Bill DeSmedt's Blog: The Accidental Author, page 5

The Why of Stories

Pick up any how-to book for the aspiring author, and somewhere around page three it’ll tell you what stories are all about: They’re all about conflict. They’re all about character. They’re all about characters in conflict. They’re all about fabulous window treatments. (Well, no — that last one was a trick.)

Point is: depending on who’s doing the talking, stories can be all about a lot of things.

On the other hand, if you ask what it is that stories do, exactly — what purpose they serve — well, that’s a different, uh, story.

Yet even posing that question, even hinting at the possibility that stories might conceivably be drafted into performing some menial, quotidian service, that literature itself might bare an unseemly utilitarian underbelly, is sure to raise the hackles of the art-for-art’s-sake crowd.

So let me put it a bit differently: If you were to observe that there is a certain kind of behavior, a particular form of activity, which humans in every culture, all over the world, have engaged in since time immemorial, wouldn’t you begin to suspect that said activity had some inherent survival value? If not survival in an ultimate, of-the-fittest Darwinian sense (though maybe that, too), then at least in the sense of carving out one’s own ecological niche in an environment whose principal dangers and principal opportunities, are — other human beings?

Well, making up stories is such an activity. It’s been practiced in every corner of the globe, by every culture on earth, for as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh[1] and doubtless beyond. So I don’t think it’s totally out of line to ask what function the art of story-making might fulfil from an evolutionary perspective.

As to what I think the answer might be, rather than attacking the subject head on, let me try sneaking up on it, by telling you some stories about stories …

[1]    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_...

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For One Brief, Shining Moment ...

As of 5 pm today, you guys made history: I'm referring, of course, to the fact that the ebook version of my technothriller Singularity crossed the Rubicon into the magic circle of Amazon's 100 Top Best-sellers in the Kindle Store, and it's all because of you!

If you're quick, you can share the moment. Point your browser here, and scroll halfway down the page. There it is at position #93, between #92. Riddle of the Diamond Dove and #94. Annie's Dream -- and you guys did that!

As WPBH-TV 9 Weatherman Phil Connors famously said, "Whatever happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I'm happy now ..."

so close I can taste it!

This morning the Kindle edition of my technothriller Singularity stands at #165 in Amazon's list of best-selling free ebooks. If you'd like to help it enter the charmed circle of the top 100, it's easy and it's FREE and I'd be much beholden to ya --

Simply go to http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Arc... and click on the "1-Click/Buy" button to "purchase" Singularity for the incredibly low, never-to-be-repeated "price" of $0.00.

Singularity ebook FREE

If you've been biding your time waiting for a great offer on my bestselling technothriller Singularity, wait no longer! For the next week only, you can download the ebook edition of Singularity for FREE at these sites:

Apple iBooks:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/sing...
(then click the button labeled "View in iTunes")

Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Arc...

Barnes & Noble Nook:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books...

But don't wait too long: This offer expires at midnight Tuesday Nov 18th, whereafter Singularity turns back into an $8.99 pumpkin.

Stave I, Part 2: Delusions of Competence, or What Made the Accidental Author Think He Could Do This Thing?

I mean, it’s just putting one word after another, right? How hard could that be?

Hard.

Not the writing as such, maybe, but certainly the rewriting, not to mention the re-re-rewriting.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Long before things ever reached the point of words on paper, I had an inkling I could do this thing.

It wasn’t utterly unfounded. I’d published a couple of magazine articles (right around the time of the aforementioned ill-starred Cosmos episode, in fact), and my day-job as a consultant to a major telecommunications corporation back then entailed a modicum of what, for want of a better word, one might call creative writing. At least, I’d found it useful to emplant the occasional outré turn of phrase ("redolent," "rhinopharyngeal") in the otherwise dry-as-dust reports and memoranda I was tasked with drafting — as a way of making sure the intended readers were paying attention.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s all the fault of a stray neutrino passing through my cerebral cortex.

Whatever the reason, I kept coming back to that germ of an idea (Tunguska and the mini black hole, remember?) that had first started me on the road to accidental authorhood. It got so I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d always read a lot of science non-fiction, particularly in areas like cosmology, relativity, quantum mechanics, but now I couldn’t pass a bookstore without checking out the astrophysics section, on the off chance I’d find something that would feed into the evolving storyline.

