“Fiction and Empathy”

We human beings like to be around other human beings.  Several blog posts ago (October 24, 2016), I introduced the idea that we’re hardwired to love stories because the oxytocin in our brains makes us empathetic toward believable and memorable characters. 

Recently, I ran across an article in the November 12, 2016 edition of the Wall Street Journal entitled “Novel Findings: Fiction Makes Us Feel For Others.”  The author was Susan Pinker.

It seems that in 2006, a study at the University of Toronto connected fiction-reading with readers’ increased sensitivity to others.  To measure how much text the readers had seen across their lifetimes, the readers took an author-recognition test—a typical measure for this type of study.  The more people read, the better they empathized.

In 2009, the same team of psychologists reproduced the study with a sample of 252 adults, controlling for such variables as age, gender, IQ, English fluency, stress, loneliness and personality type.  In addition, the subjects took an objective test of empathy called the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test.  The purpose of all this was to see how long-term exposure to fiction influences the subjects’ ability to intuit the emotions and intentions of people in the real world. 

Once the variables were statistically controlled for, fiction reading predicted higher levels of empathy.  Such readers also lived larger in the flesh-and-blood social sphere, with rich and enduring networks of real people to provide entertainment and support than people who read less fiction. 

Later studies confirmed that reading fiction causes a spike in the ability to detect and understand other peoples’ emotion. 

The experimenters then assessed participants on several measures of empathy.  Non-fiction, along with genre fiction—science fiction, romance, horror—had little effect on the capacity to detect others’ feelings and thoughts.  Only literary fiction, which requires readers to work at guessing the motivations of characters from sometimes subtle fictional cues, fostered empathy.

As one of the investigators put it, “What matters is not whether a story is true or not.  Instead, if you’re always enclosed in a bubble of your own life and interests, how can you ever imagine the lives of others?”

So now there is solid scientific support for what readers, editors and authors have known for generations, probably for thousands of years.

Create a memorable character, give him a big problem to solve and drop him in a believable setting and you are doing your part to help Humanity evolve and grow. 

And you thought you were just telling stories to amuse yourselves.

The Word Shed will take a sabbatical over the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.  The next post will come on December 5, 2016 and will cover some updated data on ebook downloads across all of my titles and what’s coming up in my Farpool series.

Have a great holiday and see you on December 5.

Phil B.

“When Your Aliens are Too Alien”

I’m about halfway through my next Johnny Winger novel (Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin) and it looks like I may have written myself into a corner.

In this last episode of Tales of the Quantum Corps, Winger has become a disassembled swarm of nanobots, what I have termed an ‘angel’ in previous books.  The deconstruction occurred in the previous novel (Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary).  Now, I have to tell the story of what it’s like to be a cloud of bots no bigger than atoms, a cloud that can form simulations of human beings and just about any imaginable physical structure.

I may have made my main character a bit too alien.

Writing a story about someone who is so different from you and me is stretching my descriptive and story-telling abilities.  On the one hand, I want to accurately describe what it’s like for Winger to be an angel.  I want to describe it in ways a human reader can understand, so out of necessity, I use a lot of analogies and a lot of “it’s kind of like this—“text.  Winger himself struggles to put his experience into words, often drawing on things he remembers from his former life as a ‘single-configuration being,” even from childhood.

There are a lot of guidelines on creating believable aliens in science fiction stories.  Johnny Winger is not intended as an alien but the effect is the same.  One writer, Veronica Sicoe, did a blog post I saw on 13 aspects about aliens you shouldn’t ignore…here’s an excerpt…

If you want to write sci-fi, or even if you’re just a curious reader, there are a handful of screwy aspects about aliens that you need to watch out for. So here’s where it’s at.

1. Aliens should be alien
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you can call it Rakumph all you want, it’s still an effing duck. Giving creatures fancy names and changing their color doesn’t make them alien. If you’re on an alien planet that has purple skies, three moons and something else than oxygen floating around, you can bet your dog’s chewbone all creatures will be completely different than on Earth. Different chemistry > different environment > different evolution of life. Don’t strap a funny costume on a donkey and call it a fearsome Sharzahkrath. That’s just lazy worldbuilding.

2. Aliens aren’t humans in rubber costumes
Humanoids? Really? You think the whole universe is populated by humans with wrinkly foreheads or an extra tit? Come on! Hollywood resorted to humanoid aliens because it’s cheaper to stuff an actor into a costume than to build a whole alien from scratch. As a fiction writer, you’re not limited by a production budget. Go wild! Go freakishly inhumanly outrageously alien and stun the wits out of your readers.

3. Aliens have their own history
Maybe they never had a war on their planet; maybe they’ve always viewed both (or all three?) sexes equally; maybe they make art out of living creatures and eat their elder in annual festive rituals. Alien creatures will have alien–as in unfamiliar–societies and hence a very different history. They might have evolved from fungi and still reproduce through spores, each female spawning 10,000 young every three and a half cycles, who knows, but this would greatly affect their entire history, don’t you think?

4. If they were smart enough to fly to Earth, they probably know your butthole is not the most interesting part of your body
Aliens that come all this way to abduct people and stick probes up their bums must be retarded. We’d be invaded by morons who got kicked out of their own society for shaming their ancestors. Why in the name of Planet Shmurp would they go there? To learn the secrets of our race?

