Why I Write the Way I Do

 

All authors develop a style of writing – something that makes their stories theirs. Some of the "signature" is in the way they use language – particular turns of phrase and patterns of prose – while other parts of the signature will show up in the themes they like to revisit, the types of characters they like – or don't like – the things they'll show or hide, and of course the plots they choose to do, or not do.

Now that I've been doing this for well over a decade (which seems so strange to me – it doesn't seem that long, unless I really think about it), I'm able to look back over my own work and see some of those patterns. Some I've known all along, others emerge as I look at my work more closely.

To an extent, of course, my own style shifts depending on what I'm writing. The opening chapter of Polychrome is deliberately written in a style that echoes Baum's own writing to set the stage, so to speak, and then the second chapter transitions to a slightly different style, with older-age touches, before fully shifting to the style of voice I use throughout most of the rest of the novel. The quick sketching of characters and swift challenge-thought-resolution sequence in the Castaway books is a deliberate nod to, and direct steal from the toolbox of, Robert Heinlein and his "juveniles".

But there are some things which are pretty much invariant. I play a lot with long sentence structure; I have a fondness for the various tools to join pieces of sentences together, like semicolons, dashes, colons; I use ellipses… frequently. Sometimes – perhaps a lot of the time – I overdo this.

I love melodrama; even in the most realistic, straightforward stuff I've written (the Boundary series), the timing of events and sometimes even the dialogue of the characters reflects my preference for dramatics that can be over-the-top (and in those books, it got throttled back by my coauthor).

I also love characters who are not stupid within the limitations of their knowledge or capabilities, and this applies to both heroes and villains. It's easy to let a bad guy get beaten because he or she is an idiot, but then was it really a challenge for your hero? And similarly, if you have a bright villain, how is it that your hero has a chance to beat them if the hero's carrying the Idiot Ball all the time?

As a corollary to that, I really hate continuing problems that are caused by people failing to communicate when they have no reason to fail to do so. Which means either I have to give a reason for them not to talk… or short-circuit the apparent comedy of errors. One of my favorite examples of this is in Phoenix in Shadow, where it looks like Kyri and Tobimar are going to continue to sort of tapdance around their feelings for each other for maybe another book at least, and then Poplock goes and tells them "KISS already!" because he's not putting up with this crap.

Similarly, I really detest the "omniscient government coverup". Yeah, I can swallow it (and even use it) when there's super-powered magic available to enforce it, but the idea that the government or any mundane large organization can manage to hide big spectacular things on a regular basis? No, I don't believe it; Franklin's dictum of "three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead" applies. Thus in Paradigms Lost, once a major supernatural event happens in the modern world, the government realizes there's no covering this one up.

Which links to yet another of the things that have peeved me about other books, and that I, therefore, try to avoid: series of stories where world-shaking events are ignored or glossed over, so that the writer doesn't have to deal with the consequences. There's a lot of examples, but the one that sticks out most in my mind is the extremely popular series of novels by Clive Cussler featuring his hero Dirk Pitt. Several times there are inventions and/or events in those novels that should have had major effects on the world around them, and it just doesn't happen.

So since this annoys me as a reader, I can't do it as a writer. Thus, in Paradigms Lost, the acknowledgement of the Werewolves starts to have noticeable "ripple effects" throughout society, and these effects will only get larger as more of the paranormal begins to appear.

I write Heroes and Villains. I like tales of redemption much more than stories of someone falling. I don't particularly like graphic violence or graphic sex, and I won't use either in my writing unless, in my view as an author, they're necessary for the purposes of the plot.

Some of the "why" of the title of this column is of course included in the above; one does some things because one likes them. But of course there's usually something behind the liking – why you like to present a world in a particular way says something about your worldview, in all likelihood, unless you're one of those authorial chameleons that simply writes whatever you think will appeal to people, or whatever you're paid to do.

In my case… part of it comes from what I realized much later was a very odd upbringing. A combination of the way my family worked and moved around, and my own health and various behavioral traits that would probably be called Aspergers' today led to me having a great deal of isolation from the world as it was during my childhood and early adulthood.

