Here’s another one of my favorite discussions about writing, from “Building the Mote in God’s Eye,” an essay by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle that appeared in Niven’s book N-Space, a collection of stories and essays. There’s a ton of fascinating material in this piece, but I want to focus on one particular thing. Niven and Pournelle’s collaborative novel The Mote in God’s Eye is set in a futuristic interstellar society whose government has reverted to monarchy. The authors defend the plausibility of this:
It is fashionable to view history as a linear progression: things get better, never worse … [the] proposition is that we of nineteen seventy-five are so advanced that we will never go back to the bad old days. Yet we can show you essays “proving” exactly that proposition — and written thousands of years ago. There’s a flurry of them every few centuries.
They also point out that monarchy has some practical advantages:
The leader is known from an early age to be destined to rule, and can be educated to the job. Is that preferable to education based on how to get the job? Are elected officials better at governing, or at winning elections?
But the part that relates directly to writing is this:
We had a choice in MOTE: to keep the titles as well as the structure of aristocratic empire, or abandon the titles and retain the structure only. We could have abolished “Emperor” in favor of “President,” or “Chairperson,” or “Leader” … We might have employed titles other than Duke … and Count … and Marquis. But any titles used would have been translations of whatever was current in the time of the novel, and the traditional titles had the effect of letting the reader know quickly the approximate status and some of the duties of the characters.
There’s a definite trade-off here. It feels more plausible for future (not to mention current) dictators to call themselves, say, “presidents,” but it’s clearer for a reader thrust into an unfamiliar milieu if the titles communicate the character’s actual status. Writing is full of these sorts of choices. Plausibility versus Clarity. Explanation versus Pacing. Many new writers paralyze themselves because they see writing as like solving a Rubix Cube where you have to get all the colors to match up, and they can’t seem to do it. In fact writing is usually more like trying to solve a Rubix Cube that has no solution. You get to a point, after lots and lots of work, where the colors mostly line up, but it’s not perfect, and anything you do to try to fix one problem will mess up something else, and at some point you just have to make a judgment call about whether it’s better to leave one red square among the blues or one yellow square among the whites. And you just have to trust that some readers will have the same tastes and prioritize things the same way you do, and will go along with the choices you made.
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