Joseph Dooley Fiction

A lack of imagination

I usually bristle at blowback against writing advice, because the blowback often comes from people the advice isn't meant for. But one piece of writing advice that really is bad is "Write what you know." On its face this advice precludes most genre fiction. For that reason it can be safely ignored.

Writing requires imagination, a mind that ventures outside the known. If I wrote what I knew, there'd be little variety in my writing. My stories would be stale and predictable. So with every story I've written, I've reached beyond my limited frame and learned something. Mostly technology and occupational stuff, but also character types who aren't like me—especially people not ethically like me. To keep it fresh, I have to be able to write more than one type of good guy and more than one type of bad guy.

F Scott Fitzgerald said intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time. I say that's more a necessity of imagination than intelligence. The writer creates drama and tension by bringing characters who believe in what they're doing into conflict. Neither one of them has to be right by the writer's personal standards, but they should think and act as if they are.

There is a stunning lack of imagination in "mainstream" science fiction and fantasy today. It shows in the puritanical and Pharisaical attacks from today's celebrated writers and publishers on dead writers and dead editors who built the market for the former to sell books to. Today's supposed standard bearers cut off their literary ancestors because of their transgressions against the idols of the present age.

Modern sci-fi/fantasy writers seem really intent on just hating on the people that paved the way.
— Vik and Me (@ViktorGorchev) February 28, 2020

Can such narrow-minded, reactionary writers faithfully explore the range of human experience that connects with the broadest possible audience? Can they characterize a patriotic soldier, religious disciple, or Brexit voter without inserting their contempt? Or, will they "write what they know," effectively cutting their readership by 80% before the book goes to print?

I don't pretend I don't have a point of view, but I'm humble (and hungry) enough to know my point of view shouldn't be the only flavor in my writing. It would bore you. It would bore me as well.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi that's neither didactic or boring, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Is worldbuilding like an iceberg?

Worldbuilding as an iceberg, courtesy of The Closer Look NK Jemisin, Brandon Sanderson, and YouTuber The Closer Look all liken worldbuilding to an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg you could call the "here and now" story elements: places, characters, motivations, tension, plot: the things that propel the story and hold the reader's attention. The bigger underwater part is history, backstories, metaphysics, religions, cultures (HBMRC). Without these things, the here and now story elements wouldn't fit together⁠—not well, at least. That's the craft of worldbuilding.

The metaphor is appealing, but is it true? To what extent is "invisible" worldbuilding truly invisible?

I've written before how it's wise to leave details up to readers' imagination. Give too much detail, and you run the same risk as movie adaptations: depicting a setting or character differently than how the reader imagined it. Describing a character as handsome allows the reader to picture whatever he wants depending on his tastes; describing the character's features in detail⁠ to the exclusion of others would limit the effect of that attribute. Plus, as a general rule you should err on the side of brevity.

HBMRC gainsays this principle. The reader may think it's there under the surface, holding up the tip of the iceberg, but it's really not. It's not anything until the writer breathes it into existence with words on the page.

Sure, if you take a snapshot of a conflict, it will be stripped of most subtlety and subtext. You'll see the the tip of the iceberg, from whose detail you can only hope to infer what holds it upright. But stories are not snapshots. Exposition can interrupt at any moment to clue the reader in as to why and how the here and now came to be. It's not so much invisible as handled deftly since it's not as pressing as the here and now.

Some examples:

The Battle of Gettysburg lasted 3 days, but you can go back months to trace the causes of the battle, and decades to trace the causes of the Civil War. To tell the story of that battle to someone who never heard of it, you wouldn't leave all that out, but you wouldn't give it proportional time either.
The Abyss is a great story. It takes place over a handful of days, but Orson Scott Card's novelization goes years into the past to explore the main characters' backstories. Although the movie couldn't devote that time because it's a different medium, you can still understand the characters and their primary traits through their actions. The B plot tension derives from Bud and Lindsey's failed marriage, and the movie makes a point of reminding you of this early and often.
Inception has a very complex setup. The technology of shared dreaming has to be explained, and Cobb's, Sato's, and Fischer's backstories have to be explained for the movie to make any sense. That's why the main job doesn't begin until almost an hour into the movie. The worldbuilding isn't hidden. The filmmakers put it front and center because without it you'd be lost.

