I'm not a very spontaneous writer. If I depend on inspiration it won't turn up at the moment I need it. I have to put a lot of mental brute force into creating stories. Over the years I've developed a set of questions which must be answered before I can write a story. These may be useful to other people interested in fiction, so I'm revealing them here. Naturally, your own approach may differ, and I'm not asserting that these are the One True Way to write science fiction or fantasy.
The Cambias Test
This evolved out of an abortive project back in the 1990s to create an Alternate Histories roleplaying game. I think the creators were hoping to make something like the TV show Sliders, but the trouble with Alternate History is that all discussions eventually veer off into arguments about historical what-if questions.
My contribution was to propose that any Alternate Histories used in the game must allow the characters (and, thus, the players) to have experiences they could not have in our own world, past or present. So if you go to an alternate timeline and solve a murder mystery, that's not any different from staying home and doing the same thing. The adventure must require the alternate history. Maybe it's a world where personal gunfights remain an acceptable way to settle disputes, so the mystery puzzle isn't figuring out who shot the victim, but instead proving that the killer never issued a proper challenge before drawing his weapon.
I called this the "Cambias Test" and it got used as shorthand by others involved in the project before the whole thing kind of disintegrated. It's not actually original to me. C.S. Lewis once spent an essay griping about SF writers who used otherworldly settings to tell ordinary romances or adventures, and of course Horace Gold famously mocked the way pulp SF writers often transposed Westerns to the spaceways in his "Bat Durston" editorial. I'll stick to my own term because it's shorter, and because I'm terribly conceited.
In a science fiction or fantasy story, the Cambias Test is the question "Why is this fantastic setting or element necessary?" Now, this doesn't mean that every single thing in the story has to be important to the plot, but it does mean that the story can't be told without the fantastic elements. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea would not be the same story if Captain Nemo just had a regular sailing ship; his fantastic submarine is what allows him to wage a one-man war of vengeance against civilization.
What Do They Want?
Back in 2005, the legendary playwright David Mamet was producing a TV series about Special Forces soldiers, called The Unit. He sent a memo to the writing staff of the show which has become legendary as a concise three-page guide to writing drama. You can read it here.
Mamet says that in every scene the writers have to ask themselves three questions: "Who Wants What?" "What Happens If Her (sic) Don't Get It?" and "Why Now?" But really those three can be collapsed into the first. In a story (and in real life) characters are driven by desires, fears, and convictions. They want something, or they want to avoid something, or they believe that something is the right thing to do. Again, this isn't original to me; Plato said it first.
Now, the alert reader may have noticed that this question of "Who Wants What?" dovetails very neatly with the Cambias Test question above. If a character wants (or fears, or is morally certain of) something which does not exist in our contemporary world or in the past, then you've got a science fiction or fantasy story right there. Or the character may want/fear/believe something familiar to us, but is placed in a fantastic environment where it is impossible to get what he wants.
Andy Weir's The Martian takes that to about the logical extreme: his character Mark Watney wants to go on living, but he's stuck alone on Mars, a planet full of ways to die. It's a wonderful reversal of Robinson Crusoe: on his island Crusoe has all the fruits of lush Nature at his fingertips, but he struggles to build the tools of civilization. Watney has the most advanced tools of civilization at his disposal, but is on a sterile planet with no food or water.
Who Pays?
My third question is one I've never heard anyone else ask, but it's a good one. "How Do They Afford It?" When I'm writing about space exploration, especially in the near future, it's hard to avoid that question. We haven't sent a human beyond Low Earth Orbit in forty-four years now because of the tremendous expense. If I show astronauts in trouble on Europa, I have to know why someone thought it was worth the expense to send them there. (Or not: in Corsair the space pirate spends his time comfortably in a luxury hotel room in Thailand while commanding a robot spaceship doing the pirating in space.)
So in A Darkling Sea, the humans have a rather lavish presence on the distant world Ilmatar because the governments of Earth are using it as a territorial marker in space, to show their spacefaring alien rivals the Sholen that humans don't require their approval to establish bases beyond the Solar System. It's not a huge plot element, but I knew the answer as I wrote the book, so I had a pretty clear idea of what kind of resources the humans would have at their disposal.
A variant of "How Do They Afford It?" is "Why Didn't They Just . . . ?" If there's an obviously easier or cheaper way to do something (like sending a robot instead of a human astronaut) the author needs to figure out why that method wasn't used. This one retroactively shoots down a lot of classic science fiction stories: when reading Tom Godwin's classic "The Cold Equations," a modern reader's first question is "Why is that ship manned at all? Why not send a drone?"
Other questions arise during the process of writing, including the inevitable "Why I am I doing this at all?" But those three are the ones I think about when beginning a story. When I think of a particularly good answer, I know I've got something.
I wish more space travel stories would address "How Do They Afford It?"
Posted by: Chuk | 10/03/2016 at 04:41 PM