Where do you get your crazy ideas? Well, if we tabulate the assertions made in the introductions to these stories, it goes like this: Magazine articles, two. Editorial suggestions, four. Cover painting, one. Works of other writers, two. The weather, two. Personal joke, one. Stylistic experiments, two. Personal emotional experience, two. Out of nowhere, two.*
Actually, I think all of them came out of nowhere.
R. A. Lafferty, than whom there is no more original writer in science fiction, claims that there’s no such thing as an original idea, and writers who think they sit down and go through some rational process to arrive at a story are kidding themselves. He claims that all ideas float around as a kind of psychic public property, and every now and then one settles on you. That sounds dangerously mystical to me—subversive—but I think it’s true.
So how can you square that with obeying the editor who calls in the middle of the night and asks for a four-thousand-word story about the person who ate the first artichoke? Easily.
When a writer sits down to start a story he faces a literal infinity of possibilities. Being told to write about a specific thing, or to a given length, doesn’t really diminish the number of possible stories. The effect is the same as dividing infinity by a large but finite number: you still have infinity. Obviously, a writer who figures out his own story idea and then proceeds to write it is duplicating this not-really-restrictive process. Writing what he wants to write about may allow him to write a better story—or it may not, if his infatuation with the idea interferes with his objectivity—but I think any really good writer can take any editorial requirement, so long as it’s not patently stupid or offensive, * and wind up writing a story he would have written anyhow.
Ideas are cheap, even crazy ones. Every writer has had the experience of a friend or relative—or stranger!—saying, “I’ve got this great idea for a story.. you write it and I’ll split the money with you fifty-fifty.” The proper response to this depends on the generous person’s occupation. In the case of a prizefighter, for instance, you might offer to name a few potential opponents, and only demand half the purse. An editor, of course, you humor. They rarely ask for as much as half.
All of this is not to say that there aren’t days when you sit down at the typewriter and find that your imagination has frozen solid; you can’t come up with anything to write, no ideas come floating down out of Lafferty’s ether. When this happens in the middle of a novel, it’s a scary thing. But if you’re just feeing a short story that won’t get itself started, there’s an easy way to cope with it, a trade secret that Gordon R. Dickson passed on to me, saying it hadn’t foiled him in twenty years:
Start typing. Type your name over and over. Type lists of animals, flowers, baseball players, Greek Methodists. Type out what you’re going to say to that damned insolent repairman. Sooner or later, perhaps out of boredom, perhaps out of a desire to stop this silly exercise, you’ll find you’ve started a story. It’s never taken me so much as a page of nonsense, and the stories started this way aren’t any worse than the one about the artichoke.
One restriction most good science fiction writers accept without question is that the scientific content of their stories be as accurate as possible. Is this really necessary? Yes, but not for the obvious didactic reason. We are not obligated (or qualified, in most cases) to teach science to anybody.
A person who thinks he learns science from science fiction is like one who thinks he learns history from historical novels, and he deserves what he gets. Some few science fiction writers, like Gregory Benford and Philip Latham, are working scientists, and a good fraction of the rest of us have degrees in some science. That doesn’t make us qualified to write with authority on subjects outside of our areas of study—but we do it; you’d have a short career if all of your stories were about magnetohydrodynamics or galactic morphology. So we try to be intelligent laymen in other fields, staying current enough so that our inevitable errors won’t be obvious to other laymen.
Any fiction writer is in the business of maintaining illusion. Like a stage magician, his authority lasts only until he makes his first error.* Every writer has to deal with mechanical consistencies like making sure the woman named Marie in chapter one doesn’t turn into Mary in chapter four. He also has to be careful about routine details, not letting the sun set in the east (as John Wayne made it do in The Green Berets), and so forth. If he writes in a genre, he has an added burden of detail, since most of his readers consider themselves experts. Mundane esoterica: Spies call the CIA the Company, not the Agency. A private eye doesn’t have to break into a car and read the registration card to find out who own it; he jots down the license number and sends a form to the Department of Motor Vehicles. A cowboy normally carried only five shots in his six-shooter; only a fool would leave the hammer down on a live round.
One reason science fiction is harder to write than other forms of genre fiction is that this universe of detail is larger, more difficult of access, and constantly changing. I wonder how many novels-in-progress got thrown across the room in 1965, when scientists found that Mercury didn’t keep one face always to the Sun, after all. I wonder how many bad ones got finished anyhow.
Nobody can be an expert on everything from ablation physics to zymurgy, so you have to work from a principle of exclusion: know the limits of your knowledge and never expose your ignorance by attempting to write with authority when you don’t really know what’s going on. This advice is easier to give than to take. I’ve been caught in basic mistakes in genetics, laser technology, and even metric nomenclature—in the first printing of The Forever War I referred time and again to a unit of power called the “beva-watt.” What I meant was “gigawatt”; the only thing “bev” means is billion-electron-volt, a unit of energy, not power. I got letters. Boy, did I get letters.
The letters are humbling, and time-consuming if you feel obligated to answer them (I do, so long as they aren’t abusive or idiotic). But the possibility of being caught in error isn’t the main reason for taking pains.
When I finish writing a science fiction novel I have a notebook or two of technical notes, equations, diagrams, graphs. Even a short story, if it’s a hard-core-science one like “Tricentennial,” might generate a dozen pages of notes. Not one percent of this stuff finds its way into the story. It may even be naive science and weak mathematics—but it will have served its purpose if it has made a fictional world solid and real to me.
Because this business of illusion works both ways. For a story to succeed, the writer must himself be convinced that the background and situation the story is built on make sense. Ernest Hemingway pointed out (though I think Gertrude Stein said it first) that the prose of a story should move with the steady grace of an iceberg, and for the same reason an iceberg does: seven-eighths of it is beneath the surface. The author must know much more than the reader sees. And he must believe, at least for the duration.
Which brings us back to Mr. Lafferty. What I’m really doing with all these equations and graphs, I think, is putting myself into a properly receptive frame of mind. Other writers draft endless outlines to the same purpose, or sharpen pencils down to useless stubs, or take meditative walks, or drink bourbon. And through some mystical—or subconscious, or subrational—process, where there was white paper there’s a sentence, a page, a story. Finding the proper words is not at all a mystical process, just creative labor. The ideas that serve as scaffolding for the words, though—they come from out of nowhere, and serve you, then return.
—Joe Haldeman
Florida, 1978
* You may note that these add up to more than the total number of stories. I can’t balance my checkbook, either.
* An editor of recent memory, who came to science fiction from the editing of wrestling magazines, and has since gone on to even greater things, once petitioned a number of writers for “an anti-homosexuality science fiction story.” None was quite that desperate for work.
* I saw an act in Las Vegas where the magician exploited this sentiment by deliberately introducing mistakes, which grew more and more outrageous until his act degenerated into slapstick, and it was more entertaining than any straight sleight-of-hand. Good surreal writers like Brautigan, Disch, and Garcia Marquez also succeed by deliberately manipulating the consensus of illusion we call reality, but that’s not the kettle of fish we’re discussing here.