Tag: fiction

You Are an Incomplete Story

Growing up, I never much liked fiction. It was probably because I knew on some level that, if I thought about it a little too hard, it would break down.

In the real universe, you can ask a question like “why is the sky blue?” and find out the answer yourself. You can speculate from the existence of sunsets and rainbows and prisms the concept of white light refracting when it bounces off of things, and do experiments to confirm your hypotheses. If you keep on asking questions, you’ll find out about the – consistent and universal – laws of reality. And if you ask a question that no human knows the answer to, that doesn’t mean you can’t find out the truth.

In a story, this isn’t true, because at a fundamental level, stories are created by taking human-level understandings of reality and modifying them in a way that makes no sense when considering the underlying universal laws. The real universe is modeled by quarks. Stories are modeled by plots.

I’ve grown to appreciate stories more over time. Although they cannot produce the sense of wonder that I get from reality, they still have valuable training data. The best, most helpful advice I’ve ever had the privilege to give comes dually from two sources: my study of rationality, and my reading of good stories.

But stories still have a major pitfall that’s applicable even to those who don’t derive your sense of wonder from the perfectly unified laws of physics.

A story, by its nature, has to be completed at a satisfying end-point. Once its plot has been resolved and its tension released, the book comes to a close. Sometimes this comes at the end of the main character’s life – and so maps conveniently to a human life’s natural close – but this is almost always not the case. The main character, and the other characters as well, typically have futures that are assumed to continue after the last page. We just don’t read about them.

And we wouldn’t want to. As much as we love to see happily-ever-afters, reading chapter after chapter of our main character’s boring daily life after all the plot has been resolved would be dull. Even fluffy fan-fictions have an end. They don’t depict the complete, uninterrupted stream of a character’s life.

Let’s contrast this with real life. There is no-one chronicling every aspect of our existence, even for a short period when it’s most interesting. Six months of training can’t be skipped over with some motivational music and a montage: you have to literally get up and study or go to the gym every single bloody day for six actual months. And our stories don’t end, not unless we die.

If someone ever writes a book about us, they’re going to have to cut out some pieces and skip over others to fit it into a compelling narrative. And despite this, it’ll still be difficult, because real human lives are messy in a way that good story plots never are. Human lives are chock-full of Chekov’s guns that never fire, plot threads that are never resolved, and a constant stream of experiences that only properly ends at death.

It’s natural to think about your current self as at end of your story. After all, it’s the end of your experiences thus far, and if your life is a story, you are at the end of it, right now and always. But you have a future that you haven’t experienced yet, where events you haven’t predicted will happen and plot threads you haven’t imagined will start. Most of the things you’ve experienced so far will be completely irrelevant, maybe totally forgotten, in twenty years. That would make no sense in a story, but it happens all the time in real life.

So this is your reminder that you’re not defined by anything you’ve done so far, and that anything you don’t like about who you are right now can be changed. Your character has so much more room to develop.

This is also your reminder that your life is not comprised of the highlights that will be picked out in your possible future biography. It’s comprised of your day, whatever your day is – get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep – over and over forever. If you don’t like your day, that might sound terrible, but the only way to make it better is to improve the little things you do every day, and be a little happier in every moment, instead of waiting for some massive plot twist or new character introduction to fix everything.

I suppose I could say that your life is an incomplete story, and it always will be. You can think about it that way, if you like. It’s mostly correct if you think about a story that never ends. Still, it’s more accurate to say that your life is not a story at all. Comparing the two is, somewhat literally, comparing the output of a human brain to the contents of the universe. Your life is a life, which can be molded into a story only if you cut a lot of it out.

Can’t Bear to Hurt Your Characters?

I’ve been writing novels – or at least trying to write novels, with varying degrees of success – for about ten years. In general, I’m a very good writer, but I have a chronic habit of not finishing novels in particular. I begin stories, get a quarter or halfway through, and never finish them. Sometimes the story stopped being interesting and I forgot about it, but more often, I had no idea where to go next.

