On Speculative

A very important part of understanding a writer is understanding where they came from. Most creative writers, whether they mean to or not, leave a whole bunch of footprints in their stories, and as a reader I've definitely noticed the tracks in retrospect. Tolkien's particular love of nature, for example, or Rowling's experience at Amnesty International. Those sorts of insights cast an interesting light on the writing, which is more than a little interesting to know when you're trying to make it big like them. Know the person, know the art.

There are probably a lot of things I could say about myself that would shed some sort of light on my writing. But honestly, this is a blog post -- you shouldn't have to know my life story to understand what I'm saying and why the heck I'm saying it. And after trying to explain everything in the first three drafts of this post, I think I've finally learned my lesson. Life stories are great for insight, but they inspire rumination and way too much meandering tales of what-I-did-when-I-was-five-that-was-interesting. And this post sorta does have a topic -- would be a shame to just ignore it.

So, fact #1 -- I write speculative. If you're reading this after going through the archives, you likely already know this. I'm also probably one of the lucky ones in that I don't get asked "Why [Genre]?", but then, I just get blank looks in general when I tell someone I want to become a writer, so I guess their thought processes don't go that far.

So I'll ask it here and pretend they did ask; why write speculative? Well, I don't know -- why does anyone do anything? Its not like I laid out in my bed one night, staring at the ceiling, and weighed the pros and cons of each genre. That's just not how I work. It's simply that every idea I've come up with leaned that way, so it made sense to write them as they where.

But then, that's not really an acceptable answer, I've found. People tend to look at you like you're an idiot when you answer "Why did you do [X]?" questions with "I dunno."

Probably the most straightforward answer that's actually honest is it's where I feel I belong.

Let me explain: I come from computer people. Both parents used to work at Apple, met there, and married when they where still on the payroll. My dad can be firmly called a geek programmer, while my mom was very firmly a spiritual chatroom moderator. My brother played videogames. All four of us had computers while I was growing up. My friends played pretend in the early years, and later did a whole slew of things from drawing anime to sneaking into theaters to snark bad horror movies.

You see where this is going, right? It's pretty much the same connection between Stephen King and B-movies as it is with me and fantastical media. It's woven its way inside of me, and still can't quite let go. The stories I think of always have a piece of that in them, and I don't think that's going to stop, because I never stop being interested in that sort of thing. Which is especially easy these days, when it's so simple to plug yourself into the internet and only get what you want out of it.

But I guess the next question to ask then is why stay there? If Fantasy and Scifi are such a looked-down upon genres (supposedly), why bother staying there outside of my own feelings about it?

Now that, I can answer more thoroughly. First off, the days of the pulps are long gone, and shows like Buffy and Star Treck have gone strong enough to have a long standing fanbase, and plenty of content being produced even after the actual shows died out. Writers like Orson Scott Card and Robert Jordan made complete livings off of the stuff, and since horror is a part of speculative, so did Stephen King. Then there are books like Eragon and Twilight, which, while very much reviled by a whole slew of people, at the same time had enough of a readership to make the authors quite a pretty penny. So it definitely isn't impossible to make it, even if you aren't perfect, and it's certainly possible to make a living off of it if you're smart.

But even excluding luck and slush piles, there are plenty of self-published people who are making it with a bit of Spec in the mix. The biggest ones I know of being Cory Doctorow of Boing-boing and Christof Laputka of The Leviathan Cronicles, but there are also a slew of other ones that make at least a little bit of money through everything from e-books to Podcasts, and can create enough of a stir to get published traditionally. And with devices like the Kindle and reader apps on the iPhone and iPad, the number of e-book sales isn't anything to balk at anymore.

But for me personally, there's a lot more of a reason than just random name-drops. Removing the limits of reality? Insanely freeing, in a way I can't even explain. Not breaking down the boundaries, but remaking them into something else -- a different reality, a different set of rules. The ability to take something that fundamentally cannot be real, like magic or time-travel, and make it real via description. Making the unreal real. Sure, you can do the same thing with a realistic story, but I don't get the same payoff of creation from it, like in something speculative. The spark of enthusiasm is gone.

Which is another thing to think about -- writing what you care about. As a friend of mine once put it, the best way for people to learn anything is to "have them give a shit about it". Having enthusiasm and passion for something is the fuel for the forge when creating something good, and the things I care about are more easily expressed when there's magic afoot.

And there seemingly is a part of me that really cares about it. One of the reasons I'm so attracted H.P. Lovecraft's work, despite the style not looking like something I'd be into, is that it echoes what I've got going on myself. Cyclopian ruins? Odd dimensions? The vast aloneness where you aren't really alone, where you're neither safe or important? They seem to be major themes in his dreams, if what he says is anything to go by, and they definitely where in mine.

My dreams involve machines that controls people's aging and houses containing secret rooms constantly. And you can imagine what directions those went in, since I've basically described by dreams as being Lovecraftian. I've never been the type of person to write something based on a dream, but I can't deny that some of that dream-logic spills over into the fantastical elements of my writing, as well as my description. I feel more at home trying to express that in something speculative, than in something more mainstream, because I honestly think that sort of thing is more appreciated there.

More obviously, I love fantastical content. I cannot express how much I love the idea of writing about magic, or creating a culture, or designing robots and lovingly describing them removing their synthetic skin. You can have the craziest sort of things happen in a speculative story, and have it work. A magical tree's wood fashioned into a magical wardrobe capable of bending time and space? Done. Giant three-headed-dog named Fluffy? Done. Monster that sleeps in an underwater city, waiting for death to die? Done. None of those things seem ridiculous while reading them in context. I can create the most insane premise for something, and with the right mix of time, effort, and skill, I can create a story from it that makes perfect sense and makes you care. I can reinvent the world, and still make it matter somehow.

And I love the thrill of trying to do that. A good intellectual challenge can always enthrall me, and worldbuilding a complex story always manages it. Trying to force out more and farther reaching extrapolations of a concept, tying all those loose threads together, solving huge logistical scrambles and plotholes in the middle of writing a gigantic story -- it always gets my figurative mouth watering. I like them as a reader, and like them as a writer, and it's an important part of how I twist a story together.

Most of what I do in the process of that is more than making stuff up -- it's using things I picked up from reality in new ways to make things real. Every good lie has a bit of truth in it, so twisting up fire magic with experience from poking at candles, to using my knowledge as an artist and perspective to properly understand how a robot's vision functions if it's made up of camera feeds, can work wonders. And unlike lit fiction, which can twist one thing with another in metaphors, I don't feel the peer-pressure of sticking to a depressing or serious tone in the process. I can poke fun at things and make you horrified at the drop of a hat, or make awe well so deep in your chest that it can't be contained.

Lastly, I like my stories long, and you can't get much longer than the door-stoppers you find in fantasy and scifi. Which is good for me -- I'm very long winded when I have something to say, which explains this post quite well. I like having room to stretch, and I definitely want readers who would enjoy the ride. And that might be the real heart of the matter -- why write to everyone else, when I can write to my people and enjoy it?