Polite Fictions

The first of a Friday Fiction series highlighting thoughts around writing, focusing on the fantasy genre.

A ‘polite fiction’ is a situation where we all see an awkward truth but we ignore it to save confusion or embarrassment. There are many polite fictions in, well, fiction.

For example, when writing or reading fiction we pretend it’s normal to be hearing people’s thoughts. Close third person point of view presents the fiction of hearing the character’s thoughts as though we are them. In novels with more than one point of view we are faced with believing we can hear the thoughts of multiple people. There are informal rules writers use to help the reader do this, but it’s still a polite fiction.

Characters’ thoughts are written far more coherently than they think them. (Or would have thought them, had they been real.) Our thoughts are a messy combination of images, memories and words, and rarely form anything approaching sentences. Yet we seldom realise that an internal monologue is a polite fiction.

This is also true of dialogue. When we talk to each other our dialogue is full of false starts, filler, stuttering, repetition, incomplete sentences, talking over each other, pauses, laughter, noise and non-verbal language. Somehow our written dialogue has to convey the rich layers of meaning in real conversation without all the messy extras. Instead of reporting verbatim:

            “… I mean… there’s no… I can’t explain what I was, ah, what was going on,” [points to her head, sniffs] “it’s like…”

            [Raises eyebrows] “You must have some, some sort of idea, surely?”

“… I was zoned, um, spaced out, cos of, did I tell you, like, I didn’t sleep…”

“Yes, you did, god!”

“… last night?” Laughter. “Oh, um, sorry.”

we write:

“I can’t explain what was going on in my head,” she said, rubbing at her nose.

“You must have some idea, surely?”

“I zoned out because I’m tired. Did I tell you I didn’t sleep last night?”

He laughed. “Yes, you did.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

This convention is extended to the language itself. Most novels sold in the western world are printed in English, even though in many cases the language being spoken by the characters is not. This is particularly true of secondary world fantasy, where the possibility that the characters would converse in actual 21st century English is vanishingly remote. (It’s also highly unlikely any far future conversation will be in recognisable English, given how rapidly language evolves, and the probability that western hegemony will have been upset by then.)

We accept the fiction that the story is being TOLD, not recorded. It has undergone transcription, translation and finessing to end up in the novel on our laps. Even this is a polite fiction: really it came from the novelist’s mind. But because we want to immerse ourselves in an alternate reality we imagine all these processes have occurred – when we think of them.

A couple of interesting points follow. First, recently we’ve seen a reaction among readers and writers against faux-medieval fantasy. The ‘faux’ is the polite fiction, an amalgam of cliche, convention and assumption (often accompanied by borderline racism) that made the novels easier to read. As our genre becomes more diverse we shed a number of these built-in short-cuts. We are challenged by different words, different artefacts and different dialogue. Our genre becomes exciting again.

Second, what about semi-textual accompanying material? Chief among this is the map: many secondary world fantasies have maps, and virtually none of them are drawn in the way the world in question would have produced them. There’s a general Tolkien-derived map style – Ye Olde Fantasy – that readers accept, doing the same mental gymnastics they do with the actual text. They are generally much simpler and easier to read than genuine historical maps, for the same reason dialogue is simpler than recorded speech. But just like speech, some of the richness is lost. And, just like the novel itself, it is past time the map because more diverse. More of our polite fictions need to go.