It was my first introduction to the fact that many readers automatically assume that anything that looks autobiographical actually is. Since then, I’ve even been rebuked by someone who thought I shared my villain’s opinions. I wanted to shout, “He was the villain, for heaven’s sake!”
Analog regular Jerry Oltion chuckles when he hears such stories. “We’re always told to write what we know,” he says. “So we do. What readers (and critics) don’t understand is that writers know all sorts of stuff that isn’t true, even for the writer.”
That said, it’s no surprise readers often view fiction as autobiographical. Because, often enough, they’re right, at least to some extent. “I suspect that the power of some of the best mainstream novels comes from the fact that they’re highly autobiographical,” says writing instructor and 2009 Sideways Award winner Mary Rosenblum.
There are several reasons authors draw so heavily on their own lives. One is simply that the details don’t have to be made up: you just look for relevant ones in your own life.
The advantage of that is that the details are often more realistic, suggests 2008 Campbell Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal. “It has the potential to seem truer to the reader than something you’re just guessing at,” she says. “If I’m describing the way a character feels just before crying, that’s the way it feels to me, too. I typically use autobiographical attitudes, not events.”
Sometimes, such details are also added to the story for the writer’s own personal reasons. “In every story with a love interest,” Kowal admits, “you’ll find some aspect of my husband. It might be a quirk or an attitude, like his love of cinema, but there’s always something.”
I myself not only use autobiographical attitudes, but also anecdotes, if they’re relevant. Partly that’s because they’re simpler to write. I know what happened, and I don’t have to make it up. But that may be an offshoot of my pre-fiction career, during which I’d sold dozens of first-person essays: adventure travel, humor, inspirational stories, and how-to articles. Not everyone is comfortable writing such things, but I was quite accustomed to them: for me, autobiographical writing feels safe and easy. Just to start with, I don’t have to figure out what happens next. All I have to do is decide which facts are relevant, then arrange them in storytelling order. Drawing on such materials for fiction has the added hurdle of making sure the anecdote fits the character and is relevant to the story. But (for me at least) it still has the advantage not only of greater verisimilitude (1), but of being easier than simply making everything up from scratch.
In that paragraph from “Among the Singing Hills,” Sioux heritage is just about the only thing that isn’t autobiographical. There are at least five elements drawn directly from my own life—six if you count the fact that the story was born on a hot day bicycling through precisely that region of Minnesota:
• I grew up (partly) in Kentucky.
• My father loved to take us on back-road drives, letting me navigate the return.
• I have a good sense of direction, acquired in part from those drives.
• I love to bicycle. I’ve even written two books about it.
• I once took a seventy-five mile bike ride on which I chose directions by dead reckoning, arriving precisely where I intended.
But it’s not truly autobiographical. In the story, I took those elements… and twisted. Specifically:
I lived in Illinois before moving to Kentucky, and it was in Illinois that we started going out into the country to get “lost.”
My father never made me spend hours puzzling out how to get home. He guided (subtly), all the while letting me think I was doing it myself.
The seventy-five-mile dead-reckoning ride was in college. By sixth grade (fourth, actually), I was exploring my small Kentucky town, but didn’t get more than five or six miles from home until I was in high school.
“Among the Singing Hills” was one of my earliest stories, and what I did in it was the simplest use of autobiographical material: I simply peppered the story with details designed to give depth to a character.
Another use is for setting. Why make up a setting if you know one you can use as a model? In fact, if you don’t know geology and geomorphology (the manner in which geology shapes landscapes) it’s easy to produce fictional landscapes that simply can’t happen in real life—and which a good geologist (or experienced backcountry hiker) will recognize as untrue. Limestone, basalt, and granite all produce distinctive landforms—right down to the shape and texture of the rocks underfoot. Similarly, deserts produce different types of stream systems than prairies. Even in the desert, spring-fed canyons and rain/snowmelt-fed canyons have different configurations (2). If you don’t know what these are (and most writers don’t) it’s better to pick a real landscape and envision it as you write your story.