In conclusion, I don't believe the iceberg metaphor best describes the reader's experience of worldbuilding. The anticipation of HBMRC can sustain for a time, but not to the end of the story. The writer eventually must support the tip of the iceberg with specifics that are inherently visible to the reader. The method of worldbuilding, like writing anything else, is a matter of craft.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Nurse Ratched

Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, the Joker, Hans Gruber. Odds are good you'll find at least one of these on anyone's top villains list. Their laurels are well-deserved. But I want to talk about a villain who isn't given her due: Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. My impressions are informed more by the book than the 1975 movie starring Louise Fletcher. Her unique villainy comes through more clearly via Ken Kesey’s prose than it does through the visual medium.

When the hero McMurphy gets committed to the psych ward, his stay becomes a battle of wills: He's big, brash, and rebellious; Nurse Ratched is cold, controlling, and manipulative. McMurphy mounts a campaign to break her vice-like grip on the patients and the hospital staff. Through sheer pig-headedness, he's mostly successful. He wins the patients' rights to play cards, to watch the World Series, and to leave the hospital to go fishing.

Nurse Ratched makes these allowances, but her will remains unbroken. Through it all she exudes maternal patience and forbearance. She doesn't let McMurphy bring her down to his level, doesn't validate the threat he poses to her authority. He recognizes this, and an unsettling feeling sets in. He begins to question his motives. Why is he here, and what ultimately does he want?

Put simply, his motive is to be free. At the beginning of the story he escaped military service by disobeying orders and acting like a lunatic. Now to be free he must prove he's sane. His antics in the psych ward don't help that cause. He reaches the conclusion that, to be free, he must submit to Nurse Ratched. Alas, submission, to become like the weak-minded patients to whom he's a hero, would mean the death of his spirit.

The turning point of the book is when McMurphy finds out all the patients are there by choice. Why? Here it's helpful to look closer at Nurse Ratched. She's about 50 years old, never married, and, by the inmates' description of her, quite beautiful in her prime. But she is completely asexual. She's not the oppressive authoritarian McMurphy's used to dealing with, but an unconditional caregiver. She rules over the patients, all men, as if they're her children. They're free to leave the psych ward when they're able and ready, but they choose not to because they're comfortable in their confinement.

Ask any empty-nester what the hardest part of raising children is, and she'll tell you it’s letting them leave when they’ve grown up. It is with a heavy heart she watches them strike out on their own. But if they choose to stay for whatever reason, she would understand. She would not push them away. The “failure to launch” phenomenon has two guilty parties: the young men who don't grow up, and the mothers who tacitly discourage them from leaving.

What makes Nurse Ratched a wonderful villain is she has motives, too, as strong as McMurphy's. She needs the patients to need her. So she conditions them by instilling affection, guilt, and fear to need her so before long they have no desire to be free. Thus she robs them of any chance at real rehabilitation. I won't spoil the ending, but how she finally deals with McMurphy will cost you an hour of sleep just thinking about it.

Panopticon

The best system of control is self-administered. The most oppressive system of control is administered by the public, deputized by earthly powers. The former spurs on a passion for righteousness, the latter a passion for conformity.

A hallmark of the present age is that you can be photographed at any time in public. No matter how cordial your interactions with strangers, no matter how ethical you are, you will make an embarrassing mistake. It's inevitable.

The decontextualized images of your mistake get beamed across the planet to millions of people, who get a dopamine kick out of mocking and scorning you. An Internet sleuth doxxes you, and you're stripped of personhood and cast out of polite society. That one mistake now defines you. You are now a cautionary tale to the rest of the world: Don't let your guard down for one minute, or your life may be turned upside-down.

Does that sound like a free society or a prison?

The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.

I can't think of a better way to divide people than weaponizing technology to enforce conformity. A society cannot withstand attack when its members are atomized thus by fear and suspicion. They will be like sheep to the slaughter.

If the Second Amendment can be restricted by the state, a strong argument can be made for restricting available technology until the people demonstrate the discipline to peacefully wield it.

In praise of Bryson DeChambeau

Bryson DeChambeau was already a good golfer and somewhat of a personality with his meticulous, analytical style. Late last year he saw an opportunity to take his game to the next level by increasing his swing speed. This year, given 3 months at and nothing better to do, he bulked up and revamped his game.

On Sunday he won the Rocket Mortgage Classic by three strokes. His performance was a revelation to some. He was routinely bombing the ball 350 yards off the tee, and hitting high iron approach shots on par 5s.

A corner of the golf world is already fretting over this. I can understand why they would want the game to be played a certain way, consistent with the way it's always been played. What I don't understand is the "competitive advantage" argument. Competitive advantage is built in to every sport. Every player has advantages that he tries to leverage against the golf course. Not everyone can drive the ball 350 yards. Not everyone can stick their approach shots. Not everyone can hit out of a bunker. Not everyone can read the break on a putt. Without competitive advantage, the idea of competition no longer applies.

