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By far, the most common question that authors are asked is, “Where do your ideas come from?” As writers, we are always trying to create something unique, trying to discover a way to make our stories stand out. We mine our imaginations, our subconscious minds, the lives of our friends and families, as well as the world around us for that special idea—the one that will make the coming months or years spent toiling away locked in dusty garrets worth all the effort. Story consultant John Truby in his book The Anatomy of Story, says the first step in developing a premise is to write something that may change your life. While that may seem like a lofty goal, if it doesn’t change the writer’s life, how can it change the reader’s? And why spend so much of your life writing the thing?
So where to begin? Where do these life-altering ideas come from? The answer to that most commonly asked question is that ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes a “what if” question will lead you down a rabbit hole: What if the cost of magic was paid in pain? What if a virus was unleashed that made 90% of women infertile? What if a girl fell in love with an invisible boy?
For some writers, characters show up in their brains fully formed, begging for the poor author to dictate their journeys while the characters just go about their business. For others, the worlds come first. They will be struck with an interesting idea for a culture, society, or cosmology, either slightly different or very different from ours, or perhaps even a world that exists right where we are but is hidden from view.
The initial raw materials out of which the tale is crafted may be different for everyone, but at some point certain questions will have to be answered and certain assumptions confronted. Whether your starting point is the origin of an alternate universe or a teenager’s first day at a new high school, one of the most important decisions, and perhaps the most fundamental, is who are you writing about?
What are people anyway?
Many years ago, I attended a series of Buddhist meditation classes and received a little pamphlet of teachings with an anecdote about a bicycle. Essentially, the question was when does a bicycle cease to be a bicycle? If you remove the front wheel, can it still be called a bicycle? What about both wheels? The pedals? The chain? The handlebars? What exactly is the nature of its bicycle-ness and when does that nature transform into something different? When we extrapolate this idea onto humans, the inherent theological implications become clear. Are humans our bodies or are we the ghosts in the machine?
In cognitive behavioral therapy, we learn that we are not our emotions. We’re not even our thoughts. I’m currently listening to The Untethered Soul by spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer, who says that what we really are is the observer or listener to our thoughts. We are awareness, consciousness. And what will happen when our science fictional future arrives and we can extract that consciousness from a body and put it into something else—maybe a synthetic body, are we still human then?
As a speculative fiction author, I have to decide if I’m writing about humans, or if I’m writing about some other creature (elf, angel, alien, etc.) as a way to write about humans. The simple act of deciding on the physical aspects of your characters can be a great wellspring from which story can emerge. Plot, character, and conflict necessarily intertwine in strong stories, and if you are creating characters that are something other than human, how will you differentiate their experiences, thought processes, values, and cognition from that of human beings and the human mind putting it to the page?
One of my favorite television shows is The Expanse. (Though I haven’t read the books.) The show is set three centuries in the future where humans have colonized Mars and the asteroid belt. An important aspect of the conflict is that humans born on space stations or asteroids in the Belt and have lived all of their lives in zero gravity have different physiological characteristics than humans born and reared on Earth or Mars.
The series uses this physical difference, in addition to the cultural and language differences present between these groups, as a source of conflict and the roots of the plot. This tight interconnection of various worldbuilding blocks is a contributing factor in the show working as well as it does. It’s also an example of a great way to create a satisfying story that reaches beyond just the cool factor of the premise, beyond the intrigue of crafting different species with different abilities, and actually building a deep emotional impact in the audience. I think it can be safely said to be a life-changing premise.
Who are we really writing about?
Recent studies across a variety of disciplines have shown links between reading fiction and increased empathy. Genre writers have long used the unique properties of science fiction, fantasy, and horror to consciously paint pictures of injustice and imagine how it might be remedied. Stories full of imagination and wonder manage to be the perfect places to tell grounded stories about what it is to be human and interact with other people—whether those people wear the guises of aliens, dragons, or fairies.
As our world seems to be more and more divided, with factions at each other's throats in the cultural and political spheres, the job of creating empathy is more important than ever. And of course it doesn't take creating a fantastical world to address these issues. We are bombarded with images of these types of clashes every day. In the real world, people are persecuted because of how they look, where their ancestors are from, who they love, or how they express themselves. Fiction wrestles with the question of whether this is a human trait or something shared by all creatures with consciousnesses so the decision of who populates a story is an important consideration.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz said this about vampires: “You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? …. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”
Fantastical fiction has long segmented and vilified the “other”—from vampires and Frankenstein’s monster to orcs and Haradrim, these monstrous imaginings are usually an analog for whoever the creator’s society is afraid of. In that context, the physicality of the body in which a writer places her characters is a vehicle by which the character can come into conflict with a society which is antagonistic to it. How that body is impacted by and impacts its environment sometimes is the story itself. And if writers are among the vectors by which empathy is created and maintained, then we must be conscious and careful about these choices.
The decision of who you’re writing about is a building block of a world broken down to the most basic level. The cellular level, if you will, and one that is often taken for granted. However, giving at least nominal thought to this fundamental is an important part of crafting an impacting and potentially life-changing story.
A version of this essay appeared in Galaxy’s Edge magazine, issue 40.
Image prompt: A bicycle standing alone on a street. — Canva text to image
What an excellent, thoughtful essay, Leslye! By the way, I also like The Expanse. The world building is so rich and it shows the cultural problems people have been facing in such a novel, poignant way. There's going to be a game of The Expanse. I hope it will be as good!