You may simply want to use that landscape as setting, but it can also play a major role in the development of the story. I did a lot of that in one of my personal favorites, “Dinosaur Blood” (Analog, January/February 2006). It’s the tale of socialite heiress Trista, who, in an energy-depleted future, inherits an ancient gasoline-powered vehicle (a Hummer), plus the world’s last cache of gasoline. With nothing better to do, and more money than is good for her, she sets off on the world’s last road trip, towing a tank trailer with the gasoline, so she can refuel (3). Unknown to her, a powerful alien intelligence is watching, with the fate of humanity depending on what she does.
When I started the story, I intended to have her remain cluelessly socialite. In the end, she was supposed to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, shrug, and call for a hyper-expensive methane-powered helicopter that would burn a hundred families’ energy allowance to come take her home. End of story. End of humanity. Too bad, sorry, and all that.
But almost by accident she came alive on me, and my dark, wry fable became the story of a real person. Curious to see what would happen, I sent her to places I knew in remote parts of Nevada, southeastern Oregon, and Utah. She wasn’t me… but she experienced things I knew: the transformative power of places that had transformed me.
That, of course, changed the story. There was no way I was going to kill her, no way I wasn’t going to give her a chance to learn what I knew, which was that the stark, simple beauty of the desert puts everything in new perspective. She encountered wild horses in the sage, slept beneath starlit skies unperturbed by even the most distant ranch lights, felt the lingering echoes of the outpoured hopes and dreams of long-gone pioneers. And when it was done, she wasn’t the same. Because I had been there too, had slept under the same skies, had heard the clatter of wild hooves near my tent-less sleeping bag, had been forever changed.
“Dinosaur Blood” was “about” one thing: the coming of age of a young woman who might (or might not) use her wealth to lead humanity to a new golden age. But if it was any good, it was because I knew the remote reaches of America’s intermountain deserts—knew what it felt like to let them really work on you and, in the end, restore you.
Autobiographical? You bet. But is Trista me? Nope. Could you have figured this out before I told you? You’d have to tell me.
Bleeding all over the page I’ve done the “Dinosaur Blood” type of autobiography in a lot of stories. Pretty much any fiction I’ve ever written that has a strong geographic setting—on Earth, anyway—has at least a few such elements. Even the ones I’ve done off-Earth draw from the same experience cache.
But there are ways to use autobiographical elements to add even more power to a story.
When I started this article, I thought I was going to write a fairly straightforward how-to. But that’s not really the message. The how is simple: you simply write. More important is a different question: how bold are you willing to be?
For some writers, the answer is not at all. And there are stories for which such boldness isn’t even needed, or helpful. Light humor works best if it’s, well, light. Adventure may bog down if it gets too introspective, as can classic
problem-solving stories.
But there are other stories that require writers to bare their souls. Though if they do it well, nobody really knows by how much… unless they write an essay like this one.
Still, there are risks. One of the most irritating criticisms I’ve ever received was from a reviewer who didn’t like a female character named Tiffany.
Tiffany, when cornered, chose to sit back and observe, rather than ranting, raving, and literally or metaphorically rattling the bars of her cage. My critic thought that made her a stereotypically weak female—and me a sexist male for writing her.
There was just one problem: Tiffany was behaving exactly as I do in crisis. Rather than doing or saying something I might regret, I slow my voice, lower my tone, and become hyper-rational. Stop, think, and don’t do anything irrevocable; that’s my motto. Tiffany was also an observer, something I’d gone out of my way to point out. “You love to do that sit-and-listen thing where nobody realizes you’re paying attention, when you’re always two steps ahead of them,” another character notes. In another place I was even more blatant, letting Tiffany describe herself as being in “fly-on-the-wall mode.” I’m a journalist. “Fly on the wall” is a classic metaphor for the way journalists want to see themselves. Observe, assess, and don’t reveal your own opinion; that’s the dream (4).
