by Isaac Asimov
There are many other ways of dealing with plot, but the important thing to remember is that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A humorous novel can be full of quite serious ideas and develop interesting characters, for instance.
On the other hand, writers can, more or less deliberately, sacrifice some elements of plot buildups in their anxiety to do, in great detail, what it is they want to do. I am so intent on presenting my opposing ideas, for instance, that I make no serious attempt to characterize brilliantly or to drench the tale in humor. As a result, much is made of my “card-board characters” and I am frequently accused of being “talky.” But these accusations usually come from critics who don’t see (or perhaps lack the intelligence to see) what it is that I am trying to do.
But I’m sure that this is not what Ms. Sullivan meant when she said I had “the greatest mind for plot.”
I rather think she means that my stories (especially my novels) have very complicated plots that hang together and have no loose ends, that don’t get in the way of the ideas I present in my stories, and that are not obscured by those ideas, either.
Now, how is that done?
I wish I could tell you. All I’m aware of is that it takes a great deal of hard thinking, and that between the thinking and the writing that I must do, there is little time for me to do anything else. Fortunately, I both think and write very quickly and with almost no dithering, so I can get a great deal done.
Which brings me to another part of the interview. The reporter speaks of my apartment as “filled with eclectic, utilitarian furniture chosen more for comfort than for style, much like Asimov’s wardrobe. For a recent speaking engagement, he wore a Western tie, a too-big jacket, and a striped shirt with the kind of long wide collar that was popular in the 1970s.”
She’s absolutely right. As far as style is concerned, I’m a shambles. It doesn’t bother me, though. To learn to live and dress with full attention to style would require hours upon umpteen hours of thought, of education, of decision-making, and so on. And that takes time I don’t want to subtract from my writing.
What would you rather have? Asimov, the prolific writer, or Asimov, the fashion plate? I warn you. You can’t have them both.
Metaphor
I received a letter from a fan the other day, one who had bought a copy of Agent of Byzantium, by Harry Turtledove, which appeared in a series entitled “Isaac Asimov Presents.” (That’s why he wrote to me.)
The cover shows a man dressed, says my correspondent, “in a Romanesque military uniform, holding a Roman helmet in his left hand.” He also carried “a very large, very modern, very lethal looking blaster rifle” and “an electronic scanning device.”
My correspondent was intrigued by the anachronism, bought the book, read it, and “enjoyed the book.” However, he found no place in the story where a man was holding such a rifle and scanning device, and he felt cheated. He had been lured into buying and reading the book by an inaccurate piece of cover art, and he wrote to complain.
So I thought about it. Now my knowledge of art is so small as to be beneath contempt, so naturally, I can’t be learned about it. There is, however, nothing I don’t understand about the word trade (fifty years of intimate, continuous and successful practice at it gives me the right to say that), and so I will approach matters from that angle.
I see the reader’s complaint as the protest of the “literalist” against “metaphor.” The literalist wants a piece of art (whether word or picture) to be precise and exact with all its information in plain view on the surface. Metaphor, however, (from a Greek word meaning “transfer”) converts one piece of information into another analogous one, because the second one is more easily visualizable, more dramatic, more (in short) poetic. However, you have to realize there is a transfer involved and if you’re a “born-again literalist,” if I may use the phrase, you miss the whole point.
Let’s try the Bible, for instance. The children of Israel are wandering in the desert and come to the borders of Canaan. Spies are sent in to see what the situation is and their hearts fail them. They find a people with strong, walled cities; with many elaborate chariots and skilled armies; and with a high technology. They come back and report “all the people we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants…. and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers and so we were in their sight.”
Right! They were of “great stature” in the sense that they had a high technology. They were “giants” of technology and the Israelites were “grasshoppers” in comparison. There was as much chance, the spies felt, of the Israelites defeating the Canaanites as of a grasshopper defeating a man.
It makes perfect metaphoric sense. The use of “giants” and “grasshoppers” is dramatic and gets across the idea. However, both Jewish and Christian fundamentalists get the vague notion that the Canaanites were two hundred feet tall, so that ordinary human beings were as grasshoppers in comparison. The infliction of literalism on us by fundamentalists who read the Bible without seeing anything but words is one of the great tragedies of history.
Or let’s turn to Shakespeare and the tragedy of Macbeth.
Macbeth has just killed Duncan and his hands are bloody and he is himself horror-struck at the deed. Lady Macbeth is concerned over her husband’s having been unmanned and gives him some practical advice. “Go,” she says, “get some water and wash this filthy witness from your hand.”
And Macbeth, his whole mind in disarray, says, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”
It’s a powerful figure, as you see a bloody hand dipped into the ocean and all the vast sea turning red in response, but, literally, it makes no sense. How can a few drops of blood turn the ocean red? All the blood in all the human beings on Earth if poured into the ocean would not change its overall color perceptibly. Macbeth might seem to be indulging in “hyperbole” (an extravagant exaggeration which sometimes makes its point, but usually reduces it to ridicule).
