science |

or, How Setting Makes a Story

Editing a good dissertation is like auditing a class, and as a person who was deported from the land of academia for taking four years to obtain a two-year master’s degree, I love that. Last Thanksgiving I expressed my gratitude for the grad students who hire me to polish their dissertations. Not only do they provide an income stream, but they bring me new ideas, lofty academic stuff that I don’t run across in my day-to-day. Bonus: I get the best of the class without having to leave my house or listen to That Guy who monopolizes every discussion. You remember That Guy.

Anyway, this year’s student introduced me to Félix Guattari, Marxist poststructuralist psychoanalyst, and his three ecologies: those of mind, society, and environment. He’s involved with the deep ecology movement, but that’s not what I’m interested in right now. Reading this student’s research made me think about the importance of setting in any narrative.

Let’s break it down freshman style: ecology derives from the Greek roots oîkos, meaning “house,” and logía, “the study of.” It is the science of where we are now and how that affects us. Biology and environmentalism are generally where people go with that, but we can transfer the concept to storytelling.

Creator of Worlds

For me, the hallmark of a good story, fiction or nonfiction, told with print or film or stage, is that it creates a world that lingers in memory long after the story has come to an end. A key element of this world building is setting. One could argue, and I do, that setting is as important if not more so than characters. In a sense, it has to be a character in whatever narrative you are telling. The audience needs to understand its backstory, its traits, and why it reacts in predictable or unpredictable ways as events unfold.

To use a negative example, have you ever watched episodes from original Star Trek or early Doctor Who in which the characters are trapped in some featureless landscape or a tiny room? This may have been edgy in the 60s, but now it qualifies as blunt force trauma. It’s claustrophobic, tedious, and more or less unwatchable unless you’re a hardcore fan. This is what happens when you subtract a sense of place that is connected to an individual (mind), a group (society), and a physical location (environment).

How do I make my setting (and story) unforgettable?

So glad you asked! Setting needs to have a connection to character and events. You can’t just toss your characters into a primeval forest or an overgrown building in Chernobyl or an underground factory in a dystopian future or a ratty apartment in the Lower East Side in the 30s—not without knowing why they are there and why this is either the best or the worst possible place for these characters to be at this time. Note that last word, time. When is part of where. It gives dimension to setting.

Frequently characters arrive in a writer’s brain with their time and place fully intact. If not, you may need to chat with them for a while, observe them as you would strangers in a train station. What are they wearing, how do they speak? What do they carry? Urban, rural, wealthy, poor, from the past, from the future? Sheltered, worldly, street smart? Are they comfortable wherever they find themselves? Are they fish out of water no matter where they go? Do the distinct places from which two characters come create a conflict between them, a disconnect?

If you are working in the genre of fantasy, you have both immense freedom to invent ecologies and immense responsibility to create the perfect place for your story because the limits of our space and time don’t exist. Use your powers wisely, and don’t trap your characters in a box when you have the universe at your disposal.

A Little Bit of Not-Here

A final note on setting: no matter how bleak their current surroundings, characters must all carry some piece of sanctuary, some memory or talisman or dream of a better future to represent the hope they have of getting out of there. That idea or item signifying a better place creates contrast with the present; without it, the setting is flat and offers no connection to the audience or the characters. Just as you need ebb and flow in the steady rise of emotional engagement, there needs to be variety in setting. When you build your house, give your characters light and shadow to play in.

cross-pollination science writing

Chase the Words

on July 21, 2015July 21, 2015

It’s been busy around here, which is why I have neglected the blog. And then there was the annual vacation in early July, back from which I traditionally come inspired to break out of the money-driven confines and do some creative work. I do want to get to that, and also I have some things to say about some of the more esoteric, Talmudesque entries in the Chicago Manual of Style, but that is for another day.

Today, I want to consider the tardigrades, microscopic animals also known as water bears or moss piglets. These tiny critters have survived the five major extinction events in our planet’s history; they can withstand temperatures from close to freezing to higher than the boiling point of water. Atmospheric pressure six times greater than that at the bottom of deep ocean trenches, the vacuum of space, radiation lethal to humans—no problem; they can handle it. They can survive for ten years with no food or water and then get right back to the business of eating and reproducing as soon as they are rehydrated.

A testament to perseverance, yes, but when I heard about water bears, the first thing I thought of was not the gorgeous flexibility and tenacity of terrestrial life, but the poor grad students whose job it was to go into the lab every day and try to kill these little buggers. Science is a bitch, sometimes.

