{"id":13659,"date":"2022-01-16T17:22:49","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T01:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=13659"},"modified":"2022-02-03T14:26:29","modified_gmt":"2022-02-03T22:26:29","slug":"how-to-write-getting-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/16\/how-to-write-getting-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Write. Getting Ideas, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately I’ve been writing some “How to Write” posts for my blog and for Medium<\/a>. <\/em> For this one, I’m using excerpts from my huge document All the Interviews<\/em><\/a>, which you can read as a PDF online. Today’s topic is “Getting Ideas.”\u00a0 And I have a Part II<\/a> on my blog and on Medium<\/em> as well.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nFrom an interview by Nozomi Ohmori. Tokyo, 1990, for Hayakawa SF Magazine<\/em><\/strong>
\nThere is a strong relationship between my nonfiction and novels. For instance, White Light<\/em> can be considered as a sort of novelization of Infinity and the Mind<\/em>. And Infinity and the Mind <\/em>also includes the Software<\/em> idea about self-reproducing robots evolving to become intelligent; this is in a section called \u201cTowards Robot Consciousness.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

The ideas in The Fourth Dimension<\/em> appear in The Sex Sphere<\/em> and again in Realware<\/em>, which has a number of scenes in the fourth dimension. The Hacker and the Ants<\/em> can be thought of the fiction version of the research I carried out to write my software package Artificial Life Lab<\/em>.<\/p>\n

My fantastic fake-nonfiction novel, Saucer Wisdom<\/em>, introduced the science ideas used in Freeware<\/em> and Realware<\/em>. The ideas include the Freeware<\/em> \u201cuvvy\u201d\u009d communication device, the Realware<\/em> \u201calla\u201d\u009d matter controller, and the aliens who travel as radio waves. It\u2019s like now I\u2019m reaching a point where even my nonfiction is speculative.<\/p>\n

I used to like to say that SF is my laboratory for conducting thought-experiments. But maybe when I said that I was just trying to impress my academic friends. Now that I\u2019m older, I\u2019m more likely to tell the truth. I don\u2019t write SF to help my science. If anything, I study science to help my SF! I love SF for the ideas, but more purely I love it simply for the rock\u2019n\u2019roll feel<\/em> of it, the power-chords, the crunch, funk.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019ve been teaching software engineering in Silicon Valley. At the low level, teaching programming is like teaching automobile repair \u2014 just having to explain these random arbitrary things like the part-numbers of the pieces inside some particular model vehicle\u2019s carburetor. And you can\u2019t just skip over that stuff because the whole point of programming is to get a nice program that works really well on some specific actual machine.<\/p>\n

At a higher level, I\u2019ve learned a lot about computer stuff like fractals, chaos, cellular automata, complexity, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Life, so it would seem like a good idea to write a book about that. But these topics are very picked over; too many people have written about them. It\u2019s like looking for a cigarette butt on the West Point parade ground. Even so, in 1997 I was trying hard to get a contract to write a nonfiction book like this. I wanted to tie the computer-inspired ideas more closely to immediate perceptions of Nature and to one\u2019s own mental experiences. But somehow ended up with a contract to write Saucer Wisdom<\/em>, a book about my fictional encounters with a man who\u2019d been shown the future by some saucer aliens! It\u2019s not always easy to predict what book you end up writing. Certainly my work with computers has very much affected the way I see the world, and maybe someday I can figure out a marketable way to write about this.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nFrom an interview by Michiharu Sakurai. Tokyo, 1997, for [relax]<\/em><\/strong>
\nTransrealism means writing about your immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. The characters in a transreal book should be based on actual people. This has the effect of making the characters be richer and more interesting. One inspiration for me in doing this is Jack Kerouac, who thought of his novels as a single linked chronicle. Though many would just call Kerouac\u2019s books autobiographical novels.<\/p>\n

My transreal novels aren\u2019t exactly autobiographical: I have never really left my body, climbed an infinite mountain, met a sphere from the fourth dimension, infected television with an intelligent virus, etc. But they are autobiographical in that many of the characters are modeled on family and friends \u2014 the main person of course being modeled on me. The science fictional ideas in my transreal fiction have a special role. They stand in for essential psychic events.<\/p>\n

