Eliot Peper's Blog, page 3

Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas

Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas, a metaphor that proves its own point. Composed thousands of years ago—initially in Homer's Odyssey and later in Virgil's Aeneid—Odysseus’s gambit still reverberates through our culture, evolving as it leaps from mind to mind, seeding generation after generation with images, archetypes, and ways of making sense of the world.

You can craft a story that conveys a single big idea like The Tipping Point or that teems with ideas like The Big Short. Stories can map new conceptual territory: 1984 became the definitive allegory of state surveillance. They can spark social change like The Jungle, which exposed the horrors of the Chicago meatpacking industry at the turn of the Twentieth Century and led to numerous reforms that ultimately resulted in the founding of the Food and Drug Administration. Science fiction is often called the “literature of ideas” because of its density of thought experiment, and novels like Snow Crash are deeply integrated into the feedback loop between imagination and technological innovation. This dynamic isn’t limited to books, films, podcasts, speeches, plays, essays, epic poems, and other formal storytelling formats. You can become a more interesting conversationalist by responding to questions with stories that embody the answer rather than stating it directly.

On their own, ideas are inspiring but ephemeral—aurorae in our mental skies. Stories ground them, humanize them, give them the narrative weight they need to make a lasting impact. And because the best stories are worth telling for their own sake, ideas can hitch a ride across millennia.

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Complement with how Richard Feynman made sense of complex ideas, what I learned about the power of stories from my secret-agent grandmother, and the Science of Fiction on the ideas embedded in Veil.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Strange and incongruous relation

My bookshelves are overflowing, and always have been. And it’s not just the shelves. As I write this, there are three separate piles of books on my desk. I’ve read many of these books. They are old friends. Seeing their spines reminds me why I love them, what I learned from them. I have yet to read many of these books. Seeing their spines reminds me what inspired me to buy them and all the amazing things I have yet to learn, yet to experience.

There are cycles at work. If I read a book and it doesn’t resonate with me, I put it in the Little Free Library in our front yard so that a stranger might crack it open to discover that it’s the perfect book for them. If a friend visits and I realize I’ve got something they need to read, I snatch it off the shelf and send it away with them. If I listen to an audiobook or read an ebook and fall in love with it, I pick up a physical copy to have an artifact that will summon the story in my mind whenever it catches my eye.

Unlike those at a library, my books have no organizing principle. They are not categorized by genre or publication date or title or author name or size or color or when I bought them or whether I’ve read them. You might find Cloud Atlas nestled up against Flash Boys, or Unaccustomed Earth hiding between “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” and Sourdough. When I choose a book to read, I put it back somewhere else. Sometimes I grab a few books on a whim and rearrange them randomly throughout the shelves.

This apparent disorder allows stories to mix and mingle. No. That’s not quite right. These books, however much they mean to me, aren’t doing the mixing and mingling. They are beautifully crafted objects, but they are objects, and inert. Rather, the idiosyncratic and evolving arrangements transform the shelves into more than a place to store or display books. The bookshelves become an engine for curiosity and creativity. Whenever I enter the room and my gaze falls across them, they conjure a mandala of stories, ideas, and feelings within me—everything juxtaposed and interpolated in strange and incongruous relation.

So I guess there is an organizing principle after all: Foment literary anarchy. Let all those shuffling spines unconsciously challenge me to forge new connections, to trace lines between disparate concepts, to flex my imagination to encompass ever-expanding constellations of possibility, to fall in love with reading over and over again.

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Complement with Look to the liminal, these interviews with my favorite authors, and my book recommendations.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Cory Doctorow on writing Attack Surface

Cory Doctorow's new novel, Attack Surface, is inseparable from the zeitgeist—both are riven by insurrection, corruption, misinformation, and inequality—and the near-future it portrays illustrates how technology and politics are inseparable. The story follows a self-taught hacker from San Francisco who helps build the American digital surveillance apparatus out of a genuine sense of patriotism, only to discover that she’s propping up exactly the kind of unjust, predatory system she’d set out to defeat. Computers play a role as important as any other member of the diverse cast, and computing is treated with a rare technical rigor that reveals the extent to which our tools shape our lives and world.

Having established that dystopia is a state of mind and how to fix the internet, Doctorow uses Attack Surface to explore what it means to build a better future. This is a novel about reinventing democracy and imagining new institutions for the internet age. You will cringe. You will grit your teeth. You will keep turning pages late into the night because this is the kind of fiction that creates space for truth to reveal itself.

Over in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I asked Doctorow why cryptography is a crucial political tool, what tech workers can do to take responsibility for the systems they build, and how the manner in which Attack Surface was published evinces the precise themes the story grapples with.

Read the full interview here.

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Complement with Doctorow on Bandwidth, William Gibson on tracking reality's Fuckedness Quotient, and Annalee Newitz on who owns the future.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Yogurt

Ten years ago, my wife and I had a quirky neighbor named Dell. He taught us to make our own yogurt and the results were so delicious that we've made it weekly ever since and taught friends to do the same.