At the same time, little bits and pieces of locale and characterization began thunking into place: Tunguska was in Russia, right? And, hey: I knew a fair amount about Russia, having done time there as an exchange student at Moscow State University back in the mid-seventies. So, why not people the story, at least in part, with Russians? Then, too, in light of my day-job, it struck me a thriller featuring a consultant in the starring role might make a welcome departure from the doctor- and lawyer-centric novels that seem to dominate bestseller lists then and now. After a while whole chunks of storyline started popping into my head unbidden, like: what would you do with a submicroscopic black hole, anyway? (More on plot development later on.)

So, maybe the question wasn’t what made me think I could do this thing, so much as what was holding me back?

In retrospect, I think the real problem was that I cared about this not-yet-book, this book-to-be. Not that I didn’t care about the routine white papers and reports I was cranking out at work. I cared about them, all right; it’s just that I didn’t care about them. Not to the point of wanting them to be perfect, not to where I imagined there was only one right way to do this, as if the book were already out there (like The Truth in the X-Files) subsisting in some Platonic realm of pure idea, and it was going to be up to me to transcribe it into earthly form.

This in itself was worrisome, because the only other time I’d cared that much about writing something, the caring had spelled disaster, pure and simple. I’m talking about my long-since abandoned doctoral thesis on the politics of Soviet censorship. In the year it took me to acknowledge that it was never going to get written, the dissertation had, in those pre-word processor days, furnished my kindergarten-aged kids with an inexhaustible supply of doodling paper, each sheet blank save for a single sentence, or at most a single paragraph, of introduction to this unattainable topic.

In retrospect, this siege of writer’s block was a blessing in disguise, saving me as it did from committing to an academic career in a field of expertise that, not too many years hence, was going to lose its raison d’etre with the implosion of the Soviet Union. Nothing like having a whole country shot out from under you to give you the sense that maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea.

I can laugh about it now, and in fact did, in a deleted scene from Singularity. Here’s my protagonist, senior consultant Jonathan Knox, encountering Gustav Atheling, a former fellow grad student, now a Georgetown professor, at a cocktail party hosted by the enigmatic Russian billionaire Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin:

“So, what’ve you been up to, Jon? You quit the Soviet field, didn’t you?”

“Twenty years ago. The technical term for what I do these days is bottom-feeding, scum-sucking consultant.”

Gus chuckled, then sighed. “Yeah, same here, a lot of the time. What with the salary freeze on at Georgetown, image consulting for these bozos” — he waved the stem of his unlit, empty, for-appearances-only Meerschaum in the vague direction of Arkady Grishin — “well, it’s getting to be the only way to make ends meet.”

Gus seemed more than usually morose. Also in his cups: Unlike the pipe, the vodka glass in his other hand was loaded and ready for business. “Tell the truth, Jon,” he said, “don’t you miss them?”

“What them? Russian area studies?”

“No-no-no! Them. The frigging bogeymen. You know — The Soviets!”

Gus turned to Marianna. “Back in the old days, honey, it was the biggest game in town. Hell, the only game in town. The only other superpower, the only other nation on the face of the earth that had prayer of kicking our butts. And VIPs, real movers and shakers, used to come to guys like me — and Knox here too, if he’d stuck with it — to find out what to do about them. I mean, that was the deal, right? The damn Soviets’d scare the shit out of everybody, and we’d all make a living off it.”

Gus drained his glass and laughed bitterly, “Look at them now. Scary? They’re a joke. It’s got to where you can’t so much as write a decent thriller about them anymore — nobody gives a shit. Even Clancy’s given up on them. I could be teaching Scandinavian politics, for all the good it does me.”

If you were to read that as a dialogue between me and alternate-universe, might-have-been me — well, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. As I said, it all worked out for the best.

But that wasn’t how it felt at the time. That year of the thousand lead paragraphs to a nonexistent doctoral thesis was unadulterated hell, the death of a thousand paper cuts. I had no desire to launch another project likely to repeat the experience.

So, why did I?

Stave I: In which my writing career is inadvertently launched by an ill-chanced Cosmos episode

Hi, I'm Bill DeSmedt, perpetrator of the technothrillers Singularity (2004), and now Dualism.

Not that I started out to write a book, much less two (or maybe three — Triploidy being next up in what's become The Archon Sequence). No, I was happy enough just to read them.