From the reader’s perspective, this writing looked like a bunch of elegant prose and interesting characters just sort of aimlessly drifting with no purpose. Any one chapter, or even a short string of chapters, might be interesting, but after an extended period of reading, you would be left confused. I was just as confused writing these driftwood stories.

Only recently did I realize what I was doing wrong, and I realized it by accident.

A few months ago, I decided to start on a novel – not an uncommon whim for me, to be sure – but the way I came at it was different. Instead of imagining an interesting scenario, or world, or set of characters, I wanted to tell a story about something. It had a moral, a plot, a purpose. (I wanted to write about three things: our relationships with others, our relationships with ourselves, and the relative importance of each.)

For the first time, I shaped the characters and the world around the story, not the other way around. Oddly, I wasn’t comfortable writing beyond chapter 1 without a very clear idea of all the major plot beats, especially the ending. I had never done that before: known the ending before writing much of anything.

Besides helping me gain a clear roadmap for where I wanted my story to go, this mindset also helped me to get over what I had known for a long time was my biggest flaw as a novelist: my inability to hurt my characters. I hadn’t known before how to fix that problem, but all of a sudden with this mindset shift, I stopped having a mental hangup about killing or hurting characters. It confused me at first.

After a short time, I realized a fundamental distinction between the way I’d been writing before and the way I wrote this new story. Before, I had been writing wish fulfillment. I started with characters or situations or worlds that I enjoyed imagining things about, and I wanted to share those imaginings with the world, so I wrote them down. It was never about telling a story, it was about sharing a cute scenario or a cool world or a neat character. And because it was about those things, I would be extremely reluctant to sacrifice the real purpose of the writing for the sake of a “plot”.

On the other hand, when the goal was to tell a story, I didn’t get too attached to any one story component, because the only reason those components existed the way they did was because the story required it; if the story had required something else, I would have come up with something else.

If you can’t bring yourself to hurt or kill your characters, ask yourself why they’re so precious to you. Is your writing shaped around a story you’re trying to tell, or is it simple wish fulfillment? There’s nothing wrong with writing wish fulfillment, by the way – but if you’re writing that type of fiction, it’s often best to know it. That way, you don’t feel compelled to add a plot to what should really be a fluffy one-shot.

Book Review: The Humans

Matt Haig’s “The Humans” gains the dubious title of “most frustrating book I’ve ever read all the way through”.

Before reading this review, please read the book yourself and come up with your own ideas about it. I very much don’t want this review to spoil it for you, and I’m about to lay out and thoroughly dissect the plot. Despite the fact that some of its meta-elements frustrate me in particular, the book is immensely well-written and beautiful, and I don’t want to diminish anyone’s enjoyment of it before they’ve even gotten the chance to read the original.

That being said…

I’ve found a number of books frustrating. The overwhelming majority, I didn’t bother to finish. Some of these books were badly-written, some espoused ideologies I strongly disagree with, some were internally inconsistent. I won’t name the specific books on this so-frustrating-I-didn’t-finish-them list, because you’ll probably think I’m making a value judgement against those books, or that I want to make you feel bad if you enjoy them. I’m not, and I don’t: my frustration with these books is an attribute of me, not of the books. Likewise, my frustration with “The Humans”.

Here’s a quick plot synopsis – as a refresher for the bits I’ll be talking about; if you haven’t read the book, read it.

There is a highly advanced alien species who finds out that a particular human has found out a thing they don’t want him to find out. As such, they kill him and send one of their own to impersonate him, to delete the evidence, including that which happens to be represented within human brains. The aliens are not concerned with the fact that humans tend to call this “murder”. The one they send has a difficult time adjusting to life as a human for a number of reasons, but gets out of some tough scrapes using magi- I mean alien technology. In the process, he gets attached to the family of the man he’s impersonating, who he was sent to kill, and also somewhat to humanity in general. He has an existential crisis over it all, and ends up relinquishing his life in his hyper-advanced home civilization to spend the rest of his life as a human mortal.

Here are my two specific points of frustration with that.

