Wonky Surface Tension

While surface tension chatter is usually about fluids or materials, thinking about personal surface tension emerged from my meditations today. I blame James Blish.

Blish was a terrific science fiction and fantasy writer. I admired his imagination. Flying cities, anti-aging drugs, he offered up so many neat and original ideas, but always managed to do so with solidly convincing style. He was one of those I put up on a pedestal with the hard science fiction Big Three of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

I’m in one of those places where my writing ideas are generating natural highs. I’v been working on cosmological entanglements (which are a similar idea to quantum entanglements) and tachyon time travel telepathy, and their impacts on the story arcs – who goes where, how and why – constructing the final puzzle from the pieces, and making up the pieces on the fly. (For these ideas, please blame Timothy Ferris and his books, especially ‘The Whole Shebang’.) This, for me, naturally demands deep thinking, thinking that stills me with focus and concentration. Then, epiphanies burst free from of the morass of cogitation. Aha, and eureka!

Now I understand my pretend science and construct it with the flimsiest of physics. And now comes the story-telling. How do I weave all this into the novel without sounding like a science book? This is especially a challenge as several disparate threads are weaving around this central idea, creating a loose fabric that’s gradually becoming tauter.

To veer into other metaphors, scenes then explode in my head. I glimpse some shrapnel of what they’re about, but I become excited. The scenes spread faster and faster. Watching and focusing, I try hard to capture the gist of each, get it down, get it down, so I may build around these kernels (splintering into yet more metaphors), create the scenes and string them together.

Like surface tensions in fluids, I need the correct coherent forces to hold it all together. Frankly, this stage of writing always intimidates and frightens me. And I heed what those old masters like Blish did, creating a story that at least has sufficient scientific integrity that people will give me a grudging pass. Meanwhile, I admire certain writers outside of the science fiction realm and prefer their writing styles, people like Erdrich, Chabon, Frantzen, and Ferranti, and yes, Irving, Updike, and Roth, and even folks like Tana French and Kate Atkinson. My style continues to emerge into something like their styles, and that is very deliberate.

It all makes my surface tension wonky, caused by the differences in what I am, where I am, where I want to be, and who I dream of being. Perhaps contributing to the wonky surface tension, if I pause and squint into the far future’s dim tunnels, I can see this gem of a novel glittering and spinning, there for my taking. I fear my reach will fall short.

But rare exhilaration can be enjoyed even when reaching and failing. No need to remind myself of that (even though I did, didn’t I?), because that’s not the impelling force pushing my writing efforts. Writing, and attempting to visualize and capture these stories and their ideas, is just fun. The process also provides an escape. Writing is like an opiate that helps me cope with my life.

So here I am, once again, writing instrument at hand (a computer), along with a quad shot mocha, time, and solitude. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.