The Accidental Author, Intro, Part 4

Three Stories in Search of Reality

This is getting old, right? Bait and switch: I tell you I’m going to tell you why I wrote Singularity, then I get hung up on some digression or side topic. Well, this time I’m going to do it, I swear. Not least because, truth to tell, it’s getting to be a drag. Besides which, the stuff that’s coming is more interesting.

So this is it, the bite-the-bullet blogisode.

But First …

I do have to cut in here for just a moment to qualify what I was saying in the last installment, about the purpose of stories being to capture and explore human motivation. That’s true, but too narrowly construed. What I should have said is that the function of stories is to capture and explore causation in general. Now, it so happens that one of the perennially most interesting and survival-reinforcing types of causation to try grokking is the one that relates to human behavior/action (= motivation). But stories can be used to investigate other modes of causality as well.

Cases in point: mythologies, just-so stories, and the like. How the elephant’s child got his trunk and how winter turns to spring when Demeter gets her daughter Persephone back from Hades. Note, though, that even these causal explanations are cast in terms of quasi-human motivation: ’satiable curiosity and mother-love, respectively. We tend to project our motivations, and our stories, onto the cosmos as a whole.

Don’t believe it? Well, John Seely Brown of the Institute for Research on Learning holds that even expert physicists, when confronted with a novel experimental set-up, do not immediately repair to their mathematical models, but instead construct a “causal story”:[1]

This sort of imputation of causality — constructing a causal story — involves a great deal of informal reasoning and manipulating of assumptions that standard explications inevitably overlook. Rather than simply pondering abstractions, this essential sort of reasoning involves “seeing through” abstractions, models, and paradigmatic examples to the world they represent, and then penetrating that world to explore the causality that underlies it.

Hey, if we weren’t forever imputing human motives to the blind machinations of Nature, “anthropomorphize” wouldn’t even be a verb!

Well, that’s about enough of that.

And now on to our story. No, really.

Here, as promised, is not one story of what moved me to write Singularity, but three. Each true in its own way. Take your pick.

Story 1: Lost Weekends

If it hadn’t rained all that Memorial Day weekend, you wouldn’t be reading this now.

As it was, the rain suited my mood.

It was the apogee of the dot-com era, which meant that the end was already in sight. Everybody wanted a piece of the new economy. The venture capital funds were sloshing with money, and there’s the rub. There aren’t all that many knowledgeable VCs out there, certainly not enough for the major funds to add senior staff at the same pace as their investors were shoveling the dough into their hoppers. In a situation like that, you’ve got one of two choices: (a) start turning away cash (unthinkable to a VC culture whose mantra was then and remains today: “never leave money sitting on the table”), or (b) start increasing the value of the deals. That in turn amounted to a lockout on the low end, as inelasticity in the supply of venture capital expertise spiked the value of the average investment far beyond what most startups could hope to justify.

Mine included. Together with a computational linguistics friend from Georgetown University, I’d been trying to put together some conversational agent technology — software that would enable computers to interact with people in plain English. Don and I figured it would revolutionize customer service, Internet search, even entertainment. In the years since, it’s pretty much gone and done so, but Don and I weren’t a part of it.

All this was becoming achingly, transparently clear in the cold, gray light of that rainy Saturday dawn.

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I’m not certifiable. At least not in the dictionary-definition sense whereby madness consists in repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different result. Instead, I decided to do something completely different.

So it was that I set to work on that bleak Memorial Day weekend and, by Thanksgiving weekend, I had a first draft of Singularity.

Whew, that was pretty depressing! Let me back up and try again:

Story 2: It Was About Time

In fact, it was all about time.

A friend and fellow writer once told me that the thesis interruptus syndrome I spoke of a while ago was a common enough grad-student malady, a subconscious stratagem for forestalling entry into the world of adult responsibility. That was maybe okay back then, but now I found I hated the prospect of growing old without ever growing up.

Put plainly, I didn’t want to leave the second millennium behind with nothing lasting to show for it.

Besides, in between my dissertation meltdown and the point at which I picked up my metaphoric quill again, I’d had some pretty good “completion experiences” — including the creation of that selfsame conversational agent technology I was talking about a moment ago (the technology worked just fine, it was the funding that failed to materialize).

It seemed the time was right to take one more run at writing something big.

Story 3: The Rush

Would you believe I fell in love?

This is less a story about why I started writing than about why, having started, I kept on writing. But that’s an important ingredient in finishing …

I tried to put everything I love into Singularity: Carl Sagan, quantum mechanics, and crazy cosmologies. How it feels to stand on the bridge at midnight as your ship sets out for the open sea. The last line of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (the Thornton Wilder police wouldn’t let me leave it in — more about that later, when I talk about the missing scene from “Midnight to Dawn”). Even a brief passage from James Carse’s “The Way the Soul Sees.”

It got to the point where I fell in love, with the characters, with the story, with the pure, unalloyed joy of writing the thing. Because writing, at its core, conveys a sense of life as endlessly malleable, scary and exhilarating all at once. Those six months from Memorial Day to Thanksgiving became one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

* * *

So, let this be a lesson to you: real life is multi-determinate. Things happen for reasons, but very few things happen for only one reason.

[1] John Seely Brown, “Toward a New Epistemology for Learning,” in Claude Frasson and Gilles Gauthier (eds.), Intelligent Tutoring Systems: At the Crossroads of Artificial Intelligence and Education (Ablex: Norwood NJ, 1990).