Not Writing About the Future
What to do with inklings and ideas?
I’m often the victim of my own overactive imagination. I can sit having breakfast and come up with two thoughts about current events that immediately evolve into ideas for futuristic novels. Some of them are even good.
The problem is that my work in progress takes place in Saigon in the forties and thinking about a post-apocalyptic future or an optimistic science fiction novel, or even a comical futuristic story isn’t helpful for that effort.
I write some of them down, of course, but they will languish in that notebook and waste away, unloved, and, in truth, unneeded.
I’ve written science fiction and enjoy futuristic stories, but living in the future for long enough to write a novel doesn’t appeal to me much any more. I’m not much into world building, and more into understanding the world I live in. These days, and increasingly, I’m more fascinated by existential fiction than science fiction. So, rather than reading some of the emerging science fiction authors, some of whom seem to be excellent and provocative, I’m turning to Camus, Dostoevsky, and Highsmith.
Highsmith? Yes, Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Strangers on a Train.
Preferences in fiction are matters of taste. While some of Highsmith’s stories will strike readers as too slow, too willing to delve deep into some shallow emotions, I like that they bother; I like that they give the reader time to breathe and contemplate.
Suspense novels used to be like that. Now that they’ve been subsumed by thrillers, they’ve changed. Pacing is king.
In my novel, I’m working to find a balance that blends a compelling storyline with some internal suspense—the kind of thing a movie can’t provide.
I want to evoke a version of a time and place as well as Somerset Maugham does Asia in his short stories. I want to populate it with imperfect characters who react to their environment and each other. That’s what Highsmith did well, and why her reviewers talk about Highsmith’s world.
About a third of the way into the first draft of this book, my characters are already surprising me. As a result I’ve rewritten more as I go than I’ve ever done. It’s a lovely, achingly painful process.
A subplot in the writing challenge I’ve set is creating a wartime story in which the war is a character. It isn’t a novel about the war, just a story during a war. Somehow that makes it feel contemporary (I wish I could explain that thought, but maybe I’ll be able to when the book is done).
I’ll fail, of course. Nothing I write can possibly reach the lofty goals I set for it, but the process involves looking at my writing quite differently than I have before. It’s both heartbreaking and amazing—sometimes at once.
So, I’m writing about the past and present, and putting my brilliant thoughts of the future into notebooks where they can do no harm. And who knows? One day I might want to move into the future and then I’ll see if any of these thoughts have survived the present.