Stave I: In which my writing career is inadvertently launched by Carl Sagan
Hi, I'm Bill DeSmedt, perpetrator of the technothrillers Singularity (2004), and now Dualism.
Not that I started out to write a book, much less two (or maybe three — Triploidy being next up in what’s become The Archon Sequence). No, I was happy enough just to read them.
And read them I did. A lot of them, mostly in the genre that the uninitiated persist in calling “sci-fi,” and the cognoscenti refer to as “sf” or just plain “science fiction.” But, in my own defense, let me say that I’ve been getting better, or at least more eclectic in my recreational reading, having recently added thrillers to the mix. Oh, and half a lifetime ago I read War and Peace in the original Russian, just like Edmund Wilson. Surely, that’s got to count for something.
(Or maybe not: Tolstoy’s prose is so limpid, so masterfully unstudied, so deceptively simple that, not only doesn’t it feel like you’re reading it in Russian, it doesn’t feel like you’re reading it at all. It feels like you’re mainlining it.)
Where was I? Oh, right. I didn’t start out to write a book, it just happened.
Here’s how: Back in the summer of 1995, I decided, all unawares, to while away a rainy Saturday afternoon by watching a rerun of Cosmos, Episode IV, “Heaven and Hell.” That’s the one where Carl Sagan talks about meteorite and cometary impacts.
Now, Carl didn’t know this at the time (maybe he does now), but he and I used to argue about that show of his constantly. About big things — like multiple universes vs. the Anthropic Principle (got to admit, recent cosmological theory seems to handing him that one) — and little ones, like the Tunguska Event of 1908. Though “little” may not be exactly the word for a multi-megaton explosion that wiped out an area of Siberia half the size of the state of Rhode Island.
Anyway, about midway through the program, Carl gets around to the aforementioned Tunguska Event, and to how it remains something of a mystery to this day, owing to the absence of a crater or any other physical evidence. And from there, he goes on to mention in passing the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis: that the Event was a collision between the earth and an atom-sized black hole. Then he’s refuting J&R, citing the by-now standard “missing exit-event” objection — namely, that an impacting black hole should have cut through the solid body of the earth like a knife through morning mist, and come exploding up out of the North Atlantic about an hour later, wreaking as much havoc on leaving as it did on arrival. Never happened. QED.
And, next thing you know Carl’s dropped the subject in favor of Great Barringer Crater in Arizona or some such, leaving me sitting there, staring off into space.
“But, Carl,” I said slowly, “— What if the damn thing never came out?”
Well, little did I know it at the time, but I’d just been hooked. I wanted to read a book that took that stray thought as its starting premise; I wanted to see where things went from there. So much so, that I tried giving the idea away to three different published authors, hoping they’d write the book for me so I could find out how it all came out.
No such luck. “Great concept, Bill,” they’d say, “but it’s not my kind of thing — too much science.”
Along about author number three it dawned on me that if I really wanted to read that book, I was going to have to write it myself. And write it I did.
So there I was, on my way to becoming an author, quite by accident. Of course, I had no clue what I was doing. Which was a good thing. Because, if I’d’ve had any notion what I was letting myself in for, I’d have fast-forwarded Carl to Episode V and never looked back.
As it is, my experiences as an “accidental author” may serve as a cautionary tale to those contemplating the writing life. And a life-lesson of perhaps wider applicability than you might think.
For — while the novel that finally emerged at the far end of the above process has since been typecast as a “science thriller” — in point of fact I’ve never regarded Singularity as fitting neatly within the confines any one particular genre. If anything, I’d intended it as a bouillabaisse of tropes and motifs — as mystery and thriller, as SF and romance, as day-after-tomorrow action/adventure cheek by jowl with dark comedy. If Singularity were on the SATs, the correct answer would be: (e) All of the above.
Consequently, you wouldn’t be far off the mark if you were to think of this blog as chronicling my rediscovery or reverse-engineering, by brute force and awkwardness, of all those cross-genre fundamentals that born writers seem to know instinctively. Things like how to frame and shape a plotline, how to construct scenes and story beats, how to breathe life into characters (drawn from life or otherwise), how to get them to reveal themselves through their dialogue, and their silences, how to work with readers and advisors and book doctors and agents and editors, how to… Well, you get the idea.
And, fair warning: this is not intended to tell you how you should do any of the above, merely to tell you how I did do them. For the most part, accidentally.
But at the least, it promises to be an interesting ride. So come along and learn how I added books to sausages and legislation on my short list of things about which I’d rather not have found out how they’re made.