincing. Hell, a story about a kaiju wrecking a city and separating two lovers who hated each other but in the face of this horror realize they want to reconcile, is completely unrealistic. (Or if you’re feeling mean-spirited, it’s two lovers who are estranged and want to get one last round of abuse heaped on the other because there’s right and wrong dammit, even in the face of apocalypse.) Sorry folks, Godzilla died because he couldn’t stand up because there’s no bones on the planet that can make a thirty story tall dinosaur work. That’s realism and it sucks. But convincing the reader that this is happening and oh god can’t you feel the sound of its footsteps thundering through you though it’s somehow still not as scary as your drunken father coming home and bellowing for his family to line up and give him his proper respects because you ungrateful kids need to be taught a lesson.

Convincing. There’s no one way to do it. There’s as many answers as there are writers out there. Yes, even the bad writers. Even those who can’t get a publishing contract.

“Oh, I know how I’ll convince the readers. I’ll do all this research and put it on the page and just bury them with facts and worldbuilding and they’ll be awed. They’ll believe.”

Or they’ll tune out. That four pages on the process of making the steel and hammering out the sword and grinding it and sharpening it and etc had better be some goddamn poetry or be a revelation as to the nature of the character or maybe it’s not doing anything. There’s ways to get around it, sure. Or you could not write the parts that most readers skip, to borrow from John D. MacDonald. Problem is everyone’s got a different line with that.

Some folks want to read and write RPG supplements. And don’t knock it, there’s good money in it if you do it right. That hundred generations of history is definitely exactly what most readers want to read. You bet. Oh wait. You’ve started your book with another council scene where the talking heads helpfully dump exposition of the past hundred years of grudges and vendettas so that the rest of the story makes sense. Or maybe you should just give quick sketches and hints and set the stage so that the characters can be at each other’s throats that much faster, so that the king exiles the heroine to the Underlands where she be inducted into the schools of mystery that the king has suppressed for a thousand years and realize that she doesn’t want to overthrow the kingdom so much as she wants to express her love for her instructor, The Wearer of One Hundred Bloody Veils, etc etc.

What do people need to know? Can they function with too little information instead of too much? Isn’t it better that things be evocative instead of relentlessly spelled out in forty volumes of books? Well, I suppose if you’re running a franchise, you want those forty books. I can’t think of too many single authors who are trying to do that. Aside from those who themselves have become a brand. In which case, it’s not a forty book series, but a forty plus book career. An enviable position, I suppose.

All this is to say that worldbuilding isn’t writing a story. Sure, do the worldbuilding. Do a lot of it. And then only show little bits of it, only the coolest stuff. Drop references into character’s conversations. Have them use their knowledge of it to one-up one another or to become indispensable. Make it a breathing part of the story. Don’t just dump it like tons of fast food put on banquet plates and expect people to shovel through it.

“But Tolkien…”

Only Tolkien can be Tolkien.

Besides, all this worldbuilding isn’t real. Well, no more or less real than anything else on the page. Which if you’re writing fiction is none of it. Except what the reader gets tricked into feeling. Because it’s all magic tricks, just one after the other. Maybe look at it that way instead of being a chronicler of an age. Worry more about making it alive than detailed.

Worry about it being more than ink on the page, or phosphors lit up in a particular sequence. Make it an experience. Detail isn’t necessarily experience, unless it’s strung together in a way that sparks something. Otherwise it’s a grocery list. But then people shop for books today on the basis of trope grocery lists so maybe that’s what people want. Just endless confirmation that yes enemies to lovers is the one true form.

I sure as hell don’t get it, either. My real suspicion is that trope lists evolved as a response to trying to sell books on social media in the first place where that’s all people have the attention to read. And yet they’re trying to sell books… which require a lot of attention… on this thing that scatters attention (but demands focus for hours of scrolling; it’s a quandry.) And sure, I’ll admit that I touch on this, but I use the admirable and time-honored form of the tagline. Sometimes that’s the only shot you get.

I should ought to wind this down, I suppose. I’ve probably exhausted your patience by now. There’s only so much advice that runs counter to every single bit of genre writing advice out there that one can take. Maybe don’t take it as advice, then.

In other news, last full week of the My Gifts Are Hungry kickstarter is coming up. The campaign ends on Sunday, May 31 at about 11pm (PDT). I’d sure love to have more folks along for the ride, but the book’s happening either way. Details, as always, just below.

My Gifts Are Hungry at Kickstarter

More later.