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Why Math and Logic Are Bad For Fiction
Monday, August 3, 2009 7:41 PM
One of the lessons from my Playscript Analysis class that has made the biggest impact on my writing was about Chekhov. In his plays, people walk in and out of the scene randomly and say lots of stuff that is completely irrelevant to the story being told. It's weird, and at the time, revolutionary to the point that it got him in trouble. Chekhov wrote that way because he tried to write what he saw, and in real life, that's what happens. Just because you're having a very important conversation with your mother about her new boyfriend doesn't mean your crazy uncle won't walk through the room drunk and half dressed and looking for his pool cue. It happens.
Without the hyperbole of suggesting I'm just like Chekhov, this is how I try to write. This makes sense to me so much that I get uncomfortable writing without fleshing out the backstory of my characters and the world around them. I may write a crazy story about magical creatures, but once I set the ground rules, it's firmly seated in that version of reality and aside from the things that make my 'verse special, it is as real as possible.
Setting the ground rules, however, can be quite complicated and distressing.
For example, let's say I'm designing a world where a certain percentage of the population randomly mutates with special powers. In this world, these mutants have been around for centuries, living amongst us without us really knowing about them. Before I start writing too much, I'm going to sit down and figure out some key details about the current state of the world as well as the history up to the beginning of the story.
Why do I do this? Because knowing the backstory helps provide character motivation and makes the story feel a bit more "real" to me, which hopefully leads to a more readable and believable story. I don't have to tell you where the bathrooms are on the Enterprise, but I need to know where they are.
So in our mutant story, I need to figure out what percentage of the population is mutant. I'll start with something that "sounds good" like maybe 1% of the population. That seems reasonable, right?
Wrong.
According to Wikipedia, 1% of the world's current population is roughly 67 million folks. That is waaaaaaaaaay too many for my story to work. I mean, can you imagine what that world looks like? How do you possibly keep 67 million mutants under wraps? You can't do it. I mean, that might make for a great story, but it's not going to work for the story that I want to write.
So, like any good math student, I start working backwards. In this case, I'll start with the US. 500k sounds like a reasonable number for mutants in the US for this story. That's roughly 15% of 1% of the population, which is about 10 million mutants world-wide.
Excellent! That makes much more sense! Onto the next problem: governing council (Really, the next step is mutant history, but that's not relevant).
I already have an idea of how this going to work and some of the characters I want to be "in charge" of the whole group. I'm also putting the headquarters in Montana, because I was inspired on a recent trip and I think the setting would be both beautiful and plausible. Before I get carried away, thought, I need to flesh out at least the representatives on the council. If not actual folks, at least numbers and stuff. Why? Because you can tell a lot about a culture from how their government works and vice versa and if this is a global thing (and how could it not be?) then I need to break down that 10 million a bit more.
Back to the math! 10 million across the world is to 505k in North America, 860k in Latin America, 1.1 million in Europe and 6.1 million in Asia....
Oh bloody hell.
At this point, the voice in the back of my head is reminding me this is why the Firefly crew spoke Mandarin occasionally. Right next to that voice is the one telling me that if I want to be Chekhov, then I should logically set the governing seat in China or India and change the culture of just about everything based on their influence, or at the very least, figure out how the balance of power shifted over to America without being ridiculously ignorant or stereotypical. Right next to that voice is a third telling me that there is no hope for me doing any of those cultures justice without years and years of immersion and research so I'm never going to be Chekov.
How do I back out of that? How do I undo that last bit of reality and charge forward with my story? Do I remind myself that everyone writes what they know and nobody's really going to judge me if I write a North-American centered story since I'm North American. Or how about that I'm not Chekov or Joss Whedon so I shouldn't hold myself to the same standards. Or that "everyone cheats" so it doesn't make a difference if I do, too?
I mean seriously, do the math on Harry Potter some time and ask yourself what India must be like if a tiny country like England spits out a super-powerful wizard or two every 30 years. I'll tell you: there are roughly 56 in India right now. Assuming only 1 in 3 is evil, that's still 19 Voldemorts!
If J.K. can still make an interesting story in the wake of such mathematical reality, surely I can, too, right? Right?
Let's see. If you figure that 1 British citizen is as crazy successful as J.K. that means that roughly 5 people in the United States....
Not all evil wizards are nerds like Dumbledore, or have the tenacity of Voldemort, who's willing to learn the dark arts away from people for many years.
Some evil wizards just enjoy doing regular bad muggle stuff and call it a day.
Great stuff!
This is some of the fun of writing fiction, but it can also get in the way of the whole writing bit. In writing for an alternate reality, all that truly matters is consistency of that world, all the information you provide to the reader. Not that world's relationship to our own. It's not about what you're leaving out so much as the stuff you do focus on.
