The Novel Viewed As Moldy Bread

Way back at the dawn of time, I used to do research on hypertext. This was the early Eighties and the Web hadn't been invented yet. It was a time of wonderful freedom - like the days before the IBM PC and its Microsoft operating system were invented, when there were dozens of different personal computer architectures and dozens of different operating systems. Once the IBM PC appeared, all that diversity was quashed. Well, the Web did the same for the many budding hypertext systems - all those brilliant ideas were trampled in the rush to the lowest common denominator.

Which is all very dreary, but what's it got to do with writing? Not much, really. It's just that I've started writing a novel as a hypertext and I've been pondering the many ways such an object could be structured. I have a strong urge to write it as a linear structure - beginning-middle-end and everything lined up neatly in between. Something in me says this is how a book should be. But I'm fighting it. I'm trying to force myself out of this groove and to play around with some ideas.

The first, obvious, thing to do would be to have the main plot be linear with a few loops out along the way into sub-plots. The main line and the sub-plot loops could then have little spikes off them for discursion, or minor character backgrounds. This isn't so bad, it may even be something like the real 2-D structure of a book if it didn't have to be 'flattened' into a 1-D line. But there is more that could be done.

The main plot could be a number of threads - different character perspectives, different emphases on the themes of the book, or different interpretations of the action. These threads could be bundled into particular outcomes, based on decisions made one way or another throughout the book. With this approach, the book is now, effectively, many books, depending on the paths you take.

But a book isn't necessarily a sealed entity. As a hypertext, it can grow tendrils out into the wider world of knowledge and opinion. Obscure references can be linked to their exegesis in Wikipedia, the social and political context of the story can be expanded indefinitely, technical terms can be explained, maps can be referenced, animated models and video can reveal what even the best writing might leave unclear. Like a mold growing on the loaf of the Web, the book can thread its ever-branching hyphae throughout its host's body.

It's all fascinating, and the possibilities reminded me of those far-away days, scribbling diagrams on whiteboards, struggling with graph theory, and trying to hammer SGML into something computable.

But what about the reader? How much complexity can a reader take? How many divergent plotlines will a reader tolerate? How many different points of view does a reader actually want to take on a story? Where does a hypertex stop being a novel and start being intellectual masturbation? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.

In the end, to be kind to my readers, I will probably go with a simple structure - the one I called 2-D a couple of paragraphs ago. But, oh, the possibilities!

Is sci-fi the new black?

I've spent many hours now trawling through listings of literary agents, trying to find ones that are sci-fi friendly, and there are very, very few of them. In fact, agents who say they handle sci-fi are outnumbered at least ten-to-one (maybe twenty-to-one) by the ones who go out of their way to say 'No science fiction.'

Now, I know that sci-fi isn't the most popular genre on the block - fantasy out-sells it by ten-to-one, and crime and 'general' fiction are 30 and 40 times more popular, respectively, than sci-fi, and, let's face it, fiction as a whole is less than a third of the total book market - but must sci-fi writers really be treated like pariahs? Must we be singled out and shunned by agents as if we were poets for heaven's sake?

I can only think of a single reason. My guess would be that, although sci-fi books in print represent less than a third of one percent of the books published each year, sci-fi writers represent a large proportion of all writers submitting manuscripts to agents. If only a third of one percent of the MSS they received were sci-fi, agents wouldn't need to mention it. So agents are trying to maximise their chance of finding a publishable book per thousand metres of slush by excluding all the 'noise' sci-fi (and poetry) introduces.

The worst offenders in the 'No peddlers, hawkers and sci-fi writers' stakes are the agencies who say they handle 'literary fiction' or 'quality fiction'. I suppose they're willing to miss out on the chance of a Bradbury, a Vonnegut, or a Ballard, in order not to have to wade through all the space operas and steampunk epics.

Well, there's no harm in asking, I suppose, so, would all the other sci-fi writers out there just stop writing for a few years, please? Then the agents won't need to hold back the floodwaters with such paranoiac fervour and I might actually get one of them to take on my books.