Say what you want about whether power golf is good or bad for the game. DeChambeau took a big risk and it worked for him. For one weekend, he was the best golfer in the world, and it was because of the work he put in. That effort and boldness are hard to duplicate, even for talented professionals for whom .

That's the point of greatness. Not everyone can reach it.

It remains to be seen if DeChambeau's new style of play is sustainable or will translate to major tournaments, like the Masters. In the unlikely event his career takes off and he dominates like Tiger Woods, the golf community would be wise to embrace him, much like it did Tiger. It would not only increase interest in golf, but highlight the factors contributing to greatness that can be duplicated by us commoners, like discipline, craft, and hard work.

That's my approach to writing, and the results speak to that. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Simpler than it seems: Dune

(The last part of a series on Dune. Read parts 1, 2, and 3.)

I finished Dune over the weekend. It's a great book, put over the top by Frank Herbert's narrative execution and brilliant worldbuilding. It has the reputation of being complex, but in fact the plot is very straightforward.

Consider the second act. You could sum it up in a few sentences: Paul and Jessica flee into the deep desert. Stilgar finds them. A jealous tribesman challenges Paul to a duel, and Paul kills him. In a public ritual, Jessica assumes the role of Reverend Mother of the Fremen. Paul is confirmed as the Fremen messiah and takes Chani as his concubine.

This story segment fills the better part of 160 pages, and it moves straight as an arrow. There are no twists or turns, and only brief setbacks. Paul and Jessica gain Stilgar's countenance after a quick demonstration of their fighting abilities. The rivalry with Jamis develops instantly. Same with the romance with Chani. The complexity comes with all the stuff Herbert hangs on the elemental plot: the oppressive environment, Paul's hyper-awareness, the Fremen's mercenary culture, the politics of tribal leadership, the scarcity of water, and the Fremen ambition to change Arrakis's surface. This is why people universally praise Dune. It's utterly engrossing. Strip all that stuff I mentioned away, and you're left with a story about a boy who loses his inheritance but finds something much greater. That summary would suffice for a thousand different stories.

Here are some final observations on how Herbert crafted such a great book:

Irulan's interludes. I briefly mentioned Irulan in part 1 of my analysis, but she deserves special focus, for Herbert uses her to great effect. He separates each chapter with an excerpt from Irulan's writings about Paul, House Atreides, or her father the emperor. These excerpts are written in the fullness of time, after Irulan's political marriage to Paul at the end of the book.

The excerpts serve many purposes. They reinforce the omniscient narrative and the theme of prescience, where the present and the future are known. Always apropos of what's to come, the excerpts set expectations for every chapter. If you're picking up the book for the first time in a few days, they're a good primer for jumping back into the story. Or, if you're reading straight through, they reorient you to the larger narrative. In that sense they are a framing device, approaching the book's material from a historical perspective. Few stories lend themselves to multiple interpretations; even fewer do it within the text. This encourages the reader to think deeply about this fictional universe, boosting its verisimilitude.

Time jump. Two years pass between acts 2 and 3. Herbert signals this time jump with a clever bit of expositional dialogue disguised as the Baron Harkonnen berating the captain of his guard. You can infer most of what happened during this 2-year interval from the narrative momentum established in act 2, which took place over barely 3 days. Such a long jump after a dense section of the story was a bold creative choice. It serves the story well. Two years is long enough for Paul to attain mythical status among the Fremen. His speech is different: plain, direct, and formal. He's become a father, a brother, and a tribal and spiritual leader. His stature exceeds even Stilgar's, to the extent that Stilgar brooks no argument when Paul orders him around.

Our sense of time is that it stretches over major events. Paul and Jessica's first days hiding in the desert and joining the Fremen should occupy disproportionate narrative space. What would be the point of sprinkling bridge scenes in the 2 years after Paul's confirmation as the Fremen messiah? The story does not need narrative support at this juncture. What it needs is an ending, and Herbert spends the first scenes of act 3 putting the pieces in place for the ending to happen.

The Chosen One trope. Paul's story is a series of rites of passage. The gom jabbar, his abrupt ascent to Duke, the fight against Jamis, his confirmation as the Fremen messiah, riding a sand worm, etc. Throughout, Paul fulfills specific prophecies about the Kwisatz Haderach and the Lisan al-Gaib. The Fremen in particular are intent on these prophecies and whisper them when he does something strange yet expected. As a Christian, I can't help but see deliberate parallels to the Gospel accounts of Jesus fulfilling the law and the prophets. Even how the Harkonnens dismiss this new religion while it percolates under their noses evokes the decadent Roman Empire during the Church's expansion.

