What Writers Can Learn from ‘Annihilation’ by Jeff Vandermeer
Cover art via Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Every once in a while, a novel comes along and absolutely floors me. Annihilation is one such novel. It transcends the usual experience of reading a book and transports us somewhere beautiful and horrifying. It slowly bores its way into your skull and settles at the base of your brain, where dreams and nightmares fester.
If you’re a writer, or an aspiring writer, Annihilation is a master class in your craft.
The first book in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (to be followed by Authority and Acceptance later this year) tells the story of a scientific expedition to Area X. Thirty years ago, something happened to a heavily forested coastal region of marsh, tidal creeks, and dunes, cutting it off from the rest of the world and provoking bizarre changes in its ecosystems.
Our narrator is an unnamed biologist, a member of the 12th expedition sent into Area X. All previous expeditions have ended in horror. When the biologist arrives, she finds something that isn’t supposed to be there: a tower submerged beneath the earth. Nothing is what it seems.
If you haven’t read Annihilation yet (read Chapter 1 here for free), surely that synopsis will compel you. If you have, here’s what the book can teach writers about their work.
Setting Matters
Too often in my grad school workshops, students would turn in stories and novel excerpts that featured characters talking…somewhere. In a nondescript apartment. On a street. In a cafe. As a reader, I had no idea whether they were talking on a winter’s night in Reyjavik or a balmy afternoon in Rio.
This kind of ambiguity is impossible in good fiction. I challenge you to think of a good novel without a clearly discernible setting in both space and time. On some level, all stories are stories about places, because human beings do not exist in a vacuum. We are defined and impacted irrevocably by setting.
In Annihilation, Area X is a character unto itself. It breathes and speaks through the author’s prose with a kind of authenticity that is only possible when a writer knows his setting intimately. In Vandermeer’s interview with Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, he reveals that Area X (although unnamed in the novel) is actually St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge, near Vandermeer’s home in Florida. Annihilation was written as result of his frequent hikes in the area, and it shows.
The natural detail captured by the author could only come from first-hand observations in the wild. Vandermeer doesn’t repeat clichéd descriptions of Nature with a capital N, he allows a hyperspecific place in space and time to bleed through reality and onto the page. As a result, the novel transports you away from whatever room you’re reading in, and out into Area X.
Characters Are Not “Characters”
Beginning writers often use a variety of shortcuts to “establish” and “develop” character, primarily via superficial traits. A protagonist is “tall, with broad shoulders and eyes like flakes of robin’s egg.” Or he is “a lifelong Texan named Rhett Cutler.” Or he “likes to eat fruit with a bowie knife.”
Vandermeer omits these surface details in Annihilation, and his characters do not suffer for it. We don’t need to know the color of the narrator’s hair, or how she dresses, or where she was born. In fact, Vandermeer goes a step further than most writers and omits even the names of the characters, fearing they would act as too strong a filter. And yet? I feel as though I know the narrator quite well, well enough to truly feel the impact that Area X makes on her.
Instead of superficial traits, Vandermeer organically encapsulates how his characters think, move, and speak. He doesn’t tell us about them, he lets them show us.
Knowledge Gaps Equal Suspense
Having developed an intricate, complex background story or mythology for their fictional universe, some writers will rush to dump all of that information on their readers as quickly as possible. But in addition to creating confusion and a steep learning curve, these early info dumps also remove the element of suspense.
Most readers, especially those of speculative fiction, enjoy thinking for themselves and solving puzzles. They want to be intellectually challenged by a novel. They want to follow a trail of bread crumbs, not have a fresh-baked loaf plopped down on their plates.
To create and sustain suspense, Vandermeer uses an “iris-out” technique, a term lifted from the world of film, where the camera is focused on a particular object and then moves outward to reveal the full scene. The TV series Lost used this technique quite well in its first two seasons (but eventually, the full scene it revealed wasn’t very satisfying).
In Annihilation, we begin with an unknown narrator in a strange environment who encounters a bizarre tower. We know she’s part of an expedition into a place called Area X, but that’s all we know.
Instead of explaining what the novel is about, the author forces us to ask questions. Who is the narrator? Where is Area X? What is the objective of the expedition? What’s inside the tower? These questions create suspense. And slowly, over the course of the novel, Vandermeer pulls the camera back to show more of the full scene. He creates appetites, frustrates appetites, and then gradually satisfies them (but only a few, as this is the first of three novels).
So. If you’re a writer who struggles with setting, character, and creating suspense, read Annihilation. If you aren’t a writer, but you’re looking to get lost in a one-of-a-kind environment, read Annihilation.