What would I know about it, you are no doubt asking. I sit around with a laptop all day reading books. Either the books are good, and I am entertained, or they are abysmal, and I enjoy a deep, satisfying schadenfreude over that. Well, no. (OK, there is a dark sort of joy in exposing and expunging ignorant usage, like “per say”—dude, I know.)

The task that has been wearing on me lately is the repeated exposure to mediocre manuscripts. They are of poor quality not simply because the writers lack vision or talent, but because they have got hold of some idea that all it takes to be an author are several thousand words strung together in a file and a few thousand dollars to PayPal off to a self-pub factory.

This is not a new idea, and people all over several industries have been decrying the self-pub revolution for ages. I don’t care about the dilution of literature so much; no one is reading this deluge of poor fiction, so it doesn’t matter. What concerns me is the attitude, the hubris, that makes fact-checking, revision, the numinous, and honest hard work seem irrelevant. It’s sweatshop work versus craftsmanship.

I recently watched a documentary about this guy, which was well done, but I was most impressed with his use of the phrase “chasing the music.” In music, as in writing, it’s not just daily practice that’s important, or even amassing a body of work, it’s the chasing—the relentless seeking after solutions, hunting the elusive, trying to take down the seemingly unkillable.

Want to write a book? Do it, I implore you. Put the sum of your experience and intelligence into it. Never stop chasing the images and characters in your head. Never give up, and by that I don’t mean the trite advice to push on past naysayers and doubt. When I say never give up, I mean your work isn’t done until it’s polished and awe-inspiring. Write it, fix it, fix it some more. Ask kind souls to read it, and then fix it again after they tell you what’s wrong. If they say nothing’s wrong, get some more truthful readers.

Care about your work. Bring a thoroughness to the job that would make a water-bear-murdering microzoologist proud. No one is going to care about your project the way you do, so put all your passion into it before you unleash it on the world. If you prefer the self-pub route to the agonizing pilgrimage of traditional publishing, that’s fine. Just don’t sign off on something that reads like self-pub, like you wrote it on your phone over your lunch break.

Give your dreams the respect they deserve. Follow your bliss, pursue your excellence, and never stop chasing the words.

cross-pollination feminism science writing

Giving Thanks

on November 20, 2014November 20, 2014

Or, All the Pretty Discourses

So it’s that time of year again—the one filled with stress and panic and copious amounts of alcohol. Not for me, you understand, for the doctoral candidates knocking up my inbox to have their dissertations edited in time. I want to take this opportunity to say, “Thanks, grad students!” Not just for the PayPal infusions, although I like those too, but because every thesis or dissertation I read teaches me something new. There’s a reason I give you guys a discount, and it’s not entirely due to my commitment to higher education.

Here’s what I learned about this week: critical discourse analysis and its sassy younger sister, feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (go on, read it—it’s a short paper, and it explains both terms). I waded in Foucault and Derrida in grad school, but that wasn’t the main course of my study, so this was all new to me. The sparkly bit that caught my eye?

FPDA believes in complexity rather than polarization of subjects of study.

What’s that mean? Basically, it means that this method of analyzing discourse (any kind, the weirder the better, apparently) prefers not to divide speakers into powerful vs. powerless, voiced vs. voiceless, oppressor vs. oppressed. The official reason is because power tends to shift, elevating the formerly oppressed into a role of authority. The unofficial but obvious reason? Because complexity is much more interesting, especially for writers, who, presumably, are writing about people and what they have to say. Polarity can be very limiting.

Enough about scholarly analysis of discourse. Earlier this evening I attended a book launch and listened to this woman talk about a character she created for a fictional habitat who ultimately never made it into the book. Most writers do this, but it isn’t discussed often: so much informs a story that the end readers never even know about. There are marginal or interstitial voices surrounding every narrative, fictional or not, and reacting to it, shaping it. We only hear half of the conversation.

Anyway, if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving next week, enjoy it and any related days off. While you’re sitting around the table, imagine what scholars would do with your family conversation. How would they quantify it? What roles would they assign? Whose voice is absent yet still profoundly shaping the discourse?

science writing

Science and Poetry: Dog Days Edition

on July 27, 2014July 27, 2014

Sirius A, overexposed so you can see Sirius B (lower left)

My latest favorite phrase from technical reports is method of moments. There are actually two definitions, one from statistics and one from probability theory, and the thought of explaining either of them is making me sleepy right now, so instead I present to you what I think that phrase should mean (hey, if it can have two quant-related definitions, it can have a literary one, too).

