Writing Fiction

The simple joys of dishwashing

This evening, after a good dinner, I did the dishes and came upstairs to find this story on Slate: Barack Obama's life will be somewhat normal for exactly 64 more days. So why not wash the dishes? Excerpt:

In Barack Obama's first interview since winning the election, he made an odd but revealing confession: He found it soothing, he said, to do the dishes.

I know exactly what he was talking about. For a writer, that kind of mundane chore is absolutely essential.

By dumb luck, I've managed to live a life in which nothing much has happened. I had the same job, college teaching, for 40 years. I've lived in the same nice house for 36 years, where our two girls grew up.

My wife's a wonderful cook, and I'm happy to clean up. When the kids were young, we'd all have dinner together; then everyone left the kitchen and I stayed to do the dishes.

In that time I could daydream, think about tomorrow's classes, and wonder about the current or future novel. And I discovered that nothing frees the mind like putting the body to some kind of automatic work.

It works on all levels. Sometimes I'd get an idea for a whole novel or nonfiction book. Sometimes, with a book in progress, I could focus on what ought to happen in the next chapter. It got to be a running gag: If I was having plot problems, we needed to invite people over for dinner so I'd have more dishes to wash.

It doesn't have to be dishes. Mowing the grass is good, and so are shaving and vacuuming. Walking our black Lab one night many years ago, I wondered what my neighbourhood would look like ten million years from now. That led to Eyas, the book I still consider my best.

That beloved dog is long gone, but I still walk his successors, two beautiful Australian shepherds, and I think about books in progress and books that I might someday write. Then I come home and accomplish work that I'd never have even imagined if the dogs hadn't dragged me out in the pouring rain.

Some years ago my wife insisted on buying a dishwasher. I could see the artistic crisis that meant, but you can't put a cast-iron skillet in a dishwasher. Some chores, thank heaven, will always be boring, robotic manual tasks. I hope I can perform them for many more years.

And I hope President Obama gets some dishwashing time as well. It could give him the ideas that will save us all.

War Fiction

It's Remembrance Day here in Canada, and Veterans' Day in the US. Today The Tyee published my essay War and How We Told It, discussing the early Canadian novels about what they called the Great War.

Farewell, Michael Crichton

Via The New York Times: An Appraisal - Michael Crichton - Builder of Realms That Thrillingly Run Amok. Excerpt:

Michael Crichton, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, was like a character in a Michael Crichton novel. He was unusually tall (6 feet 7 inches), strikingly handsome and encyclopedically well informed about everything from dinosaurs to medieval banquet halls to nanotechnology.

As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum...Of the dead, speak nothing but good. At the age of 67, I feel a shiver when I hear of another writer dead at 66.

But Crichton's novels survive him, though they don't deserve it.

Crichton was clearly a very, very smart and well-educated man. He was also a fast writer of formula fiction, and he stayed within the limits of his "engineered" formulas. That was the key to his success and the cause of his failure.

Crichton understood how to take a half-teaspoon of science and add it to four cups of routine story. The result was a nanotech threat, or a dinosaur threat, or an alien-virus threat. The half-teaspoon of science made his stories just exotic enough to interest readers, without actually making them think. They could sit back and let the routine story carry them up and down the usual roller coaster. At the end, we usually got something like a return to the safe, reassuring status quo.

I read quite a few of his novels, sometimes enjoying them as a pleasant way to waste a weekend. But I stopped taking him seriously after The Andromeda Strain.

Here we have an alien disease, which is to be identified and destroyed in an underground laboratory. To ensure that the disease can never escape, a nuclear bomb is planted under the bottom floor of the lab.

More clearly in the movie than in the book, the lab is a symbolic vagina: the various floors are built around a central shaft. The whole plot depends, in effect, on doing exciting stuff in this vagina without actually setting off an orgasm. (One of the scientists, a woman, is also an epileptic who goes into a trance when alarm lights flash. Figure that out for yourself.)

Now, a satirist could have had a great time with such an image while poking fun at thrillers, Big Science, and any number of other targets. But Crichton didn't have a satirical bone in his body.

He certainly advocated for certain values, and opposed others. One value he opposed was Dumb Kids who Get In Trouble. Another value was Bitchy Women who Hassle the Hero. But he used dumb kids and bitchy women simply to move his plots along, and to make us sympathize with his heroes. God knows the heroes themselves didn't offer much we could sympathize with.

Most of his novels, especially after he began to succeed in Hollywood, read more like treatments for the inevitable screenplays that would follow them. They offered just enough technobabble to give the stories some credibility, and they kept readers turning the pages. But they never drew readers to think seriously about the issues the stories dramatized.

Writing fiction is a craft. If we're good enough at that craft, our readers (not we ourselves) can call us artists. Like any craft, writing relies on formulas and conventions. If we want to challenge those formulas, we first need to understand them very well.

Then we can tweak them in ways that make our readers snap out of their trance and ask: "What the hell is this story really about? And why the hell do I find such a story interesting?"

A story that makes us ask such questions, and find answers to them, begins to escape formula and become literature.

I'm glad for Crichton and his family that he was able to make enough money to keep them all very comfortable. But I'm sorry for Crichton, because his intelligence and talent suggested that he could have been a far better writer if only he had taken his craft seriously.