The quest for infinity, for instance, is nothing other than the soul\u2019s quest for God. Or, more mundanely, it represents the individual\u2019s quest for meaning. In another sense, a White Light at the top of a transfinite mountain stands for the psychedelic experience, which loomed large in those years when White Light<\/em> was written (1978 – 1979). But, again, the whole point of the psychedelic experience, at least from my standpoint, was to see God. Another inspiration for me in pursuing transrealism is Philip K. Dick. His blackly hilarious book A Scanner Darkly<\/em> was a real inspiration for me in forming my ideas about this way of writing. And in fact Scanner<\/em> had a blurb on it describing the book as \u201ctranscendental biography,\u201d\u009d which was probably the reason I coined the word \u201ctransreal.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, transrealism means writing about reality in an honest and objective way, while using the tools of science fiction to stand for deep psychic constructs.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nFrom an interview by Tatiana Shubin un San Jose, 2003, for Math Horizons<\/em>.<\/strong>
\nYou asked about math and SF. One thing we do in mathematics is to investigate the consequences of constraints or assumptions. You might, for instance, add a new axiom of set theory and then see if any nice theorems come out of this. Or you might make a definition, such as \u201can Archimedean solid has regular polygons for its faces (not necessarily all the same) and has the same arrangement of polygons meeting at each vertex,\u201d\u009d and then carry out a search, partly empirical and partly theoretical, to characterize the objects satisfying your definition.<\/p>\n

Science-fiction can be carried out in this vein. Thus I might ask what would happen if people had \u201cfemtotechnolgy\u201d\u009d wands that would turn dirt or air into whatever kinds of objects they wanted. Or what would happen if people could make hundreds of copies of themselves. Or what it would be like if we had a mountain as tall as all the transfinite ordinals.<\/p>\n

Science fiction can be thought of as a laboratory for carrying out thought experiments. The bare idea of a femtotechnolgy wand doesn\u2019t tell you much. You need to do some work to investigate the consequences. In effect, you have to carry out a simulation of a society with your additional assumption. This is in some ways similar to what we do in mathematics.<\/p>\n

Note that just thinking <\/em>about a question often isn\u2019t enough. You need to write something down. The paper does part of the work, that is, the act of writing elicits further ideas and fills in details, regardless of whether you\u2019re writing literature or math.<\/p>\n

Something I learned from mathematics was to never turn back from an idea just because it seems too counterintuitive. Logic can take you to some very strange places.<\/p>\n

All this said, I need to point out that science-fiction is also quite different from mathematics. SF is a form of literature, after all, and literature involves creating realistic human characters and using words to capture one\u2019s sensations and emotions. Personal human experience isn\u2019t something that mathematics directly deals with.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nFrom an interview by Lori White in Oakland, 2005, for Strange Horizons<\/em><\/strong>
\nYou asked me about Edwin Abbott\u2019s book Flatland. When I was in high-school, perhaps the tenth grade, my best friend and next-door neighbor Niles Schoening told me about this odd book he\u2019d found in the Louisville Public Library. About characters who were squares and triangles and lines. I was intrigued, and I read the book.<\/p>\n

On the first reading, the book confused me. Even though I\u2019d read some Golden Age science fiction stories about the fourth dimension, I didn\u2019t I initially understand that Flatland<\/em> contains a series of analogies intended to help us visualize the fourth dimension. At the time I wasn\u2019t yet aware that the fourth dimension is something solid and precise that it\u2019s possible to actually understand. And, on a first reading, the satirical aspects of Flatland<\/em> threw me off as well. The hero A Square is kind of a Victorian Everyman, not all that bright, and full of dumb received ideas about social class.<\/p>\n

When my parents took me to begin Swarthmore College in the fall of 1963, my father bought me a paperback edition of Flatland<\/em> in the little town drugstore. He himself was interested in the book; he\u2019d recently become ordained as an Episcopal priest, and he saw the main character A Square\u2019s experiences in the third dimension as an analogy to the spiritual life. I dipped into the book several times in the coming four years, but still didn\u2019t get very passionate about it. I was too busy being a college student.<\/p>\n

My interest finally came to a boil in 1970. I was at Rutgers University working on my doctorate in mathematics, and all sorts of things about mathematics were becoming clear to me, ranging all the way from the meaning of infinity and logical proof down to how carrying and borrowing work in pencil-and-paper arithmetic. Finally I began to understand what Flatland<\/em> was getting at.<\/p>\n

I was also getting interested in relativity theory, and one problem that nagged at me was how the geometric fourth dimension suggested by Flatland<\/em> relates to the fourth dimension as used in relativity theory to represent the axis of time.<\/p>\n