5. Aliens that are naturally telepathic won’t even grasp the concept of language
Humans have developed language because there was no other direct way to communicate. If an alien race is naturally telepathic, they will never have developed language. That has huge implications! No language means no words to describe things, no symbols to represent experiences, and no written signs either. They would be absolutely unable to grasp the concept of language, let alone learn it. Your human characters will never be able to communicate with such aliens in any simple way, because even if the telepaths could to tap into your thoughts, they won’t understand them. We think in words, we think in describable concepts, we think in relations that make sense in our language-dominated sense of reality. An alien that has never felt the need to name a thing, simply won’t understand us.

6. Aliens that can’t hold a tool won’t invent space ships
Space faring slugs? Highly technological fish-like creatures? How the hell did they come up with buttons if they don’t have hands? How would they have felt the need for tools if they have no possibility to grasp them? How did they weld metal or shape a console if they can’t even hold a screwdriver? Think a bit about this one before you put such nonsense on paper.

And this one…very important.

10. Aliens are subject to the same laws of physics as we are
Unless you’re writing about converging dimensions, which would make it fantasy not science-fiction in my opinion—but that’s an entirely different debate (read: stay tuned for more)—your alien races will be subject to the same basic universal laws of physics as we are, like gravity, electricity, the laws of movement and so on. If you throw an alien down the well, he will fall down not float upwards. If you ram a fist into his face, he will budge (unless he weighs ten tons, in which case you’d better get the fuck out of there fast).

My predicament as a story-teller is how to describe the living experience of a being who is a loose collection of atoms surrounding a processor that can organize that collection into just about any form you can imagine.  This being (Johnny Winger) experiences things like Brownian motion and van der Waals forces that are so far beyond your and my thinking that words are hard to find.

In the next post to The Word Shed, on November 21, I’ll delve into how science fiction writers describe such alien experiences in ways that make you think you’re actually there.

See you November 21.

Phil B.

 

 

“Where Do You Get All Those Crazy Ideas?”

Every author, especially in the science fiction world, gets questions like this.  Actually, it’s a good question.  Let’s try to explore the idea process as it pertains to authors and creating stories.

Story ideas can come from anywhere.  From life, from problems, from things that nag you and just won’t let go, from things you’ve observed and wondered about.  The key is to be open to ideas and to record them in some fashion when they come.

1.     Simple Observation

 

One place to find ideas for stories or characters is to be a good observer.  Melissa Donovan describes this particularly well, at the ‘Writing Forward’ website:

First, let us dispel the myth that if you want to be a writer, you must have a vivid imagination. Plenty of writers have found success by being simple observers.

Mark Twain is a shining example. His idea for Huckleberry Finn wasn’t an idea at all; he simply based the character on someone he knew from real life. It turns out that the beloved character was practically a replica of Twain’s childhood friend, Tom Blankenship:

“In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us.” — Mark Twain

Have you ever known someone with a standout personality? Such a person can influence your work in the same way that Tom Blankenship influenced Mark Twain.

2.     Current (or recent) Events

Again, Melissa Donovan describes how to turn what you see or experience into a workable story…

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of people migrated from the Dust Bowl to California and other western states. John Steinbeck (one of my literary heroes) told their story in The Grapes of Wrath, which was developed from a series of articles that ran in the San Francisco News in 1936.

But it was more than a story about people struggling with poverty in a downtrodden economic climate:

“I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects].” — John Steinbeck

Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel is a thoughtful commentary on social injustice and the forces behind poverty and oppression.

In today’s world, which is rampant with political, religious, and sociological commentary, one need not look far for writing ideas. If you can find an issue that matters to you, just look to the news and documentaries for true stories that you can use for inspiration.

3.     Making Connections Between Unrelated Things

You may find that reading widely (as I do), then letting your mind free-wheel will generate all kinds of odd connections.  Some of my ideas come when I’m swimming, working out, doing yard work, or am otherwise unengaged in work directly related to writing. Here, Melissa Donovan relates the story of Suzanne Collins, author of Hunger Games…

Suzanne Collins broke the mold with Hunger Games, arguably the most successful post-Harry Potter series to date. The books captured the hearts and minds of untold millions of young adult readers and the films turned the story into a cultural phenomenon. So how did she do it? Where did Collins get the idea for a dystopian, young adult novel set in a future where citizens are required to tune in to an annual reality show so they can watch teenagers fight to the death in an oversized arena?

“One night, I was lying in bed and I was very tired, and I was just sort of channel surfing on television. And, I was going through, flipping through images of reality television where there were these young people competing for a million dollars or a bachelor or whatever. And then I was flipping and I was seeing footage from the Iraq War. And these two things began to sort of fuse together in a very unsettling way, and that is when I, really, I think was the moment where I really got the idea for Katniss’s story.” — Suzanne Collins

You really don’t have to have a vivid imagination to create stories.  Look around you, be open to what you see and hear and write it down.  Let your mind wander.  The idea for my sf novel The Farpool (available at Smashwords.com) came from reading about dolphins and somehow conflating that with a weather report about waterspouts off the Gulf shores of Florida.  It didn’t hurt that I had done a story decades ago set on a similar oceanic planet.  Put all three together, mix it up and you have a science fiction novel that has been downloaded over 500 times in its first four months of existence.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on November 14.

See you then

Phil B.