It does make sense to know a little bit more about this new world than your readers do. But if you know too much about it you're risking a lot of inside jokes. It's hard to discern what's covered in all the pages and paragraphs before and what's only rattling about in your head. You start alluding to things with no breadcrumb trail for the readers to follow. Sometimes this works out because it's a throwaway line, a superficial detail that only serves to color the world. But if you accumulate too many loose threads, that makes for a confusing read or a ratty scarf.
Moderation, that's all.
my risk is giving the reader more information than they care about to prove that i've thought about it and am not cheapening out on them. i'm likely to put privys and stinky smells and hairy legs into romance novels because hey, that's how they live back then, folks!
only in my head, because i have the same sort of discussion when it comes to writing historical romantic fiction. i feel the need to accurately depict the clothing and living conditions and that one voice says "um, yeah. you can't pull that off and expect the target audience to embrace it."
Who's to say that the global population in your fictional mutant world is the same as the real world? Couldn't you reduce that to fit your needs as well?
Perhaps there is something about England that creates more super powerful wizards than anywhere else in the world? Maybe it's like our world with Brazil and footballers.
i've considered some of that for the world i'm actually building. i mean, some of these races have specific sources, so it's really nationality/ethnic heritage more than geography that i should be basing my percentages on.
it's reaching the point that it's getting so complicated that i need to leave it alone and work on other aspects of the world, which is really where i need to be.
I just got done reading the book FLASH: STOP MOTION (yes, the one novel ever written about the Flash) and in it, the Flash tries to figure out just why all the speedsters seem to be based out of the Midwest. He tried to rationalize it out by thinking that all of their ancestors ran a bit faster so they moved out to the open plains of mid-America for move running space.
The explanation just felt weird to me. Speedsters are there because various writers needed people with whom Wally and Barry could tango. If other speedsters were in Australia, there wouldn't be much of a story there. Rationalizing it after the fact just didn't seem necessary to me.
But kudos on looking at the big picture. It's a fun mental exercise.
doesn't seem necessary to you, maybe, but this world is full of fans that nitpick any sort of story hole and "because then the story would be over" does not satisfy them.
i must be one of them, the way i try to pre-find all those holes :)
Now that I think about it, my example doesn't really work. I'm talking about a franchise that has a history created by dozens of people over decades. You're talking about one person's specific focus to create a complete, complex world. They are different creatures. I'm okay with the explanation of "the story would be over" because I know that the story has never had one person guiding it from beginning to end. If it's one person's creation, like your example of J.K. Rowling, I do expect the story to have a stronger internal continuity.
you don't think that people who pick up the threads of a story line have a responsibility to stay true to the original?
As long as the new story is episodic in nature and it keeps the relationships between the characters recongnizable, I'm okay if the details change. I don't want fiction that's so completely betrothed to what has come before that it stagnates.
If it's the direct continuation of a story without an end (such as the Robert Jordan WHEEL OF TIME series) then yes, it needs to be directly related to what has come before. I wouldn't be as open to a shift in that instance.
But, I do realize that not everyone feels the same way that I do. If I discover holes in my fiction ("Hey, I thought that the Enterprise could only hold 16 photon torpedoes and they fired 18!") I think of that as just a fun game. I don't let it ruin the enjoyment of the individual story, as long as that story is well constructed.
I say forget math and logic and go with what you know. You can still have a believable universe for you story. Take Torchwood for example. The reason the rift in time and space is in Cardiff is because that's where they shoot. Yes, the odds of a rift running through the center of Cardiff are very low, but it's what they have to work with. Think locally :)
I appreciate your Macro- Perspective. I take the alternate route. As soon as I hear a character's voice, he/she/it guides me through the universe. I'm a tourist in my own creations.
i do that, too, but part of finding the character's voice/motivation is finding out their backstory, which i sometimes need/want global context for.
example: if i create a character that is half-demon, it's important for me to know why she's half demon, and if she's had any contact with her demon relatives and if not, why not, and how common are half-demon children so that i know whether she's grown up isolated or with a group of people who understand her, and for that i need to consider how groups of demons gather and why and for that i need a rough outline of how the real history of our planet is affected by demons always being around and for that...
i'm still a tourist, in a sense. i ask the questions into the void in my brain and something answers. occasionally i chose between a couple of options, but usually, the "right" one is obvious.
it is wild up in here sometimes.
Agreed. I come to know my characters in much the same way I make friends or Date. I'm more interested in what brand of firewater that half demon likes and why, and if she's as sick of rock stars pretending to be demonic as I am. The bigger questions come later, but only after a solid number of conversations.
Sounds like you consider the big questions first, which must take some impressive and exhausting mental aerobics.
cachaça because her great uncle (3/4 demon) taught her it's the only one that has an effect on demonic constitution.
she thinks it's silly, like halloween, but since those concerts are one of the few times she doesn't have to concentrate to keep her eyes and fingernails looking human and her skin from taking on that purplish hue, she's kind of grateful for it.
(it should be noted i've made her up just for the purposes of this comment thread)
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Logic and math definitely can have a place in GOOD fiction. It just ends up being a different kind of fiction then what you'd find in most paperbacks.