I’ve just finished reading The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, quite a shift in gears after James Joyce’s Dubliners. Like much speculative fiction it was rather like a ride in a hovercar: the interesting technology was (mostly) able to carry the story, and keep our belief suspended, across the plot holes.

While the book is enjoyable, there was one aspect of it busted my hovercar: Miles Vorkosigan’s followers are simply too easily lead (almost as easily led as Captain Phule’s legionnaires in Robert Asprin’s Phule’s Company). Many of Vorkosigan’s main associates seem to act like a single self-help seminar was all that stood between them and greatness: an out-of-work pilot and drunk not only stays sober after meeting Miles, but contributes both to strategy and to fighting, a thuggish commander learns restraint apparently by osmosis, a hermaphroditic mercenary becomes a great field commander (and manages to get a crush on Miles). One deserter becomes a brave war hero simply because Miles gives him the old “we’re all afraid; it’s not about losing your fear but about learning to control it” speech.

The climax of leadability is when when Miles’ crew of five, with only one fit and trained military person, overcomes two-dozen mercenaries and then manages to convince them that they (Miles’ five) are an inspection committee, rather than a bunch of smugglers. The reason we are given for why the the mercenaries believe the bluff (despite having one of their crew killed by the “inspectors”) is that doing so would make them feel less humiliated by their defeat. This is a level of psychological vulnerability almost as unbelievable as the physical vulnerability of the Star Wars stormtroopers to Fightin’ Ewoks.

Leaders Created by Followers

The plot of The Warrior’s Apprentice is dependent on the supernatural leadability of secondary characters in a way that brings to mind the dependence of the Tarot character of The Fool on his luck. Phule’s Company can at least be defended as a book targeted at younger teenagers meant for simple pleasure reading (I loved it at 15, but couldn’t enjoy it nearly as much at 25). Since it doesn’t try too hard for seriousness, the supernatural leadability of supporting characters can be just part of the way the world works. Bujold gets into trouble because her book does try for more: such as seriously addressing political intrigue and war crimes. Because of this, each instance of Foolish leadability is an example of bathos—a fall in the story from the serious to the absurd.

Why did Bujold, like many other writers, make this mistake?

My best guess is that to become a writer, a person must have an exceptional ability to see other people’s points of view and value them as their own, as well as the time and the inclination to go off in a room alone to create for much of their lives. Good leaders need to pursue goals with single-minded determination and consistency (that’s vision), and must be constantly in the public eye, inspiring their followers to follow same these few goals. A fiction writer-leader is quite nearly an oxymoron.

Writers writing about leadership are describing people totally unlike themselves, so it is understandable that even good writers sometimes resort to propping up their weak leaders with unrealistically impressionable followers.

Real Leaders

Trying to create realistic leaders is central to a number of the stories I want to write. However, I am a typical writer with little experience myself with leadership to work from. That means a concomitant increase in research. I’ll add more on this topic as I come across it. Some of my ideas follow, but if you have any, please comment:

1. Don’t make a charismatic leader as reflective as you are. A person who interacts with a couple coworkers and meets about one friend per day for a couple hours is going to be able to do a lot more reflection, relative to talking, than someone who is leading and talking morning to night. Also, just because some leaders are successful does not mean their self images are free of major inaccuracies. Let your overworked leaders fall into misconceptions more easily than you do.
2. Give leaders slogans and core concepts to repeat. Good leaders often “read” their audience and adjust their messages, but they succeed most when the fundamental part of the messages remain unchanged. In Colleen Willis’s fabulous To Say Nothing of the Dog, “God is in the details” is the slogan used by Lady Schrapnell to push around an entire Oxford faculty, to the point where the main character flees through a time machine centuries into the past just to escape her attention. Giving your leaders ideas and slogans they hold on to relentlessly will help explain how they can guide large numbers of people, many of whom they may never meet directly.
3. Don’t make your followers abject worshippers. Another way that To Say Nothing of the Dog gets Lady Schrapnell right is by making many of the characters dislike her. By definition, a good leader is someone who can get other people to do more than they would without the leader. That often requires pressure, and few people respond well to pressure. Even if a leader is greatly admirable, lower-level officials may misinterpret the leader’s vision, and this will also compromise the leader. If follower reactions cover a range from bitterness through grudging respect, with only a select number admiring the leader, the leader will seem more real than one worshipped by otherwise not-overly-impressionable people.

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.