Giving It All Away

I just had an email from Jeff Vandermeer - which is kinda cool. I don't know the guy but I know his books and I read his blog and he is one hell of a writer. So it's nice to be tenuously associated with him. It makes me feel more writerly just being in the same cyberspace.

It also reminded me of how I came to read him for the first time: I foud City of Saints and Madmen remaindered in a big bin of books in a mall in Brisbane. The book had a quirky cover, so I picked it up and scanned the blurb. It all seemed a bit weird but, hell, it was only a few dollars, so I bought it anyway. And, boy, am I glad I did! It blew me away. It was a fantastic read, the writing was excellent, and the 'world' of Ambegris was the richest, most sumptuous and compeling that I had come across in many years.

And this, in turn, reminded me of other authors I've discovered through their remaindered books. (Like the amazing The Limits of Vision by Robert Irwin - a book I re-read often and which I found in a remaindered book shop in Toronto, Canada.) Maybe I'm just tight-fisted (well, alright, I admit it, I am tight-fisted) but I hate paying out $25 to $35 for a paperback and then finding I don't like it. It gives rise to what novelist Dave Freer recently called 'the resentment factor' (and he's in the same writers group as me - another cool thing) - that feeling of antagonism one feels towards an author for making you shell out so much for something you didn't like. Dave actually gives his books away (as well as selling them) and says it helps him win new readers - and paying customers - something I've heard from several different writers.

For me, being able to buy remaindered books for a couple of dollars is an even better way of getting a sample of an author's work than downloading the text for free. It comes as a real book. I hate reading long works on screen and it's well worth a few dollars to avoid having to do that. (Libraries are pretty good too - that's where I first found Dave Freer's work.)

I would encourage every bookshop, everywhere, to carry a large stock of remaindered books - and then be sure to have the same authors represented on the full-price shelves.

What Is The Future Of Publishing?

As a one-time Authonomy user (see why I left) I have been following the recent controversy about what happens to their top-ranked authors. Rumour is that not one has yet had a book contract and, instead, some have been quietly offered the chance to take part in a print on demand (POD) self-publishing experiment. Well, Harper Collins, which runs the site, has published an apology for the concern they've caused and assurances that POD is merely another service that HC is offering Authonomy users. It's all very odd, I must say.

But that's not why I'm posting. What struck me about the HC post was that they assured authors who felt like self-publishing that this would not bar them from future publication with HC. To quote:

"And as a publisher we certainly don’t have a problem with authors who have self-published: we’ve acquired a number of authors who took this route initially."

Which is nice to know, since I've read several self-published books which are better than most of the stuff currently on the shelves at my local bookshop. (I'll pass over the hideous grammar of this sentence and the horrible notion that HC 'acquires' authors - as if we were commodities to be bought and sold.)

Agents, publishers and bookshops act as filters on what is available to us to read. Agents and publishers in particular use their professional skills to prevent the great bulk of manuscripts which are poorly written from being published. This, I believe, is a valuable service. It means that, what you see in the bookshops, in the high street and online, meets a minimum standard of coherence and literacy. It is a fairly low standard, but it is there.

But what the agents, publishers and bookshops also do, is try to guess what we the readers will want to buy. So they exclude manuscripts - however well written, however thoughtful, intelligent and insightful - which they do not expect will sell in large enough numbers. The reason for this is obvious: publishers and booksellers need to make money from selling books, and agents need to make money from supplying publishers with books. If the books that are printed don't sell, the whole supply chain collapses.

For the writers of books, this can be a frustrating, infuriating situation. Some writers are not writing commercial works - but they would still like to see them in print. Some writers are producing highly commercial works but their themes or presentation, genres or style, or whatever, are not judged to be saleable that year, or that month. Some writers who produce good, saleable work still don't get a look in because the industry knows it will make more money from a da Vinci Code lookalike, or a celebrity memoir, and each publisher can only do so many books in any one year.

