Lately I have finished reading Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer, and also one more book, from outside my reading queue: Stephen King’s On Writing (that very Mr King from the faraway America, the one who writes about all kind of mysteries and telepathic horrors).
As I was pointing out a while ago, I wanted to read the Wonderbook on Creating Imaginative Fiction in order to hear VanderMeer’s advice on how to actually create—and create!— this very fiction and the worlds that it needs to have. It clearly is a very daunting task! The world is complex, multi-levelled, multicultural, hierarchical—or maybe just the opposite, plain… and they could have so many different kinds of state administration, political systems, their technological level, their fashion, even their people could vary so much; whatever they wear, whichever way they express themselves might be very different from ours; their natural world—its flora and fauna, geography, geology, and so on—their languages, their concepts of familiar and unfamiliar—such as maybe the Moon as we see it, if their planet even has a moon… An infinite amount of questions to address, to think about, and to visualize in a conscious manner—because this world needs to be describede¸ for the reader to be able to immerse in it without the need for dictionary or explanatory footnotes. You would hardly want to read a novel with a parallel dictionary, would you.
At first I naïvely believed that a book about wonders would contain some concise instructions: how, what for, when… maybe not instructions, but at least some hints or something. But no, such a wonder is not sold for $15 (the approximate price at which I got the book). And no—in no way am I disappointed. I read the book—just like nearly everything else that I read—gladly and I learnt a lot from it. Moreover, it is very colourfully decorated.
‘Instantaneous galaxy-wide travel that entails being eaten by a giant transdimensional bear and reconstituted on the other side—the messy type of teleportation—might work best with a minimum of explanation in detail.’
‘In fiction, we make the same kind of decisions about setting as about character; we never include everything, any more than [that and] we would be exhaustive about a person’s backstory. You are creating a model of a world, putting only certain elements of that model into play. Otherwise, you and your reader would get hopelessly lost in the details.’
‘Revision is hard, repetitive work, but it teaches you about language and narrative at an immersive, nitty-gritty level. It also requires certain optimal conditions, which may vary for every writer. Some commonly held ideas about revision are indeed true. You do need distance from the manuscript, usually achieved by sticking it in a drawer for a couple of weeks after you’ve finished the rough draft. You also may need to change the font or the margins, or, in the case of short stories, have a friend read your work to you—all of this so you can see what you’ve written with fresh eyes.’
‘Faulkner said a smart thing about this: ”Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” That’s what revising is all about, being better than yourself, and you can never stop trying. Because after you learn to forgive yourself for writing bad prose, you also have to learn that other people won’t. Authors can be merciful, but readers? They’re absolute bastards. They’re out for blood. And if you let them down, they will never, ever forgive you.’
This last quote from VanderMeer’s book, the one where he quotes Faulkner, I liked it particularly. I mean, I did like it—but the idea is deeper than just about the emotion. I believe it had more to do with one’s general worldview: if you are doing something that you genuinely like, something that has you wholly devoted to it and that is more than just work for you, if you really make the necessary effort to get better in the area of your interest—then work on, dear friend, and you will get there!
Surely everything is a bit more difficult, but the common divisor, as far as I can see it, is fairly precise: ‘Try to be better than yourself.’
The book has a lot of useful advice and plenty of recommendations, it shows many examples and even gives hometasks, as well as some theoretical exposition on the topic. And I am glad that there is just some. To be brief, Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook will surely find a grateful reader.
Stephen King’s On Writing, on the other hand, feels more like a heartfelt conversation instead. Something like that—imagine Mr Stephen King himself sitting there and telling you how he got on with his writing career. And I do agree with him, just as he is saying in his book: this is not an autobiography, this is something else. He shares his experience, his knowledge, and his understanding of how to do—he shares them with those of us who are ready to tell something to someone, by recording some thoughts on paper (or better on a screen—it’s no time to forget about environmental consciousness).
It has been very interesting to listen to him—to hear his ideas. When reading a work of fiction, it is usually very hard to imagine what the author of this work actually is—the thought process, the important things—the actual person usually remain hidden behind a wall of narrative. I believe that to a certain extent Mr King has revealed something to me. I can’t say I liked everything in his story. But I don’t think he was trying to be too persistent.
Let me offer you two quotes from On Writing:
‘This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.’
‘In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.’
This says it all, I guess.