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Getting Things Write

June 14th, 2008

I missed my day to blog at www.sfnovelists.com yesterday, but did jump in today with “Getting Things Write.”  I’m reproducing it here below.  If you’d like to comment, I suggest doing it over there. 

I’m primarily a writer of what’s referred to “hard sf,” which of course means what I write is really difficult science fiction.

That’s baloney. Ok, something a little harder than baloney. Salami, or a nice summer sausage.

What I write is science fiction with plausible science. I try to get all the science right, and while I certainly speculate plenty in my work, I won’t put something in that violates science as we understand it. We’ll certainly learn more in the future, but everything that happens shouldn’t violate the laws we know already. Einstein, when developing relativity, made sure it agreed with Newton in cases where Newton was known to apply.

I have bachelor’s degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and a doctorate in astronomy. That makes it easier for me, at least when it comes to getting the physical science right, but I include a lot of other science in my work and I have to get that right, too. I have more than a few bookshelves for the writing hard sf.

Now, not everyone agrees with me on the topic of getting the science right. Over at sfsignal.com, there was a recent discussion about this, which I have previously responded to. Now, I agree with the dissenters in this sense: a writer should know what’s right and what’s wrong in their work. There are entire branches of fiction about intentionally getting things wrong to great purpose, e.g., fantasy, alternate history, etc. Still, I’ll make these admonitions. If you’re writing science fiction, get the science right. If you’re writing historical fiction, get the history right. If you’re writing crime drama, get the police procedurals right. Get everything right you possibly can, from the spelling to the quantum physics, because the writer is the only one responsible in the end.

If you don’t, you risk the greatest threat to fiction writers, a threat greater than poor characterization or limp prose or anything else. You risk losing the suspension of disbelief. The suspension of disbelief is critical to the entire enterprise of fiction, and when it’s gone, you’ve lost the reader, perhaps forever. Bad writing or weak characters risk this too, of course, but having a reader stop and think, with regard to an important plot point, “I thought penguins were at the south pole, not the north,” and then wait for a payoff that never comes…well, that’s a crime against readers.

I have a couple of authors I won’t read again because of errors not much more subtle than this. Now, it doesn’t have to be a crisis. Larry Niven got to write entire sequels to books based on subtle problems with the original (see Ringworld and the Ringworld Engineers). Still, my guess is that he would have preferred to have gotten things right the first time.

You have to have authority in the reader’s mind, based on the words on the page, in order to keep that disbelief in suspension. The best and easiest way to get that authority, much easier than writing sterling power-infused prose, is to be an authority. Know your world and know how things work in it. Do the research.

Research can be fun, and it doesn’t have to come from books (although most writers I know love any excuse to read an interesting book). If you’re writing a story set an observatory, go visit the place and set up interviews with real astronomers who work there. The internet and email makes this sort of research incredibly easy today, and websites like google make it trivial to get maps or see what an area looks like. I’ve met few astronomers who minded taking a little time from their day to answer questions. Likewise for world-experts in all sorts of fields who rarely have the audiences they (think they) deserve.

For one of Michael Swanwick’s award-winning stories (I think it was “Radio Waves”), he researched what it was like to die in a parking lot. He went out and laid down and took note of the things around him. In two minutes he got details he wouldn’t have imagined given hours to think about it.

That’s a bit subtle. Not so subtle is a reading exercise I developed while I was really working on the craft and realizing the importance of this issue of research. I started reading books of the type that I wanted to write, and as I read each page I asked myself if I could have written that page without doing any research. Sometimes I could, when it was a passage involving the characters and internal monologues, but more often I realized that I’d need to look at a map, or a website that provided annual temperatures or local wildlife, or pull out a calculator to get an orbital velocity right.

Nobody knows close to everything about everything. All you really have to know is when you’re not sure about something, and go check it.

For Spider Star, I went hang gliding, even though I didn’t really want to. I really wasn’t as relaxed as I looked. I didn’t wind up changing much if anything in the book as a result of the experience, but I also knew for sure I hadn’t made any major mistakes. I could have gotten someone else who had hang glided to read what I’d written, but the first-hand experience is sometimes critical.

One of the best one-sentence pieces of advice about writing professionalism I got from Octavia Butler. She said that you shouldn’t ever send something out that had mistakes in it that you knew of. You were ultimately responsible and a professional didn’t send out something with errors.

Perhaps your editor will forgive you, and your audience too, if the error makes it into print. But perhaps not, and that may be the only chance you ever get with them.

If you’re going to be a serious writer, you need to get things write. I mean right. You know what I mean, but a writer shouldn’t count on it.

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3 Responses to “Getting Things Write”

  1. Mallory Says:
    June 15th, 2008 at 2:59 am

    I think it is important to make the reader THINK the science is right.

    I read a story recently about Native Americans and almost immediately there were details that just SOUNDED wrong. I don’t know that they are wrong because I haven’t done the research but they felt wrong and because they felt wrong I kept popping out of the story and found myself scowling.

    You may be a good scientist and other good scientists may read your work and know that this is that but ultimately most of your audience wants the adventure that science can provide not the science that science can provide. It has to be romantic and exotic, creepy and a bit fun otherwise what you get is drier than dirt and equally as boring.

  2. Mike Brotherton Says:
    June 15th, 2008 at 12:15 pm

    It’s not an either/or thing for quality writing, but no writer should pretend that it isn’t important to get things right. Style without substance is a crime, the propoganda/lies leading us into the Iraq War being the largest recent example. Star Trek technobabble is one is sf — I couldn’t watch Voyager much because it was so ridiculous, even though the lines were delivered with great authority and enthusiasm. The whole thing came across like an inconsistent fantasy.

    It’s possible to get things right, including the science, without it being dry and boring. That’s a craft challenge.

  3. Science in Science Fiction | Mike Brotherton: SF Writer Says:
    November 22nd, 2008 at 10:45 am

    [...] written about this before, and I’m sure I will again. It’s one of my things, the pinnacle of my triple passions [...]

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