Infrastructure in fiction–in the books we read–is usually deep background.\u00a0 Characters drive vehicles…on roads, streets, trails, whatever.\u00a0 If the writer sees the roads in his\/her invented world as like the streets we have, then no reason to describe them…everybody knows what a street looks like; what matters is the person n a vehicle or on a bike or walking along. Older fiction often described more then modern fiction does, because readers weren’t bombarded daily with visual imagery of everywhere and everything kind of thing that’s there…for familiar foreign things (Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Scottish Highlands, tundra, glaciers, every kind of terrain from flat plains to rolling hills to canyons, to really BIG mountains on several continents, to swamps, to deep under the ocean) writers no longer need to construct detailed descriptions unless the plot relies on it.\u00a0 So the infrastructure of a story is, on the one hand, the physical background depicted in quick sketchy fashion for the reader to fill in from what’s easily found in visual form.\u00a0 You don’t have to describe every pothole, every building…just let the reader know whether potholes are common or rare, the buildings “what you’d expect” on an urban street or industrial hog farm, or unexpected in their setting.<\/p>\n
But in real life, we come in daily physical contact with infrastructure that we walk on, sit on, put a plate of food on, drive on and drive past.\u00a0 The sights, sounds, smells, tactile feel of *things* that impact our lives–the window that slides open easily (or cranks open) or the window that sticks….the smooth floor or the one with splinters or a sag on that side of the room, doors easy or hard to open, chairs comfortable or shaped just wrong for our bodies, colors that affect our mood, textures that reinforce or deny our importance, the feeling of safety inside one room or building, and the feeling of vulnerability inside another.\u00a0 All infrastructure that (when our characters encounter theirs) needs to be shown or inferred from their reaction to it.\u00a0 And in real life….infrastructures do fail, do require maintenance, or they fail faster.\u00a0 Writers live in the real world, even if they get to be multi-millionaires with movie and TV deals and stuff, and so writers depend on infrastructure to undergird their writing and relieve them from the frustrations that beset lesser writers who have to clean their own bathrooms,\u00a0 wash their own dishes,\u00a0 diaper their own kids…all infrastructure tasks.\u00a0 Most writers hope that either enormous success or a wealthy partner or some other miracle will relieve them from such duties (the infrastructure of Tolkin’s story “Leaf by Niggle” ) but plumbers make more per hour than most writers.<\/p>\n
So yesterday, after a weather change and rain and more rain coming, our personal infrastructure took a dive.\u00a0 We are fortunate to have a house with two bathrooms, so that if two people come down with a gut bug, each has an open toilet for their needs.\u00a0 Yesterday…first one failed, the attempt to clear it failed, and then a later retry of flushing produced a flood in the shower.\u00a0 And an ominous gurgle in the tub drain of the other bathroom.\u00a0\u00a0 I cleaned up the shower, which then didn’t want to drain normally, but at least looked more like a shower and less like a disaster.\u00a0\u00a0 For those who haven’t personally dealt with a drainage problem that resulted in regurgitation of toilet water…it’s doable, and one of those wand things with little disinfecting and bleach stuff on the stiff sponge you stick on the end…is really helpful.\u00a0 Cleans the grout very well.\u00a0 Apparently the stoppage when moved down the drainage system and blocked toilet #2, which at first had appeared unaffected, but by late afternoon couldn’t be flushed without flooding the shower in the first bathroom again.\u00a0 (I cleaned that up.)\u00a0\u00a0 This stoppage didn’t *act* like a full septic tank (been there) but we were, after all, a little overdue on having it pumped out, for Reasons, so we called a plumber and the septic tank service after the usual attempts at amateur fixing (that often do work) didn’t work.\u00a0\u00a0 R went out to start digging away the dirt over the septic tank.\u00a0 It was raining off and on.\u00a0 We’re older.\u00a0 It’s no longer an afternoon project.\u00a0\u00a0 Also…I had to find the photos of last time because he couldn’t remember exactly where the thing was.<\/p>\n
Again, we’re very fortunate to have access to a toilet in the house across the driveway that belonged to my mother, was left to me, and that we’ve kept as a guesthouse and as a future resource for our son (who’s been staying there this past year and a month, instead of in his apartment in the city…saves us the drive back and forth to bring him home on weekends.\u00a0\u00a0 We used to have more house guests more often, and we may again when it’s safer to travel and meet up.\u00a0 So back and forth we went for the calls of nature, but then…it rained more and was getting dark.\u00a0 Our computers are here, and access internet with DSL off the house phone.\u00a0 This–my desktop–is my writing computer.\u00a0 So to get work done I need to be here.\u00a0 OTOH, I could just take my current five unfinished knitting projects over there, but the reality is that I need to switch back and forth, knitting to keyboarding, multiple times in a day.\u00a0 And it’s raining.\u00a0 We need rain.\u00a0 Comments about rain do not mean I don’t want rain.\u00a0 I’d just rather be able to pee and poop in the house I work in. Infrastructure failure.\u00a0 Could be worse.\u00a0 Could be better.<\/p>\n
As usual, real-life problems are also Material!\u00a0 Material with a capital M for sure.\u00a0 Because random infrastructure failures are like a spice cabinet…if you have experience with hurricans (I do), street flooding (I do),\u00a0 storm-downed trees (ditto), nonworking toilets (ditto again and more than once), power outages, frozen pipes, leaking faucets, leaking roofs, flat tires, blow-outs on a freeway at high speed (check, check, check, check, check, check…) and many more (oh, yeah: grease fire in the kitchen, check) then you can ensure that your characters live in a realistic setting by tossing one of these, or a relatives of it, into their lives to ensure things don’t move too smoothly for anyone to believe.\u00a0 Few things bring realism to the fore like a common domestic problem: the stopped drain, the kid who throws up or geysers out the other end, the dog who gets skunked or cactused or porcupined (or fictional equivalent.)\u00a0 (Dogs in Elk is the larger version of dogs getting into a messy situation and anyone who doesn’t get the reference should hunt it down on the internet.\u00a0 Literally Dogs IN Elk, and there is not enough almond milk in the world…..it is superb and there’s no way to describe it; you have to find the original.)\u00a0 There are many, many flavors and sizes of infrastructure failures, from small mishaps to…well…Dogs in Elk.\u00a0 You can have salt, pepper, cumin, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cayenne pepper, turmuric, saffron, vanilla, cocoa…dozens of ’em.<\/p>\n
So, as I’m doing today, when the sh*t hits the stopped drain and diverts to the formerly clean shower,\u00a0 and the nearest functioning toilet is over there …when it’s raining…you can be glad it’s only rain, and not a deep freeze with the power off, and begin thinking where to put this in the current (or a future) book.\u00a0 Do your characters have sewage treatment in that spaceship?\u00a0 It could fail.\u00a0 Or a country house, one of the big elegant ones?\u00a0 (Did you ever notice how often some English writers mention a problem with the drains?)\u00a0 What kind of infrastructure do you characters live with and what do they do when the bridge is out, the road’s under water\/snow\/a foot of muck from the hog farm up the hill, their pump fails (any pump will\u00a0 fail and it’s usually at the worst time), pipes stop up or break…??\u00a0 If you want to reveal character, call in the infrastructure failures.\u00a0 They get the job done.<\/p>\n
I need to go visit the other house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Infrastructure in fiction–in the books we read–is usually deep background.\u00a0 Characters drive vehicles…on roads, streets, trails, whatever.\u00a0 If the writer sees the roads in his\/her invented world as like the streets we have, then no reason to describe them…everybody knows what a street looks like; what matters is the person n a vehicle or on Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":786,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785\/revisions\/786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}