Inkless

Fiction as a String or Web of If-Then Statements

In addition to laboratory experiments on ideas, works of fiction can also be thought of as elaborate if-then statements, comparable to those in much clearer-defined fields such as mathematics and logic.

For fiction, the basic details and the elements of stories about which readers are meant to “suspend their disbelief” are the if side of the statement, and the implicit agreement is that the story will produce from those ifs a number of thens that are both logical and surprising.

Of course one of the goals of fiction is to make the story flow so naturally that readers do not even perceive they are making assumptions (accepting givens) on their way to the conclusion. For this reason it can be difficult to pick apart the bits that must be accepted from the bits we should analyze and examine. A relatively simple way of telling them apart is that when ifs are done wrong, readers think “Huh?” or “What the heck?” (like a thrice divorced main character who is presented as having the exuberant optimism and naivety of a fifteen-year-old), but when thens are done wrong, readers thinks “It wouldn’t happen like that!” (like a pudgy office worker who fights off a half-dozen trained assassins in scene three).

Ifs and Thens in Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye story is told from first person POV, so one of the ifs we must account for include situational characteristics, such as the death of Holden’s brother Allie, character characteristics, such as the personalities of major characters such as Holden’s former girlfriend and his favorite professor, and aspects of the writing itself, such as the implicit bias that the writing will evidence because it is supposed to be from the first-person point of view of Holden.

This story is a classic because Salinger does an excellent job of developing believable effects of the dynamic influences of these givens. It seems reasonable that Holden might care disproportionately about his sister, sneak back to visit her, that (with her character) she would anger at him, his response, and their whole back and forth throughout the story, with each then being part of the if in the next scene.

Speculative Fiction - Big Ifs

The same is true of speculative writing, it simply presents more extreme ifs and thens. Science fiction presents us with worlds, parts of which are meant to be taken as given and and part developed realistically from that given information. Fantasy includes even less reference to our current world, because it is not based on extrapolation of current elements of our world into the future and thus even fewer of the givens of our own world can be imported without question. But almost all such stories include humans or human-like characters, the basic psychological characteristics of which are meant to be like people we know, of those people were in their extreme situations. And with just as much certainty as any other fiction, a given presented early in the story cannot be blithely broken later in the story.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, we are made painfully aware that the main ring gives the wearer a connection to a being of pure and overpowering evil. Not one of the characters could wear the ring for long without being overcome by the evil, and many of them proved their goodness by not trying. If one character were immune, we would feel cheated or disappointed.

The Part We Care Most About is the Thens

Thinking of writing in this way is useful for me because it reminds me that the important, and enjoyable, part of writing is in seeing how the story develops (the thens), not the scene or situation (the ifs). I can (and do) spend enormous amounts of time on worldbuilding, so it is helpful to be reminded that the proof anything I write will still be in the way all those ifs crash together, and characters weave their own story ies through the crashing and jangling of those events in ways that are continually influenced by what has gone on before.

Fiction as Thought Experiment

From time to time, one hears from people who, for whatever reason, disdain fiction. Usually, they are the kinds of people who consider themselves non-fiction purists, and their most common jibe is that fiction is all just a pack of lies. Perhaps because writers are self-conscious lot, even great writers seem to have accepted this accusation (Hemmingway - Fiction is the truth inside a lie).

Balderdash.

Lying requires an intention to deceive, and a good fiction writer has no such intention. A good work of fiction does not convince us that the events it describes actually happened, but that they might have happened.

A Philosophical Laboratory

In great writing, each event in the story seems to flow naturally into the next, and the questions or hypotheses that are brought up along the way seem to be addressed (but not necessarily answered) in a satisfactory way. Like a laboratory scientist that formulates a hypothesis then tests that hypothesis in an isolated environment, a fiction writer takes a philosophical premise, a big idea or set of such ideas, and puts it in the isolated environment of a fiction story. The ability to isolate a story is essential because it allows fiction to address countless situations which could not, have not, or would be extremely difficult to find in our own world.

Non-fiction is certainly also worthy writing, but the purity of any truths discovered or ideas explored in works of non-fiction will always be contaminated by the infinite number of distracting and disruptive events of everyday life–because the ideas are being observed in the field, as it were. Disregarding fiction because it does not describe actual events (as imperfectly as we understand those) is like disregarding laboratory findings because they take place out of context.

