This came up yesterday, when talking about writing.
Writing can be therapy, as we work out the consequences and play out roads not taken, or problems, or just the theoretical “If this goes on.”
Or, yes, killing that grad school advisor, if only in print. I didn’t do that specific one, but I can appreciate it. In the last book? Why yes, Deputy Director Spurgle is loosely based off a person who annoyed me deeply.
However, the act of writing can be just as helpful not just to you-the-writer and your readers… but to your subject matter experts.
One of the aspects of Logotherapy is Paradoxical Intention. This directs the client to give excessive attention or hyper-intention to trying to bring about the thing they most fear happening. With self-distancing and humorous exaggeration, the client cannot be anxious and intentional at the same time.
The first time this happened it was accidental. These days it’s intentional.
Whether the plot runs to tactical actions, or the quieter moments of downtime, I do my damnedest to research and write it correctly. But then I take it to my subject matter experts, and go, “how did I screw this up?”
And they come back, and sometimes sit and tell me how it should have gone.
I have to ask lots of questions, though not as many as I used to, and then I sit down and write it again. It’s not what happened in the past, it’s a scene in a dusty corner of a science fictional universe, with the characters I bring into it… but I know, and they know I know, what they’re telling me to write.
Unlike the dry distancing of an After Action Report, helping me write a scene is bringing “excessive attention and hyper-intention” to make something happen. By making it characters that aren’t theirs, in a world that’s not theirs, there’s plenty of self-distancing, and to get the point across, there’s plenty of humourous exaggeration.
And after they’ve had to review it carefully five times, including the re-reads of my improving attempts to write the scene… the emotional charge that specific memory brings is rather drained, and it feels like unloading a little weight out of your ruck on a long march.
I am not fully in control of this process. Sometimes I don’t even get to choose when we’re doing it.
There was a scene in which I couldn’t find anything useful to describe, so I simply solved that by having the viewpoint character looking the wrong way. I got called out on that by my love in beta, and had to stop and rewrite the chapter with full gory detail…
At which point I grumped at him, “I thought you said you were never going to write about Africa!”
He grinned cheekily. “I’m not. You are!”
sigh
Be good to your Alpha readers, and your subject matter experts, and they’ll be good to you.
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Logotherapy”
“Or, yes, killing that grad school advisor, if only in print.”
This is absolutely true. My first book began as a reaction to my THIRD time at university. The first two times got me a BA and a calculus course, plus a stab at architecture. (I did well but bailed as it was obvious there was no money to be made as an architect in Canada. Nobody building anything.)
Third time was in New York state, at SUNY college. So many people needed to !@#. (You get the idea.)
My first fantasy was driving a vehicle big enough to bully all the tailgaters and fender-threateners on the Sawmill Parkway. I drove that thing every day for two years, what a nightmare. (My fantasy was made real when I drove my F-250 crew cab down the Sawmill to White Plains on a holiday. Sweet Justice…)
Accordingly, my first book is filled with giant tanks. Nobody is going to mess with 33,000 tons of fusion-powered doom. Or at least, not twice.
Being at school as a grown ass man, weathered by life as it were, I did not have much time for the antics and requirements of the academic set. (Class attendance? At a university? I signed in as Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin ever time. Except when I signed in as Mao Tse Tung.)
Accordingly, my main character gets transformed from normal guy to armored saurian troll big enough to eat the administrator’s head, or slap some sense into the punks fighting in the cafeteria. (A feature of SUNY colleges as it turns out. The punks fight each other at lunch time. Over poker games. Not a well advertised feature.)
Something I did not expect though, it took me 20 years to write the book. Because as it turns out, it is extremely difficult to use overwhelming force in a reasonable, responsible manner. Merely looming over miscreants and showing them your teeth has a very specific and quite limited utility in modern life. The people and organizations you need to quell to live a nice quiet life are widely spread and well hidden.
It took a long time to figure out how Our Hero was going to fix all that. The answer I settled on was giant tanks and robot girlfriends. The most personally satisfying way to defeat an alien invasion. ~:D
Much easier to write the Alice Haddison story. See zombie, shoot zombie.
I wrote a parody and showed it to my fellow grad-students. “Did I get [redacted]?” They grinned and said, “You got all of them.”
I’ve also used characters to work through stuff I didn’t want to admit needed to be worked through.
Then there’s the story about… Ah, yeah. Statute of limitations and all that.
See Rex Stout’s =The League of Frightened Men=.
No alpha readers yet… I wrote a story about a child with cancer(which I know a lot about on a personal level), wondered if I had exposed my inner self too much, and my siblings yawned. Then I wrote a story about a girl fleeing a cult, and hanging out on a farm in Iowa (which I know from research and visiting on vacation for years), and they sat up and told each other to read it if anyone wanted to understand me. Very mysterious. The big difference between the two books really is that the second one has lots more commas and is better written.
I just got through reading Christiana Brand’s Death in High Heels ($1.99 on Kindle), which was the first of eight well-regarded WWII-and-later murder mysteries by Brand. Supposedly, she took her evil boss from her then current job demonstrating household gadgets, transplanted said boss to the setting of one of her previous jobs (dress shop), and bumped her off there, using a particularly nasty poison. (TBH, I don’t think I would have spotted the murder victim as the RL evil boss; she’s a sleazy schemer but there’s at least two other characters who look more like standard issue evil boss material to me; and one of them gets off rather lightly all things considered).
Revisiting some old favorites from 17-20 years ago has also had me going, “Oh, that’s where I got that from.” Or not so long ago: I was rereading the first Mageworlds (bought in 2015) and realized that the not-Falcon’s hot rod engines (a plot point allowing not-General Solo to determine that his daughter faked her own death and the crash of the not-Falcon), were probably the inspiration for the Vanner’s hotrod engines in my first Star Master book (written 2019-2020, pub. late 2020), which enable the Vanner to receive further, maguffiny updates.