Situation Normal Author Commentary #1: High-level structure

Hey, folks! My second
novel Situation
Normal came out three weeks ago, and I've heard that at least a few people have
finished it, so I'm reinitializing a tradition I started
with my first novel, Constellation Games: author commentary.

With Constellation Games I did a chapter-by-chapter
commentary as the book was serialized. I won't be doing that this
time—Situation Normal is significantly longer
than Constellation Games, which was itself really long for a
science fiction book. Instead I've written a number of topical essays; a combination of "stuff for
fans" and "stuff I wish I'd known when I was planning a big
novel."

I'll be posting chunks of comentary every Tuesday and Friday; I
have about a month of stuff depending on how I split it up. Today's episode takes a look at the structure of the book on the highest level. All of these essays will have big spoilers for Situation Normal, but since this one's a high-level overview I think it's vague enough that you could read a bit to see if the book sounds interesting.

Plot structure

The single best piece of writing advice I've ever gotten, or at least the best one I consciously remember, comes from Jim Macdonald, who compared plotting a novel to a game of chess. At the beginning of the story, the crucial thing is to get your characters "out on the board" as quickly as possible.

One you do that (this is my own discovery and not part of Jim's advice), you can get a long way through the plot by writing a scene for each pair of characters and seeing what they have to say to each other. I don't know if anyone else does this as a conscious strategy but I see it happening a lot in ensemble TV shows like Star Trek. I did this in Constellation Games, e.g. "Daisy and Ariel haven't had a scene together, what would they say to each other?" But this doesn't quite work in Situation Normal because the characters spend most of the book in small, physically isolated groups. What I did instead was shuffle the groups.

In Situation Normal, Cedar Commons is the "chessboard". At the beginning of the book, most of the major characters are drawn to the planet. This lets me write "before" scenes with sets of characters who already know each other:

Becky + Hiroko (on Cedar Commons already)

Churryhoof + Dwap-Jac-Dac (on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka)

Kol + the Chief (on Sour Candy)

Myrus + Den (on Jaketown)

Then I turn on the particle accelerator. The Situation goes Normal, and all the characters are shuffled and flung back into space. Now the characters are separated again, but every grouping of characters contains wildcards:

Kol + the Chief + Becky (on Sour Candy)

Dwap-Jac-Dac + Hiroko + Myrus (in Scoop Bravo)

Churryhoof + Den (on Cedar Commons, then on Magna Carta)

Over the course of the book, the characters become even more isolated than this. Myrus is sent to the Youth Festival, Becky leaves Sour Candy. But at the end of the book everyone comes together a second time, at Nimar, pulled together by the gravitational pull of the plot.

Because the characters spend so much time in separate plotlines, a
lot of fun scenes didn't happen. Churryhoof and Myrus make things
very difficult for each other without ever meeting or even becoming aware of each other. Ethiret-Jac and the Chief only have the tiniest
interaction, but in that interaction I see the seed of an amazing
scene: those two are effectively the same character, and you can
just see how much they hate each other.

I'm not crying over what might have been. This is a huge book. I cut major characters and plotlines to get to where we are today. But compared to Constellation Games, there are a whole lot of scenes I could have written but didn't.

The Lebowski Connection

It's now a bit of a cliche to love The Big Lebowski, but it
went through a long wilderness period where it was dismissed as a
post-Fargo brain fart, so let me have this. I've loved The Big
Lebowski since opening day, March 6, 1998; and one of the things
I love about it is the plot, which is pretty tightly constructed
(not perfect) but seems random and incoherent because the POV
character doesn't understand what's going on. Since POV is so
tight, the moviegoer must see the film multiple times to piece
together what the Dude can't.

In Constellation Games a whole lot of stuff could have been
cut without affecting Ariel's through-line (e.g. Ragtime and the
Mars mission). For Situation Normal I wanted to work on
tighter plotting, and naturally I took The Big Lebowski as my
model. The problem is, it's a bit much to ask someone to watch a
movie multiple times to understand the plot, and it's a non-starter
with a big novel. This only worked with The Big Lebowski
because it's funny as hell; even then it took years for the film
to get its due.

However. With multiple POV you can tell a complex story and
the reader will be able to keep up even as each
character stays in the dark. If you told the story of The Big
Lebowski from multiple POV (let's say the Dude, Bunny, and
Maud—the three Lebowskis), you could tell the story all the way
through in chronological order, it would make sense on first viewing,
and the core elements of the comedy would come through just fine, because
no one character would know what was happening.

When writing the first draft of Situation Normal, I worked
on a scene-by-scene basis and didn't really know where it was going
overall. But I had a single guiding principle: all the major
characters need to end up at the same place and play a crucial role in
a climax that fires every Chekhov's gun introduced over the course of
the book: Evidence, brands, pain debt, rre colonies, etc. No Return
of the Jedi stuff (or, be fair, Constellation Games stuff)
where entire subplots end up making no difference to the
outcome.