I was married by then, and we\u2019d had our first child Georgia, and there was this one weekend when my wife had taken the baby to go visit her parents at the Watergate hotel in D. C. I was listening to a great new vinyl Frank Zappa album, Chunga\u2019s Revenge<\/em>, smoking pot, and thinking about the fourth dimension. I was also into underground cartooning then, I was drawing a strip called Wheelie Willie<\/em> for the Rutgers Daily Targum<\/em>. On this one magical evening alone with my speakers propped up the desk playing \u201cThe Nancy and Mary Music,\u201d\u009d I started making Rapidograph drawings of A Square and of the spacetime diagrams of relativity theory, working them into an explanatory narrative, with captions and little bits of connective text. One of the nice things about the Flatland<\/em> characters is that they\u2019re very easy to draw!<\/p>\n

A few weeks later my father was visiting our apartment and I showed my work to him \u2014 I had maybe a dozen pages done by now \u2014 and he was interested but a little baffled that I\u2019d become that<\/em> interested in the ideas of Flatland. \u201cWhere are you going with this?\u201d\u009d Where I was going was into my career as a science and science fiction writer. But I didn\u2019t know this at the time.<\/p>\n

My friends in grad-school even began teasing me about my interest in Flatland<\/em> a little bit. I was carrying around Dionys Burger\u2019s Flatlandesque book Sphereland<\/em>, and an English major friend asked me, \u201cSo is your career goal to write, like, Tubeland<\/em>?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My first teaching job was at what\u2019s now called SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York and I took over a course called Foundations of Geometry<\/em>. I was supposed to be focusing on axiomatic approaches to geometry, and I covered Euclid, but most of my course was focused on the fourth dimension. I wrote up some lecture notes that I mimeographed for the students; the notes were initially called Geometry and Reality<\/em> and they grew into my first book, Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension<\/em> (Dover Publications, New York 1977).<\/p>\n

In my first book I invented some further adventures for A Square. And my 1983 story collection The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka<\/em> included several science-fiction stories involving the fourth dimension, including \u201cMessage Found In A Copy of Flatland,\u201d\u009d and \u201cThe Indian Rope Trick Explained,\u201d\u009d both of which include drawings of good old A Square.<\/p>\n

I also took another crack at a nonfiction book about fourth dimension: The Fourth Dimension<\/em> (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1984.) In the course of this book I describe events in an imaginary book called The Further Adventures of A Square<\/em>. I tell about A Square having affair with the Flatlander A Hexagon\u2019s wife Una \u2014 I really enjoyed copying the style of Flatland<\/em> \u2014 which was already archaic at the time that Abbott wrote the book, remember that he was, among other things, a Shakespearean scholar.<\/p>\n

At the very end of writing my Fourth Dimension<\/em> book, I hadn\u2019t tied up one last loose end, I\u2019d left A Square cornered by an angry A Hexagon. And I had a dream of A Square down in Flatland, chirping up at me for help. So that went into my book too, at the very end, another excerpt from The Further Adventures of A Square<\/em>. Here\u2019s a quote from The Fourth Dimension <\/em>(pp. 202-203).<\/p>\n

I felt myself as but a Thought, a baseless fragment of some recurrent Dream. All around me I sensed my Dreamer\u2019s mind. Mustering my courage, I cried out my plaint.<\/p>\n

I: Can you hear me, my Lord?<\/p>\n

Dreamer: And how! What time is it?<\/p>\n

I: There is no Time \u2014 so says the Sphere.<\/p>\n

Dreamer: Well, yeah. Not for you, anyway.<\/p>\n

I: Return me to my fellows, oh my Author. Grant that the Hexagon forgives me.<\/p>\n

Dreamer: I can do that. And thanks, I\u2019ve enjoyed being with you. I hate to say good-bye.<\/p>\n

I: But surely you will always be with me? Is not my World a fragment of your Mind?<\/p>\n

Dreamer: It\u2019s not my mind, really. I\u2019m just filling in. Who knows who\u2019ll dream you next. You\u2019re the real immortal, Square, not me. You\u2019re an eternal Form.<\/p>\n

For an instant I could see it All: the boundless Truth, the many Dreamers, and my own life\u2019s passionate play.<\/p>\n