This, however, is not hyperbole, but metaphor. Consider! Macbeth has killed a man who had loved him and loaded him with honors, so he commits the terrible sin of ingratitude. Furthermore, the man he murdered was a guest in his house, so that Macbeth has violated the hallowed and civilized rules of hospitality. Finally, the man he murdered was his king and in Shakespeare’s time, a king was looked upon as the visible representative of God on Earth. This triple crime has loaded Macbeth’s soul with infinite guilt.
The blood cannot redden the ocean, but the blood is not blood, it is used here as a metaphor for guilt. The picture of the ocean turning red gives you a violently dramatic notion of the infinite blackness that now burdens Macbeth’s soul, something you couldn’t get if he had merely said, “Oh, my guilt is infinite.”
A literalist who sets about calculating the effect on the ocean of a bloody hand is getting no value out of what he reads.
One more example. Consider Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In the fourteenth verse of the third part, there come the lines: “Till clomb above the eastern bar the horned Moon, with one bright star within the nether tip.”
The “horned Moon” is the crescent moon, of course, and there can’t be a bright star within the nether tip. The crescent is the lighted portion of the moon, but the rest of it, though out of the sunlight and dark, is still there. For a bright star to be within the nether tip is to have it shining through hundreds of miles of lunar substance. It is an impossibility, and I don’t know how many readers have snickered at Coleridge’s naïveté in this.
But is it naïveté? The poem begins very simply and naturally till the Ancient Mariner kills the albatross, a lovable and unoffending bird. This itself is a metaphor. After all, human beings have killed lovable and unoffending birds since time immemorial. In this case, though, the killing represents all the callous and indifferent cruelty of the human species, and, as a result,
the ship with its crew (who approved the Mariner’s deed) enters a strange world in which natural law is suspended and chaos is come again as God removes himself. The atmosphere of the poem becomes weird and unearthly and normality begins to return only after the Mariner involuntarily blesses all the living things in the ocean in a gush of love.
I have a feeling that Coleridge knew that a star could not shine within the nether tip of the crescent but merely used it as one more example of the chaos of a world in which human cruelty denies love, order, and God’s presence. It is only fitting that a star shine where no star could possibly shine.
To miss that point is to miss the point of the poem and to understand only its jigging meter and its clever rhyming—which is plenty, but far from enough. A literalist deprives himself of the best part of art.
Suppose we apply this way of looking at things to visual art. If you ask an artist to illustrate a piece of writing precisely, you make of him a slave to the literal word. You suppress his creativity and impugn the independence of his mind and ability. The better the artist, the less likely he is (barring an absolute need for money) to accept such a job.
An artist worth his salt does not illustrate the literal words, but the mood of a story. He tries, by virtue of his art and ability, to deepen and reinforce the meaning of a story and the intent of the writer.
Thus, in the mid-December 1988 issue, the cover of Asimov’s illustrates my story “Christmas Without Rodney.” It does not illustrate any incident in the story. Instead it shows in the foreground a boy with a sullen and self-absorbed expression. What’s more, the predominant color is red, which to my way of thinking symbolizes anger (a metaphor for the flushed face of a person in rage). This demonstrates the anger of a spoiled brat who does not instantly have his own way, and the anger he inspires in the narrator of the story. Behind the boy is an elaborate robot, with one metal hand to his cheek as though uncertain as to his course of action, something that fulfills one of the underlying themes of the story. The artist, Gary Freeman, does not illustrate the story, but adds to it and gives it a visual dimension. That is what he is supposed to do and what he is paid to do.
This brings us to the cover illustration of Agent of Byzantium. It is clearly the intent of the artist to illustrate the nature of the story, not the story itself. Constantinople is in the background, identified by the gilded dome of Hagia Sophia. In the foreground is a soldier who has Byzantine characteristics. So far we have an historical novel. But he also possesses objects of high technology associated with modern western culture. Clearly it is an historical novel set in an alternate reality. And that is what the book deals with. The cover is precise, it tells us what we need to know, it satisfies the artist’s own cravings, and if the details of the technology are not precisely met in any incident in the book, that matters not a whit.
Ideas
Someone once asked Isaac Newton how he managed to reach solutions to problems that others found impenetrable. He answered, “By thinking and thinking and thinking about it.”
I don’t know what other answer people can possibly expect. There is the romantic notion that there is such a thing as “inspiration,” that a heavenly Muse comes down and plunks her harp over your head and, presto, the job is done. Like all romantic notions, however, this is just a romantic notion.
Some people may be better at solving problems and getting ideas than others are; they may have a livelier imagination, a more efficient way of grasping at distant consequences; but it all comes down to thinking in the end. What counts is how well you can think, and even more, how long and persistently you can think without breaking down. There are brilliant people, I imagine, who produce little, if anything, because their attention span to their own thoughts is so short; and there are less brilliant people who can plug away at their thoughts until they wrench something out of them.
