A Novel is Not a Sonnet

As of now, my book-in-progress is little more than an elaborate and rather epic demonstration of world-building. I have a main character who has been launched on a baffling journey and is at the mercy of events. How can I raise the stakes and give him agency? If he has no insights into what’s really going on in the world, then where is his conflict, and how can he choose his goals? I do have a vague plan for where he’s going to end up, and all will indeed be revealed in the end… but I’m not at that point yet.

I’m in danger of writing a travelogue, like Ringworld. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Ringworld and it was my introduction to science fiction novels when I was sixteen. It’s just that the plot of it leans heavily on the world-building aspects. It’s about going on a journey to explore the astonishing (and often the inexplicable), and most of the attraction of reading it comes from a sense of awe at the world Niven created. I don’t have a world as impressively alien as that, and in fact parts of mine are almost cliché in their Bladerunneresque Dystopianism – at least, until the reader finally discovers the underlying truth that overturns that impression – but it’s difficult to imagine a plot that would serve my thematic goals and introduce peril without being embedded in that sort of world.

An idea came to me recently, which might be a way out of this dilemma. Unfortunately, it’s so much of a spoiler for the book that I’m loath to go into details in public. Let’s just say that it’s a way of creating something that could go wrong, of making the character vulnerable, so that he’s actually risking losing everything if he chooses poorly.

But as soon as I’d had this idea, I realised that it undermined the world I’d built in my imagination. The very fact of something being at risk was at odds with the optimistic message I’m trying to convey in the story.

And this perfectly illustrates that a novel is not a sonnet, the same way that morality is not simply a depiction of what is good, but rather a roadmap to achieving it. The essential difference betwen taking the reader on a wild ride and simply opening a curtain and showing them a magical Utopia is kind of like the difference between earned and unearned respect; between deserved and inherited wealth; between working to make a relationship succeed and expecting happy-ever-after.

I’m beginning to wonder whether the message itself is the part that I need to delete, in order to make this book worth reading. But if I do that, I will have failed in my stated goal. I want to weave some dirt into the cloth, but end up with fine silk. I want to eat my cake and have it too.

I think I’ve found out why so many people write grim science fiction. It’s easier to have stakes if you’re a pessimist. But it shouldn’t have to be that way! We should be able to find green shoots of hope in the rubble of Dystopia. For some writers the trick is figuring out how to grow them – but in my case, the green shoots are already a beautiful landscape, and my difficulty is in finding some garbage and burnt-out cars to scatter around it.

This is why it’s such a challenge. Littering doesn’t come naturally to me.