My wife and I had family over for Easter, ranging in ages from my 93-year-old mother-in-law, to the nine-month-old baby boy of our nephew and niece, and every age group in between. Four generations.
Like many families, we’re spread out throughout the U.S., and on my side of the family, throughout Spain as well. Because of distance, we see each other sporadically. Nothing like the old days, where everyone lived in the same village. Back then, you didn’t have to say goodbye. People would just walk back to their homes, and in all likelihood, you’d see them tomorrow.
Not anymore. Now at parting it’s: hope to see you again soon, careful driving, good luck with your new job, excited for you starting college, take care, we love you guys, and so on.
So when my brother-in-law gave me a hug and said, “A labor of love,” for an instant I thought he meant the family gathering at our—by modern American standards—modest home. He said something else—I don’t remember his exact words—and I realized he was talking about my new novel.
Something I wasn’t expecting during our Easter gathering had happened a couple of hours before. I had been informed that a softcover proof of my new Sci-Fi novel, Beneath An Alien Sun, would be delivered the Tuesday after Easter Sunday. I was eager to review it, hoping the glossy cover would do a better job of bringing the images and colors more alive than the matte cover of the previous proof I’d received.
I don’t remember what we were talking about between sips of beer as we stood in our crowded kitchen, me, my sons, eighteen-year-old grandson, and brothers-in-law. From the kitchen you can see the big bay window in the living room, and anyone who approaches the front door.
“Who’s that?” someone said. “Looks like a delivery guy,” someone else said. You’d think I’d remember who said what. I don’t, because I was thinking, Oh wow, I think that’s my new proof!
Someone brought the packet inside, and my five-year-old granddaughter immediately went to work tearing open the package with her methodical little fingers and repeating in her sweet little voice, “What’s this? What’s this?”
And there, sure enough, was my glossy softcover proof. My grandson was all over it. Then my sons. Then I thought, I have to show it to my brother-in-law, who whenever he sees me asks me how the book is going, and who would later characterize this novel, which took me three and a half often grueling years to write, as a labor of love.
What’s love got to do with it?
I’m getting there… In my previous post, Living the Sci-Fi Life, I wrote that, in my next post (this one), I would talk about why I decided to write a Sci-Fi novel and discuss in a little more detail why I write at all. So here goes.
Like many writers, I was encouraged from an early age to write. My first memory of that happened when my fifth-grade teacher dragged me out of class to show two of her colleagues a poem I’d written. The experience was mystifying. I didn’t fully understand why it was happening. I felt more like a spectator than a participant, standing there in the hallway hearing my teacher and her colleagues discuss my poem while other children sat at their desks wondering what the heck was going on out in the hallway. Was that kid in trouble?
Getting that kind of attention early on is not the reason I write. Writers—I don’t mean dabblers, I mean those who are in it for the long haul (the ones who persist until they can no longer write a decent sentence) really have no choice. They can’t not write. And when their circumstances and obligations, which can persist for decades, allow for only writing in disconnected spurts, the writer feels incomplete.
I’m fortunate to be able to write almost every day now, for hours at a time. And as fruitless as some writing days can be, writing on a consistent basis helps me understand myself and others better. And with that understanding comes greater compassion, and yes, a more profound sense of what we mean when we talk about love.
I don’t mean romantic love. I mean agape love, which happens when we choose to love others, while seeking nothing in return. And “others” means everyone, at least to the best of our ability. Writing gives writers a special opportunity to connect with others, with total strangers, with fellow humans. And when we connect on a purely human level, we find that we are more alike than we are different.
Look, I’m not suggesting all writers write because love compels them. It can take a while to get there. Writing can be an enormously selfish enterprise , like any art or passion, and it can also be motivated by any number of reasons that are as complicated and inscrutable as any given writer’s life, circumstances, and mindset. But when the act of writing takes a leap beyond the writer’s ego, it can touch the heart of another human in a way that makes us all better.
In the first paragraph of my Acknowledgements page in Beneath An Alien Sun, I wrote:
The gift of kindness, distributed without discrimination or self-interest by ordinary people, is always a cause for celebration. It was these disciples of compassion who inspired me to spend the past three plus years writing Beneath An Alien Sun. In my life, these people have included family, friends, neighbors, teachers, classmates, coworkers, and strangers, individuals whose self-giving acts and words remind us in the most simple and beautiful ways what it means to be human.
My brother-in-law was right, this book was a labor of love. That’s what I want my writing to be. But why Sci-Fi? Well, I’ve always loved watching it and reading it (Star Trek, The Martian Chronicles, Dune, Star Wars, etc.), though, as a writer, literary fiction is more my thing (especially with a touch of magical realism).
The simple answer is that I want my grandchildren to want to read something I’ve written. The more complex answer is, I want the fictional worlds I create to allow for experience beyond our senses and our limited understanding of the universe and what it means to be human. The unimaginable becoming imagined, the impossible becoming possible. Within the context of our shared humanity, we are, each of us, spectacularly unique, and so much more than meets the eye. And love is infinitely better for all of us, and our planet, than indifference and hate.
A Sci-Fi novel—if you don’t want it to sound like a technical manual—is a bear to write. At least for me it was. But it does allow you to go where no human has gone before. And unleashing one’s imagination can be a whole lot of fun, once you’ve figured out how to manage all the world-building details and tamed the plot and timeline monsters. In the end, it’s the human story, our story, that matters, regardless of time or place.
Sci-Fi? Yes, absolutely! Who can resist a good Sci-Fi story, right?
Live long and prosper, my friends,
Ramon