Elizabeth Bear's Guest Post: Experimental Archaeology

The last time we visited, I talked a little about how learning practical things can improve one's writing. Upon reflection, I suspect that my belief in the usefulness of this tactic stems from my own long-ago experience as an anthropology student. At that time, I met a guy who was an experimental archaeologist. He knapped flint, tanned hides and furs (salvaged from roadkill), and at one point built his own paper-birch canoe and sailed it down the Connecticut River.

I was fascinated by this idea, of putting theoretical structures to physical proof--sure, we can build a scale replica pyramid using period techniques! We will just substitute grad students for slave labor!--because it seemed to me so very useful. So often, the stuff people tell us seems rational and reasonable, or alternately to cool not to be true, until a little research of experience reveals that the idea that so enamored us just isn't so.

Storytelling is sort of the same process in reverse. We're trying to build a lie that will hold up to the experience (and experiment) of the reader, lull her into believing and not questioning--and one way to support her suspension of disbelief in the big ticket items is to get the details right. Because once you get them wrong and get caught, the reader starts questioning everything.

Some readers, of course, so delight in catching the author in errors that they will invent them in they're not actually there in the text. They're beyond help: I recommend you just accept their foibles and let them have their fun.

The rest of us, though--we know that a scarlet tanager is red, and not blue. So if you show us a blue scarlet tanager, we need to be given a reason in the text to believe you, or you're going to have a tough road winning our trust back.

But if you've had everything right for twenty pages and then you show me that blue bird, I'm going to have some faith in you.

I think of Richard Adams, here, where in Watership Down he gets every detail of the landscape he lived in note-perfect, so perfect that talking rabbits don't throw me for a second.

Get the details right, in other words, and everything else follows.

The Practical Author

First of all, I'm tremendously flattered to be asked to guest blog for Kepler's books. Second, hello there and hi!

Since I just got back from a rock-climbing expedition (I am a not-particularly-good rock-climber, if you wondered) and since rock-climbing is a skill I learned on behalf of a character, it seems logical to me that tonight I should talk about the practical aspects of research for the writer.

One of the interesting things about being a writer is that you have to know--or at least be able to fake knowing--all kinds of stuff about all kinds of stuff. Quite regularly, I am called upon to discourse on the finer points of animal husbandry, forensic pathology, piloting aircraft, middle management, swordfighting, BASE jumping, maintianing a marriage--

--it might surprise you to know that I am not a qualified expert in any of these fields.

I am, however, perfectly capable of reading books and calling up actual really real credentialed experts and throwing myself upon their mercy (you'd be surprised how many people are thrilled to be asked to calculate the destructive potential of a nickel-iron meteorite at two in the morning). I am capable both of reading some ten thousand pages of text to discover that apparently nobody knows the answer to the historical question I need fielded and so making it up out of whole cloth--and of electroplating a mono-molecular layer of research all over my fiction to make it look like I did my homework.

I am also capable of getting up off the couch and going out and actually learning something, when it comes right down to it.

In the past thirty years, I've learned to ride a horse, rock-climb, kick-box, throw a pot, work-harden wire, swing a sword, shoot a bow and a gun, play guitar, and crawl through caves on my belly, all in the service of fiction. I'm not actually any good at any of those, but it's amazing how much more convincing just getting the texture of the thing in your hand makes the writing. (I draw the line at BASE jumping. That one, I'll place phone calls for.)

This last Worldcon, I was privileged to be at a table with a bunch of other writers comparing notes on the dumbest thing we've done for a story (tie: Steven Boyett (hang gliding) and Walter Jon Williams (cave diving)) and it was actually kind of a relief to realize that it's not just me. A lot of my writer friends consider my boots-on-the-ground technique a little excessive, but I find that for me it leads not just to richer writing but also more ideas. Because every time I learn something, it gets added to the pile of things in my head from which stories spring, and that in itself is kind of awesome.