So there are a lot of writers out there who will take the risk and publish their book themselves - because they believe in it, or because they can make enough money from it (even though a publisher couldn't), or because they just don't care about the money. There is a world of talent and excellence in self-published books that the ordinary buying public never sees simply because the agent-publisher-bookshop chain excludes them.

I can understand why each of these groups is loathe to accept that there can be high quality self-published books. The agents simply have no role in the self-publishing supply chain. The publishers are also excluded middle-men. The booksellers can't easily take on self-published books because, without a book going through the agent-publisher filter, there is no guarantee that it will meet even the minimal standards of quality I mentioned earlier - the booksellers would have to become their own filter, judging the books they allowed on their shelves. (For booksellers, there are also issues of quantity, reliability of supply, economies from single-sourcing, and the sale-or-return deals they have with publishers, that would make them wary of self-published works.)

Which all means that the self-published author, no matter how good he or she is, or how saleable his or her book is, is almost inevitably doomed to economic failure because they simply cannot get their product under the noses of the book-buying public. Yet, in this digital age, it has become cost-effective to lay out all our wares - good, bad and ugly - and let the market decide which are the quality products. After all, we find the best blogs to read, the best news aggregators to visit, and the best online shops. The Web has made finding what we need and what we like easier than it has ever been, and a lot quicker and better-focused than marching around town, browsing through bookshops.

There is so much talk these days about the future of publishing - which is mostly about ebooks and other delivery mechanisms. Maybe some of that talk should get down to the basics of how the whole industry could be restructured to let more voices be heard and to give the public more choice in who they listen to.

The Devil Made Me Do It

OK, so I'm skiving off work. Ever since I finished my latest novel, TimeSplash!, my productivity has been way down (although I just finished a new short story I'm very pleased with - Jim'sWorld.)

So here's a drawing of a character from TimeSplash! by way of whiling away the time. I know, I'm no Jeremy Gordon, but it's fun trying new things. This guy really does appear - looking just like this - in the story. Only my readers (Terry, Rod, Christine and Becky) know why.

Anyone else care to hazzard a guess?

Dead America - News of the Dead

Check this out! Writer Luke Keioskie has started up a new website based around the 'world' of his unpublished zombie novel Dead America. The site features news items from Dead America's alternate reality, along with fake adverts offering services, like cosmetic surgery, to zombies.

Apart from being way cool in and of itself, as a marketing vehicle to get a buzz going around his novel, this a fantastic idea. Everyone who has come across Dead America agrees this is a great premise for a novel, and I know for a fact that Luke is a skilled and original writer. Surely it can't be long before a publisher catches on too.

Limbering Up

There ought to be some kind of limbering-up exercise a writer can do. Joggers pose around in the streets trying to pull their feet off, musicians play scales and arpeggios, actors pull faces and make strange noises. What can a writer do? Compose haiku? Write out the alphabet?

I'm about to write the very last scene of my new novel TimeSplash! It's a tender scene that puts the final, delicate touch to a blossoming relationship, but it has also to tie off a number of lose ends from various plotlines, and I'd like it to end on a light, humorous note. I have the scene in my head but not the actual words. I now need to put it down on paper in all its subtlety - and I have performance anxiety.

Writing, for all that I do it in my quiet office on an isolated mountaintop, is in many ways a public performance. Just as a pianist on a stage must get every note right and give the performance the full emotional intensity the piece demands, so must the writer pull off a virtuoso performance with everything he writes. Some pieces are harder than others, some require more technical skill, some more emotional engagement, but every piece must be performed as well as it can be. The goal is always to be perfect, flawless, magnificent, to leave the audience enraptured.

So here I go with that daunting, final scene.

Wish me luck.


(The picture is 'Warming Up' by John Asaro.)

Why I'm Leaving Authonomy

If you've somehow been missed by all the advertising - viral or otherwise - Authonomy is a website run by HarperCollins. Authors can post part or all of their books on the site and other participants (mostly other authors) get to read them, comment on them and vote for them. There is a ranking scheme so that you can see how popular your book is with the other members. Another website quite like this has also just started, called Writing Raw, it is basically the same deal except for one crucial difference. On Authonomy, HarperCollins promises that their editors will take a look at the top five ranked books each month.

