{"id":8165,"date":"2011-05-03T14:53:36","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T18:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=8165"},"modified":"2011-05-03T14:53:36","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T18:53:36","slug":"fiction-and-overly-real-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/fiction-and-overly-real-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction and (Overly) Real Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[Photo by Alan Bauer<\/a>]<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

I want to share with you a little anecdote about one of the wild joys of writing a novel. But let’s put real life aside for a moment; let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re<\/em> writing a novel, as follows:<\/p>\n

A certain set of events must happen at night, say, because… um… In order for something else — something absolutely critical — to happen, two characters must exchange their first kiss (or bite) under the light of a full moon, within the first twenty-four hours of the April 21 opening of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, in the restaurant atop the Space Needle.<\/p>\n

Now, of course, Seattle is often rainy, and when it’s not rainy it’s often foggy. But suppose you resolve the weather question satisfactorily, and hence resolve the question of visibility from the top of the Space Needle. Was the moon even full that night? If so, what time was moonrise? Could a character in a nearby skyscraper observe the kiss (bite) through binoculars — then lower the binoculars, noticing that the moon is full… without having to turn around?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This didn’t happen to me recently, not exactly. None of the action in Seems to Fit<\/em> occurs in Seattle, and in the scene in question — the one I think of as “the last, climactic chapter”* — no romantic (or romantically dental) activity takes place. The setting, although based on a real place, does not exist. The exact date isn’t even important.<\/p>\n

So what was the problem?<\/p>\n

Stuckness<\/em>. I was stuck. For all the years since the first draft of the work-in-progress, I believed that I knew:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the night on which these events happen (the exact date never appearing anywhere in the book, mind you — I just knew it);<\/li>\n
  2. the timeline on the night during which these events happen;<\/li>\n
  3. the weather (mostly clear at first, with clouds gradually building and then, finally, some flashes of lightning);<\/li>\n
  4. what the characters are wearing (fairly lightweight formal wear); and<\/li>\n
  5. the phase of the moon (full, naturally — both for the drama<\/em>, y’know, and for the light it affords at least one character, and probably two)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Finally, I also believed that I knew the location in question, almost to the precise latitude and longitude. It’s not a real place, but it’s so close to a real place as to be almost indistinguishable from it. (You may remember my review<\/a> from a couple months ago, of China Mieville’s The City & The City<\/em> — with its two overlapping cities. Yeah. Like that.)<\/p>\n

    So I’m working on this chapter Saturday morning, and one of the characters stands outside at this location, on this evening, and he looks up, and he sees… What? Jeezus — what does he <\/em>see?!?
    \n<\/em><\/p>\n

    “Breaking out in a cold sweat” verges on dead metaphor, but for the next five seconds it became for me neither dead nor metaphorical. <\/em><\/p>\n

    Well, that’s no problem<\/em> (I finally told myself). I can turn to the Web!<\/em><\/p>\n

    The next two hours: up the flue. The weird thing was, the whole episode didn’t feel to me like self-indulgent, work-avoiding distraction; I know what that feels like. (Know it all too well, in fact.) No, this felt more like determination — single-mindedness. If I can’t get this right, the story will feel wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

    And to answer the obvious question: no, I don’t read other peoples’ fiction with an eye to this sort of detail. (Note that I’m not talking about huge<\/em> events. Unless someone is writing fake history, for example, it always will matter what the weather was like in New York City on the second Tuesday morning in September, 2011.)<\/p>\n

    If you write fiction, has anything like this happened to you? And if you write fiction or not, does this strike you as, uh, “normal”?<\/p>\n

    P.S. Re-reading this before posting, I just found myself wondering: “Is<\/em> there a restaurant atop the Space Needle — or are you just taking it for granted???” Oh, I crack myself up. I really do. I also refuse to look for the answer to that question.<\/p>\n

    ________________________<\/p>\n

    * The verbiage misleads. For one thing, a d\u00e9nouement<\/em>-style chapter appears after the scene in question — so this has never been the last chapter. For another, it’s no longer a single giant chapter (although it once was); it’s a series of short ones. But climactic? I sure as hell hope so! (The atmospheric conditions will also have been meticulously confirmed. Or ignored, as the case may be.)<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [Photo by Alan Bauer] I want to share with you a little anecdote about one of the wild joys of writing a novel. But let’s put real life aside for a moment; let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re writing a novel, as follows: A certain set of events must happen at night, say, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,5,324,372,515],"tags":[2352],"class_list":{"0":"post-8165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-researchresources","9":"category-style-and-craft","10":"category-grail","11":"tag-reality-vs-fiction","12":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-27H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8166,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8165\/revisions\/8166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}