If Cedar Commons is the planet where everyone ends up together by
chance, Nimar is the planet that everyone goes to intentionally. The
middle part of the story equips everyone with the motive, means and
opportunity to get to Nimar. Every major character has an individual
character arc as they proceed through the same plot arc, though some
characters (Dwap-Jac-Dac) change more than others (Kol).

Then the climax fires all the Chekhov's guns, and the epilogue
draws the lifelines of the survivors a little bit past their second
point of intersection at Nimar. It gives you a little cooldown
without changing the emotional tone, like Donny's funeral in The
Big Lebowski.

In my 2013 review of The Big Lebowski I mentioned how, like in a Thomas Pynchon novel, "each of [the] characters is surrounded by a protective bubble of literary genre". In The Big Lebowski each character lives in a different genre. In Situation Normal everyone is in the same genre—madcap space opera—and the characters who get the best endings are the ones who'd already been living in a compatible genre bubble, or who manage to develop one over the course of the book.

This is a smaller influence, but Myrus's subplot in particular was
inspired by the John le Carré (RIP) novel The Tailor of
Panama. I'm probably not remembering this right, but the
bit I remember is someone tells a little bitty lie that spirals out of
control and ends in death and disaster. The upside for Myrus is he
never finds out about the consequences of his (totally justified IMO)
lie.

Building the cast

So, all these characters who can't see the consequences of their actions, where did
they come from? Going back to "Four Kinds of Cargo", the Sour
Candy crew were all structured around the Chief, who's a huge
weirdo. Kol was the one who managed the relationship between her
adventure-story fantasies and reality; and Arun and Yip-Goru
were... pretty similar to each other. In the novel I differentiated
them by making Yip-Goru extremely cowardly (inspired by thons line
"Why should we risk our vocalizers for a dead body?") and Arun
smoothly British (inspired by his willingness to do a "Bertie
Wooster routine").

Becky Twice is the starting point for all the new characters. Becky
herself stems from a request of my friend Mirabai, a big fan
of Constellation Games who wanted to read a space opera romance
between two butch women. I had one butch woman character (the Chief)
so I created another (Becky) and put them on a collision course to
disastrous romance.

I didn't consciously know this at the time, but a romance story
often has a red-herring partner to create tension or to contrast with
the story's "real" relationship. Hiroko Ingridsdotter came out of that story
need—a maximally inappropriate match for Becky. Hiroko's
personality was somewhat flexible through the drafts, as she got moved
from one subplot to another, but her character design has always been
(Mirabai's phrasing) "high-maintenance military hard femme."

(Mirabai fan-service also explains Crinoline White,
though I cut Crinoline's storyline in the final draft. I'll talk more
about her in a later post, but she was basically Hiroko's style
plus the Chief's cavalier attitude.)

A chain of logic gives us the other characters: at the end of "Four
Kinds of Cargo", Kol suggests Sour Candy "sit out the war in a
forest." In Situation Normal we see he had a specific forest in
mind—Cedar Commons, a whole forest planet where he and the Chief
had previously hidden their purloined Evidence.

This raises the question of why Becky is also on that forest
planet, or why a "forest planet" even exists. A lot of forests on
Earth are monocultures that basically exist to be cut down for wood,
so it made sense to say Cedar Commons was that kind of forest. This
created a good reason for Becky and Hiroko to have a whole planet to
themselves (they're guarding the trees), and for Becky to have missed out on recent developments (meaning she needs
the same exposition you do).

Given that a forest planet is our chessboard, who else would
go there? Answer: people who want to cut down the forest and make
things out of the wood. Jaketown came out of this, and Myrus
and Den, the apprentice woodworkers. From that came the
question: how come Becky and Hiroko didn't hear that a customer was on
the way? Answer: Jaketown is running from something. Not in a
panicky way, where you'd hide on the closest planet. Jaketown
is a bunch of draft dodgers, and they're looking for a forest
planet, where they can pretend they're doing business as
usual. Churryhoof and Dwap-Jac-Dac came out of the need to have
someone chasing down the draft dodgers.

At that point I had plenty of characters for a novel, with main
characters from all three Outreach species, so I stopped sending
people to Cedar Commons. We do have some characters introduced
later in the book: Starbottle and the Errand Boy are shadowy villains who get revealed over time. Tia and Ethiret were necessary to
further Dwap-Jac-Dac's character arc of ceasing to be
Dwap-Jac-Dac. And the standalone arc of Styrqot and Vec is necessary to further Den's character development.

The occupation of Cedar Commons changes Den from the person
Myrus remembers to the person we see in Part Four. Styrqot and Vec play a role analogous
to (though much nastier than) Tammy Miram's role in Constellation
Games. I could have cut Tammy without affecting the main
plotline; she's actually the main character of a different book we
never see. But Ariel's relationship with Tammy puts him through the
transformation he needs to be ready for the climax
of Constellation Games.

On Friday I'll go into more detail about the sci-fi components of the worldbuilding, and the transition from "Four Kinds of Cargo" to a novel-length story. I'll cover the secret origins of Evidence and skipping, and reveal which real sci-fi corpus was my model for the Cametre stories. See you then!