The chance of having a major publisher actually look at your work has proven irresistable to many authors (myself included). When I joined, about a week ago, my book was allocated the number 3,403 and I estimate that about 200 books a week are being added to the site (I don't know how many are being removed). I know many people reading this blog might also be tempted to join, so I thought I'd write a few notes about my experience with Authonomy and why I'm leaving it.

1. The first and foremost reason is that the cost-benefit equation is not working out for me. I am spending too much time on the site and yet it doesn't look as if I'll make the top five - which is the main point of doing it. My book 'Time and Tyde' has been well received and I've had some very flattering comments about it. It also climbed steadily in the rankings - from the bottom to about half-way up in five days - but now it has stalled in this mid-league position and the only way to get it moving again would be to spend more time on the Authonomy site. This is because
2. Everyone on Authonomy is hustling. If I say Authonomy is a popularity contest, you probably won't get the full flavour of it. The way to get your book read on Authonomy is to plug it. You join the forums, you start threads, you comment on other people's books, you make 'I'll read yours if you read mine' deals, you invite 'friends' (yes, like MySpace!), and on and on and on. You plug and you plug and you plug. Putting up your book is the least of it. Being successful on Authonomy is a matter of constant, intensive marketing. And it works. The people whose names come up in all the forums, whose comments are all over the site, are the same people who are highest in the rankings. I'm not saying their books are no good. They're mostly quite readable. What I'm saying is that if you're a good writer but you're not a good, persistent, single-minded marketer, with loads of spare time, Authonomy is not for you.
3. Even as a popularity contest, Authonomy is not ideal. Some genres (particularly sience fiction) and sub-genres (comedy) are grossly over-represented, compared with book markets in the real world. I suspect this is partly because Authonomy is a more accurate cross-section of writers than it is of readers, and partly because those writers in genres for which it is most difficult to find a publisher, are the ones frustrated enough, or desperate enough, to try Authonomy. So if your book hits the top five, my guess is that it will still struggle to get past the HarperCollins editors who will have a much more market-oriented view of what is publishable.
4. There is an awful lot of rubbish on the site. I've tried to read widely and not just to follow the herd's recommendations and, while I'm sure the overall standard must be miles higher than a site like Writing Raw (just because Authonomy is attracting some serious writers) I still find I am handing out detailed advice to writers who don't seem to know even the most basic things about the craft. Meanwhile I'm getting lots of 'Wow that's great!' comments and no real help or guidance. It has begun already to grate on me that I am providing my time and effort for free to HarperCollins to help them winnow their slush pile and all they're giving me in return is the chance - the very small chance - that one of their editors might one day look at my book.

So there you are. Maybe it's all rationalisation because 'Time and Tyde' didn't shoot to the top of the rankings and I've got a bad case of sour grapes. It's possible, but I feel more like it's resentment at having been 'used' by HarperCollins. I entered into Authonomy enthusiastically and was a good citizen of this social network but I found that to get anything out of the site, the site demands more and more of my time and effort. In the end, far more than I was prepared to give away.

Jim Frenkel Saves My Self-Esteem

One of the things you struggle with as an unpublished writer - and I have this from many reliable sources - is that there is so much rubbish published each year while your own manuscripts lie mouldering on the hard disc. Who hasn't put down a book in disgust, crying to the unjust heavens, 'How the hell did that get published? I write a million times better than that and all I get are rejection slips!'?

We all know that the publishing game is a lottery - and not a particularly well-run one at that. Slush piles are so high and standards of writing so low that anything good in those piles is effectively a tiny signal buried in lots and lots of noise. I used to think that it was so hard for the publishers to spot the good stuff that, in despair, they simply picked something that wasn't actually written longhand in green ink, published that, and hoped for the best.

Yet something that was said at the Brisbane Writers Festival has given me a bit more insight into what is going on. It was Jim Frenkel who said it.