Got a story in your head? Some people do a traditional outline, some go for less linear processes such as spider diagrams, and others like to sit down and type it out from start to finish. Nothing wrong with any of these methods as long as they work.

Here’s another way. Most stories start with a seed: an overheard phrase, a road sign, an earring, a dog tied up outside a store. Call them moments. What if you laid out the entire story as a succession of moments? Put them on index cards, either physical or virtual, so you can shuffle them around until they tell your story the way you want to tell it.

Two reasons why this works: One, it’s an organic method of recall; when you try to remember something that happened, it usually comes to you as a jumble of events, not always in chronological order. Once the pieces are collected, you can assemble them in the most effective way to relate the experience, which, again, not always chronological. Two, and closely related, the story changes with the sequence of moments and how you choose to connect them. Like a constellation.

Try it sometime, whether you’re writing fiction, memoir, or sampling techniques. You know you’re going through life filching moments like a ferret steals socks; now you can put them to some use or at least string them all on a narrative cord so they don’t get lost under the sofa with the cat toys and spare change.

Still wondering why there’s a photo of stars at the top of the page? The Roman phrase “dog days” (diēs caniculārēs) refers to the hottest part of the summer, which coincided, at that time and location, with the period when Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, rose with the sun. It was considered an unlucky time, rife with disease, and the Romans sacrificed a red dog to Sirius to keep off the worst of it. This astronomical coincidence no longer happens (and red dogs are safe to chase Frisbees and pant in the shade), but the name lingers and still signifies torpid, sweaty weather.

Enjoy the dog days. Don’t forget to collect some good moments.

science writing

Voice and Fiction: Finding the Right Note

on June 3, 2014June 3, 2014

Recently, I’ve been in negotiations with authors for projects that ultimately were not a good fit. Sometimes it was the author who made that call, and sometimes I’ve had the luxury of opting out myself, not because the manuscript was a cracked bell but because I personally could not make it sing. The author and I were, as my former boss the surface scientist used to say, out of phase.

What do you know about wave physics? It’s cool stuff. Next time you’re facing down some nasty writer’s block, go and do a quick search on the dynamics of sound and light. Light, obviously, is not only a wave, it’s also made of particles, but that makes the subject even more fascinating. And I digress, but digressions on wave–particle duality are exactly what you need when you’re stuck.

Back to voice. Every artist has a closetful of those, and in the beginning most artists try on different voices to see what fits. We all try to emulate our idols for a time, and then we develop something in reaction to what we hate, and the voices we keep tend to be an amalgam of the better parts of all those we discarded.

(Could there be more metaphors in this post? I’m thinking yes.)

My point? Is two-pronged. Prong 1: Writers, play with your voice. If a story isn’t quite working for you, try it with a different accent. Don’t be afraid to take on a verbal persona that doesn’t feel like you. You’ll find a balance between overkill and underwhelm and between out of control and overly contrived. Doing that work is what separates the aspiring from the published. Push the voice a little too far in any direction to find the boundaries of what works. Recognizing the “too far” point, not to mention the critical “not far enough” point, is a valuable skill that only comes with practice.

Prong 2: Editors and collaborators, don’t be afraid to say no. Work is nice, paychecks are good, but trust your instincts no matter how dire your finances. If you don’t think you can make something work, if it’s physically painful to read, don’t waste your and the author’s time. Cut that one loose like a bad first date, and move on to the next project.

Editors have voices too; they may not be immediately audible to the reader, or they may create a subtle harmony to draw attention to the force and talent of the writer. Proper harmonics send a shiver down the spine, and that is the feeling we’re all hoping for with every new project. When you feel that resonance, you’ll know that you’ve got hold of a sound project, one that will repay all the dewing and sanding and polishing.

science

Applied Poetry, Part H2O

Updated on March 1, 2014September 15, 2013

This batch of poetic terms comes from a particularly fishy technical report—enjoy!

Area of production foregone. A demographic model that calculates the area of spawning habitat required to offset the number of eggs and larvae lost as a result of intake operation. This is at the same time utterly practical and yet mindblowingly and heartbreakingly metaphysical, and that is what makes it poetry.

The following is a very short sample of bizarre common names for fish:

alewife

hogchoker

mummichog

cunner

I’d really like to know the etymology on these fish, but a cursory search turns up very little. If anybody knows more, please drop me a comment or an email. You know I love this stuff.

science writing

Holmgren’s 12 Principles of Permaculture and How They Apply to Writing

Updated on April 22, 2016April 20, 2013

David Holmgren developed his 12 principles to assist architects, engineers, environmentalists, farmers, and anyone else involved in creating a sustainable habitat. In honor of Earth Day, I have found a further use for them.

