How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (13 page)

The Beginning That Sets Up the End

Let’s go back to Octavia Butler’s
Wild Seed.
The story is about Doro, a character born thousands of years ago. He is immortal, not because his body cannot die, but because whenever his body is about to die-or at other times-his spirit or essence immediately and involuntarily jumps to the nearest living person, taking over their body completely. Thus the displaced spirit ceases to exist, while Doro lives on in his victim’s former body.

Butler could have begun
Wild Seed
with the scene of Doro’s first transition from one body to another-the time when he first realized that he could not die. It is indeed a powerful scene, because the first person he killed, the first person whose body he took, was his own mother. Not understanding what happened, he looked down and saw his old body-his own body, lying there dead in “his” arms-and panicked. How had he suddenly become a woman? He screamed; his father, trying to calm and comfort the person he thought was his wife, touched him and Doro inadvertently jumped to his body. Without meaning to, Doro discovered his powers by lulling his own parents. It took a long time before he came to terms with what he was and what he had done. Those events could have been a novel in their own right.

In fact, that’s one reason why Butler was correct not to begin
Wild Seed
with that event. She does include an account of his first lulling-but it comes on page 177 of a 179-page book. It is a flashback, a memory. Receiving that memory makes the audience revise its view of Doro, so that we reinterpret all that he has done from the beginning. Yet by coming when

it does, that event doesn’t take over the book. It is one more piece fitted into the whole.

If it had come at the beginning, the event is so strong, so powerful, that the audience would have expected the whole story to be about Doro’s struggle to know and control himself. It would have made Anyanwu a fairly minor character, latecome and perhaps a bit contrived. “Oh, right,” we would say. “Doro is a slimeball until the love of a good woman transforms him. How convenient that she happens along.”

Butler wanted to tell the story of Doro’s relationship with Anyanwu, a woman with extraordinary talents of her own -a shapechanger, a healer. Butler’s story ends when Anyanwu and Doro reach a sort of accommodation with each other-when Doro is at last able to love and respect another human being instead of regarding them all as his tools and subjects, when Anyanwu is at last able to reconcile herself to a world that includes a monster like Doro-and reconcile herself to the fact that she understands and, in a way, loves him despite his monstrousness. The only way Butler could do that was to make Doro and Anyanwu equal in our eyes-and if we spent the first fifty pages of the novel watching Doro struggle with his powers several thousand years before Anyanwu is born, that balance between them would be almost impossible to achieve.

All that I’ve said, however, comes with hindsight. Perhaps Butler was aware of all this; perhaps she wasn’t. I haven’t asked her. What matters is that there is a way to determine where a story should begin and end.

Since the story will end with their accommodation with each other, the story must begin in such a way that the audience will expect that ending. That is, the beginning must make the audience ask questions that are answered by the story’s ending, so that when they reach that ending, they recognize that the story is over.

The beginning of a story creates tension in the audience, makes them feel a
need.
The ending of that story comes when that tension is eased, when that need is satisfied. So in determining your structure, it is essential for you to make sure your beginning creates the need that your ending will satisfy; or that your ending satisfies the need that your beginning created!

You’d be amazed how many stories fail precisely because the writer began one story and ended another. Or began the story long after it should have begun, or long before. Yet how can you know where your story should begin, or what the right ending is? Most writers learn to do this instinctively -or never do it at all. But there is a way to look at your own story,

discover the possible structures, and choose among them.
The
MICE Quotient

All stories contain four elements that can determine structure: Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event. While each is present in every story, there is generally one that dominates the others.

Which one dominates? The one that the author cares about most. This is why the process of discovering the structure of a story is usually a process of self-discovery. Which aspect of the story matters most to you? That is the aspect that will give you your story’s structure.

Let’s take each element in turn and look at the structure that would be required if that is the dominant element in the story.

The Milieu Story.
The milieu is the world-the planet, the society, the weather, the family, all the elements that came up during the world creation phase. Every story has a milieu, but in some stories the milieu is the thing the storyteller cares about most. For instance, in
Gulliver’s Travels,
Swift cared little about whether we came to care about Gulliver as a character. The whole point of the story was for the audience to see all the strange lands where Gulliver traveled and then compare the societies he found there with the society of England in Swift’s own day-and the societies of all the tale’s readers, in all times and places.

So it would have been absurd to begin by spending a lot of time on Gulliver’s childhood and upbringing. The real story began the moment Gulliver got to the first of the book’s strange lands, and it ended when he came home.

Milieu stories always follow that structure. An observer who will see things as we would see them gets to the strange place, sees all the things that are interesting, is transformed by what he sees, and then comes back a new man. Stephen Boyett’s
Architect of Sleep
follows that structure, as a modern man passes through a cave in Florida and comes out in a world in which it is the raccoon and not the ape that gave rise to a sentient species. He is the only human in a world of brainy raccoons.

But it isn’t only in science fiction and fantasy that this structure occurs. James Clavell’s Shogun, for instance, follows exactly the same structure. It begins when his European hero is stranded in medieval Japan and ends when he leaves. He was transformed by his experiences in Japan, but he does not stay-he returns to “our” world. Other stories are told along the

way-the story of the shogun, for instance-but however much we care about those events, the closure we expect at the end of the story is the main character’s departure from Japan.

