M.J. Whitehead

So, today I added a new idea to my notes full of loose ideas. This document is really important to me because I have a tendancy to make light first drafts without enough complication, so it really helps to have a list of things I’ve been wanting to write a story about so I can look at it and ponder “what can I fit in there?” Usually I write stories first based on what is familiar to me about the story: is it a fantasy? What’s the main similarity here that I need to work off? Part of this probably comes from being a dedicated reader who goes over books again and again.

Having a list of loose ideas is great because stories aren’t just defined by what they’re similar to, they’re also defined by how they’re different. When I’m partway through a draft and realise my story is not complex enough, it usually means I’ve failed to distinguish it enough from its peers in my outlining process. ¹ Usually when I refer back to my cheat sheet to help me out with longer-form fiction², I’m looking for the strangest idea I can get that I can make fit comfortably into my story. While this might sound weird to those of you who read this but I assume it will be familiar to those involved in writing for any sort of fiction. When someone tells you about a book, or TV series, or movie, the format you’ll often use to sum up a piece of fiction is something along these lines: “It’s like Battlestar Galactica, only with zombie accountants instead of human-looking robots.” That is, you’re contrasting the familiar and the unfamiliar, and both need to be cool enough to catch your potential audience’s attention.

Today I added “the logic of increasing returns”. This seems obvious to me because it’s one of those little theories I’ve been really interested in for a while. For those who don’t know, the logic of increasing returns is simply this: In some markets where it is costly to switch products, a product doesn’t need to always be the best overall to sell the most. It simply needs to be the initial best product when demand increases, and then be sufficiently good to maintain its position as a standard. While that might not sound particularly cool on its own, it has great potential to become a conspiracy- what if the products we trust are out to get us? Are they spying on us through them? Are they ripping us off? Or is there something even more sinister about this monopoly? Corporations make excellent conspiracy fodder in urban fiction and science fiction, not because they’re all evil, but because they aren’t transparent. It’s credible for a corporation to not be trustworthy because it happens so often in the real world- without that transparency they often run out of check, accountable only to their investors, and even then it’s usually only in terms of whether they’re making enough money.

That said, I have no desire to write corporate dystopias. The a big draw of SF/F is escapism, and for many people the bad elements of corporate culture are exactly the things that most frustrate their lives. So my corporate villains tend, in my early fiction that I shall never release³, to be the least successful ones, because it makes for good escapism.

¹ Which is really easy for me to do as I tend to function as a discovery writer, figuring things out as I go and more and more of the pieces click into place. I’ve only actually started outlining since I got back into writing and started taking it seriously, and it has made a huge difference.
² When I write short stories I don’t need to complicate them any more as a short story tends to be about exploring a single concept, or in the slice of life genre, one facet of a single character or relationship between the two main characters.
³ I’m sorry, but even for free, nobody is that interested in stories that can be summed up in single clauses like “my take on elves”, that I wrote when I was in the early half of my teenage years.