Teaching in Writing Fiction

Writers have to provide a certain amount of solid grounding in their world, whether it be realism in an “ordinary world” or explaining the rules in a world of magic. But they have to do it carefully — not enough grounding and readers shake their heads at fancy words with no meaning; too much explanation and it comes off like sitting in a lecture in a stuffy classroom.

I wrote that “sitting in a lecture in a stuffy classroom” metaphor very deliberately, because grounding a reader in the rules of the world is, in effect, teaching. Doing this grounding not only helps the reader understand the world, but teaches them something new.

I remember a Jayne Ann Krentz book I once read (yes, I have read fantasy, and some of it is quite good) where the lead male owned a winery. At one point, he strides through the winery checking up on things. That’s about the only detail Krentz provided about the winery — he could have been touring an aircraft carrier for all we knew. This really stood out to me because I used to make wine at home and had considered starting a commercial winery at one point. My character would have stopped by the lab to discuss pH levels and brix — sugar levels — of grape must going into the process and the percentage alcohol and residual sugar of a batch waiting to go into oak barrels if it was red wine or bottling if it was white. He would tour the barrel stock and take a sample from a 55-gallon barrel with a wine thief and taste how it began to mellow under the influence of the oak. With these details, the reader understands more about wine — and the male protagonist is portrayed as having a keen eye on details, an understanding that winemaking is as much a craft as a business, and a rapport with his workers. That’s the beauty of teaching — done right, it develops the rest of the story — character, plot, theme, or all three — as well as teaching the reader about something new.

I do a certain amount of teaching in my own writings — I am, after all, a professor. I write what would be called magical realism if I wrote literary fiction instead of genre fiction (e.g. romance, science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, erotica). Sometimes what I write just has to be revealed rather than explained because there is no logical explanation — for example, the mystical aspects of my writing such as seeing visions and hearing the voices of the Gods (sounds epic, but the recipients of these preternatural events are a twenty-year-old college student and a fifty-year-old architect.)

Some extraordinary things need to be explained — such as the rules around time travel:

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And sometimes I teach the most prosaic things:

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