SF Writers and Fitness

Someone asked about science fiction writers and fitness. I would guess that they tend to be a little fitter than fans on average, but still fall into that category of people who live primarily from their heads, and store blocked emotion in their bodies. A spooky amount of dysfunction...with lots of ultra-liberal and Libertarian sentiment--to me, both are symptoms of people trying to believe they can think their way out of a box. By the way--ultra Righties strike me as people yearning for a past that never was really all that great. At least if you aren't a white, Christian, heterosexual in the top 10% of earners. So there.

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Watching the health care debate is so sad. Down the road, we're going to have Single Payer, I believe. The amount of lying and obfuscation to distract people from the fact that it has been proven to work all over the world, getting better results (for the average person. Yeah, if you're in the top 10% maybe the current system works great for you) for less money. I know some of you disagree with that. Those of you on the Left--will you look at the responses we've had on this forum. To my knowledge, none of the people opposed to a Public Option or whatever are being paid by the insurance companies.

Now, some of them might be so politicized that they will say anything to try to bring Obama down, therefore opening the door to re-taking the White House. But the majority simply see the situation differently, or interpret the statistics differently. I think I said that as neutrally as possible. So whatever comes out of Congress, if it doesn't match your image of what the best bill would be, you'd better grasp that Joe Lieberman, who everyone perceives as pissing in the punch bowl, is still (probably) more Liberal than any Republican. And that there are other Conservative Democrats to be dealt with. This thing has a fantastic amount of inertia, and yes, the bill is gonna be non-optimal. But if you think you can get there in one jump, I just don't think there's much realism going on in your mind. This is a bloody, violent clash of ideologies. Capitalism has some fantastic benefits, but voracious immortal corporations clamoring for all the rights of individuals while having few of the disadvantages ain't one of them. People who think the media, in general, obeys anything other than what will put cash in the corporate coffers have a very different view of society than I have. It is horribly amusing to watch both Right and Left claim that the media is a puppet of the other side.

Nobody seems to get the joke, and that gives the wealthy and powerful a free hand to pick our bones. Just, by the way, as the disadvantaged at the bottom of the pyramid would "eat the rich" if they had THEIR chance. The difficulty is not that some group is "worse" than the others, it is that we have this need to believe that "our side" is more ethical and "better", rather than seeking to understand how such differences in perspective can exist in intelligent, moral people. I think that a generation from now, we'll have Single Payer. And if the American public digs it, the history books will be re-written, trying to make it look as if those who opposed it were actually its staunchest advocates, in the same way Conservatives try to act as if they were the champions of civil rights, or Liberals try to say THEY are the only real patriots. It's sad, and it's just the human condition.

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Yesterday I roughed out a scene in the new Dream Park book. The second to last major scene, in fact. In it, we are jumping reality levels: gamers playing a game inside a game, with REAL kidnappers breathing down their throats. Larry and I got blocked for a while because of the difficulty of conveying the rules of the "game in a game" to readers and "gamers" without disrupting the flow of the book...in the same way that the GameMaster has to educate the players without disrupting the flow of the game.

Arrgh. But if I am aware that we are pushing the edges of reality-level juggling, then hopefully we won't fall into the trap of shallow characterization. This is such a lovely trap, really. It works like this: in general, the deeper the characters, the simpler the story. And the more complicated the story, the shallower the characters. It isn't that people deliberately set out to do this: it is that a writer only has so much talent. Let's say they have a hundred cubic units of talent to expend upon a project. If they go for a story with wild twists and turns, and serious extrapolation...that uses up more units, and they just don't have as many left over for their characters, which often come out shallow and unconvincing...but WOW! That plot! And the stories with deep, resonant characters are usually stories of everyday life, small drama writ deep and wide. Scathingly real human beings against a backdrop of the mundane.

Note that from this model, both of these, the fast-moving twisty-plot action/suspense novel and the "literary" novel of psychological depth require the same amount of "talent" to produce two very different kinds of books. You would be best off understanding that you don't have infinite resources, and expending them in the way that makes you happiest. I promise that you ain't gonna please everyone, no matter what you do.

That said, Larry and I are going to finish this first draft. Then I will travel through the book, following one character at a time, looking at every reaction, every motivation, every word of dialogue--from that character's perspective. This has always worked for me in the past, and I have no reason to doubt it will happen again.