Guest Post: Kyle Winter on The Power of Passive Representation

Everybody’s tried to make a meal they mess up. A pile of perfectly good ingredients that just won’t come together into something palatable despite our best efforts. And when time and money and supplies are tight, sometimes tossing out the pot and starting over is not an option.

In each act of my new spacepunk steam opera novel, FLOTSAM, the four-person airship crew sits down to a meal. They come together to eat, to debate, and to problem solve. Their thoughts in these scenes are filled with worry over finding work, getting paid, keeping the ship in good repair, and staying out of trouble long enough to spend any money left after that.

Each meal is a backdrop to what’s going on in the story at that moment: an easy, familiar meal to celebrate getting away from a confrontation in one piece; a load of their favorite takeout as distraction from unpleasant news; and, finally, a dinner that goes horribly wrong before coming together in the end.

FLOTSAM‘s Captain Talis is as reckless in the galley as she is in life. When the crew members normally in charge of cooking are otherwise engaged in higher priority duties, Talis volunteers herself to fix them something to eat. She fumbles her way through dinner preparation until the engineer discovers her at work on an over-salted, unpalatable meal and firmly ejects her from the galley. When the captain later tastes the food she’s amazed that it has transformed into a rich, balanced, and flavorful chowder.

Even in secondary world fiction there is research to be done. During one revision pass of FLOTSAM, I double-checked a piece of cooking advice I picked up somewhere: that you can add a starchy vegetable to the pot to draw in excess salt. This proved to not be the case, as an oversalted meal needs not one starchy vegetable or even a pile of starchy vegetables, but rather an increase in every other flavor and ingredient in the meal to balance itself out. There are no magic bullets or miracle treatments.

The disastrous meal was a critical component of the final act. The situation that limited their menu options, the botched attempt to make something of it, and the meal’s subsequent salvation were deliberately crafted and I was reluctant to fudge the details.

I turned to my friend, a classically trained chef and cookbook writer, in the hopes they could give my scene a pass of plausibility as I described it. When I was told that there’s no easy fix, I felt lost. Frustrated. This big important scene became implausible and people would stop reading, throwing the book across the room because I stretched credulity well past its breaking point.

My friend reminded me, “It’s Science Fiction and a different planet; who’s to say they don’t have a fix?”

It is a different planet. It is a different reality. I’ve knocked it down and built it up so many times over and over in different ways, there wasn’t any reason why the rules of cooking couldn’t also be knocked down and rebuilt.

I rolled up my sleeves, thought about the oversalted dinner and the rules of the world and the characters who abided by them, and finished the scene with only minimal adjustments.

In FLOTSAM‘s final draft, the ship’s engineer brandishes a jar of something she calls “an old family secret” and chases the captain from the galley. The draft saved the amusing interactions between characters along with the parallel between the meal and the situation aboard the airship. And along with the dinner’s saltiness went my own self-conscious over-explanation. My characters gathered in the next scene over a hearty meal and hoped, despite everything they’d been through, things just might turn out okay.

And now that dish might be my favorite meal in the novel.

About the Author
R J THEODORE (website) is hellbent on keeping herself busy. Seriously folks, if she has two spare minutes to rub together at the end of the day, she invents a new project with which to occupy them.

She lives in New England with her family, enjoys design, illustration, podcasting, binging on many forms of visual and written media, napping with her cats, and cooking. She is passionate about art and coffee. Follow her on Twitter @bittybittyzap.

Book One of the Peridot Shift series (Parvus Press), FLOTSAM is Theodore’s debut science fiction novel, available March 27, 2018 in print, digital, and audio.

Are you a fantasy and science fiction creative looking for a place to promote a new effort? Here’s my guidelines for guest posts.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Everyone always wants to know the writer’s writing origins, when for many of us we can’t recall the first time we scratched out a story. Was it a moment of inspiration, they want to know, a story we’d run across that needed our personal improvement? Or maybe we had somehow leaped over childhood development itself and landed in the middle of our search for identity only to discover that damn it, we were writers.

I don’t remember when I thought of myself as a writer, even if I know I bundled up in the front room of my parents house because it was cold enough to see my breath, and I banged away on a towering Royal typewriter, feeling every carriage return as small progress. But my writing genesis is far less interesting to me than its trajectory. I had no idea, making up tales about natural disasters and families and sea monsters, that I’d come to have certain inalienable opinions about my work thirty-plus years later. I write with purpose beyond that of simply selling my work””which don’t get me wrong, is a great goal, fellow authors””I write because there were books I needed in my youth and early adulthood that didn’t exist. I write to fill in at least a few of the gaps. I write for myself, of course, and sometimes I’m writing for one other person who will read the thing and send me a Facebook message saying they’d never seen themselves in a story before mine. I am so lucky to get the opportunity to write for even a few others who will find it resonant.

A professor friend of mine who is rather brilliant in many regards was almost boastful with me last week by declaring that she simply doesn’t read novels. The novel is a product of The Enlightenment, she said, all about a kind of egotism between a luxuriating individual (presumably because they have the time to read) and a narrative that centers their being through the protagonist or movement of the plot. It’s the very act of finding oneself in the text that she found so distasteful. But I ask, when do Americans not seek themselves in their lives? We are told to “find” careers that we love, we buy our sofas with our own comfort in mind, we make friends based on common interests and with the expectation that they will understand us. While it is useful to inquire into our relationship to literature, why only do this to literature and not everything in culture? And why is the best move to act like literature isn’t there?

I would rather engage the process of reading and writing, of authorship and ideology. My ponderous process of writing has led me through many questions about narrative itself and the late-capitalist products that support narrative, like novels, blogs, Internet free-for-alls of visual productions like House of Cards. I return again and again to the production gaps””whose stories aren’t being told, which communities aren’t heralded in the publishing industry, in Hollywood, in New York City””and I revisit the questions of our newest generation of readers. Yes, stories should destabilize the oversimplified identification with the protagonist. Good writing should push those boundaries, as well as resisting the expectations we have for form, genre, literary merit, and popularity. Great writing should speak to readers who have never before felt spoken to, who have before that latest moment always had to wrap themselves around the writing in order to engage the text.

I thought nothing about any of this when I first sat down in my childhood, even if the kinetic energy of these questions was always at my fingertips. Who I was in my earliest stages of writing was not very interesting. What I try to achieve with my writing today however, fascinates me. I take that as a good sign I am headed in the right direction.

BIO: Everett Maroon is a memoirist, humorist, pop culture commentator, and fiction writer. He has a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and is a member of the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association and was a finalist in their 2010 literary contest for memoir. Everett is the author of a memoir, Bumbling into Body Hair, and a young adult novel, The Unintentional Time Traveler, both published by Booktrope Editions. Everett blogs at transplantportation.com.

Want to write your own guest post? Here’s the guidelines.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.