I was actually crying when I wrote this.<\/p>\n

What I was getting at is that when you write about a shared world, like Flatland<\/em>, or the Star Wars universe, or for that matter human history, you\u2019re describing characters who in transcend any individual author. And that\u2019s kind of awesome.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nFrom an interview by Carmine Treanni. in Rome, 2005, for Quaderni D\u2019Altra Tempi<\/em><\/strong>
\nWhen I start, I always have in mind a few crucial situations or devices that I\u2019m eager to explore and depict. These ideas arise to some extent spontaneously, and to some extent from thinking about scientific and social ideas that interest me.<\/p>\n

Once I have a vague idea of the book\u2019s theme, I begin working on figuring out the characters, the geography, the society, the tone, the point of view, the story arc, the physics, and, above all, the plot outline.<\/p>\n

I write about all these ideas in a notes document that I develop in concert with my novel; usually my notes documents end up nearly as long as my books. I post each of the notes documents online when the corresponding book is published.<\/p>\n

The virtue of having a notes document is that then there\u2019s something I can work on when I don\u2019t quite feel ready to write the novel.<\/p>\n

When a book\u2019s going well, I can average about a thousand words a day. When I get my thousand words, I print it and go to the coffee shop and reread it and mark it up, then type it in again and repeat the process. I might cycle through a given section three times in a day, and the next day maybe one more time and then I move into the next section.<\/p>\n

I tend to be somewhat anxious when I work, worrying I won\u2019t be able to get things to come out right. In general, I worry too much.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n<\/a><\/a>From an interview by Ernest Lilley, Brandywine, Maryland, 2006, for SFRevu<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m so sick of quantum mechanics getting a free ride. It\u2019s an intellectually empty edifice, a false front with nothing behind it. They used to be able to get away with saying, \u201cah, reality is stranger than we can know,\u201d\u009d but I think a lot of us have had it with that line of mystery mongering. Our brains are made of the same quantum mechanical matter as everything else in the world, so if there\u2019s an explanation to be had, there\u2019s no reason we can\u2019t understand it. The foundations of quantum mechanics suffer from a complete and utter bankruptcy of new ideas.<\/p>\n

According to a newer new line of thought \u2014 I\u2019m thinking of people like Stephen Wolfram, Lee Smolin, and John Cramer \u2014 there could well be a deterministic subdimensional physics below quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is like mist over the landscape of the crisp underlying reality.<\/p>\n

You mention predestination, which is a way of broaching the question, \u201cIf the future is determined, does that mean I don\u2019t have free will?\u201d\u009d Maybe we don\u2019t have free will, but in practice this isn\u2019t so bad because, at least in the world we live in, the future is computationally unpredictable. Turns out there\u2019s a distinction we didn\u2019t use to be aware of. The future can pre-exist in an idealized kind of way, but it may well be that it is even in principle impossible to predict it. This is widely believed to be the case in our world.<\/p>\n

In Mathematicians in Love<\/em>, they start out in a world in which the world\u2019s computation is in fact simple enough that they can make a device to predict the future, but they end up in our rich and gnarly world, where prediction is a practical impossibility. I also discuss these ideas in my nonfiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n<\/a><\/a>From an interview by R. U. Sirius, in San Francisco, 2007, for MondoGlobo<\/strong>
\nA lot of the ideas in my recent novels come from Stephen Wolfram\u2019s work. My The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/em> was largely about his work. The basic idea is that any natural process can be regarded as a computation. We define computation in a fairly broad sense to mean any deterministic system that obeys definite laws. And it doesn\u2019t have to be digital.<\/p>\n

The digital thing is sort of a red herring. We have this idea that being a computer is about being digital. But computers aren\u2019t actually digital, OK? They\u2019re made of a bunch of electrons. And the electrons are fuzzy analog wave functions.<\/p>\n

So you can look at a brook or an air current and you can say, \u201cThat\u2019s doing something complex.\u201d\u009d And if you look at the natural world, there are four kinds of things that you see. Where something is sort of stable \u2014 not changing \u2014 it\u2019s static. Or else it\u2019s doing something periodic. Or it\u2019s completely fuzzy and like totally scuzzy and screwed up. Or it\u2019s in the interface zone \u2014 which is what I call the gnarly zone \u2014 the zone between being periodic and being completely scuzzy.<\/p>\n

Life is gnarly. Plants are gnarly. Air currents are gnarly. Water currents are gnarly. Fire is gnarly. In Wolfram\u2019s view, every one of these actually embodies a universal computation, similar to a universal Turing Machine or a personal computer, and in principle they can compute anything that you want it to. I agree with him.<\/p>\n

