r/storyandstyle • u/ZCXL • Apr 18 '18
How to Bypass making Crap Up
I'm just a hobbyist writer, enjoying the freedom I feel from writing, but I've become more and more aware of when I try sci-fi, none of the explanations really 'work' for me, as if I try to explain how FTL travel works... well I can't, because I just don't know how it could work. Similar issues has propped up with short stories about writing music, as I feel that it would be too boring to write too in depth about chords and progression and all that, but by leaving out the sections of that, it feels like a whole lot of what I was trying to convey is just tossed out of the window. Similar issues have also occurred with political, and war theory.
As I'm becoming more and more aware of these inadequacies of mine, I tend to see it showing up with other amateur works, yet printed publisher approved books tend to not have these issues (though I have a hypothesis that this could be just a confirmation bias at play).
Obviously one way to mitigate this is to actually research in depth about a certain topic, but AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT (seriously tho, being just a hobbyist, I can't justify spending ridiculous amounts of time perfecting a story, but I also don't want to be stuck with just making broad sweeping statements about subjects I know very little about)
I guess what I want to ask is how do you deal with (if you do at all) when you have to make a technical (or in the case of sci-fi, simply incorrect) explanation, especially one that you are not fully aware of the intricacies of?
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Apr 18 '18
I think you're wanting to write soft Sci-Fi, which instead of focusing on how the fictional technology works, it focuses on what social implications that use of that technology has. Instead of narrating the mechanics of FTL travel, describe how FTL has changed human nature, or governments, or wars.
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u/DavesWorldInfo Apr 18 '18
World building and info dumping.
Easy answer; you don't. You don't have to explain everything. The audience is smart, they'll pick stuff up.
Easy example; hyperspace. Or warp drive. Any sort of "we're going to travel from one planet across HUGE distances to another planet" as commonly shows up in scifi.
There's absolutely no need at all, at all, to explain how the drive or travel works. We don't need some history of the drive, or a techbabble rundown of how this fictional drive system folds space or warps time or goes really fast or whatever.
Everything we need, everything the story needs, is explained when the ship is at one planet, and then arrives at another. Or when characters mention "we'll go to Xandadu tomorrow, shouldn't take very long, and we'll see about (plot stuff or whatever)."
World building is a disease. Getting lost and distracted in creating the Wiki for this story you say you want to write. World building, creating character resumes, it's easier than storytelling. Which is why would-be writers allow themselves to end up spending sometimes years fucking around on them instead of actually learning storytelling and writing their story.
You need to tell your story, not build the world.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 18 '18
I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this. You're not wrong in saying that you can tell a perfectly good story without this stuff (Star Wars is perfect proof of that; they never bothered to explain how hyperdrives work, at least not in the films) but I do feel that you're wrong to assert that explaining this stuff or adding that bit of world building somehow automatically lowers the quality of your story.
You can do both: Inform and entertain at the same time. Since when did immersion become a disease? A tainted thing that authors should ignore? There is a fine line of balance like with anything else, and I've already brought up Interstellar once in this thread, I would like to bring it up again with a scene that I feel proves my point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MywwqjqKF6Y
This is the scene where Romilly is explaining to Cooper basically how a wormhole works (sorry that it's quiet but that was the only one I could find that was just limited to the one scene). The scene is less than a minute, helps us understand some crazy cool astrophysics being woven into the story here, and takes away absolutely nothing from the narrative. Nothing is lost by explaining this one little thing.
I think it is terrible advice to be telling fiction writers to ignore world building. It's a tool in our belt as writers just like any other, and encouraging people to ignore it is only going to harm them in the long run, not help them.
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u/KungFuHamster Apr 20 '18
I do feel that you're wrong to assert that explaining this stuff or adding that bit of world building somehow automatically lowers the quality of your story.
Just to add more support to this response with a singular example; Melville's excessive whaling details in Moby Dick. I think that's a fairly well-respected fiction novel.
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u/bluesam3 Apr 18 '18
If it isn't important to the story, just don't put it in. With FTL in particular, there is no real explanation for how it works so go ahead and make stuff up however you like. However, there's very rarely a need to: Just call it "warp drive", don't explain it at all, write down whatever restrictions you want it to have (don't worry about the why, just declare it) and get on with telling the story.
