Bonus post: Pin the autism on the novel
Bonus post: Pin the autism on the novel
Exploring how I write longer stories.
This post is about the craft of writing, and how I like to put worlds and characters together.
Pin the autism on the novel
It’s not my favourite party game, but it made for a good title.
I have, in recent months, accidentally become something of an ‘autism advocate’.
I don’t know precisely how it happened, or why it happened, but when I noticed that the brilliant burden of waking up to hundreds of comments to read and reply to didn’t spook me, I realised I might just be the right sort of person to do some advocacy.
The unexpected fame might have come from this video in which I claim autism causes vaccines. This is a theory that came about in Who Built The Humans? and I plan to expand upon it in its spiritual sequel Who Killed The Humans? because I don’t think I’ve lowered my chances of traditional publication enough yet.
Tin foil Tim is a fantastic character to write as, and I am glad to have him back for WKTH.
Becoming popular online overnight can be anxiety-inducing, which is darkly hilarious considering that most indie Sci-Fi authors I know have anxiety, and that they need the anxiety-inducing pseudofame to sell enough books to make enough money to pay for private therapy to help them manage the anxiety.
Anyway, lots of comments appeared on that reel.
What surprised me is that every single comment was nice.
People were, and still are, talking politely about their experiences and diagnoses within the digital cell walls of my instagram video, and its counterpart on tiktok.
It’s weird. I made a joke and it helped people.
How to do the representation thing
Aside from Tin foil Tim’s satirical theories on the origins of autism and vaccines (a chicken and egg scenario in his rants), there is an autistic character in another, more serious universe of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? (the collection that came before WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?) and I refuse to tell people which one. If I’ve done a good job writing the character, I shouldn’t have to go around literary events yelping about how I am the bestest ever at representation, whatever ‘representation’ is (depends who you ask).
So, I won’t tell you who it is. Ever.
Not even if you email me privately.
This approach is doubly rewarding because, on top of being able to pat myself on the back for not making autism into a sales pitch for my book like how poets use being sad, I have effectively hid my little bit of ‘advocacy’ (to me it’s just writing) so that when I do get compliments about it, I know the reader found it on their own.
I’ve never held your hand and said “See him, he’s got the tism”
Because if I’ve done a good job as a writer, you’ll notice.
I’m getting back into teaching Creative Writing soon. Opening up Patreon workshops for the hardcore (where I’ll be on hand for some hours each month to pick apart your poems), and a little space for everyone else who is scared of that other thing.
And, as I’ve pored through years of old notes, I’ve found scraps of drawings that visualised things people hadn’t visualised before.
So I’ve made them into these fun infographic things.
But look at me, telling, not showing.
If you tell too much, you’ll bore the hell out of people.
If you show too much, you might accidentally make a story that isn’t pleasant to read, but instead feels like trying to reassemble a clockwork mechanism whilst smothered in treacle. Making your stories too syrupy, too poetic, can be just as bad as spelling everything out to your reader. I often reference a particularly bad example for this. I won’t name the author because I’ve forgotten, but a fantasy novel I picked up in a hospital once had a huge, random segment about French bakeries. This would sometimes be excusable, but it was shoehorned in between two horrendously detailed execution scenes.
It made my brain think “THIS IS A BOOK I AM READING”
It was to immersion what a hammer is to an expensive watch.
You absolutely don’t want a book that lets you know it’s a book, unless it’s intentional and has an artistic reason to do it. I have some fourth wall breaks in WBTH, but I hope they have meaning.
Ultimately, whether they do or not is up to you.
What you don’t want, is a fourth wall leak (I just coined that).
Fourth wall leakage: It happens
Example: Teen character in medieval fantasy novel uses 2010s slang despite never encountering 2010s teenagers. This could be excused stylistically, but very often it just won’t work. Using standardised English (words with a bit more history to them, that are less transient than slang) can make a fictional world feel more real, as our minds don’t attribute novelty to those words.
It’s also just more fun to try and see what you can do without modern slang. I like inventing my own slang, like Coldbeds, a general catchall(1) term for single-occupant, horizontally inclined cryogenic hibernation units. There’s coldbeds in the universe of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH and in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? which I use to signal to you that these stories might have some common threads, locations, and characters eventually.
(1) I’ve never typed that word before, and yes, I do remember all the first times I type things. Catchall 00:28 08 08 2024.
Come to think of it, I might have used it in a poem about deserts in 2015, but I don’t think I ever finished the thing. I published Uranium Sunset and A Glint Of Future instead. That was summer 2015. I was in a strange appendix to the English corridor at my uni that overlooked the plaza between faculties, and was strangely adjacent to some women’s-only accomodation that was built into some of the old classrooms, I think.
Above might be a decent example of necessary telling. It’s not massive, it’s got no flare. It just lists off the details for anyone who cares for them. Anyone who doesn’t, doesn’t have to sit through paragraphs of description, they just skim that one bit.
Summary
Show, don’t tell is the number one rule of writing. If a character is sad, 90% of the time you can do something better than “She was sad.”
But it works sometimes.
Show don’t tell has become its own literary convention, and all of those can and should be broken if it serves the story. Sometimes it’s efficient, too.
Whether to show or to tell should be up to you, ultimately.
And this brings us onto reality.
Struggling for reality
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, woo, hoo
Ha, ha, ha, ha, woo hoo
Reality, ah ah ah ah
Today’s Bowie song is, predictably, REALITY.
Show, don’t tell can also apply to people.
A good way to explain this is to imagine you go on a blind date with someone.
You sit down at the table, and as you gaze upon their ocean-spray-blue orbs of vision and seeing (I’m also a poet, by the way) you notice the person is very excited to speak to you.
This is the first time you hear their voice in the real world.
“I’m really nice,” they say.
And you might be inclined to believe it, but is it not just a little bit weird that they’ve not given you a chance to come to this conclusion yourself?
“I have never pushed someone over",”
Again, suspicious.
“I do not steal. And if I did, I wouldn’t steal spoons.”
This is SHOW, DON’T TELL in action in reality. And here in the real world, to me at least, it feels just as unsettling as in fiction.
“If I did steal spoons, I wouldn’t use a blowtorch to fuse them together into a spoon robot in my garden that I pray to every night, wishing the downfall of my colleagues.”
It is at points like this, that the telling really does become telling.
Okay, that’s enough wordplay. Goodnight
The weird worlds of Phillip Carter is funded by shadowy entities that lurk outside time, space, and sense. You don’t need to do anything to keep it going, but it’s nice when people buy books because it makes me feel like I’ve acheived something in the geologically miniscule time I shall spend on this planet with all my bits stuck together.
Thanks.
Books include: Sci-Fi, Comedy, Writing prompt lists with activities included (all human-written, obviously), and soon - poems.