1. Observe and interact.

To write truthfully, you need to pay attention to what’s around you. Even the wildest fantasies are inspired by what’s going on right here and now. Want to write realistic dialogue? Listen and talk to people.

2. Catch and store energy.

Take notes; you never know what will spark your next idea. Open yourself to inspiration in common and uncommon places.

3. Obtain a yield.

Keep your day job until your writing pays. To take this in another direction, does your creative work sustain you in other ways? If not, reconsider how you are spending your energy.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

“No one understands my brilliance!” Possibly. You can either be brilliant all on your own or listen to and consider suggestions, especially if more than one of your readers give you the same critique.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services.

Write what you know; work with what you have. You know which projects are likely to pay you back for the time invested.

6. Produce no waste.

Focus your ideas and nurture those that are likely to bear fruit. Obviously not everything you write is going to see publication or even a second draft, but if you suspect you might be frittering away your time, you’re probably right.

7. Design from patterns to details.

Develop your outline or plot first, using a pattern that makes sense to you and is at least somewhat familiar to your audience. Add the small touches, the trees in your forest, as you go.

8. Integrate rather than segregate.

You can apply this to your associates, your jobs, and your writing projects. It’s a far more efficient use of creative and emotional energy.

9. Use small and slow solutions.

Remember that story about the patient tortoise and the arrogant rabbit? Incremental change is easier to implement and monitor than a drastic, reactionary rewrite.

10. Use and value diversity.

Eggs, meet multiple baskets. Try a new method if you’re stuck. Seek out different critics.

11. Use edges and value the marginal.

My favorite one! Watch the interstices in any system or population; really interesting stuff happens there and often goes unnoticed. Got a rough edge in your story? Instead of trimming it off, examine it closely. It may be your new center.

12. Creatively use and respond to change.

Change happens, and fighting it is a waste of your time. Put it to work for you instead of complaining.

I hope these concepts are helpful in your writing endeavors and life in general. Celebrate Earth Day by reusing them and passing them on.

science writing

Applied Poetry, Part One

Updated on March 1, 2014April 11, 2013

Here’s what I love about technical and scientific work: it brings with it a fantastic and varied vocabulary and creates new associations for common words. What makes writing fresh and exciting? A new voice, a new way of describing something we all can recognize. A new phrase made out of old words. Every discipline has its own specific lexicon, exotic and utilitarian at the same time.

Below is a brief sample of borrowed terms that are entertaining me at the moment. Want to play along? Start reading things outside of your usual choices. Pick up a magazine about astrophysics, knitting, veterinary medicine. See what you can find and steal for use elsewhere. If you find something great, add it in the comments.

Axiom of countable choice: This is “an axiom of set theory [that] states that any countable collection of non-empty sets must have a choice function. Spelled out, this means that if A is a function with domain N (where N denotes the set of natural numbers) and A(n) is a non-empty set for every n ∈ N, then there exists a function f with domain N such that f(n) ∈ A(n) for every n ∈ N.” Straight out of Wikipedia because I can’t explain it any better than that without screwing it up. One thing I can tell you is that it is not inductive, because countable choice is not the same as finite choice.

Chain of custody: This is a form that accompanies field samples on the way to a laboratory for testing. It provides a record to guarantee that the samples were not compromised. I love the idea of a metaphorical chain, a written tale of an item changing hands from creation to disposal. Imagine if every person had one.

Doctrine of signatures: Not a science term anymore, but this was cutting-edge medicine in the Middle Ages. First discussed by Dioscurides in Greece and Galen in Rome and later written about extensively by Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme, the doctrine advances the idea that living things will heal or affect parts of the human body that they resemble. For example, liverwort looks like a liver and is used to clean the blood. Earwigs were believed to make a fine remedy for earache. The idea is that of some divine pharmacist signing everything with its proper function for us, the alleged stewards of creation.

Shadow price of carbon: This reminds me of the Shadow Parliament or Shadow Ministers in the Westminster system of government, which sounds terribly sinister but is really just a form of checks and balances. If it makes you think of the Shadow Proclamation, well, I’m right there with you. The actual definition of the SPC is the long-term environmental cost of using or avoiding the use of a unit of carbon in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly everything has a shadow price: say, for example. you slip out of your office to grab a cup of coffee and miss a call from a client, who then offers a $40,000 job to someone else. The shadow price of coffee just became $40,002.