One of my prize possessions is a letter I received early in my reporting days from someone who said I was the only reporter who’d ever portrayed her opinions accurately. What made that such a compliment was that I hadn’t agreed with anything she’d said—but I had believed she had the right to have her views reported accurately.
The point here is that Tiffany was me, at least partially. Which meant that I got to read a review describing myself as having created a stereotypically weak female character—whose “weakness” was something I, a male, viewed as one of my personal strengths. It was a very strange moment.
But the risks can be even greater. “Phantom Sense” (Analog, November 2010) was perhaps the most deeply personal story I’ve ever written.
Superficially, it’s about a new military technology, but what it’s really about is loss. At the start of the story, the main character, Kip McCorbin, is a retiring special forces soldier who has lost everything: his wife, his career, his relationship with his daughter. He’s also been forced to give up a special “sense” created by that military technology—something he’s had so long it’s effectively become a part of him.
I won’t tell you what loss I channeled writing that story. Death, divorce, abandonment, failure, loneliness: we’ve all had one or more of them. What I will say is that my collaborator, Mark Niemann-Ross, unknowingly handed me the outline for that story a mere twenty-four hours after what had probably been the worst day of my life. I took one look at the plot outline and the characteristics it required of Kip, and thought: “I can channel this guy.”
Friends thought it was therapeutic. But it was more like anti-therapy. You do therapy for yourself, often to get in better touch with your feelings. I had no need for that: I was way too aware of my feelings. Rather, I did it for the story. Repeatedly, I unpacked the worst moments of my life and relived them, over and over, cataloging the minutia of how I felt, and how I acted. Then I twisted them, as I did with the autobiographical details in “Among the Singing Hills,” because I was writing about Kip, not myself. But if it rings true, it’s because the result is a mix of me and not-me.
I also delved into a different type of heartbreak: the damage that people like Kip, however good their intentions, inflict on the women around them, particularly their daughters.
Kip doesn’t mean to be a bad father. His job, with its erratic absences—long, dangerous, and secret—would make that very difficult for the best of men. But I wasn’t in the mood to cut him slack. Through too much of my adult life, I've watched too many women, some of them very close friends, deal with the emotional wreckage such AWOL fathers leave in their wake, whether the cause is work, alcohol, excess expectations, or simply a deep-set inability to communicate emotion. And so, when Kip’s daughter Cora gets a chance to give him a piece of her mind, I let her unleash it… in honor of all the Coras I’ve known who never got the chance.
“Wow,” Mark said when he read it. “That’s intense.” And, he added about that and some equally strong scenes dealing with loss (about which he now knew the details of what had happened to me), “I think you bled all over the page.”
Another friend agreed: “Yeah, there is blood on the page, isn’t there? [But] that’s a good thing.”
And that, ultimately, is the power of this kind of boldness. Not all stories require it, but some do. And when they do, people may not know what autobiographical events you are channeling, but they will know the color of your blood, the saltiness of your tears. They may figure out things about you that you didn’t intend to make public, or make wild, inaccurate guesses. Some of you will be doing both of those about me, right now.
But if you’re going to write—really write—those are the chances you sometimes have to take.
FOOTNOTES
1. Richard A. Lovett, “Making Unreality Ring True: Writers’ Tricks for Bringing Stories to Life,” Analog, January/February 2010.
2. Rain or snowmelt-fed river systems tend to have a many tiers of branches as you move upstream: a “dendritic” pattern like veins in a leaf. Spring-fed systems have stubbier canyon systems, with fewer branches. They also tend to be “cliffier,” as seepage from springs undermines valley walls, forming box canyons.
3. For those who thought I picked the Hummer as some kind of political statement (and there were a few who did), I actually picked it simply because it had the power to pull the tank trailer. That was necessary for the story, to give Trista an easy way to refuel.
