Quantum Storytelling

I’m finishing up The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies. It’s interesting, but more in the trivia kind of way. For a book about the singularity and future technology, it doesn’t cover very many of its subtitled ‘Rapidly Advancing Technologies.’ I would expect the gamut from quantum computing to cloning, and while the book does briefly cover those it spends most of its chapters talking about nanotechnology ‘minting’ and A.I. that could possibly control the minting process. I expected a little more diversity of coverage.

Perhaps the reason why I am most disappointed is I was looking for ideas to mine, and nano minting or self-automated A.I. controlled manufacturing has already been covered in sci-fi, and is relatively well tread territory. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of a couple Philip K. Dick short stories: Autofac and Second Variety.

Something the author Damien Broderick brings up which I thought might be good fodder for a story; The biggest threat to a future society might be boredom. If it were even remotely possible, what would people do to fill their time if the cost of living was zero and everyone had every minute of their waking life to use however they please? Would chaos erupt out of sheer boredom? Would the irrationality of some belief systems only find more fuel for violence in the absence of meaningful life? Or would everyone become a couch potato?

Aside from a few tiny nuggets, I didn’t get much out of Spike. So much for research… but then you can’t win them all. Sometimes digging only gets you dirt!

I was in Barnes & Noble over the weekend, and I noticed even more books about writing on the shelf than I have in past visits. Is it just me, or is the Books On Writing section in your local bookstore exploding? I flipped through a few, although most of them seem to cover all the same material ad nauseum. Every one seems to have a chapter on plotting, one on characters, one on doing outlines, etc.

For me writing theory is alot like my other pet subjects: quantum physics, networked complexity (Six Degrees, etc.), branding. Once you’ve read 3-5 books on the subject, it gets harder and harder to find more books that have a perspective you haven’t encountered, or any new information. As you can tell from my own Books On Writing section, I’ve already plowed through a decent list of them.

Like my other pet topics though, it’s hard for me to just walk away from the subject. I still love to read about it, and the quest to find new information on the topic is fun in itself.

I noticed Nienke mentioned First Draft In 30 Days over on her site last week. I didn’t see that one in the bookstore or I would have flipped through it. It does remind me a lot of Chris Baty’s book “No Plot, No Problem: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days” - which I didn’t feel the need to read because I’ve already participated in NaNo and I know what that’s all about, and could probably tell you that Baty’s book is an advertisement for NaNoWriMo without having read it. ;-)

One that I have seen mentioned in the blog circles a bit is Novelists Boot Camp, which after flipping through at the bookstore seemed to have a few trickles of alternative techniques and information.

I’ve encountered quite a few writers who don’t ‘believe in writing books’ — I’m not sure what there is or isn’t to ‘believe,’ it’s not exactly a religion? Although, I think if you are interested enough in a subject to spend a lot of time on it, wanting to read a book about it is only natural. I do it to learn new tricks or techniques to make the hair-pulling a little less, and life a little easier.

Do you read books on writing? Why or why not? And does it seem like there has been a flood more recently? Any good recommendations?

I just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I know, I know… I was supposed to have read that in the 3rd grade, or the day I was born, for all the ravings about it and how it is a must-read ‘classic.’

I really enjoyed it. Which is a surprise to me and I’ll tell you why.

I normally enjoy stories with a cohesive story. I normally don’t enjoy stories where the author jumps around a lot, going into seemingly random moments according to whimsy. By all measures, Slaughterhouse Five shouldn’t be a book I enjoyed. There are a couple reasons why such a self-indulgent piece of work managed to hold up for me.

One of them is that Vonnegut chose interesting moments for his hero Billy Pilgrim to jump around within. Although the character is time traveling throughout the multitude of moments in his life, each of those moments seems to have a point, and if not a point, then at least a kind of poignance. In that sense it reads almost like a memoir, which it is more or less the fictive version of, as many of the events in Slaughterhouse come from Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II and the bombing of Dresden. There are many interesting, amusing, wistful, and even touching moments.

These moments are also given a context. For fun, Vonnegut has the hero abducted by aliens who have no understanding of the human concept of time. When forced to explain their perception of time to the hero Billy Pilgrim, they do not see time as necessarily a linear sequence, one event following another. They see life as a large collection of events, each moment immortal in its own way. If a person dies, it is nothing to be sad about, because they are alive in a ‘past moment’ forever.

What I love about this is it creates a kind of philosophical dressing to complement the fact that the story jumps all over the place to various moments in Billy Pilgrim’s life. The nonsensical structure actually follows the logic of it’s own mythmaking–that the alien race understands time the exact way that Billy Pilgrim is traveling through it. This lends a logical beauty to the entire work which it would not have without the aliens’ concept of time.

The second element is that Slaughterhouse is written beautifully. It is laced with vivid metaphors throughout, and Vonnegut’s tact for description is exceptional. Note my use of the word exceptional. He is the exception for a work of this nature. Vonnegut’s ability to describe even the ordinary in an extraordinary way makes it fun to go along with whatever he’s explaining. He could be describing the grass grow or the paint peel, and I’m sure in its Vonnegut style it would be interesting. Most writers do not have that skill, or have not cultivated it to the same degree that Vonnegut has, for whatever reason.

Normally I wouldn’t enjoy this kind of self-indulgent work. And I suspect if it had been written by any other author, the masses wouldn’t have enjoyed it either. There is a lesson to be learned here. If you’re going to be self-indulgent, and whisk your story throughout whimsical flights of fancy, make sure you know what you’re doing. If your story isn’t much of a story in the traditional sense, at least make sure the audience has fun, and that you’ll reward them for putting up with your nostalgia and whatever else by making the moments interesting, and the descriptions vivid.

Tread carefully, for this brand of self-indulgence is often not executed well by amateurs.