Sympathy for the Writer - 5/4/2014

There's an interesting balance that has to be struck when working in a fictional universe. I talked last night about the choices Peter Parker might make were he to be interested in putting an end to the problems he constantly complains about. Those choices are at the crux of how one builds a fictional universe.

In order for the reader to become immersed in a story, there must be sufficient similarity between themselves and the characters and their world for sympathy to occur. The farther those characters and that world is from the world the reader knows, the less sympathy can be created.

And so those of us who create fictional worlds may want to come up with things that are entirely unknown, to explore impossibilities, inhuman psyches and the realistic extrapolations of those. And many of us do.

But for our fiction to reach an audience, the world and the characters we write must resonate with our readers. We must put together people and realities that do not bend so far away from what exists around us that people become lost.

Why do so many fantasy empires resemble historical ones? Because it creates a structure within which the reader can come to understand the characters. The farther that society moves from the historical version of reality, the more time the reader spends simply trying to understand the world which the characters inhabit. Take it far enough and the story is about the world, not the people in it.

Which is fine, and which has been done in various ways both well and poorly. But it is this basic struggle that means that Peter Parker will not make those decisions that could actually resolve his problems. If he becomes the source of a true cure-all for the physical maladies that often define the human condition, then the world he inhabits (indeed, the entire Marvel Universe) becomes utterly unrecognizable, as 'normal' humans simply disappear from the stage, replaced by people who are, at the very least, healthy to a degree we cannot understand.

And this is why Space Opera champions both starships and swordplay. This is why comic book superheroes never really seem able to change the world around them (the villains never can, either, at least not permanently). If their world deviates too far from ours, the audience falls away in confusion, until we are only talking to ourselves, on a journey into places that allow us to find immersion and sympathy because they are our places.

For instance, I once spent an evening (quite enjoyably), trying to figure out exactly how a three-mile wide bed of fungus would perceive the world and what its thoughts would be. I can't turn it into a story that would make sense to anyone but me (yet), but it was an interesting experiment and taught me a lot about how to think like someone not myself.

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