I had an epiphany recently. Not one that’s likely to lead to a sudden burst of writing because I am So Fucking Far Behind On Everything that the idea of resurrecting a project that has like an absolute total of 10,000 words written on it is just not happening, but.
So I’ve been re-reading the Continuing Time books by Daniel Keys Moran, which are easily some of my favorite books ever. Desert island stuff, that. But I ran out of the ones I had on my ereader so I switched to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, which are also desert island books for me.
As plenty of you know, I’ve long, long, long since nurtured a desire to write a climate change series, one that’s more accessible than KSR’s books but tackles the same kind of big picture ideas. One of the things that’s always stopped me is the intimidating amount of research, although at the same time I’ve paid a lot of attention to climate research for 30+ years now, so my grounding is pretty solid.
But a fascinating thing happened, picking up KSR immediately after DKM, which was my brain fully went, “Yeah, no, you want to be writing a DKM-style near future SF thing, not at all a KSR one.”
And I KNEW that, because much of the point of writing it for me is that while I love KSR, I do think he’s an opaque writer and not the kind of read that draws people effortlessly into a story: you are there for The Ideas, and if you’re dedicated to them, it’s really, really great stuff. But it’s not an easy read. Cerebral, perhaps, would be a good word for it. Not precisely detatched, because there’s a lot of passion (and some of the modern era’s best nature writing, IMHO) in it, but…difficult.
Dan’s stuff is often complicated as hell, and often has a lot of characters with page time (one of my favorite sections in THE LAST DANCER is from a medical robot’s point of view), and it has a shit ton of Big Ideas, but it’s incredibly readable in the draw-you-in-drag-you-along sense. It connects, if you will, on a more emotional level; the Big Ideas, the world development, etc, whatever you want to call it, are strongly in support of the characters, rather than the characters very much being in support of the ideas, which is where I think KSR rests.
I have all the parts for the climate change series I want to do. I have for a long time. And I’ve known for some time that to some degree I’ve been getting in my own way about it because I’m living in this space of intimidation about tackling Big Ideas with the weight KSR does. Like, I’ve had long conversations with other writers about that very thing.
But switching directly between those two writers really opened up a space in my head that more or less said, “Yeah, no, you could do this just fine, it’s just that you’re a writer more like DKM than KSR and that’s fine, so you just have to do it in the space you already work in,” which is, I like to think, compulsively readability. :)
So I don’t know what I’m going to do with this information. Nothing right now, because I have fifty other things to do by, like, yesterday, but I feel like that juxtaposition of writing styles right next to each other really unlocked my ability to give myself permission to write the things.
In my copious free time. :grimace: