A few years ago, I stood barefoot in the middle of my back yard on an early June afternoon, curling the freshly cut grass between my toes. And I thought to myself while I cleaned up my lawn mower, “What if my entire property was just grass? No landscaping, no driveway or sidewalk, no house. Just pristine, green grass.”
Then I asked The “What If” Question: “What if I lived on a property like that?”
Six months later I wrote The Emancipation of Bartholomew Benson, the story of a possibly delusional, possible savior-of-humanity farmer, who is torn between raising dairy cattle and annihilating quantum artificial intelligences that threaten to take over the world right beneath our noses. Oh, and he lives in an underground bunker, covered by beautiful, luscious green grass. Of course.
As writers, we all know that crafting fiction is hard. I think it comes down to the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” When writing a novel, the logic in our stories has to make perfect sense during every single moment and every single scene. The logic has to be even more believable than the real world. People around you act irrationally all the time in the real world, but if a character in a story acts irrationally the reader often loses the story thread because they fail to comprehend or empathize with the actions of the character. Your characters can perform extreme acts (i.e. hunt AIs masquerading as utility boxes in people’s basements), but their actions have to follow a logical pattern that the reader can comprehend and accept.
My solution to the uber-logical storyline constraint has been to keep my stories very simple, at least at conception. The simpler the premise, the simpler the maintenance of that thread of logic that the audience requires while reading my story. Reflecting back on my inspiration for my manuscripts, I see that the start of every story I’ve written has begun with one or two basic questions which I attempt to answer throughout the novel. These “What If” questions have typically fallen into three major categories.