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 elements of stories about which readers should “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 “What the heck?”  (your main character is a boxing neurosurgeon?), but when thens are done wrong, readers thinks “It wouldn’t happen like that!” (a character you set up as a typical office worker fights off six trained assassins in scene three).

Ifs and Thens in Catcher in the Rye

Some of the explicit and implicit ifs in Catcher in the Rye are:

• situational characteristics: the death of Holden’s brother Allie
• character characteristics: the personalities of major characters such as Holden’s former girlfriend and his favorite professor
• aspects of the writing itself: implicit bias we assume there will be towards Holden’s point of view, because Holden is “speaking.”

This story is a classic because Salinger does an excellent job of developing believable effects from those givens in a dynamic way. For example, Holden loves his sister, we have to take this if as a given, which justifies why he would risk being caught by his parents to sneak back and visit her toward the middle of the novel. But it would also make sense from both his and her character that he would let her know his plans to go to California (if: he loves her; then: he won’t go far away without telling her), that she would want to go with him (if: she loves him and he is going away, then: she will want to go with him), and that he would refuse her (if: he loves her and she tries to give up her life for vagrant travels with him, then: he will refuse to let her), 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 accepted as-is, and parts accepted as realistic extrapolations. Fantasy includes even less reference to our current world, but almost all such stories include humans or human-like characters, whose basic psychological characteristics we are expected to judge based on our own. Moreover, because of the size of the ifs, the thens must follow even more strictly than with mainstream fiction.

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 heroes prove their goodness not by overcoming the power of the ring, but by avoiding testing themselves. 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 love worldbuilding, and spend inordinate amounts of time on it, but the proof of anything I write will still be in the way all the ifs crash and jangle against each other to produce a dynamic stream of thens.

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 if one man were given ultimate power over a state? What if a normal working man lost his whole family in an airplane disaster? What if a billionaire and a beggar struck up a friendship (or tried to)? A non-fiction story could address or at least come close to addressing some of these issues, but there will always be complicating factors making the findings hard to assess.

Take another 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 just a few possible complications a dilligent non-fiction writer might encounter after spending years researching for his story:

1. He is forced to limit himself to examples from the last two hundred years in the English-speaking world, because of the limitations of his language ability and access to historical data. Shakespeare could set his story in Verona having never visited the country and no knowledge of contemporary Italian.
2. Many of the families the researcher finds simply do not have young people of opposite sexes but comparable ages at the height of their feud. Those that do have no equivalent of the Capulet’s costume ball: the children don’t have opportunities to meet, let alone fall in love.
3. He finds certain details plentiful, but others impossible. He has plenty of court records that mention long-standing family feuds, but fails to find useful diaries of 15-year-old girls in love with boys from rival families. Finding contemporary ones turns out to be too fraught with potential lawsuits. He does find a few compendiums of girls’ diaries, and eventually one girl whose situation seemed promising. But after more months of research, he fails to find anything else about her, her boyfriend, or their families. He is left with only one data point, and gives her up. Shakespeare had the immediate, if imperfect, access to the minds and thoughts of both Juliet and Romeo provided to him by his imagination.
4. The researcher eventually narrows his search to three pairs of families.However, one pair of them managed to reconcile their differences relatively easily, making the researcher unsure of how deep their feud was. One of the two families in his second example flees the country during the English Civil War, the boy in his third example dies of smallpox. Shakespeare was able to take two translations of the original Italian tale and then modify it simply to increase the conflict–and thus the dramatic effect.

Of course, despite all of the complications, sometimes it will be most intriguing for a writer to find an event, research it, and try to tell that story. However, sometimes it must also be worthwhile for that writer to work from an idea he knows well and is passionate about, but experiment on it in the strictly controlled environment of fiction to find its most fundamental properties.

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 object to a bad story based on this argument: see my entry on stories as if-then statements.) But non-fiction readers must trust the writers as well, and sometimes for more than they might think.

Consider a non-fiction biography of Jane Austen in which the author extrapolates Austen’s thoughts based on a few letters that she wrote to her family. This is still, strictly speaking, an act of speculation. What if Austen was trying to deceive her family about something? What if her recollection of an event was slightly different in different letters? Even if she was being as truthful as she could, how much self-serving bias and other unconscious factors should the author attribute to her? Readers of Austen’s biography would have to base their trust of the author on their own knowledge of the topic being discussed, the writer’s tone, and the advice of friends. For the most part, this kind of analysis also applies to fiction.

A science fiction story about space travel will fail miserably if any college physics student can find errors in fundamental parts of its mechanics, just like a Middle-Ages fantasy would be rejected if the author put Kalashnikovs in the hands of Saxon villagers.

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. Even if he wrote it while working with youth with Asperger’s, neither the salience of his memories, the importance of the issue to him (read his interview with Powell’s to learn about it), nor his descriptive talent could ever allow him 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.