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Introduction to Spit Ghost Woman

 

“My students had been told all of their lives to write what they knew.  I always began by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.”  First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence.  Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.”

-Toni Morrison

 

Until I started writing science fiction, all the so-called fiction I wrote in college was based directly off my own life.  I rehashed almost-wacky scenarios I’d gotten into with my friends or, if I was feeling especially creative, I put characters I knew in real life into slightly different circumstances.  I thought that every detail taken directly from real life was crucial to making the overall story genuine and interesting, but given that I only had direct access to nineteen very comfortable years of life experience, my stories were so boring that it was hard to get through even a few pages of them.  The mantra of “write what you know” had locked me into a dull pattern that kept me from producing the kind of fiction I actually enjoyed reading: books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ursula Le Guin, Tolkien, anything that pulled me into another world and gave me new perspectives with which I could view my own life.

 

My first attempt at stretching outside my own life experience was a year ago, when I wrote a story for a short fiction class that had nary a college student in sight.  Still, the plot and setting (oil spill in western Michigan) were both very familiar, which allowed me to coast on imagination and plot development.  It was an improvement but still too dry, too dependent on events I thought would be likely to happen.  At the same time, I was re-reading and devouring the science fiction TV series , remembering how much fun it was to get sucked into an entirely different universe to an extent where the universe started bleeding into my own life and making it seem more beautiful and adventurous.  I wanted to make something like that.  I wanted to write a story that could take the reader somewhere outside, maybe not a better world, but a surprising world, a beautiful world, a world that would make them look at their own lives differently.

 

I wrote a story called “Smoke and Honey,” set in a brothel on an obscure mining-economy moon some hundreds of years in the future.  I now know that that type of story is known as “soft” science fiction, where the actual technology takes a backseat to plot and character development.  That story is mainly about the cold-hearted owner of the brothel, Saro, suddenly becoming responsible for a boy she believes to be her nephew.  Taking myself out of my comfort zone in “Smoke and Honey” improved my handling of setting and character, and it was the first story I was truly proud of.  My professor became interested in one of the side characters, Rita, and we have been working over the past seven months on a longer novel-style piece based off the setting of “Smoke and Honey” with Rita as the central character.  That novel is Spit Ghost Woman.

 

Writing has helped me control my urge to write about myself.  The parameters of writing a novel based on another planet hundreds of years in the future make it impossible to simply mimic my own life.  I’ve realized that the mantra “write what you know” doesn’t have to mean every little external detail; it means writing what I know about human relationships, about loneliness, about sex and the pull of religion and free-trade market economics.  The process of building the world of has enabled me to put what is close to my heart on the page.  It has no indications of what my daily life is like as a college student, but it is nevertheless a map of what is important to me and who I am.  That process is reflected here, in my capstone project.

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