The Sun Kisses Karl Schroeder’s Cheek

Some people are fascinated by the world around them. They care what kind of car you drive, where that blouse came from, how many carats that ring is. I can read LORD OF THE RINGS in about 6 hours because my eyes naturally glide by all that stuff about brooks and hollows and cloud formations. Whether Strider’s boots are doeskin or dragon’s hide makes absolutely no difference to my enjoyment of the story.

In fiction — and to a large degree in life — I’m focused on two things: people and what they’re doing. Where they do it is not of much importance to me. I have no problems watching a high school play where the entire “world” is a card table and two chairs. Tell me who these people are and show me what they care about; the rest can wait to fill in those awkward pauses in conversation.

Of course, I’m not writing these books so I can read them, I’m writing them so you can read them, and you likely care whether a forest is filled with alders or spruces or sequoias. So in the spirit of doing my best to figure out how to write things that please us both, I went to the Creating Setting panel.

OK, I lied; I went to hear Karl Schroeder.

Schroeder¹ co-wrote a terrific book with Cory Doctorow called COMPLETE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO PUBLISHING SCIENCE FICTION that I’ve read at least a dozen times. He also writes books set in amazing locales that give me the heebie-jeebies just to think about. The “Virga” series he’s working on now² takes place inside a planet-sized balloon. Where do you even start crafting a story that takes place in a zero-gee shirt-sleeve environment without a ground?

As the panel got rolling, they brought up some interesting angles on setting I hadn’t considered. The first was that “setting” wasn’t just the buildings and landscape, but the psychological and social milieu the story relies on for tension and conflict. In a world of telepaths, telepathy is setting the same way gravity is setting in ours.

The second was an observation by William Jones that “The sun can either kiss your cheek or glare at you. That’s character talking.” He expanded on it by saying if the viewpoint character tells you about “my New York” you get setting interlaced with character based on what they include/exclude and what personality they assign to it: the damn subway, these cold, hard streets… In the movie Se7en, we see the city as Morgan Freeman’s character sees it, and it’s not a pretty picture because the inside of Morgan Freeman’s head is no longer a pretty picture.

The panelists went into an extended riff about “rigor” and internal consistency, concluding that even in hard SF it didn’t have to be scientifically accurate as long as it created a believable world in the mind of the reader. Schroeder said the experience of the reader is all that matters, not how it is produced. He also said that in SF, we build worlds so people can live in them, but we build them as “backless ladies”,³ giving our reader enough details to imply an entire world that the reader creates in their head.

That’s when I jotted the subtitle of this blog on the next page in my notebook: the writer strikes the sparks, the reader does the burning. Books are merely tinder that set the reader on fire with story.

It doesn’t matter a damn whether you’ve written a novel. That’s just sticking signs in the ground with arrows pointing in certain directions. It doesn’t become real until someone decides to start walking the path and it doesn’t become complete until they reach the end. We nudge them onto a path, but they have to do all the walking. We give them signposts to show them the way toward they goal we’ve set for them, but if they stop walking, put the book down and don’t pick it up again, the rest of the story doesn’t really exist, like that hypothetical tree falling in the forest.

Of alders. Or cypress. Or whatever.

Next, why Shakespeare is in the public domain but “Steamboat Willie” isn’t, and the eighth deadly sin: pissing off your fans.

1. pronounced shray-der [↩]
2. SUN OF SUNS, QUEEN OF CANDESCE [↩]
3. An Arthurian legend where a questing knight meets what looks like a real woman, until she turns her back and there’s nothing inside her: she’s just a shell [↩]