He's an odd sort of bloke, Jim. An editor with Tor Books in New York, he's about as world famous as an editor can be. I was in one of his workshops at the BWF so had the pleasure of listening to his insider insights for about three hours. I've never seen so many people get up and walk out of a workshop because the presenter had pissed them off before. (Maybe I need to get out more.) It's true he had a strangely confrontational manner, with not just a hint of pomposity about him. He even said that anyone who was anti-Semitic should leave the room because he was Jewish and they might not want to hear what a Jewish person had to say. (I found this quite shocking. I don't know what New York publishing is like but that's not the world I live in. Someone did actually get up and go at that point but not, I suspect, because they didn't like Jews.) Yet there was something strangely likeable about the man. For all the apparent aggression and arrogance that simmered just under the skin, there was a deeper layer of intelligence, delicacy and sensitivity that drew me to him. I could easily imagine being friends with him (not something I often imagine about anyone!) but only after he had lowered the all-but-impenetrable defences he seems to have deployed against the world. It will never happen, of course, unless the two of us are ever marooned together in a well-stocked bar for three days.

I digress.

What Jim Frenkel said, among several other interesting things, was that there are great writers in this world and there are great storytellers and they are not necessarily the same people. He took an impromptu poll of the workshop participants (all wannabe writers, I would suppose), asking who would rather read a good story than read good writing and, to my astonishment, almost everyone wanted the story. His contention, therefore, was that the reason so much execrable prose is published is because publishers are giving the people what they want: good stories.

It certainly explains the fact that not one in twenty sci-fi books I read these days is well-written. It also explains much of the advice and guidance editors, publishers and other writers put out, which almost exclusively focuses on structure and pace, character and plot. It explains why most sci-fi these days is space opera - and pretty awful space opera at that. It also explains why my favourite sci-fi writers are mostly dead, or getting there; they come from a time when good writing was valued more highly than it is now.

So now when I toss aside the unreadable work of some modern 'master' of the genre with cries of anguish and wails of self-pity, I can at least console myself that it was the half-witted, clichéd, trope-ridden story that the publisher liked, even though it seemed to have been written by a hyper-active ten-year-old with literacy issues.

The Tyranny of Numbers

One of the things I'm doing with my new novel (TimeSplash!) is setting myself a daily word-count target. It's something I haven't tried before and it is very revealing.

I actually write very slowly and part of the reason for that is that I hate editing. The very thought of NaNoWrImO (or however it's capitalised) makes me shudder. The idea of having to face 50,000 words of badly written sentences in a poorly-structured rats' nest (which is what I'd end up with) is just unthinkable. I like to plan ahead, get the whole structure in my mind, spend hours mulling over each scene before I write it and then make each sentence I write as good as I can make it as I write it. I also do a lot of detailed research while I'm writing (I have a fetish for accuracy which means I need to know lots about every little thing I casually mention in passing!) I still have to go back, read through what I've done, edit and rework, even move large chunks around - but not very much. The time I put in up front saves a lot of much more difficult and tedious work at the end. So it is difficult to decide just how many words a day I should write.

In the end, I decided that a thousand words a day should be doable. This would give me a first draft in roughly a hundred days and, with editing and re-work, a finished draft in, say, 150 days - about half a year per book. So I set myself the target and I've been monitoring myself ever since. I have records of my productivity for 49 days now and it's interesting.

First thing to notice is that my running average is well below the 1,000 word target. In fact, it is 704 words/day. I only have 33,000-odd words written instead of the 50,000 I should have by now. I tell myself that the first half of the book requires more research and more thinking about than the second half but I'm not entirely convinced.

The second thing is that my output is incredibly variable. There are days - sometimes runs of several days, when I write nothing at all. There are others - sadly, no runs - where I do 2,500 words. (My output looks more bi-polar than normally distributed but, for what it's worth, the standard deviation on that 704 average is a whopping 646.)

The third interesting thing is the way the forecast changes over time. The forecast is the number of words I will have written in a hundred days based on how many I've written so far and how many more I'm going to write if I keep up the same average output. This figure fell steadily from the initial 100,000 until it hit about 85,000 fifteen days ago. Since then, it has bumped along at the same level. This means my average output appears to have increased when my forecast output reached some kind of threshold level. What this tells me is that my earlier, lower average was just laziness. When I'm faced with the stark reality of not having enough words at the end of the project for a decent-sized book, I am clearly able to push myself a little harder.