4. For old-time journalists, anyway. The openly opinionated reporting we see today by both sides on cable news is a different matter.
Copyright © 2010 Richard A Lovett
Novella
Novella
The First Day of Eternity
by Domingo Santos
Seven hundred twenty-one years, seven months, and fourteen days after leaving Earth, the ship Diaspora 32 finally arived at the planet. It wasn’t its planet; it had never sought it deliberately....
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Special Feature
Novella
The First Day of Eternity
by Domingo Santos
There are inherent risks in trusting your descendents to finish your work.
Seven hundred twenty-one years, seven months, and fourteen days after leaving Earth, the ship Diaspora 32 finally arived at the planet. It wasn’t its planet; it had never sought it deliberately. Project Diaspora had merely sent a whole series of “ark” ships (forty in the first phase, called “cradle” ships since their mission was to establish new offshoots of humanity, not to save them from some horrible fate) in all directions, toward all corners of the Universe, each in search of its own goal: a planet, any planet, that might provide the minimum conditions to support life and launch a new humanity. It didn’t matter how long it took to get there; everyone knew that, sooner or later, the goal would be reached.
In its 721 years of travel, the instruments of Diaspora 32 had examined more than seventy candidate planets, and in every case the ship had ruled: “Not suitable for colonization; we must keep looking.”
Until now.
Rhina Solomon studied the ochre orb that floated in the center of the main screen in the ship’s control room. As captain of the Diaspora, her place was here. Her responsibility, and that of the ship, was the 26,431 future colonists (pilgrims, they’d been called by the ship itself, emphasizing the double meaning of the word) that the ship housed. But that didn’t keep her from envying Thor Ashner, whose shuttle was now just a shrinking black dot against the scorched planet in the final stage of its descent from Diaspora’s geosynchronous orbit to the surface. Like all the other pilgrims, Rhina Solomon had never know
n, in her fifty-two years of life, anything but the ship’s cold, confining walls, and the possibility of seeing something different simultaneously awoke in her desire and imagination. And a certain fear of the new and unknown.
At her side, the Caretaker guessed her thoughts; the Caretaker always guessed everything. Its imposing faceted eyes gleamed with an internal light from its steel-blue face. “The ship’s data are most encouraging,” it said unnecessarily, as if Rhina didn’t know it. “We should give thanks to the god of the stars for that.”
And to the god of the ship for bringing us this far, thought Rhina, and to the god of the planet for putting it in our path, and to the god of the Universe for sheltering us all in its immensity. She wasn’t an atheist, not even an agnostic, but she had never fully accepted the ship’s religion, monotheistic like the ancient religion of its origins even though it was replete with all manner of gods. They, said the Caretaker, were all just manifestations of a single god, just as it and all the servants were manifestations of a single entity, the ship.
The Caretaker continued expounding its thoughts in a loud voice, with the cold, mechanical gravity befitting its nature and station. “When the shuttle returns with Thor and the others,” it said, “we’ll hold a great ceremony of thanksgiving in the festival hall. We must celebrate our good fortune in finally arriving safely at the end of our journey.”
Rhina thought of the thirty-seven generations that had preceded hers since Diaspora 32 left Earth and had not had such good fortune.
“Yes, of course,” she said. On the big screen, the shuttle had disappeared, swallowed up by the planet.
In reality Thor Ashner was not a shuttle pilot. In the refuge of a cradle ship voyaging toward infinity there were few chances for a shuttle pilot to practice his skills.
But the Caretaker was provident (the ship was provident) and in addition to his other duties and responsibilities, those whom he (and the ship) considered his pupils and protégés, and to whom he was at once servant, master, mentor, counselor, confessor, priest, and theologian, were his only reason for being. One of his many missions was to foresee all possible futures, and for that reason most occupants of Diaspora had at least two jobs: one inside the ship, during the long journey, and a second for when Diaspora finally arrived at its destination.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11 Page 32