Wolfram says interesting things about evolution. He does talk about evolution a little bit. Someone might say, \u201cHow could a butterfly have evolved that precise pattern on its wings? Or how could we evolve the exact shape of our body.\u201d\u009d And Wolfram makes the point that natural systems are actually fairly robust computations. They like to do things like make spots on butterfly wings or grow limbs from animals. The genetic code doesn\u2019t have to be as finely tweaked as people sometimes imagine. You could actually perturb it quite a bit and you would still get plants and animals that look pretty similar to the way we look now. So it\u2019s not so much that things evolve to perfection. They just get to a level of functioning well enough. In fact, we aren\u2019t tuned to complete optimality.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n<\/a><\/a>From an interview by Anneli Rufus in Berkeley, 2009, for East Bay Express<\/strong>
\nThe ideas trickle in unpredictably. Often I\u2019ll push for an idea, focusing on a story situation and trying to imagine what comes next. When I\u2019m brainstorming like this, it helps to be taking notes, either on a scrap of paper, or by actually typing into my laptop. Making little drawings helps, too. But I don\u2019t always get the full insight that I need while I\u2019m pushing. The search seems to continue in my subconscious, and maybe a few hours or even days later I\u2019ll get an \u201caha\u201d\u009d moment about what I need to do. That\u2019s what we call the muse.<\/p>\n

And I do go out and do research. When I was working on Hylozoic, I made a trip to Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s home town, s\u2019Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. I used the material from that visit a lot, it was rich. And My wife and I lived for week in a flophouse on Valencia Street in San Francisco, and I picked up some local color there. And I read this scholarly book by David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West<\/em>, about the history of the idea that objects might be able to think. And always I\u2019m cruising the web, watching movies, reading…looking for clues everywhere.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nFrom an interview by Mike Perschon, in Edmonton, Canada, 2009, for Steam Punk Scholar<\/em><\/strong>
\nI think there\u2019s still a lot of room of all kinds inside science fiction. My genre\u2019s house has many mansions.<\/p>\n

The field isn\u2019t very old when you think about it\u2014I\u2019m only like the second generation of science fiction writers, next in line after Fred Pohl. But already you have to be careful not to repeat the old things. I don\u2019t want it to be like I\u2019m throwing down standardized cards that say, like, time machine, spaceship, robot. And I don\u2019t want to write SF that\u2019s parodistically or self-mocking. If the ideas become juiceless tropes, that\u2019s not interesting. As an extreme of this, in certain comedic SF books I feel like the authors are saying \u201cOh let\u2019s just be silly\u2014SF is all silly garbage, let\u2019s be silly together.\u201d\u009d It degenerates into fan fiction where, again, you\u2019re just throwing down picture cards and laughing at them. That\u2019s not a route I want to take.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about making up new tropes, or using the old ones in fresh ways. There\u2019s always more cool new stuff we can work with, and the future is coming faster than people can absorb. We don\u2019t want to fall back on recycling whatever Heinlein and Asimov did, any more than a contemporary musician wants to emulate Sinatra or even the Beatles. That\u2019s over, it doesn\u2019t speak to our time.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m particularly leery of using things that I see on TV or in the movies\u2026that crap is so watered down, it\u2019s written by fifteen people, it\u2019s completely under the establishment\u2019s control. Star Trek <\/em>is another way for the government to grind its boot into your face, another way for the rulers to indoctrinate the masses with lies about society.<\/p>\n

I like to think of science fiction as an edgy literature, like the beatniks or the punks, where we\u2019re turning our backs on the bullshit, we\u2019re trying to make a new world, we\u2019re trying to look at things with fresh eyes. And it\u2019s always possible to look at things with fresh eyes. It\u2019s never been easy to do that, but it\u2019s not any harder now than it ever was.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s exciting when you have science fiction where you don\u2019t depend on your characters working in a government lab. If you just need to have an arbitrary door to another world, then let\u2019s do it. I mean, there\u2019s been so many surprises in the history of science, why would we think we couldn\u2019t still have something really surprising happen?<\/p>\n

And if it\u2019s mysticism\u2014fine. We really have no idea what\u2019s really going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately I’ve been writing some “How to Write” posts for my blog and for Medium. For this one, I’m using excerpts from my huge document All the Interviews, which you can read as a PDF online. Today’s topic is “Getting Ideas.”\u00a0 And I have a Part II on my blog and on Medium as well. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13659"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13721,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13659\/revisions\/13721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}