I’ve been reading a lot the past few days, which is a switch for me. I spent the winter watching movies and binge-watching TV series, and only this week turned back to the printed page (well, digital page). And it’s just dawned on me tonight–I’ve been half dead since November–that in both film and print, I’ve been anesthetizing myself all this time with story.
I think I realized it first because I just looked up in the middle of a book of short stories (Petrella at Q) and realized that I was completely calm. Calm’s been in short supply around here, achieved previously through a stringent regimen of film and crochet. I know theoretically that the calm is because I’ve been living in another world, one constructed by an author(ity) I trust, in this case Michael Gilbert. I know Gilbert won’t let me down, won’t violate character or do any handwaving over plot holes, and most of all, I know he’ll deliver justice in the end. I’m safe with Michael Gilbert. And Georgette Heyer. And Terry Pratchett, although I still clutch when I think about him gone. These are the world-builders I go to when my own world gets a little shaky on its pins.
Which of course led me back to my own fiction, the stories I’ve been struggling with. And I’m wondering if part of my problem might be that I don’t have the confidence that I used to, that I’m not sure of my authority in the text. The world is changing and I’m withdrawing from it (happily, peacefully), so there’s no chance that I actually know how Young People are going about things now. Of course, there is no One Official Life for Young People; all people are many and varied so there’s not one standard to hit, but there is that willing suspension of disbelief, that sense (again) that there’s an author(ity) in the text. Michael Gilbert wrote about the mid-twentieth century in England, and I trust him. I’m not sure I trust Jennifer Crusie to write about the second decade of the twenty-first with any authority at all, since I’ve looked at it, decided it’s depressing as all hell (the best have lost all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, and who knew Yeats was a prophet?), and decided to look out over the trees and down to the lake sparkling in the sun and pat a dog.
But I also think it’s possible that if you build your story world with real conviction, no, with real belief in its existence, then maybe that authority is there. I believe that Liv is undead when I watch iZombie, I believe that Vimes is there racing across the pavement to save Sybil from the dragon in Guards, Guards, and I believe that Patrick Petrella will do whatever needs done to keep his part of London safe. It isn’t so much “If you believe in fairies, clap” as it is “If you believe in this world and the characters who walk its streets, relax.” It’s that safe space, that island of meaning in the chaos. I think that’s the baseline for good story, a trip through a world constructed with authority and infused by belief.
The problem lies in achieving that. I think that’s where the strength of series stories lies: the world’s been established, the reader believes in it, the writer believes in it, and everybody can settle in. Doing one-offs every time means establishing a new world, or at least one that’s only marginally connected to the last one. You’re essentially constructing a new society every time, with new characters and new rules, walking new streets, going into new houses, so both you and the reader start on unsteady ground. I think some authors construct their own worlds and then set their stories in them–Dick Francis comes to mind, very few sequels but all his stories set at least peripherally to the world of horse racing–and maybe that’s the answer, that you know when you pick up a book by that author, you’ll be in that world, maybe not a long-established world like Discworld or Hogwarts, but in the kind of world that author constructs. You feel safe because that author wouldn’t build you an unsafe world.
I’m still flailing around this idea, but I’m positive that the success of a story rests on that authority in the text, those safe hands that open the door to the story world, even if it’s a disc-shaped world resting on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. Which is why I’m going back to Petrella now. If he’s on the beat, I’m safe.