Q/A with Ted Chiang

I recently had the chance to attend a Q/A event with one of my favorite science fiction writers, Ted Chiang. As a brief intro for those of you who haven’t read his work, he’s the mind behind “The Story of Your Life”, the short story which inspired the movie Arrival¹. His short stories are known for their soulfulness and focus on themes such as free will and determinism². On a personal level, his stories resonate with me, since they’re a great example of a thought process to aspire towards, which is to start with simple questions, and then envision the consequences of what could happen if those basic tenets were to change. What follows is an excerpt from the Q/A session, curated to emphasize various themes that the discussion evolved along³:

• How has being a technical writer affected your research process?

• • I’d honestly say that they are different activities, and there isn’t as much transfer. However, there is one thing that connects the two activities and is the reason why I got into technical writing, which is that I’m very interested in clear explanations. This theme sort of shows up in my writing, which is to help readers understand abstract ideas through simpler explanations. I think a really good explanation can be beautiful, mind-expanding, and help us understand previously opaque things. So I guess there is some overlap between technical writing and the research process, in the initial impulse for clear communication.

• What are your thoughts on the writing process (and why it takes long)?

• • I don’t write a lot. It takes me forever to write, and I wish that this weren’t the case. Many of my stories revolve around free will and determinism. I usually start with some idea and then realize that I’ve started writing about it again. I’m somewhat obsessed with those ideas. As a writer, you should write about things that you’re obsessed with unless some editor tells you to stop writing about it and maybe not even then. Ultimately, you have to write about what you’re energized by. In the abstract, you should write about something which energizes you. Hopefully, all of your stories don’t end up the same, but that’s unlikely to happen if you have diverse interests. Write about things you’re energized by since ultimately that’s where your creative energies come from.

• Are you aiming for these “aha” moments where you catch the reader (or is it more accidental)?

• • I wouldn’t say that it’s a coincidence. I am interested in what you’d call recontextualization. This is what happens when some scene in which the reader interprets one way, with the addition of extra information, the reader can interpret in another way. This is a potentially powerful technique in fiction, and there’s a lot of different ways in which you can do something like this. For example, movies that have twist endings are usually successful only if the new information is coherent. If it’s one of those endings where at the moment you feel “aha”, but in retrospect, you question whether that makes sense, that isn’t it. I guess I’m interested in this general technique of how things can be interpreted in a different context. It’s a technique that I think is interesting to me, but it’s not something that I’m deliberately aiming for. Since it’s a general idea that I’m interested in, it recurs in my work, without consciously trying.

• In one of your stories, you write that making information more accessible is an intrinsic good. Do you believe in that?

• • I generally think that’s true (i.e. the more information is better). One possible position the alternative leads to is that some people know more than others, and they can decide what is appropriate for others to know, which is an idea I’m not comfortable with. Or for example that things should be withheld from the public. I think there are relatively few things that should be withheld. Transparency, for the most part, is a good thing. It’s hard for me to generate examples where hiding information from people is good. In terms of weighing the trade-offs, I generally think that more information is better.

• What are some of the larger changes to the stories you made from the first draft to the final draft?

• • This varies depending on the story. In general, I think a lot about what’s going to happen in the story (i.e. make a lot of notes before I start to write anything itself). Often the first paragraph that I write is the final part of a story. For me, I need to have that destination in mind to write the rest of the story. Due to that, there usually aren’t big dramatic rewrites. I initially underestimated how long the lifecycle story⁴ would be. I started by writing a much smaller version of the story, all of which I had to undo later since I realized that the length didn’t work at all, and had to rethink some of the decisions which I’d made. That’s perhaps the story that demonstrates a big difference between the first and final versions. That doesn’t happen often though, and I usually have a closer grasp of what the story ought to be.

• Would you use a Remem⁵?

• • If as described in the book, then perhaps yes, I would. I’m interested in whether I remember things accurately. I don’t think we’ll get a product like that anytime soon though. Perhaps it’s more likely that a lifelogging product in the near future will be used in a way personalized advertising. This I’m not a big fan of! Which is also why I’m not into current home personalization devices. I’m concerned about the model of surveillance tech that we’re moving into.

• So much of what you talk about, human augmentation via technology, is analogous to earlier works by Vannevar Bush, Norbert Weiner, and other titans of thought in the early wartime/postwar computing age. It also follows the vision at the Augmentation Research Center in the sixties, which has philosophical (and personnel) ties to Xerox PARC, and much of modern computing. How much was your work inspired by their writings, if any, or is it a happy coincidence?

• • I’ve read works of Vannevar Bush while in college, and I know of Norbert Wiener, though I haven’t read anything directly by him. I wouldn’t say that I’m consciously inspired by their work, but I’m sure that they’ve influenced my thinking about tech in various ways. Concerning the idea of writing as a technology, the book that opened my eyes to this was Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. There’s certainly other people too, Marshall McLuhan for example. Maybe it’s reading this sort of work, that made me think of computer pioneers in a different light because it made me think of how technology is a much broader category than we usually think of. It’s been with us as long as we’ve been human, so it’s difficult to draw a line between humans and tech. Reading them helped me make more sense out of the other things. It enabled me to recontextualize the other things that I’d read in the past and helped me appreciate it more. My position on it is still evolving since I’m regularly reminded that I need to reexamine my assumptions about these ideas, but that’s what science fiction is all about :)

Thanks to James Yu, Scott Hurff, and Amit Gupta for organizing the session, and to all the attendees for facilitating such an engaging discussion through asking these questions.

Footnotes