Sadly, the fourth (and last) interesting statistic is my running calculation of how many words a day I will have to write now and for the remaining 52 days, to finish on target for my initial plan. It currently stands at 2,200 words/day. Given my current struggles to produce 1,000, 2,000+ looks impossible.

So the book might overrun a little.

Of course, the book will be as long as it needs to be. This 1,000 words/day for 100 days target is purely arbitrary, based on a rough guess (a gut feel) as to how long this particular book will end up being. Perhaps it really is an 85,000-word book and I'm bang on target! I won't really know until I'm farther along - it's not something I'm good at estimating yet.

On the other hand, maybe 2,200 words/day isn't impossible if I just stop writing blog postings, answering emails, chipping in on news groups, and reading all those blogs in my feed reader.

Software To Support Writing My New Novel

The mechanics of writing isn't something I've ever bothered much about. At times the technology has been irritating. Do you remember when Microsoft Word used to fall over and die when a file became large, or when PDAs and hand-held computers used to have file size limits? I certainly do and it was a pain, but I coped and it wasn't so bad. It is probably because of the technical inadequacies of older software (things like Word's 'master document' features being so flaky, the inability to do a search or 'find and replace' easily across multiple files, etc.) that I've learned to write book-sized documents in a single, linear lump - keeping the plan in my head rather than in software. It has meant that I tend to do a lot of planning up-front and have a pretty clear idea of how the whole book unfolds before I start writing. Once I start, I can start at the beginning and keep writing to the end.

Yet, lately, I've been tempted by reviews of software that purports to support writers, things like Scrivener (Apple Macs only) which is raved about by one and all. These tools let you plot, write research notes, structure the book, describe characters, include arbitrary background materials, images and so on, track progress, produce final copy, and much, much more, all within a single, integrated environment. It's the kind of thing I could really have used when I was at work, writing ginormous proposals, consultancy reports, and software designs. But would it really help me with writing a book?

To find out, I downloaded yWriter, a free writing tool with many of the features of Scrivener that was developed by Australian author and programmer, Simon Haynes. I've just started writing a new novel (Timesplash!) so it seemed like a good time to try it.

I'm not going to review yWriter (sorry) except to say it did everything it promised to, did it well, and played nicely with all my other software. My only quibble is with the user interface which was a bit non-standard in places - but then, as a usability specialist, I always find fault with user interfaces. So, my congratulations to Simon for a well-made application. If you want novel-writing software, you should definitely try it out.

Having said all that, I didn't get along with it at all. yWriter (and, by extension, Scrivener and all the others) was way too structured for my taste. I found myself putting so much effort into the structuring, it was keeping me from the writing. Maybe it's because I've become so used to working it all out in my head - for example, knowing who my characters are, what motivates them, where they're headed and why, etc. - that explicitly describing it feels like a burden, an unnecessary overhead.

But the experience of using yWriter did make me think about just what tools I do use and do need to get a novel written. Essentially, it comes down to this:

A good word-processor. This must cope with very large files, allow me to navigate around the book using a navigation panel that shows any headings I've used (typically just chapter headings), give me control over formatting through the definition of character, paragraph, page and section styles, and support check-as-you-go spell-checking. It must also do file format conversions, supporting at least .DOC, .RTF, .ODT, and .PDF (different publishers require different file formats and I must also have the ability to save in formats that will last for decades to come - I've lost work in the past because the format it was written in became unreadable after fifteen years!) It must also allow me to set up templates for different kinds of manuscript. I use sWriter from OpenOffice.org - which is not only a good word-processor but also free.

A good browser. I do a lot of research on they fly while I'm writing. I like to have my facts straight. So I tend to check things online all the time (people's biographical details, town layouts, historical facts, foreign words, science and technology, etc.) I use Firefox, which is free, fast, tabbed (I often have five or ten different pages open at the same time), and handles bookmaring well (I set up bookmark folders for the various projects I'm working on to keep all my research handy.)