Likewise,
The Wizard of Oz
doesn’t end when Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch of the West. It ends when Dorothy leaves Oz and goes home to Kansas.

As you work with your story, if you realize that what you care about most is having a stranger explore and discover the world you’ve created, chances are that you’ll want to follow the Milieu Story structure. Then your beginning point is obvious-when the stranger arrives-and the ending is just as plain-the story doesn’t end until he leaves (or, in a variant, he finally decides not to leave, ending the question of going home).

And who is your viewpoint character? The stranger, of course. The milieu is seen through his eyes, since he will be surprised by and interested in the same strange and marvelous (and terrible) things that surprise and interest the audience.

The Idea
Story. “Ideas” in this sense are the new bits of information that are discovered in the process of the story by characters who did not previously know that information. Idea stories are
about
the process of finding out that information. The structure here is very simple: The Idea Story begins by raising a question; it ends when the question is answered.

Most mystery stories follow this structure. The story begins when a murder takes place; the question we ask is, Who did it and why? The story when the identity and motive of the killer are revealed.

In the field of speculative fiction, a similar structure is quite common. The story begins with a question: Why did this beautiful ancient civilization on a faraway planet come to an end? Why are all these people gone, when they were once so wise and their achievements were so great? The answer, in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star,” is that their sun went nova, making life impossible in their star system. And, ironically, it was the explosion of their star that the wise men saw as the sign of the birth of Christ. The story is told from the point of view of a Christian who, like most of the audience at the time Clarke wrote the story, will believe that this must have been a deliberate act of God, to destroy a beautiful civilization for the sake of giving a sign to a few magi.

Many other stories follow this pattern. A question is raised:

Who buried this monolith on the moon, and why did it give off a powerful radio signal when we uncovered it?

Why did this young man try to kill himself after his brother was drowned in a storm while they were boating together, and why is he so hostile to everyone now?

The story may take many twists and turns along the way, but it ends when the question is finally answered:

In
2001: A Space Odyssey,
we find out that the monolith was left for us to find, so that when we reached it the master race that created it would know we were ready to move on to the next stage in our evolution.

In
Ordinary People,
we find out that the main character tried to kill himself because he believes that his mother blames him for not dying in his brother’s place; and he discovers that he has been lashing out at everyone around him because he can’t express his anger at his brother for letting go of the hull of the boat-for dying.

When the mystery is resolved, whether by a detective, a scientist, or a psychiatrist, the main tension is resolved and the story is over. So Idea Stories begin as close to the point where the question is first raised and end as soon as possible after the question is answered.

You may notice that some mysteries don’t reach the discovery of the body until many pages into the story. Aren’t they following the Idea Story structure? In most cases they are, but they can bend the rule about starting with the question because the mystery tradition is now so well established that mystery readers take it for granted that someone will be killed; they’re willing to wait a little while to find out who dies. Thus mystery writers have the freedom to spend quite a few pages establishing the character of the detective or setting up the society in which the murder will take place. But the audience is quite aware that a murder will take place, and soon becomes impatient if the writer takes too long getting to it.

Outside the mystery genre, there is a good deal less leeway because the audience doesn’t know that the story will be about the process of answering a question. If you begin the story by establishing character at great length, and don’t come to the main question until many pages into the tale, readers will expect the story to be about the character, and not about the question; if you then end the story where the mystery is solved but never resolve the character, they’ll be quite frustrated. You must begin the story you intend to end-unless you
know
that the audience already knows what the story is about.

The Character Story. All stories have characters, and in one sense stories are almost always “about” one or more characters. In most stories, though, the tale is not about the character’s character; that is, the story is not about who the character is.

The Character Story is a story about the transformation of a character’s role in the communities that matter most to him. The Indiana Jones movies are event stories, not character stories. The story is always about what Indiana Jones
does,
but never who he is. Jones has many problems and adventures, but at the end of the movie his role in society is exactly what it was before-part-time archaeology professor and full-time knight-errant.

By contrast, Carson McCullers’s
Member of the Wedding is
about a young girl’s longing to change her role in the only community she knows her household, her family. She determines that she wants to belong to her brother and his new wife; “they are the we of me,” she decides. In the effort to become part of their new marriage she is thwarted-but in the process her role in the family and in the world at large is transformed, and at the end of the story she is not who she was.
Member of the Wedding is
a character story; the Indiana Jones movies are not.

It is a common misconception that all good stories must have full characterization. This is not quite true. All good Character Stories
must
have full characterization, because that’s what they’re about; and other kinds of stories
can
have full characterization, as long as the reader is not misled into expecting a Character Story when that is not what is going to be delivered. On the other hand, many excellent Milieu, Idea, and Event Stories spend very little effort on characterization beyond what is necessary to keep the story moving. The Indiana Jones stories don’t require us to get more of Jones than his charm and his courage. In short, he is what he does in the story, and while it’s delightful to meet his father and learn something of his background in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,
the first two movies certainly did not leave us wishing for more characterization. That’s not what they were about.