All this comes up in my mind now because a friend of mine, a science fiction writer whose work I admire enormously, in the course of a conversation asked, in a very embarrassed manner, “How do you get your ideas?”
I could see what the problem was. He had been having a little trouble coming up with something and he thought that perhaps he had lost the knack of getting ideas, or had never really had it, and he turned to me. After all, I write so much that I must have no trouble getting ideas and I might even have some special system that others could use, too.
But I answered, very earnestly, “How do I get my ideas? By thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to jump out the window.”
“You, too?” he said, quite obviously relieved.
“Of course,” I said. “If you’re having trouble, all it means is that you’re one of us. After all, if getting ideas were easy, everyone in the world would be writing.”
After that, I put some serious thought into the matter of getting ideas. Was there any way I could spot my own system? Was there, in fact, any system at all, or did one simply think at random?
I went back over what happened in my mind before I wrote my most recent novel, Nemesis, which Doubleday published in October 1989, and I thought it might be helpful to aspiring writers, or even just to readers, if I described the preliminary thinking that went into the novel.
It started when my Doubleday editor, Jennifer Brehl, said to me, “I’d like your next novel not to be part of a series, Isaac. I don’t want it to be a Foundation novel or a Robot novel or an Empire novel. Write one that’s completely independent.”
So I started thinking, and this is the way it went, in brief. (I’ll cut out all the false starts and dead ends and mooning about and try to trace a sensible pathway through it all.)
The Foundation novels, Robot novels, and Empire novels are all interconnected and all deal with a background in which interstellar travel at superluminal speeds is well established. Of my previous independent novels, The End of Eternity deals with time-travel; The Gods Themselves with communication between universes; and Fantastic Voyage II with miniaturization. In none of these is there interstellar travel.
Very well, then, let me have a new novel which exploits an entirely new background. Let it deal with the establishment of interstellar travel, with the first interstellar voyages. Immediately I imagined a settled solar system, an Earth in decay, large numbers of space settlements in lunar orbit and in the asteroids. I imagined the space settlements as hostile to Earth and vice versa.
That gave me a reason for the drive to develop interstellar travel. Naturally, technological advances may be made for their own sake (as mountains are climbed “because they’re there”) but it helps to have a less exalted reason. A settlement might want to get away from the solar system to create a completely new society, profiting by past experience to avoid some of humanity’s earlier mistakes.
Good, but where do they go? If they have true interstellar flight, as in my Foundation novels, they can go anywhere, but that’s too much freedom. It introduces too many possibilities and not enough difficulties. If humanity is just developing interstellar flight, it might not be a very efficient process at first and a settlement trying to escape might find itself with a very limited range.
Now where do they go? The logical place is Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, but that is so logical that there’s no fun to it. Well, then, what if there’s another star only half as far as Alpha Centauri? That would be easier to reach.
But why haven’t we seen it, if it exists? Well, it’s a red-dwarf star and very dim, and besides there’s a patch of interstellar dust between it and ourselves and that dims it further so that it just hasn’t been noticed.
At that point, I remembered that a few years ago there was some speculation that the Sun might have a very distant red-dwarf companion that once in every revolution penetrated the comet cloud and sent some comets whizzing into the inner solar system where one or two might occasionally collide with Earth and produce the periodic waves of life-extinction. The red dwarf was called Nemesis.
The suggestion seems to have died
down, but I made use of it. My characters would go to the nearby red dwarf, which I would call Nemesis, and then use that as the name for my novel. Of course, you can’t very well have a habitable planet circling a red-dwarf star, but I wanted one. It would give me greater flexibility than simply to have the settlement go into orbit about the red dwarf. That meant I had to think up a set of conditions that (if you don’t question things too closely) would make it sound as though a habitable planet could exist. For that I had to invent a gas giant, with an Earth-sized satellite, and it would be the satellite that would be habitable.
Now I needed a problem. The obvious one would be that Nemesis was circling the Sun and would eventually pass through the comet cloud. I rejected that because it had been well discussed in the media and I wanted something a little less expected. So I decided that Nemesis was an independent star that happened to be en route to a relatively near miss of the solar system, with possibly dangerous gravitational effects.
That was a good problem, but I needed a plausible solution. That took some time but I finally thought one up. (Sorry, I won’t tell you what it is. For that you’ll have to read the book.)
What I needed next was a good character that would serve as the spinal column of the book, around whom everything would revolve. I chose a fourteen-year-old girl, with certain characteristics that I thought would make her interesting.
Then I needed a place to start the book. I would begin with my main character and have her do or say something that starts the chain of events that will take up the rest of the book. I made the choice and then waited no longer. I sat down and started the book.