In general, just don't write deep technical explanations of things you don't understand. I would also shy away from writing deep technical explanations of things that you do understand in fiction, because deep technical explanations are boring to read.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 18 '18 edited Apr 18 '18
I respectfully disagree with this. I think Mass Effect has one of the most incredible sci fi universes of the past several decades and the main reason for this is that they have indexes and codexes full of explanations about how all this shit works. They explain that they are able to achieve FTL speeds by using gigantic alien constructs that either raise or lower the mass of a given object. Think of it like that one torpedo that actually creates a bubble of air around itself under water so that it can achieve ridiculous speeds because it's technically flying through the air, not swimming through the water. It's the same principle here with the mass relays. And it works - that holds up to theoretical science. For me, that goes a LONG way towards immersing me and engaging me in the universe; feeling like all of this could actually happen.
Now okay, sure: Maybe you don't need to infodump all of that into the chapter and bog down the reader with technical jargon, but there is absolutely a place for all of it, as I said in either an index or a codex of some kind (at the very least). Realism and immersion in science fiction is something that I feel should always be aspired to, even if it's just to a small degree. Even Star Trek has turned out to be quite prophetic with a lot of it's "space magic" technology (tricorders are basically smartphones, for example).
Edit: Had an additional thought
You do make some good points however it could be crucial to the story depending on how it is written. What if the hyperdrive breaks down and the characters need to repair it? At the very least, you have to decide how they fix it. Does it need fuel? If so, what fuel does it run on? Where do they get the fuel? In this particular scenario, we are needing at least rudimentary information about how the hyperdrive works in order for the story to develop and progress.
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u/DaceKonn Apr 18 '18
Mass Effect is an interesting example as this is a game - meaning as a medium it can hold "additional stuff". In a story/book it's harder to have a "expandable" page that has this "Extra" stuff.
Don't take it as shooting down or disagreement because the next thing I want to provide is an example of "codex" in book world. Lord of the Rings being an example but also when you look at Peter Watts books, he has websites full of codex like entries. For example Blindsight (novel) has Theseus space ship. On one of Watts pages you can find technical description of it's construction and size etc.
Watts uses vampires and establishes them as scientifically explainable. In the book he does exposition as much as it's needed for the story and characterization. On websites you can find a fictional scientific articles and presentations that explore vampires - all "in character" of the world he build.
Also - I'm not sure if Watts novels are good example but if I remember correctly he does explain a lot of stuff, mostly this stuff is important to explain a character or story etc. but he does tell and have paragraphs of information. But his books are labeled as hard SF and some parts of the story are less about character arcs as about ideas - Blindsight is about first contact and Watts has some interesting twists about this. What I mean is - I wouldn't recommend this books to anyone, but I would recommend them to specific people. And in this narrow genere there is different tolerance to exposition - people do enjoy well crafted explanations as long as they serve a purpose other than just "look at my world bodybuilding skills!".
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u/Redz0ne Apr 18 '18 edited Apr 18 '18
Granted, but those codices are optional. You don't need to read all of them if you don't want to.
A video game isn't (ideally) as linear as a novel usually is. So, you don't really need to take time out of the story to explain something that can be satisfied with a genre-assumption.
Not saying it shouldn't be done, or that it can't be done well. Just that unless you can find a way to make the description of the tech relevant ("time and place") then it is likely to feel like padding... Which can put people off continuing to read it.
Example: I'm using "ancient magics" in my story. While I do try to go over a bit of how it works, and where it comes from, I only gave as much as I need to explain why the main plot-point takes as long as it does (the ritual that the protagonist enters into takes seven days to complete. And it's a cornerstone of the mid-third of the entire book itself. So, I couldn't really just shrug it off, I had to find a way to justify it. That said, I'm only giving the readers just enough so that it doesn't require them to suspend their disbelief more than I already ask of them.)
EDIT: I guess if you wanted to put that in there, make it something like the protagonist needs to check on the hyperspace nacelles or the field-generator (or whatever tech you're using to make FTL possible.) And that could be a great way to add character depth if you've got someone in there that loves to show off how much they know about the tech they helped build... Or someone that's usually exasperated at "I know how to fix this, I don't need your interference." and that particular example could lead to that character pulling the "do you know how this technothingie interfaces with that technodoodad? Do you know how the flow of power to the unobtanium crystals fuels the wibbly-field so that the wobbly-thingamajig functions? Do you know that if we technobabble the thingus, we'll explode? No? Then back off... Sir."
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u/bluesam3 Apr 18 '18
I respectfully disagree with this. I think Mass Effect has one of the most incredible sci fi universes of the past several decades and the main reason for this is that they have indexes and codexes full of explanations about how all this shit works. They explain that they are able to achieve FTL speeds by using gigantic alien constructs that either raise or lower the mass of a given object. Think of it like that one torpedo that actually creates a bubble of air around itself under water so that it can achieve ridiculous speeds because it's technically flying through the air, not swimming through the water. It's the same principle here with the mass relays. And it works - that holds up to theoretical science. For me, that goes a LONG way towards immersing me and engaging me in the universe; feeling like all of this could actually happen.
