Designing Novels, Part 1: The Gimmick
I've been meaning for some time to talk a bit about the process by which I design novels. I don't claim that this is the only way to make a novel, but it's the way my stories come together in those odd back-of-the-head places that I can only barely perceive.
And that's a good place to start: Novels are emergent processes. You don't design one quite the same way you design an electronic circuit. From my experience with my own work in novels (I've written several, though only one is published) and from talking to other people who do it, something like this happens: You toss a certain number of consciously designed elements into the chipper/shredder in the back of your mind, and then you open the gates to see what comes out. Some people toss more consciously designed elements into the chipper than others do. Some people just start writing, and after a few thousand words take a break to see if what has emerged has any value or is just incoherent mulch.
I've tried it both ways, and at many points along the gradient. As usual, there's a sweet spot in the spectrum, where the degree of conscious design is just enough to feed the individual characteristics of the mad chipper/shredder operated by your subconscious. Too much design, and the chipper gums up and the process grinds to a halt. Too little, and the chipper spits back incoherent blather that never coalesces into anything you could call a story with a straight face.
Where do you start? I always begin with what a call The Gimmick, though many call it The McGuffin. I don't like the term "McGuffin," because it implies something that advances the plot without being especially relevant to it. A good gimmick lies at the very core of all the conflict that besets your characters, and it may well be the thing that your readers remember years after reading the story. Gimmicks are extremely important in SF and often in fantasy as well. (Literary fiction generally dispenses with gimmicks entirely, and relies completely on characterization.)
The gimmick in The Cunning Blood is not so much the Sangruse Device (an intelligent nanocomputer) as it is a planet where electrical things don't work. They don't work because of a bacterium-sized nanodevice that homes in on the magnetic fields generated by electrical currents of useful intensity, and breaks down the metal of the circuit's conductive elements until the current stops flowing. Earth authorities (who designed the nanodevice and turned it loose on a nearby Earthlike planet) assume that this condemns those who live on Hell to a sort of pseudo-Victorian gaslight existence. What they forget is that there are more paths to high technology than the electrical ones that Earth followed. Diesel engines, chemical lighting, photochemical amplifiers, mechanical and fluidic computers, fiber optics, they're all in there-and they're all real. Where electricity is crucially important, the Hellions use wires consisting of liquid mercury in thin hoses. The current-sensing nanomachines can't disrupt liquids.
I could have spun a lot of stories around that one gimmick, and I may do one or two more. The point is that it's a good gimmick, and a memorable one. I put a lot of energy into researching it, and many people have told me that Hell sounds completely plausible and real to them.
You come up with gimmicks by paying attention to the physical world. I read a lot of science, a habit I got into when I was in high school, and Isaac Asimov was publishing a fat paperback full of fascinating science essays every few months. I had a nose for the odd corners of science and technology, especially the ones that never made it into the mass market. Popular Science ran an article about fluidic computers when I was in high school. I read as much about Babbage's mechanical computers as I could as soon as I heard about them. You do this for a few years, and stuff starts to precipitate out of that mass of intriguing facts in the back of your head.
I keep a notefile of gimmicks, and add to it when odd things occur to me. Could an astrobleme have such high walls that the atmosphere would be different inside the bleme than outside? I think so. It's a gimmick. I may never use it, but it's intriguing. Could hacked bacteria separate isotopes of metal salts dissolved in seawater? I don't see why not. Not every gimmick is big enough to hang an entire novel on, but there's no law saying that a novel can only have one gimmick.
Once your gimmick is in hand, you have two ways to go: You can start playing what-if, to see what would happen if the gimmick were made real and turned loose, and then build a plot around the consequences. Or, you can design a cast of characters and see how that gimmick might affect them, which would then suggest a plot. Stories have been done both ways. We'll talk more about that in my next entry here.