#1: The author is so focused on the main character’s journey to the end state which he understands (poetic sympathy with the modern human condition) that he doesn’t adequately demonstrate the beginning state, and the whole journey is cheapened as a result. Essentially, he writes a story from the perspective of someone who comes from an entire society whose entire purpose in existence is math, and yet there isn’t much actual math in it. Not even for the purpose of making decisions. I know from experience that when you really care about the math, you sort of become the math. It isn’t just a tool you use, it takes over your thoughts. Part of the beauty of stories like HPMOR is that they’re really, honestly about science – you couldn’t remove the science without removing the story.

There is a fundamental disconnect when you try to write a book from the perspective of someone in love with math, without yourself actually being in love with math. Really being in love with math doesn’t look like having a favorite prime number. It doesn’t even look like recognizing the importance of math to the structure of the universe, though this is in fact a piece of insight more people could do to have. Really being in love with math looks like having the thoroughly amazing realization that the question “what should I believe?” has an empirically proven correct answer. It looks like finding beauty in a proof like an artist finds beauty in a flower. It looks like loving the universe more because of its mathematical roots; finding more joy, not less, in a rainbow once it has been explained.

In short, I’d like to see this book’s premise rewritten by a mathematician.

#2: The ending of this book generally makes the transhumanist in me want to scream.

I don’t think it’s terribly hard to see why death is a bad thing. A decent portion of humans have already decided on it. It would be even easier to decide that death is bad if you came from a society which didn’t have any such thing: the only reason that many humans think it’s okay is rationalization, anyway. You could make people rationalize reasons why getting hit on the head with a truncheon every week was actually a good thing, if they thought it was inevitable. (It makes your head stronger! And makes you happier on the days you’re not getting hit on the head! No, really!) But if I asked you, dear reader, who are presumably not subject to such a weekly annoyance, if you’d like to start, for all the amazing benefits, I think you’d say no.

And yet this alien, who comes from a society which has no such thing as death, and furthermore no such thing as permanent physical injury, accepts mortality in exchange for becoming one of The Humans.

I mean, I get it, humans are cool. That’s the whole “humanist” bit. I love humans too. I think we’re capable of greatness. But exchanging immortality for us? Without so much as putting up a fight?

I think I’d at least try to apply my superior intelligence to figure out exactly how the relevant bits of alien technology worked, and find out how to apply them in humans. Yet he fails to take a trip down that line of discovery. Further, the alien is small-scale altruistic without ever considering the concept of large-scale altruism. He spends a lot of time agonizing over the fact that he can’t help the humans since they’d realize he wasn’t one of them, and yet he spends a non-negligible portion of the book helping the family of the man he’s impersonating. I think if I had a magic left hand that I didn’t want anyone to know about, I would still go around using it to cure people. Just, when I got asked how it worked, I’d say “Science!” – it’s a curiosity-stopper for a lot of people. On the whole, if I was really intent on abandoning my home planet for Earth, I would at least try to steal as much useful stuff as possible before I left, and use it to the best of my ability.

So why didn’t the alien do this? Simply, because he was written by a human who had not thought of it. The writer must encompass his characters, and so no character can go beyond the knowledge of the writer. If you consider what an immortal alien would do, that doesn’t let you magically climb outside your own brain to generalize from knowledge that isn’t yours. If you accept death as the natural order, who says that an immortal alien wouldn’t accept it too?

I do. It doesn’t make any sense. I wouldn’t do that, and I grew up with death. Within the past year, two of my relatives have died, along with hundreds of thousands of strangers, and I find that completely unacceptable. I have reason to believe that an immortal alien would probably think a bit more like me than like Matt Haig – assuming the alien were capable of thinking like a human at all.

So, I suppose, this book is frustrating because it accepts what, to me, is unacceptable, without putting up a fight at all. It’s one long exercise in the Mind Projection Fallacy, and a demonstration of the fact that to write true science fiction you need to actually know science. I read it all the way through anyways because it’s beautifully written and incredibly interesting.