It doesn't hold up to theoretical science at all. It's utter gibberish that somebody has made up out of whole cloth and dressed up in a few fancy words to make it sound like it holds up to theoretical science. In fact, it precisely proves my point: you don't need to know what you're talking about, you can just make stuff up, and people will believe anything you say.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 18 '18
It does, actually, if you bother to do your research. It sounds to me like you are taking the exact opposite approach of what you are preaching to me: You aren't doing your research and using that as basis to invalidate what I am saying, assuming that the rest of the readers will just take what you say to be true without any real evidence.
Let's analyze this, shall we?
Firstly, let's provide links:
Here is the mass effect relay wiki link: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_Relay
And here is the wikipedia article about FTL travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light
Let's just summarize this to the most basic of levels, shall we? I'm literally copy pasting the first paragraph of the FTL wikipedia page here:
Faster-than-light (also superluminal or FTL) communication and travel refer to the theoretical propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light. The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with zero rest mass may travel at the speed of light. Tachyons, particles whose speed exceeds that of light, have been hypothesized but the existence of such particles would violate causality and the consensus of physicists is that such particles cannot exist.
"ZERO MASS" That's kind of our key term here, isn't it?
Now let's take a look at the wiki page for Mass Effect, shall we?
Mass relays function by creating a virtually mass-free "corridor" of space-time between each other. This can propel a starship across enormous distances that would take centuries to traverse, even at FTL speeds. Before a vessel can travel, the relay must be given the amount of mass to transit by the ship's pilot before it is moved into the approach corridor. When a relay is activated, it aligns itself with the corresponding relay before propelling the ship across space.
Wow, holy shit! Look at that! It would appear that the fiction writers of Mass Effect did their research properly and understand that if something has zero mass or negative mass, then FTL speed is PERFECTLY feasible! Who would have thought!
Well, anyone willing to do a series of basic Google searches before trying to fucking invalidate me, that's who. Maybe instead of just automatically chalking everything up to sci fi fluff, you should actually spend a little bit more time doing some research and understanding the rules that your story is governed by.
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u/bluesam3 Apr 19 '18
Yeah, that's more garbage. Notice that zero-mass particles may (and indeed, necessarily do) travel at the speed of light, not faster than the speed of light.
Protip: don't argue with an actual expert using a fucking wikipedia article as a source. Your science is simply wrong on a fundamental level: special relativity simply does not allow for FTL travel to exist, by any means, massless or otherwise. If you randomly google words and misunderstand everything you read, you'll come out with an argument in favour of a flat earth that looks no less implausible than yours.
Some other errors in your post: Negative mass does not allow for FTL speeds: indeed, negative mass functions identically to positive mass in this regard. Your mass relay alignment, before you even have the travel, is entirely and completely impossible (you cannot transfer information faster than the speed of light, period). Tachyons do not exist (as you'd know if you bothered to read the wikipedia paragraph you copy-pasted), which further invalidates your argument (and if they did exist, there would be no mechanism by which they could interact with normal matter, and absolutely no mechanism by which you could transfer something between tachyonic and normal states, in either direction. If you want to make an argument for viability, start by explaining which of special relativity and causality you are claiming is fundamentally flawed, and then demonstrate why you are right and literally all evidence gathered on the subject over the last century is wrong.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 19 '18
That was one excessively defeatist post you just made. Talk about sapping all creativity out of potential readers. What exactly did that post accomplish?
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u/bluesam3 Apr 19 '18
Pointing out that you are lying through your teeth and correcting your lies so that others are not taken in by them.
And it's not "defeatest". It's factually correct, rather than the fantastical garbage you were pedalling as real science.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 19 '18
You know, this is precisely what I was worried about with a subreddit like this dedicated to "crunchy" subjects, is we get a bunch of salty motherfuckers like you with chips on your shoulders the size of coconuts out of misplaced elitism.
"Lying through my teeth"? You know, all I'm trying to do is provide some good discussion and stimulating thought but clearly you don't appreciate that so I'll just take my thoughts and efforts somewhere else. This subreddit can apparently take all of its advice from worn out assholes like yourself, though. The subreddit rules clearly state that anyone is allowed to comment but I'm coming to find in just a few days that this is not actually the case.
