Madeline Ashby on why you have to earn your endings
Madeline Ashby's novel Company Town is set on a city-sized oil rig off the east coast of Canada, where a violent mystery unfolds in the wake of the rig's acquisition by a powerful family. The novel was defended by Measha Brueggergosman on Canada Reads 2017.
Madeline Ashby answers eight questions submitted by eight of her fellow writers in the CBC Books Magic 8 Q&A.
1. Colleen Murphy asks, "Why do you love words?"
Words make me feel strong. Words are what I've always had instead of physical strength, or beauty, or money, or much of anything else that the dominant culture says is a source of power. I've been very privileged in a lot of ways, but growing up I didn't understand those privileges, or the intangible way they'd been conferred upon me. So, with that limited understanding, as a child I felt that my words were the only weapon I had, the only way I had to define myself and create an identity for myself.
2. Adam Haslett asks, "From which other art or discipline have you drawn the most aesthetic inspiration?"
Probably cinema. I have a fairly keen visual sense of how things should unfold within a scene, physically, and that comes from loving cinema. I teach science fiction film at OCAD, and I teach it as a cinephile in addition to being a science fiction writer. But I also did my share of summer stock theatre as a kid, and so I leaned to "block" my scenes, to have my characters doing "business" in scenes, to have them moving and breathing and doing as a way of demonstrating who they were. I think a lot about how my characters hold themselves in space, and that comes from having been onstage in front of people.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my love affair with Japanese animation and manga, though. Growing up, anime and manga were the among the few places to find affirming stories about women or queer people in any kind of science fiction context. (It took me a while to find William Gibson's work. He's always done right by his women characters. I met him this year at Comic-Con and I wanted to thank him for that, but I was overwhelmed just by meeting him.) They also had a low-key approach to exposition, which is the central problem in science fiction. There's very little explanation in anime or manga, just a depiction of how the future works in real time. It's all showing and very little telling. And as a person who despises overblown paragraphs about how a single drill bit works on a space station or something, I appreciate that. I read stories for story, not for engineering porn.
3. Kate Taylor asks, "Do you always know the ending before you start a novel?"
Yes. I have a series of images that play out in my head. I usually see a single defining image of the ending, and a lot of the work around the ending is about refining that image, seeing it from different angles, figuring out how to get there. However, I'm fairly rigorous about not writing the ending until I've written the manuscript. If I wrote the end first, I'd never finish the novel as a whole. You have to work to earn the achievement of that initial vision.
4. CC Humphreys asks, "Is there another type of writer you secretly yearn to be?"
A faster one.
Aside from that, I should mention that I grew up reading a lot of Stephen King. In fact, I cut my teeth — literally — on my mother's paperback copy of his early collection, Night Shift. She still has the book with my teeth marks in it. And now I'm married to a horror writer and journalist, David Nickle. So occasionally I consider writing horror fiction. Whenever I voice this, Dave tells me that I already am a horror writer, I've just got everyone fooled what with all the robots and so on. I'd really like to write a gothic novel one day.
I suppose I would also enjoy being a mystery writer. Or rather, I would enjoy having the organization of a mystery writer. They understand how plot works better than anybody else. They have to hold a massive amount of clues and details and red herrings in their heads. It's really impressive.
5. Jane Urquhart asks, "Could you write a novel about two square metres of outdoor space (urban, rural, or wilderness)?"
Two square meters is about the size of a grave, isn't it? So I think it's possible.
6. Erin Bow asks, "Do you love your villains?"
Passionately and unabashedly. The villain from my first novel, vN, is an abusive grandmother who just happens to be a self-replicating humanoid robot. In the prologue, a little girl robot eats her alive, and then carries her granny as a partition within her consciousness afterward. I wanted it to be metaphor for how depression sometimes works — about what it's like to live with a voice that wants you to destroy yourself. But I know other people found it to be resonant in terms of how some family dynamics can work, too. That no matter how far you run, the voice of your abuser or your bully will always be in your head.
Between the covers of Company Town, villainy is a lot more insidious. Sure there's a primary antagonist, but the villainy is more evenly distributed, shall we say. More characters have more opportunities for villainy — especially the small, petty, grasping, unthinking, ignorant kind. Having co-edited a James Bond anthology, I can safely say that not everyone is a James Bond villain. Most of us are just selfish.
7. Robert Currie asks, "What writers do you read, not only because you admire their writing, but because you think you can learn from them?"
I tend to really admire and envy the fiction of poets. Poets have a much better sense of the potential lying dormant within a language. They see all sorts of opportunities that a sort of plain prose writer like myself might not see. So I have a real love for the work of Michael Ondaatje for that reason. I also have a lot of respect for translators, because they have to think like poets. I've been so influenced by the work of Haruki Murakami, but I wouldn't have him in my personal canon without his translators, who are so careful with his voice. The closest I get to this is writing for my work to be read aloud. You cut way down on useless, turgid exposition in genre work when you write for your work to be read aloud by a human being. Those interminable sentences about the world-changing power of alternative currencies evaporate from your prose when you force yourself to read them aloud, or even better, to read them in front of another human being. If you watch carefully, you can see the exact moment when someone tunes out. And that's how you know it's bad.
Genre-wise, I pay close attention to the work of Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis, Chuck Wendig. I really need to catch up and read Laurie Penny's latest. I love her columns and I suspect I'd love her fiction, too. Ursula K. Le Guin is an artistic heroine of mine. I like a lean, spare prose style. I think you can learn a whole lot about how to exposit from detective fiction, like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But also playwrights and screenwriters — think about the thorny policy stuff in The West Wing, for example, or the weird real estate shenanigans Mamet somehow explains in Glengarry Glen Ross. If you can share information of that complexity and make it meaningful to an audience, then you can also do science fiction.
8. Nino Ricci asks, "If one day science manages to make us immortal, will fiction still be relevant?"
Immortality will make fiction more relevant than ever. If we figure out how to live forever, we will either be very wealthy and profoundly bored, or very poor and profoundly anguished. Either way, we'll need a good story to get us through.