How does writing done without literary intent, to make a living, shape the writer? Asked during a live Q&A if his job as an advertising copy writer had any influence on his literary works, Don DeLillo replied: "No." Next question. William Trevor once worked in advertising and wrote no odes to it. From the books of theirs I've read, I didn't detect a hint of their previous contact with the language of the corporate world. But it's hard to imagine any literary writer worth reading consciously and unreservedly adopting it as a crucial influence. With journalism, say, one is far less likely to encounter such denials and rejection among those who've worked in that field. Plenty of esteemed literary writers have been journalists, at all stages. There are those, too, who produce journalistic fiction, hardly straying from the conventions of journalism to venture boldly, furiously, strangely into fiction. 40 hours a week and the reinforcement of a paycheck, year after year, decade after decade, can become an obstacle if the goal is to be unconventional.
Ted Chiang, author of a pair of sci-fi short story collections, Stories of Your Life (2002) and Exhalation (2019), is a technical writer. In college, during a temporary bout of pragmatism, I registered for a class in technical writing. One of the first things the professor said was that it's not "creative writing," warning anyone who was in "creative writing" it'd probably be a difficult transition. By the end of the lecture, the only one I attended, I understood what he meant. If you're writing an instruction manual or a funding proposal, anything other than dry formality of language can be distracting, inappropriate, unprofessional. Employers looking to hire a technical writer aren't asking for originality, for freakiness, for linguistic play or beauty. Quite the opposite. What they want is clear, sanitized, anonymous writing, malleable enough to fit whatever house style dictates, delivered on schedule.
That's pretty much what Chiang's writing is like and, in the context of fiction, it's antiseptic. Put another way, he comes dangerously close to transporting the reader to work, specifically that horrible moment, sitting in a cubicle, face down at a desk, nowhere near the end of the day, GAH!, jumping out of your seat, running down the hallway, down several flights of stairs, past security, through the turnstiles, knocking down some executive, apologizing profusely, stepping over him, the front doors locked, beating frantically on the doors, frightened passersby, tackled by security, security piling on, and on, darkness, waking up at your desk in a cold sweat to find that maybe a minute has gone by. Gah. Not to say that these stories are without appeal. Every subject Chiang takes on, from time travel to raising AI animals, is delineated with care, fascinates and challenges, which is why I eagerly purchased the book. And every story nags at me for what's missing.
Exhalation, like his earlier collection, which I want to reread partly because now I'm not so sure it's as good as I recall, gathers stories written over the course of more than ten years. Their arrangement is roughly chronological, permitting the reader to track Chiang's development, however minimal, during this period.
The first three stories are first-person reports on a phenomenon. People, when speaking for themselves, employ a certain speech and rhythm, draw on a unique past, make personal references, (often inadvertently) display peculiarity, commit verbal blunders, digress, (knowingly or unknowingly) reveal themselves. With the exception of drawing on a past, and only because of the demands of a plot, Chiang's narrators, individuals belonging to totally different time periods or realities, are the same in possessing none of these basic human qualities. Or, since one isn't technically human, qualities expected of an entity that communicates thoughts and has an internal life. It's the storytellers, not the stories, I have trouble accepting. Who they are is secondary to what they observe, so while the subjects change, the problem of conspicuous absence is exacerbated by repetition.
Years later comes the novella-length fourth, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," which switches to third-person and tentatively depicts living, breathing people. It's the story about humans raising AI animals, the evolution of their relationships through the years, and the difficulty of protecting a software entity through technological advances and the vagaries of commerce. The least shocking part of it, and the entire book, is that the principal characters meet at work, at a tech company, and a significant portion of the story takes place there. Of all the stories in the collection, it comes closest to reading as though the events have been lived - ideas are debated among colleagues with their own views, users of a product convincingly discover ways to abuse it. Chiang achieves parity between human and creature, bonds firmly established on both sides, one no more or less alive than the other. The creatures have distinct voices, the rudiments of a background, genuine hopes, fears, and frustrations. The humans have indistinct voices but more background (by default), genuine hopes, fears, and frustrations, along with the thinnest layer of romantic tension to rest the story on.
"The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" is the weakest long story. On the surface, it would seem to be an attempt at a new form, shuttling back-and-forth between two stories, separated by centuries, on different continents, connected by the ways in which the mind is molded. It blends first- and third-person. Chiang maintains the same degree of emptiness in his characters but at a couple of points his fiction breaks down further. One of his strengths is taking an idea and acutely examining its implications before drawing a conclusion, satisfying in its completeness. However, he makes the too convenient choice to have a journalist narrator report on a piece of technology, the augmentation of the mind with a system that allows perfect recall of past events, changing memories from vague (and possibly suspect) fragments to searchable video evidence. Instead of letting the reader get lost in the experience, the narrator affords Chiang the opportunity to just openly speculate on the implications in pages that could be the story writer's notes:
It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn't capture the emotional dimension of events.
And what will the consequences be when people can claim to remember their infancy? I could readily imagine a situation where, if you ask a young person what her earliest memory is, she will simply look baffled; after all, she has video dating back to her birth.
Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children's ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do about my imperfect, organic memories.
It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.
For all this, in the end he doesn't even examine the full implications at all, coming to an abrupt conclusion that's untenable, absurd. Of course, people are capable of thinking little and coming to absurd conclusions they'll base their whole lives around. But the narrator is barely a person, so I don't care that he's reached it. What's left is an argument for a radically life-changing, seemingly virtuous decision that's easily dismantled and ridiculed.
The last story of the collection, "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom," is the most successful. Chiang doesn't manage to escape the carefully drawn lines of a plot but nevertheless it's the story that comes closest to achieving balance. Once more, a technological innovation: Computer access to yourself in an alternate timeline. Once more, his exhilarating ability to envision what happens next: for example, people cash in by selling content harvested from alternate timelines. Click to see what your favorite star is up to in another world. Click to see how a popular movie ended in another world. Then, on a smaller scale, there's a chance of profiting off someone's grief, another abuse of technology, and one woman's moral conflict. Unlike the ease with which he imagines humanity's actions on the broad scale, he stumbles imagining the source of an individual's actions. And once more: there's a degree of emptiness. But not so much that it prevents me from caring about what decision his character makes, which is a decision that matters in whatever timeline she belongs to.
There are writers that start with people and are such masters of presenting them authentically that one can take their existence for granted, as if passing them on the street without noticing them. Exhalation ends with Chiang's notes on the origins of his stories. I don't know why he's tasked with doing this when most every other story writer isn't, unless maybe for a career-spanning collection or reissue, but it's welcome and illuminating. Among other things, it confirms that for every story, he doesn't start with a person or a relationship but the abstract idea. I have no doubt that he'll come up with more. And the book, though colorless and bloodless, ends by suggesting that he can potentially correct in the future.