In 1984, George Orwell attempted to analyze totalitarianism by creating a world in which it was triumphant. He explored how the state would behave itself, what effect it would have on peoples’ lives, how life within this state would feel, what it would smell like, how it would look. A situation of this extremity hasn’t happened (thank God), and if it did we would be unable to analyze it because of the very limitations the totalitarian state itself would impose. Yet even the word “1984″ has become a helpful corrective, a warning to the world to make extra effort to limit the powers of states.

Orwell’s fiction had something hugely meaningful to say about totalitarianism that no non-fiction story could ever have said.

Compromising Findings

What is the utmost limit on how much a person’s character be changed by a single very bad day? What if an aging hippie and young corporate executive were forced by some disaster to work together to survive? What if two young people fell in love whose families were irreparably at odds with one another? A non-fiction story could address these issues, but sometimes the findings would often be hard to assess.

Take the last example: What if two young people fell in love whose families were irreparably at odds with one another? That describes Romeo and Juliet. Now consider the plight of a non-fiction writer looking for a pure example that will address this issue in the same manner as the Shakespeare play. Think of all the possible complications

1. The Capulet’s hold a regular ball, instead of a costume ball—Romeo never sneaks in and sees Juliet
2. A guard outside Juliet’s window catches Romeo before he professed his love—she never hears it
3. Tybalt kills Romeo instead of Benvolio
4. Benvolio recovers or Romeo is able to control himself enough to refrain from killing Tybalt—Romeo isn’t banished

These and a thousand other changes would render a non-fiction analysis of near-Romeos and near-Juliets worthless. And they don’t even involve changes in the attitudes of the characters (What if the priest had felt they were merely infatuated and refused to marry them, or at least rejected his poison-plan as unethical?).

A non-fiction story writer might search for a real-life example of young love thwarted by family opposition, but the number of potential stories will be limited to those the author knows a great deal about. Sometimes it will be most intriguing for a writer to find such an event, research it, and tell that story. However, sometimes it must also be worthwhile for that writer to work from an idea that he or she cares deeply about and knows a great deal about, but explore it within an isolated fiction environment, where every detail can be salient, and contaminants can be strictly controlled.

Knowledge and Trust

Of course, since a fiction writer is controlling both the materials and results of a story, readers must trust that the writer is not manipulating events contrary to how “they would actually work out”. (And readers of fiction can certainly say such a thing of a bad story: see my entry on stories as if-then statements for more.) But non-fiction readers must trust the writers as well, and sometimes for more than they might think.

Consider the case of popular non-fiction biographies. The good titles will most certainly be based on a great deal of research, but they also often venture out into unknown territory based on the information available. For example, and author might spend some time in a close third-person POV, and occasionally give us the thoughts of one of the main figures at a certain time, based on educated guesswork from available first-hand sources. Even if, for example, the writer gives us a certain woman’s thoughts based on a letter that same woman wrote to an acquaintance, the inclusion of the thoughts is still, strictly speaking, an act of speculation. What if the writer thinks the woman is trying to deceive her acquaintance? What if the woman said something slightly different elsewhere? Even if she is being as truthful as she can, how much self-serving bias and other unconscious factors should the writer account for?

The need for trust in non-fiction certainly doesn’t spoil the writing. It simply means that readers of popular biographies must apply their own knowledge of the topic being discussed and analyze writer’s tone and assertions before deciding whether or not they find the book persuasive. For the most part, this kind of analysis is just as applicable to fiction.

A science fiction concerning space travel will fail miserably if any college physics student can find glaring errors in fundamental parts of its mechanics, just like a Middle Ages-style fantasy would be rejected if the author clearly did not know anything about how society functioned in the actual period between the 700s and 1500s.

Mark Haddon spent a great deal of time working with youth who had disabilities before writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time from the point of view of one of them. However, the time lag between when he spent the time and wrote the book (20 years) would be far too long to produce a good non-fiction story, regardless of his ability or salient memories, and no matter how important understanding of disability was to him (read his interview with Powell’s to learn about it) or how great his descriptive talent, he would never be able to put us in Jonathan’s shoes. A similar non-fiction book could be written (like Born on a Blue Day), but Haddon could not write it and we could not experience it as intimately.

Fiction, like non-fiction, is focused on revealing truths about human existence and exploring philosophical ideas. Untruthful authors will be found out in the same way as people who fudge historical information for biographies or falsify experimental results. Liars are not welcome.