My mom was a big reader. She loved mysteries, legal thrillers, and historical fiction, especially if they mixed in a little romance. She whipped through books by James Patterson and Mary Higgins Clark. But she never read science fiction, fantasy, or horror novels… except, of course, the ones I had published. (She was a good mom.)
I knew I didn’t write her kind of fiction. But just knowing that she was one of my readers changed the way I wrote. I began to follow what I call the “Mom Rule”: no matter what weird thing is happening on the page, could Thelma Gregory understand it, and more importantly, could she care about who it’s happening to?
I wrote my latest book, When We Were Real, during the last years of her life. The novel is set in a world that has been revealed to be a simulation. Two old friends join a bus tour to visit North America’s Impossibles, the glitches and physics-defying miracles in the landscape that prove that we’re code running inside a computer.
Explaining that premise to a woman who had never seen The Matrix would be difficult. The book is full of other hard-to-explain concepts, too: AI, time dilation tunnels, supercomputers….There’s also a large cast of characters, from all walks of life—everyone from engineers to internet influencers to rabbis—which is fitting for a story heavily influenced by Canterbury Tales.
Did I mention that the book makes frequent references to Chaucer, Sylvia Plath poems, and The Epic of Gilgamesh? My mom, as much as she read, had never been an English major, had never argued in bars about free will, and had never become obsessed with the works of Philip K. Dick—unlike me.
I began to follow what I call the “Mom Rule”: no matter what weird thing is happening on the page, could Thelma Gregory understand it, and more importantly, could she care about who it’s happening to?
Let’s take a moment to pity Thelma Gregory, a good Baptist woman who accidentally gave birth to a nerd. She was born in 1939, at the foot of the Smoky Mountains, and vividly remembered the day electricity came to her family’s house.
She married my dad straight out of high school, moved to Chicago with him, and raised me and my two sisters. She crocheted world-class afghans. In short, she was not a person my publishers expect my books to attract.
But I’m a needy writer (a redundant term), so my goal is to bring in everyone: hardcore genre fans, casual readers, and the people I’ll call the Reluctants—folks who’d no more pick up an SF or fantasy book than a feral cat.
The biggest hurdle to draw in the Reluctants is getting them to pick up the book at all. That’s the job of the cover artist and the marketers, who have to somehow make this feral cat seem adorable, or at least approachable. My job is to get those people to read the first paragraph, and then finish the page, and then keep turning pages, until they’re proud of me—I mean, until they get to the end.
The two questions embedded in the Mom Rule—how to explain to Thelma what’s happening and how to make her care about the people it’s happening to—turned out to have the same answer: I needed to explain what’s happening by making her care about those characters.
One of the first problems, especially in genre books, is presenting exposition—the information that’s necessary to understand enough of the world and what’s at stake so that the plot can move forward. These scenes usually take the form of an expert explaining an idea to a non-expert. (Even new writers know to avoid the “as you know, Bob” scenes where two know-it-alls explain things to each other.)
I hold off on exposition as long as possible. I try to let the mystery build until the reader’s begging to know the details. Even then, the explanation only comes when one character needs something from another, at that moment. Maybe the expert needs to persuade a reluctant boss to take action. Or they need an ally, and the only way they’ll get help is to explain what they’re up to.
In When We Were Real, Gillian is a professor and AI researcher on the run from a group of gun-toting incels who take The Matrix as scripture. She needs to talk her way onto the tour, and then keep her identity hidden from the other passengers. She’s forced to get help from the two old friends, but they don’t trust her until she tells them why she’s being hunted.
Those incels, who believe they’re in the one percent of truly conscious people in a world of NPCs, think she’s a tool of the Simulators. Gillian doesn’t tell them everything—just enough to get her onto the bus. But the reader knows she’s hiding something.
My mom, at this point in the book, would probably still be confused about terms like “non-player character.” But my mother could still understand that the professor is afraid she’ll die if she doesn’t get help.
Literary allusions and pop culture references are seasoning, not the steak.
If this were a movie scene, it would make emotional sense even with the sound off. Mom would see the men’s skepticism on their faces, and then the relief on the professor’s face when they agree to help her. And if my mom cares about Gillian, she’ll turn the page to see what happens to her, and find out what she’s hiding.
Intellectual content—what characters are thinking and arguing about—still matters, but if it’s not tied to the characters’ needs, it’s lifeless and didactic. For example, one of my goals for When We Were Real was to discuss many of the philosophical issues arise from living in a simulation. Why would the Simulators create it? What really matters in an artificial world?
To get those questions onto the page, I needed that large cast of bus passengers who cared deeply about them. A nun wondering if her belief in God is changed if He didn’t directly create the world keeps asking others for their opinion. A pregnant influencer, living in the attention economy of likes and follows, wants to make her child so interesting to the Simulators that they won’t delete him, and so must recruit other passengers into his “storyline.”
Everyone on the bus, which is run by a company called Canterbury Trails, is a pilgrim looking for an answer.
If the reader is amused by that Chaucer reference, great. But if another character’s Blade Runner joke goes over their head, no problem. Literary allusions and pop culture references are seasoning, not the steak. All that Thelma needs to follow the book is to understand what characters want, what happens if they don’t get it, and why they need it now.
My mom never got to read When We Were Real. It’s the first time I won’t be able to ask her, So… did you like it? But I’m hoping there are others out there, like her, who are willing to step into a strange book, and find inside it people they recognize.
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When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory is available via Saga Press.