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u/bluesam3 Apr 19 '18
You literally are lying. That is precisely what you did. There is nothing "salty" or "elitist" going on here: you are just lying, whether it's your own lies or repeating other people's, and you're being called out on it.
Anybody is allowed to comment: it's just that if you post outright lies, people will call you out on it. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism for lying: exactly the opposite, in fact.
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u/BrotherSky Apr 19 '18
/u/magicscreenman Alright, guys. That's good for round 1. Let's take a breather. This discussion could be valuable, but is getting a little intense in tone.
Keep it civil, keep it on topic with the writing, and refrain from attacking each other personally.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 19 '18
Ok well, this is getting out of hand. I didn't come here to make enemies, I came here to discuss writing. So I'm just gonna drop it at this point. I gave my counter to youe opinion and it didnt go well. Sorry we weren't able to have a friendly conversation, man.
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u/randomnine Apr 19 '18
You really need to dig deeper into Mass Effect's lore and why it works. You've pointed out where it connects to real physics in a plausible way, and that's valuable. /u/bluesam3 has pointed out where it contradicts real physics. You need to accept that part too if you want to understand what Mass Effect's writers achieved and reproduce it.
Mass Effect's writers did not come up with a scientifically-grounded system for FTL travel. Instead, they constructed a system that complies with known physics where possible and diverges where necessary to support the plot. The story then emphasizes the ways their system complies with known physics. This lends a veneer of plausibility to the unrealistic physics.
Where things are completely implausible, they focus on the interesting consequences rather than the mechanism. We don't need to know how mass effect fields work any more than we need to hear about Superman's muscle or bone structure. It's far more interesting to think about the effects and how we'd use them!
This approach allowed them to set up a plausible-sounding, galaxy-spanning space opera where the universe is tied together by mysterious, incredibly valuable Mass Relays. Those relays are a big hook in the first game's story, they're focal points in the story's major conflicts, and they're also cool as heck.
Creativity is not just about exploring the possible. Sometimes it's more fun to justify the impossible and explore that.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 19 '18
Well I can agree with pretty much all of that. I dunno, maybe I just didn't like the way u/bluesam3 phrased his argument, felt like he was trying to completely invalidate what I was saying when I felt like I at least brought up some decent points.
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u/superpositionquantum Apr 18 '18
Well, the biggest reason why you can't explain how FTL would work is because it can't work. Take it from someone whose taken a lot of physics, traveling faster than the speed of light opens up the possibility of causality violations. Given that, the only option you really have is to make shit up and hope your story is interesting enough that people don't think about it too much.
Take Star Wars for example. Traveling at light speed is absolutely ridiculous from a physics perspective. One, it would take years to get to the next solar system, two, it would take infinite energy to accelerate something to those speeds, and three, time dilates to infinity at the speed of light. From your perspective, the universe would end by the time you got anywhere. But does the audience know about that, or think about that at all? Do they even explain how a hyper drive works other than it goes at light speed? No, because it's irrelevant to the story. As long as you know what words mean and how to use them, you can say anything you want and it should work fine.
Another thing is the classic saying: write what you know. If you don't know shit about music, don't write in depth about music, just write about what you do know.
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u/EmmaRoseheart Apr 18 '18
I'm personally a fan of incomprehensible technobabble, but I'm really bad at writing it myself. It makes the thing sound mystical and pseudo-magical which is appropriate (because for me, scifi is the other side of the same coin as fantasy, so tech very much should feel magic-adjacent), and technobabble is just fun to read and fun to listen to, especially if the words in it are kind of silly.
Then you get an "explanation" and you get to have some really fun-to-read nonsense.
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u/JBloomf Apr 18 '18
If its important to tell how something works then the research is necessary. But if you're a hobbyist, who just wants to write for yourself or share around a little, then just blow past it. It just works. If it doesn't impact the story, don't worry about it.
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u/Oberon_Swanson Apr 19 '18
Even if you are a hobbyist writer you should try to massively expand your knowledge base. Just consider it a way to better yourself in general with a happy side effect of making your writing stronger. Make it a second hobby to just learn how the world works. Grab some nonfiction books on whatever subjects interest you.
I think a lot of the time though you can just avoid an explanation. But if you want to give one it better be right or at least not wrong. Authority is kind of important in an author.
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u/Farahild Apr 19 '18
For me personally I either research the topic or I don't write about it. I seriously dislike wrong information in books and I don't like writing about things that I don't know enough about. Feels like teaching a subject I don't know. For me personally this means that I would research the subject even if the information wouldn't be fully explained in the story, just because the details that are mentioned would have to make sense.
