Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26047
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26047
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You are either presenting real science principles or you are writing a novel. You can't do both. You might as well say that you are presenting a symphony concert but first you are starting off with a monster truck rally. It's not the same audience. Even if there is a crossover between the two audiences, people who like both symphonies and monster trucks, they don't want them in the same venue.

This is what Creighton is saying in the piece you quote. People do not read the Andromeda strain because they are interested in the science, but because they have an instinctive fear of contagion. It isn't the presentation of the science that matters in such a story, it is the manipulation of fear and hope. If you use technical details it is either to evoke fear or to evoke hope. You use whatever details do that best, regardless of whether they are correct science or not. Correct science is usually full of caveats and complexities that leave people feeling confused rather than afraid or hopeful.

The whole anti-vaccination brigade demonstrate this basic psychology. They need a clearly delineated enemy in which to repose the fear that every parent has for their children's health, and they need one that they can clearly and definitively do something about. Doing something, like refusing vaccinations, gives them a sense of being the hero of the story of their children's lives. Real science muddies that clear and simple heroic storyline.

And that is the problem with real science in novel. Real science is hard to reconcile with clear storylines. That is what Creighton had to learn to deal with and that is what you will have to learn to deal with.

Here's how you cut: If it does not create a clear and well defined threat that corresponds to people's native fears for themselves and their families, or solve such a threat in a clear and well defined way, cut it.

You are writing a novel. A novel is a piece of artifice that corresponds to a particular emotional need in the human heart. Politics, history, mythology, science, etc all provide elements you can borrow and bend to lend verisimilitude to a story, to provide McGuffins when you need them, and to create obstacles to the hero's journey. And that is all they do. A novel is not a textbook. Cut anything is is not contributing to the story.

Or write a text book.

Original score: 7