And read them I did. A lot of them, mostly in the genre that the uninitiated persist in calling “sci-fi,” and the cognoscenti refer to as “sf” or just plain “science fiction.” But, in my own defense, let me say that I’ve been getting better, or at least more eclectic in my recreational reading, having recently added thrillers and Civil War non-fiction to the mix. Oh, and half a lifetime ago I read War and Peace in the original Russian, just like Edmund Wilson. Surely, that’s got to count for something.

(Or maybe not: Tolstoy’s prose is so limpid, so masterfully unstudied, so deceptively simple that, not only doesn’t it feel like you’re reading it in Russian, it doesn’t feel like you’re reading it at all. It feels like you’re mainlining it.)

Where was I? Oh, right. I didn’t start out to write a book, it just happened.

Here's how: Back in the summer of 1995, I decided, all unawares, to while away a rainy Saturday afternoon by watching a rerun of Cosmos, Episode IV, “Heaven and Hell.” That’s the one where Carl Sagan talks about meteorite and cometary impacts.

Now, Carl didn’t know this at the time (maybe he does now), but he and I used to argue about that show of his constantly. About big things — like multiple universes vs. the Anthropic Principle (got to admit, recent cosmological theory seems to handing him that one) — and little ones, like the Tunguska Event of 1908. Though “little” may not be exactly the word for a multi-megaton explosion that wiped out an area of Siberia half the size of the state of Rhode Island.

Anyway, about midway through the program, Carl gets around to the aforementioned Tunguska Event, and to how it remains something of a mystery to this day, owing to the absence of a crater or any other physical evidence. And from there, he goes on to mention in passing the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis: that the Event was a collision between the earth and an atom-sized black hole. Then he’s refuting J&R, citing the by-now standard “missing exit-event” objection — namely, that an impacting black hole should have cut through the solid body of the earth like a knife through morning mist, and come exploding up out of the North Atlantic about an hour later, wreaking as much havoc on leaving as it did on arrival. Never happened. QED.

And, next thing you know Carl’s dropped the subject in favor of Great Barringer Crater in Arizona or some such, leaving me sitting there, staring off into space.

“But, Carl,” I said slowly, “— What if the damn thing never came out?”

Well, little did I know it at the time, but I’d just been hooked. I wanted to read a book that took that stray thought as its starting premise; I wanted to see where things went from there. So much so, that I tried giving the idea away to three different published authors, hoping they’d write the book for me so I could find out how it all came out.

No such luck. “Great concept, Bill,” they’d say, “but it’s not my kind of thing — too much science.”

Along about author number three it dawned on me that if I really wanted to read that book, I was going to have to write it myself. And write it I did.

So there I was, on my way to becoming an author, quite by accident. Of course, I had no clue what I was doing. Which was a good thing. Because, if I’d’ve had any notion what I was letting myself in for, I’d have fast-forwarded Carl to Episode V and never looked back.

As it is, my experiences as an “accidental author” may serve as a cautionary tale to those contemplating the writing life. And a life-lesson of perhaps wider applicability than you might think.

For — while the novel that finally emerged at the far end of the above process has since been typecast as a “science thriller” — in point of fact I’ve never regarded Singularity as fitting neatly within the confines any one particular genre. If anything, I’d intended it as a bouillabaisse of tropes and motifs — as mystery and thriller, as sf and romance, as day-after-tomorrow action/adventure cheek by jowl with dark comedy. If Singularity were a question on the SATs, the correct answer would be: (e) All of the above.

Consequently, you wouldn’t be far off the mark if you were to think of this blog as chronicling my rediscovery or reverse-engineering, by brute force and awkwardness, of all those cross-genre fundamentals that born writers seem to know instinctively. Things like how to frame and shape a plotline, how to construct scenes and story beats, how to breathe life into characters (drawn from life or otherwise), how to get them to reveal themselves through their dialogue, and their silences, how to work with readers and advisors and book doctors and agents and editors, how to… Well, you get the idea.

And, fair warning: this is not intended to tell you how you should do any of the above, merely to tell you how I did do them. For the most part, accidentally.

But at the least, it promises to be an interesting ride. So come along and learn how I added books to sausages and legislation on my short list of things about which I’d rather not have found out how they’re made.