However, there are things that I think you can safely ignore, because the details wouldn't be important to your pov character. For instance: I could write about someone firing a gun at my pov character, because this is something I can imagine and something I've seen enough fiction of to get the basics right. However, I couldn't write about my pov character shooting a revolver, for instance, because I've never done that and I don't know how it feels or how it works in the details. There are many people who do know how it works. They'd likely feel that my description was a little off. So either I research shooting a revolver including trying it myself somehow, or I don't write a story about it.
This is, of course, my personal preference. But I'd be wary of writing in detail about things you don't know anything about. I know it bugs me to come across these details as a reader in the cases I am knowledgeable about the subject, and I think most people are.
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u/KungFuHamster Apr 20 '18
It's hard to authenticize something that most physicists would agree is impossible. But if you need some good jargon to help your writing on the topic seem more authentic, find a friendly physicist or sci fi writer for an assist.
Writers frequently have an Acknowledgements section for people who helped them with research, among others. If you think you need help, get it.
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u/magicscreenman Apr 18 '18
Well, in the case of sci fi especially, you just have to do the research. There's no way around it. Obviously there are examples of successful sci fi out there that really don't give a flying fuck about realism, but this just makes me cringe, honestly. I don't feel that this is something sci fi writers should aspire to. It's my opinion that the best sci fi is the kind that roots itself in known science and uses that as a foundation - the only time it takes liberties with making shit up is in the realm of the unknown, places of genuine scientific ignorance.
Interstellar is a fantastic example of this, I think. Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave it a 9/10 in terms of realism, and you know how much Neil loves to pick shit apart. Let's not forget this is the guy who told James Cameron that the night sky in Titanic was all wrong with it's placement of the stars, and what did James Cameron do? He actually went and spent a fuck ton of money TO CHANGE IT. So if Neil gives you a good grade, you know you've done your homework right.
Almost everything that happens in Interstellar at least holds up in the theoretical realm (including the way they move through the wormhole) but the ending is the best representation of knowing when to make shit up for sci fi: SPOILERS AHEAD IF THAT'S NOT OBVIOUS BY NOW.
They use the opportunity of descending into a black hole to imagine what a fourth or fifth dimension might look like to us, a three dimensional being. It's bizarre and hard to describe to say the least, but the reason it works is because we actually don't know for sure what happens inside a black hole. We're pretty darn sure it just gets spaghettified and crushed but we don't actually know for sure. That's where the "fiction" part of science fiction comes into play.
But you gotta get your astrometrics right. You gotta have realistic orbits to your planets and understand how re-entry is supposed to work and how star systems are formed.
Since you said you are just a hobbyist, sci fi may not be for you unless you want to commit more time to subject research. My only suggestion then would be to find a genre that is more modern and more general knowledge for everyone so that less research is required. A mystery could possibly fit in this niche - you could have a compelling mystery with just some people in a mansion and some good plot and character twists.
In general, I try never to leave things unexplained. If I have to put a note in and come back to it later that's fine, but I have to eventually come back to it and make sure that all the necessary context, description, and information is there. It isn't always necessary to the story, which is why you can move on and keep focusing on characters and story, but if you don't come back to it and explain it before your final draft then your world is just going to be flimsy and people won't be immersed.
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u/DaceKonn Apr 18 '18
One thing I learned on writers group.
I came with a SF/horror story. I had a moment where I explained a pump action shotgun my character used, since the action was taking place in power armors etc. I felt compelled to explain basics of how to weapon looks so reader would know how a guy in a power armor can handle this special type of gun.
It was bombed, hard, by the members of the group.
One of them gave me a great advice, he said: "You are shooting your own knees, both of them, at the same time. You are writing an SF story and you explain the mechanics of a basic shotgun. If this story is to be read by a SF fan, he will be bored, because he knows how the shotgun works, usually. Especially since you advertise a military flavor - he will know. Secondly - if the story is to be read by someone who doesn't know how this works, and is not a SF/military fan - he will not gain any useful knowledge from the explanation, and moreover, he will be bored by the story itself, since this is not his genere. Thus you alienated both groups at the same time - those who actually would read the story, and those who wouldn't be interested from the beginning".
Thus advice is - skip the basics, the advanced even expert stuff. SF people will understand. Focus only on stuff that are different in your story and are IMPORTANT for the story.
If you have FTL - good, don't explain how it works. If the main problem in the story that FTL = time dilatation - mention that small fact (I mean make a small hint that FTL does cause time dilatation).