We just found out that Dell passed away two years ago.

It's profoundly bittersweet to consider the unpredictable echoes we leave in each other's lives. You can’t control cultures directly—neither yogurt nor human—but you can create the conditions for them to grow and thrive.

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Complement with How to kill a dragon, What my secret agent grandmother taught me, and There aren't even any endings.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Magic

The world is brimming with magic. 

Summon it by bringing your attention to bear, by following the path into being. 

The keener your sense of presence, the more miraculous the universe reveals itself to be.

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Complement with Look to the liminal, Maria Popova on reality's density of wonder, and There aren't even any endings.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Bridging the personal and the universal

A key component in great writing is building bridges between the personal and the universal.

Without specific incarnation, universals revert to truisms. The insight you’re trying to articulate may be foundational, but cliché drains it of color and weight. Aphorisms can blaze bright on social media because aspiration is a potent fuel for sharing, but often they fade in readers’ hearts just as quickly because there just isn’t enough to hold on to.

Without plugging into the universal—even if the extension cord is long and tangled—personal stories won’t turn on a light in readers’ minds. Your anecdote might be funny or charming, but if there isn’t something there that connects to the human experience, that connects us, then why should we make time to read it?

As a writer, you can work in either direction. In Breach, a piece of pottery crucial to the plot illuminates the novel’s underlying theme. In Veil, the arc of the protagonist’s evolving relationship with her father mirrors humanity’s evolving relationship with the planet. In Cumulus, the freelance photographer’s struggle to make a living with her art opens a window into the systems shaping the gig economy.

When a story integrates the personal and the universal, it becomes an emotional flywheel that moves the reader, offering them a new perspective of lasting value, subtly or profoundly changing them into someone new.

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Complement with The Path, A pop band that talks about complicated emotions, and Cultivating a sense of presence.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Reassurance

When I ask for advice, often what I’m really looking for is reassurance.

But the work I’m most proud of requires taking real risks with no possible guarantee of success, so seeking reassurance that things will turn out okay is a trap.

Trust yourself. Trust the process.

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Complement with Most successful people have no idea what made them successful, How to do interesting work, and Be bold.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Narrative daisy-chains

We all know that stories sometimes go viral, apotheosizing into memes. But much more interesting than a single story propagating itself through retelling is when stories inspire the telling of other stories in a cascading cultural daisy-chain.

What anecdote can you share with a friend that inspires them to share an anecdote of their own, deepening your mutual understanding? What might inspire them to share their story with others in a way that inspires those others to open up in turn, each a domino falling across an expanding web of conversations that stitch humanity yet more tightly together?

Stories can reproduce themselves through repetition, but a certain kind of story unlocks the hearts of those who hear it so that they pay it forward by giving of themselves.

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Complement with Stories are bicycles, Chapter 0, and A pop band that talks about complicated emotions.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Be bold

Be bold. Many eschew grand ambitions for fear of falling short, so the higher you aim, the thinner the competition. Plus, because nothing is truly easy, you might as well attempt something truly hard. Who knows? You might even succeed, surprising everyone, yourself most of all.

Because so few people are willing to risk boldness, being bold makes you a leader by default. Some will see their feelings articulated in your vision and join up. Others will see their fears reflected in your vision and cry fowl. Whether they opt in or out, you are defining the terms of engagement and inviting them to clarify their thinking.

If you're going to boldly go where no one has gone before, do so with clear eyes. Otherwise you might go boldly off a cliff or into a brick wall. Don't cling to obsolete points of view. Boldness requires flexibility. If you discover new evidence that changes your mind, admit you were wrong and set a new course.

Life is so damn short that living boldly seems an apt way to honor the fleeting gift of existence. If you're not going to be yourself, who else are you going to be? Be yourself, be bold, or die trying.

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Complement with How to make sense of complex ideas, Cultivating a sense of presence, and Quantity is a route to quality, not its opposite.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

The Path

The girl entered the Dark Forest.

Leaves whispered. Shadows swirled. Bright eyes gleamed. Mud sucked at her boots. She evaded the bandits, won over the fairies, escaped the quicksand, emasculated the creepy lumberjack, survived the poison thorns, defeated the monsters, fed wild carrots to the unicorn, slipped away from the strangling vines, and outsmarted the witch.

The woman emerged from the Dark Forest.

She dropped her pack, salved her blisters, ate an apple with a hunk of cheese and a chocolate bar, drank from the brook, and sighed.

Ahead was the Open Steppe, the Rushing River, the Endless Desert, the Stormy Sea, the Bottomless Cave, the Highest Mountain, the Brilliant Stars—worlds pressing up against worlds forever in all directions, thick with promise and peril, almost but never quite overwhelming, a summons and an apology and a challenge.

She smiled and hefted her pack.

There was only the path.

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I wrote this little story as a birthday gift for my wife, Andrea Castillo, who sends the incomparable Seasonal newsletter that explores the California food system, one fruit or vegetable at a time.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.