A spreadsheet. This doesn't have to be fancy. I only use it for keeping track of my progress. I have got into the habit lately of giving myself a words-per-day target. For my new novel, the target is 1,000 words per day - and I'm already slipping (which is OK - there tends to be far more research going on in the early stages of a book than in the later stages.) When I worked, I used to run projects a lot so I like to see where I am against my plan. For a novel, that's just columns for plan, actual, to go, forecast and what I'll need to achieve to catch up - plus a nice chart to make me feel good about progress. For this I use sCalc from OpenOffice.org - which is overkill but its the spreadsheet I use all the time these days.

As for notes about characters and such, I put a table at the end of my novel with the names of characters and places and a one-sentence description of each - just to remind myself (mostly of the names of minor characters and settings). Being a sci-fi writer, I also include the names of invented technologies and any neologisms I've come up with. I sort the table alphabetically and it does me just fine. I give it the heading 'Glossary' so I can quickly jump to it from the nav panel.

The plot is typically done on paper, with a pencil, before I ever start typing. Nothing else is flexible enough (and, yes, I've tried 'mind-mapping' software.) For the new novel, I've typed in some plot notes at the top of each chapter but I'm finding I don't use them. Once the book is plotted, I pretty much know it.

So no purpose-built software for me - I just don't work that way - but I do require quite a bit of software support for my writing. In fact, I also like some hardware support. I like to have a very small, very light computer to carry around with me when I'm away from my home office. For this I use the Asus EeePC running the same OpenOffice.org software and Firefox browser I use on my desktop.

Science Looks At Fiction

I love science. I love writing fiction. I even enjoy programming. So an article in last week's New Scientist was especially interesting to me. Keith Oatley, a cognitive scientist from the University of Toronto, has been studying the effects of fiction on personality and emotion. His conclusion is that there is a strong effect. He and his collaborators found that people who read fiction (as opposed to non-fiction) actually become more like the characters in the stories. He likens fiction to a simulation of a social world, created by the author, which then runs in the minds of the readers. Reading involves exercising empathy to identify with the characters and, through a kind of social learning, the absorption of some of their traits.

Oatley's finding is that reading fiction improves social skills and gives fiction readers 'substantially greater empathy.' He therefore believes it is generally beneficial to a society. Of course, he might be slightly biased. Oakley, as well as being a scientist, is also a writer of fiction.

But I like the idea that when I write fiction I am also writing a simulation of a world that will run in people's minds. It is an idea that squares pretty well with how I have always thought of writing fiction – although for me, the greatest pleasure in doing it is to create a simulation that will run in my own mind.

Yet I can't help feeling a little anxious about all this. If people are learning social skills, learning to understand people and their interactions, from fiction, doesn't this mean fiction writers have a strong moral obligation to represent the world truthfully and accurately? Doesn't it at least mean they should be intelligent and wise enough that what they write isn't stupid or plain wrong?

Many years ago, I used to study 'argumentation' – the modern incarnation of rhetoric. Ancient rhetoricians such as Aristotle (pictured), Plato and Cicero, understood that effective argument could be a force for good as well as ill. Aristotle in particular believed that only moral men should be taught these potentially dangerous skills. It is pretty obvious that persuasive arguers who might use the craft of rhetoric for their own ends and without regard for morality or truth, can do immense damage to society. Look at the way the USA and the UK were persuaded to invade and conquer Iraq.

If fiction – apparently harmless entertainments like novels and short stories – can have such a strong influence on the reader's mental construction of social reality, maybe we should be more careful about what we read – and what we write. Should only moral people be allowed to write fiction? Should publishers and editors take their share of the blame for what damage an inaccurate or untruthful depiction might do?

Oatley has not directly investigated the other kinds of fiction in our world – films and games, for example – but he suspects they will be found to have a similarly powerful effect on personality and social understanding as literature does. Now that really does make me worried.