Tag Archives: Stranger in a Strange Land

Connessione

Together, you and I have arrived at the end of this seven-part series of posts. We’ve been working our way through the principles in Michael J. Gelb’s wonderful book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. For each principle, we’ve been exploring how it relates to fiction writing.

The last principle is Connessione: a recognition and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena—systems thinking.

ConnessioneLeonardo had a fascination with the connections between things. He’d study how a tossed stone caused expanding circular ripples in water. He wrote, “The earth is moved from its position by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.” His notebooks were a disorganized, chaotic stream of consciousness, as if his mind would flit from one thing to a seemingly unrelated thought. In a strange echoing of what we might consider Eastern philosophy, he wrote: Everything comes from everything, and everything is made out of everything, and everything returns into everything.”

In what ways should a writer of fiction embrace the principle of Connessione? Here are some that occur to me:

  • When you’re thinking of plot ideas for stories to write, look for separate ideas from the world around you and connect them. To pick just three examples of this, consider how Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series combines the ideas of TV reality shows and war; how Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein combines Tarzan, Jesus, and Mars; how Herman Melville’s Moby Dick combines whaling and obsession.
  • Think of the interconnections between characters within your stories. For characters A and B there are (at least) four connections: how A feels about B internally, how A behaves toward B externally, and the same internal feelings and external behavior of B toward A. Now imagine three, four, five, or more major characters and convey, in your story, the rich web of interconnectedness between them all. This alone will be the subject of a future blog post.
  • Your stories have an internal, systemic structure. They are a connection of related parts. The chapters (or sections) are themselves composed of scenes, and build on each other to form the integrated whole of the story.
  • The story element of theme is a connection between concrete things in a story to abstract ideas in real life. Similarly, the techniques of metaphor and simile are connections in the form of comparisons—relating something you’re describing in your story to something familiar or understandable to the reader.

See? If you write fiction, you must embrace the notion of Connessione to some extent. In fact, it helps to practice all seven principles— Curiosità, Dimonstrazione, Sensazione, Sfumato, Arte/Scienza, Corporalita, and Connessione. Perhaps you’ll not become as well remembered or universally admired as da Vinci, but you can think like him, and write fiction as he would have. That’s the aim of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 11, 2015Permalink

Dear Robert Heinlein

Yeah, I know the records say you’ve been dead since 1988, but I figure you found or inherited some way to cheat the reaper, like your character Lazarus Long did.  By some weird and inexplicable means, I think you could be reading this.

170px-RAH_1929_YearbookOver my lifetime, I’ve read several of your novels and short stories.  In my high school and college days, I read “By His Bootstraps,” Time Enough for Love, Star Beast, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, Farnham’s Freehold, and The Number of the Beast. In later years I read Friday, Grumbles from the Grave, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I’m not sure what it was about your work that stuck with me most.  Maybe the cool future technologies.  Perhaps the gritty, wise-cracking, rough-and-ready characters, all of whom pulled themselves up from humble backgrounds.  The writing style, full of well-turned phrases, could have been part of it.  Or possibly the hard-nosed, no-excuses, freedom-loving philosophy undergirding it all.  I can’t say, and likely I’ll never know.

Though I didn’t realize this until later, there is some similarity in our backgrounds, yours and mine.  I was born about fifty years after you, but also grew up in the Midwest, also graduated from the Naval Academy with an engineering degree and also served in the Navy.  After leaving the service, both of us turned to writing fiction.

I’m not comparing my writing to yours, just pointing out reasons I can relate to your life experiences.  After I began writing, I began to appreciate your approach to authorship even more.  I liked your rules for writing with their linkage of hard work to eventual success.

I also began to see how different a writer you were from some of my other author heroes.  Jules Verne lucked into a new field; no one else was writing science fiction.  Isaac Asimov took the established model of the time (publishing short stories in pulp magazines) and churned out an enormous output following that model.

By contrast, you rejected the status quo and uplifted the whole genre.  You believed science fiction should be regarded as respectable literature and worked to bring that about.  Your success benefitted not only you, but other authors too.  Without question, your stories inspired generations of engineers, scientists, and writers.

When I pondered over my own portfolio of published work, I had to confess I didn’t see the Heinlein influence there.  My story themes and characters differ quite a bit from yours.  But when I thought about it more deeply, I realize now what I took from your example wasn’t a writing style, but the hope that a guy like me could sell stories.

For inspiring me to be a writer, not necessarily to write like you, thanks.  And if you don’t mind, I’ll ask a favor.  How about taking time off from shaking up the status quo in your current plane of existence, to sprinkle just a bit of your writing talent on—

                                                              Poseidon’s Scribe

November 11, 2013Permalink