Secrets and false identities

 I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on Twitter recently about the merits of writing ‘quiet’ stories.  It seems that people are content to read stories without a big heroic quest at their centre.

Some writers from other cultures have also said that they see the traditional Hero’s Journey type of quest with a big conflict at its heart as a product of white cultures.  Some of them see colonialist echoes of the conqueror in such story structures.

I confess that this was an aspect of story structure which I’d been unaware of before, but it makes absolute sense that the way we choose to tell our stories is shaped by the culture we grew up in.  As a white English woman, I have to remind myself that much of the history I was taught at school (what little I remember of it), was told by white people from the perspective of the culture of a colonial conquerer.  

I’ve always been at odds with the grand quest type of story structure.  I’m a writer of often quiet hopepunk stories.  And that’s always put me at odds with what the predominantly white English publishing industry  considers to be a ‘good story’. My work generally doesn’t conform to the hard-driving hero narrative.

Take the novel I’m re-writing at present.  It’s set on an orbital shipyard where several species live in harmony.  The story follows the lives of four main characters there.  Even the set-piece destruction at the end of the novel, where part of the shipyard is blown up,  results in minimal loss of life.  Hardly great hero stuff.

That’s another way that I differ from a lot of storytellers.The people in my books might be imaginary, but  I still feel queasy about killing them off.  I’ve been turned off many a book by detailed descriptions of gory fights to the death. Their authors have clearly been enjoying spilling their characters’ blood all over the page.  I never have.

Yes, novels are fiction, but a novel can hold great power.  It can move its fans to act out the events of the book, so I see it as my responsibility not to put more darkness into the world.  There’s enough already, thank you.

So how do you write a compelling narrative if your conflict is quiet and devoid of blood?  Well, conflict comes in many forms, and in my current novel a lot of it is generated by characters keeping old secrets.  The conflict of one character revolves around hiding from a brother who wants to kill him.  A second character is an unregistered telepath, who is also running away from her family.

A third character’s conflict is that he’s an illegally-created sentient AI in danger of destruction if his identity is discovered.  So my story is centred around the secrets which each character keeps, and the false identities they’ve constructed to keep those secrets.

This provides all sorts of opportunities for quiet conflict during the narrative.  It’s enough to provide tension in the story, and to drive it along.  I don’t need to make my characters into all-action heroes.