Laurie J. Marks

The never-ending pandemic

Due to Deb’s complex medical history, she and I continue to behave as we did at the worst of the pandemic, avoiding indoor crowds and wearing masks all the damn time.  Nevertheless, we caught a virus, which, although quite mild, turned me into a zombie for a few days, with a bonus bout of mild depression.  I wanted to write, didn’t feel like writing, suspected I’d be unable to write, and wondered if I’d ever write again.  When I did get back to writing, it was a deeply unsettling slog, a reminder that writing isn’t always—perhaps not often—fun and easy the way it’s been the last couple of months.  Naturally, this slogging sensation led to a crisis of confidence: What makes me think I can write?  Why am I writing such a dumb/crappy/ill-conceived book?  And so on.

Sometimes—a lot of times—writing feels like this. My solution to just keep putting words on paper until it gets better.  Lots of experience allows me to know–not merely hope–that this approach will work, a bit like starting a manual transmission by rolling the car downhill and popping the clutch: Going through the motions starts the engine.  So for several days I’ve been just putting words on paper, writing a chapter in which, unsurprisingly, my POV character is also in a funk, is also going through the motions while slogging through her own mess of death and disaster, and (she doesn’t know this, obviously) about to get sick and nearly die.  She and I are floundering together in the middle of the book, which always is a Slough of Despond. As usual, it feels like we’ll be stuck here forever.

Sickness and counter-productivity

Why does being sick have such a counter-productive effect on a writer’s abilities?  And, why is it so unusual for a character in a fantasy or science fiction novel to be sick? 

Being sick is inherently counter-productive.  When we get sick, our bodies change their priorities, and we go into a mode that scientists dub “sickness behavior.”  Our immune systems send a chemical message to our brains announcing that we are at war, and our brains join the war effort by making us less smart and less active.  As with all sick animals, we experience malaise, we sleep a lot, we eat and drink less, we don’t think well, we’re lethargic.  Scientists believe this behavior helps us survive by diverting energy into fighting off the infection.  Our energy-hog brains are on short rations, and the resulting psychological lethargy encourages physical inactivity. When the war has been won, the biological priorities shift, and we (gradually) become smart(er) and start doing more intellectual tasks, such as writing and/or worrying about writing.

For fictional characters, however, being sick or injured is problematic because it has a negative effect on the plot, and as a result characters don’t tend to get sick, and when they get injured and beaten up they have amazing powers of recovery.  A panelist at a conference–an emergency room doctor–once pointed out that in speculative fiction, the depiction of injury and physical stress is extraordinarily unrealistic.  Actual injured people can barely function, require months to recover and may be traumatized much longer.  When I was seriously injured in a fifteen-foot fall, I spent six weeks in the hospital, was in physical therapy for four months, didn’t feel normal for at least a year, and never regained my previous level of physical conditioning. Characters in science- and fantasy fiction, however, are more like cartoons: they fall off a cliff and then they are fine.

A fantasy protagonist can’t take a year off to recover: The plot engine must keep running, so In fantasy and in science fiction, the plot-destroying effects of injury and illness can be resolved by one or another form of Phlebotinum (a minimally-explained phenomenon such as magic or wormholes that prevents a plot from grinding to a halt). Illness, however, is usually absent unless it’s a central driver of the plot, as with plague stories like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

I’m currently rereading Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, in which characters, including the protagonist, frequently are injured.  In accordance with a science fiction trope that might originate in Star Trek (1966), injured people are brought to a medical unit in which technology rapidly does things that (if you’ve every recovered from abdominal surgery) seem more like magic than like science.  Or, as in the Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie, they apply a specialized “corrective” that falls off when it has done its work.  In fantasy novels, quick-recovery options are legion: potions, spells, spirits, quests, intervention by the gods, and so on.  (However, as a counterexample I offer one of my favorite books, Among Others by Jo Walton, in which the protagonist has been partially disabled by an event in the recent past and suffers from chronic pain.)

These miracle cures tend to conveniently treat ailments as physical phenomena while giving short shrift to the psychological effects, both on the injured and on the people who frantically try to save their lives.  We all carry such injuries with us: My parents were burdened by the Great Depression, just as you and I are now burdened by our survival of a plague.  I have long been interested in the heroism of ordinary people who keep moving forward in spite of their past history and current circumstances, and in my novels I endeavor to acknowledge the downward-dragging effect of these traumas. 

The Dullness

The character in my current project is suffering from a condition known in her community as “the dullness.” Everyone knows it is possible to die from it, and there is no magic cure.  It’s hard to blame them, since that world is pretty awful, and I keep thinking of ways to make it worse.  If I lived in there, I’d have a chronic case of the dullness. 

Also, I’d hate the author.