Originally posted at Livejournal Sep. 14th, 2011
"Write what you want, and make me believe you know it." - Emma Darwin
During her novel-writing course and Swanwick Writers' Summer School, Emma Darwin offered the above quote as a remedy to the advice "write what you know" (and has an excellent blog post on it here). It's something I imagine writers of literary and mainstream fiction fall foul of more than speculative fiction writers, since very few of us have actually met a dragon.
Emma's alternate advice comes from the fact that the mind doesn't know the difference between a real thing and an imagined thing - if you can imagine it well enough, it seems real, and this is the effect we aim to create in the reader. Observation is important, as is engaing all six senses (the usual five and that sense of weight and presence we get of an object). As a demonstration we did a short exercise where we wrote a description of a real object, then followed it with a description of an imagined one. Emma suggested that in order to better imagine what isn't known, it should be treated as poets often treat their subject matter - with word associations, pursuing odd connections, and reading the work aloud.
Another thing Emma brought up, something I'd never heard of before, was the idea of psychic distance. It's something she discovered in John Garner's The Art of Fiction, and basically describes how close in the narration is to the character. She writes about it in her blog post here, and gives the following example (used in Gardner's book):
- It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
- Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
- Henry hated snowstorms.
- God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
- Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul
We moved on to the choice of who is telling the story and why they're telling it, and how this affects the choices the author makes in the way they tell the story - narrator, tense, order of telling.... But I think I'll leave that for another post, as it could fill an entry all on its own.