Much of my knowledge and perception of the world came through books, and my preferred reading – when it wasn't science fact books – was science fiction and fantasy. And the ones I liked best carried themes of optimism – of men and women confronting challenges intelligently and overcoming them because they were right, and because they were both smart and determined. Looking over a lot of the Under the Influence posts I've made would reinforce that impression for any reader. I never really went through the classic "rebellious teen" phase that many people describe, though I was certainly a PITA to my parents in many ways.

One attitude that has always shaped my writing is that I should be presenting a world that is, at least in some way, better than the one I live in. There should be something about the story that can leave the reader feeling better for having read it, uplifted rather than dragged down. That doesn't mean that the world should have no problems in it – after all, without problems what need is there for heroes? But it does mean that it's my job, as the guy in the position of God Almighty for my own universe, to make that universe better than what I see when I look out my window.

Having smart heroes and villains of course also means that things tend to get complicated. Most of my heroes and their adversaries don't make big mistakes often, and usually when they make one that, from the objective viewpoint of the reader, is a big mistake it's usually true that the character couldn't have known it was a mistake. Either they were lacking, as Bert Gummer would say, "critical, need-to-know information" about the situation, or something about their essential nature made the mistake inevitable.

As an example, Richard Fitzgerald, in Threshold, is a high-functioning sociopath, so his very nature made it difficult for him to really understand the motivations and thus actions of several characters until it was too late. The Big Bad in the Balanced Sword would have succeeded in Its plans completely had there not been a single missing piece of the puzzle. In my not-yet-published space opera Demons of the Past, the main villain's plans are entirely undone because he is unaware of a single three-word message transmitted from one character to another.

I like to have good people in the forefront of my novels. And even the villains I like to have… well, panache, at least, a style that makes them fun to have onstage for the time we see them. After all, in real life, many of us have to put up with people who aren't so much fun to be with; if my readers are paying me for entertainment, I should give them the ability to not have to tolerate more assholes in their lives.

I have become more cognizant of my limitations as well during those years. I try to avoid writing about things I don't know – although I can't always manage that, since "the real problem ain't the things you know, it's what you do know that ain't so". I can of course study up on a subject and use that information, and in fact that's part of my day job at times – writing technical proposals for subjects I might not have heard of before the assignment landed in my lap.

Because of all this, of course, there are obvious limitations on my writing. I don't, and pretty much can't, write hard-edged military SF, because my military experience is very limited, and I see many other people writing it far better than I could even with study. Similarly, things like modern romance novels are out of the question, and writing real alternate history is really out of the question. The closest I'm likely to get to "gritty" writing is someone with Jason Wood's semi-hardboiled detective shtick.

I do recognize that this is a potential failing. I'm never going to write a guns-blazing adventure with a Punisher-type character killing and maybe occasionally wenching his way through the plot. My characters are never going to come to the end of the plot and wonder if it was all worthwhile, or contemplate all the gray choices they had to make along the way. These days, it seems that "grimmification" of things is still taken as "making it more realistic" and that grim, oversexed, and/or extreme violent settings are usually the ones that sell. But for better or worse, I can't do that.

Why? Because I want to paint worlds where things work out well. I can't force the real world to conform to fantasy; and at least to some extent, I feel thus no obligation to force fantasy to conform to the real world, at least in the areas of violence, hatred, futility, and arrogance. Sure, the heroes have to work for their happy ending, but they should get a happy ending. The villains should succeed enough to show us what that will mean in the end, but they ultimately need to be taken down.

Why? Because the stories that shaped me told me this was so. Jack Williamson's Legion of Space, Doc Smith's Lensmen, Elizabeth Moon's Paksenarrion, Star Wars and the original Star Trek, Captain America and Spider-Man and Superman, Steve Austin and Nancy Drew, L. Frank Baum's Oz and C. S. Lewis' Narnia, Conan Doyle's Holmes and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy and Hitomi Kanzaki of Escaflowne, all of them told me this was the way the world should be.

And if I'm going to be a forger of worlds, then the world I make will be forged from their steel.