There is dramatic poetry in the way Herbert rolls this out. The Fremen prophecies come from the Missionary Protectiva, the pseudo-religion seeded across the galaxy by the Bene Gesserit to prepare the way for the Kwisatz Haderach. The Bene Gesserit want to control the Kwisatz Haderach, and control the Fremen through this religion. But Paul turns that expectation on its head. The Kwisatz Haderach makes his home among the Fremen. He empowers them in revolt against the Harkonnens, and they become his foot soldiers in a jihad (holy war) that subjugates the galaxy. Paul spends much of the third act fretting over this, but he can't avoid it, either in life or by death.

I cannot overstate how well Herbert executes this trope. It pulls everything, on all narrative levels, into a cohesive whole. Without it, the stakes and the drama would fall flat.

Managing the cast. Dune has a big cast of characters, and some of them come in for only one or two scenes. Duncan Idaho is in three scenes and dies offscreen. The Beast Rabban is in one scene and dies offscreen. Count Fenring is in two scenes. After the first act, Thufir Hawat is in three scenes. The emperor does not show up until there's 30 pages left in the book! Irulan is present for only the last scene; I can't remember if she has any spoken lines. I highlight this because, despite the large cast of characters, Herbert doesn't overwhelm you by giving them all prominent voices. You can have characters who are important to the functioning of the plot without making them major characters. The two major characters are Paul and Jessica. Leading supporters are Gurney Halleck and Baron Harkonnen. Everyone else is secondary at best.

That being said, it's impressive how secondary characters loom largely over the plot. Herbert's tight narrative is structured around scenes, with the featured characters talking often about the other characters. This keeps the active background of the story ever present in the reader's mind. Hawat, in service to the Harkonnens after Yueh's betrayal, figures prominently in the Baron's and Feyd-Rautha's machinations. But we see him only twice after the Harkonnens capture him. Herbert was confident enough in the character he established in the first act to rest on those laurels. The key to making this work is character consistency. It was another bold choice that paid off.

The bane of eisegesis

I first encountered the word eisegesis in Bible study. As a Christian who believes the Bible is the Word of God, it's important to know the meaning of what the Bible says. Eisegesis is a type of interpretation that allows the reader to view the text through a lens, usually bent to his prejudices. View anything through a lens, and it's distorted, changed from the original. Exegesis is the opposite, an attempt to find the text's true original meaning.

Eisegesis is the reason you hear nonsense like the Bible endorses socialism in Acts 2, or Jesus commands His followers to be pacifists in Matthew 5. These are instances of people seeing what they want to see in the text, rather than letting the text speak for itself. Not only is the eisegetical interpretation false, it holds zero binding power since it's entirely subjective. When you realize someone's interpretation of a text is eisegetical, that should be the end of your giving it any consideration.

Mark Twain said whatever your bugaboo, you will find it therein. People have powerful prejudices. They often don't realize they're reading something that isn't there.

Take, for example, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It's taken for granted this was a racist act by the cop. This interpretation fits neatly into a perceived pattern of racism in America because the cop is white and Floyd was black. But without proof of racism these facts are incidental. What evidence is there that the cop acted the way he did because of racism? The reports are the cop knew the victim, that he had come under fire within the police department before. The text of the event doesn't directly refute the interpretation, but the interpretation doesn't logically flow from the text, either.

Critical theory is an area where eisegesis is actively encouraged. I took a semester of this in college and it was my least favorite class. We learned about different theories of critique, from feminism to queer theory to Freudian psychoanalysis to post-colonialism to structuralism to deconstructionism. There were others. We learned Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is actually about the narrator's homophobia and suppressed homosexual urges.

I didn't know it at the time, but that class could have done great harm. It taught me—or tried to teach me—there is no true meaning of a text per se, but a million interpretations from a million lenses I may look through. Even if I strived for objectivity, my lens would still determine what I saw. I could not rise above my upbringing, my psychology, my politics, the facts of my birth, etc. I was alone, and I had no way with words or reason to find someone to share something meaningful with.

If you accept that, really accept that the world can only be viewed through ideological and personal lenses, it will undermine your sanity and turn you into a hyper-individualized brute, more responsive to power than to reason. These days you don't need to look far to find antisocial behavior. How much is that due to the deliberate and unmitigated lensing of our shared reality into subjective experience? Quite a bit, I'd wager.