TRIZ and the rizz. Essay. 1500 words, 8-minute read
Novel Origin Stories
By Ray Tabler
Where do ideas come from? I really don’t know.
TRIZ is an organized, methodical problem-solving technique, created in 1946 by Soviet inventor and science fiction author, Genrich Altshuller. The acronym is from the Russian words for “theory of inventive problem solving” (roughly translated), and some people I’ve talked to swear by TRIZ. Reportedly, TRIZ is responsible for hundreds of thousands of inventions. I don’t doubt that (much). However, the concept smacks of the same brute-force mentality which supposedly prompted Joseph Stalin to once direct Soviet medical scientists to look into getting 9 pregnant women together and produce a baby in 1 month… That’s probably a joke, but the funniest jokes usually have some basis in fact.
Has TRIZ ever been applied to creating fiction? Yes, it has. A google search will turn up numerous examples of utilizing this technique to inspiring and writing literary fiction, as well as science fiction and fantasy. Lately, AI has been harnessed to drag TRIZ-written stories and novels down the road. How well does that work? Personally, I don’t care to find out. Dive right in if you’re curious. But, as a writer, subcontracting out the fun part of writing to a rote method and a machine holds no appeal for me. I’d probably make more money that way. But if I just wanted to make money, I’d be selling insurance instead.
TRIZ and AI aside, then, where do the kernels of stories originate? JRR Tolkien was a professor at Oxford University. Halfway through grading a tall stack of exam papers he unexpectedly came upon a blank sheet of paper. Mentally zonked by the best efforts of his students, Tolkien wrote down upon that fateful page, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” That sentence flowed straight from the subconscious, no doubt bored to tears by the dreary task Tolkien was trudging through. The back of his brain was daydreaming away, and seized the opportunity to send a message. From that one scribbled sentence Tolkien built The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and a beloved global phenomenon.
Stephenie Meyer spun the Twilight series of urban fantasy novels from a dream she had of a pair of lovers, lying side by side in a sunlit meadow. Robert Louis Stevenson drew Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from a terrifying nightmare of the unnerving transformation of a good man into an evil one. Stevenson also drew a map of a tropical to entertain his son on a rainy day. That scribbled map inspired the novel Treasure Island. George Orwell passed a boy driving a cart horse down a country road, and briefly marveled at how a small human controlled a beast many times his size. That led him to write Animal Farm. Robert Heinlein pondered Kipling’s Jungle Book, the tale of a human boy raised by wolves, and retold it Stranger in a Strange Land, substituting Martians for the wolves. F. Scott Fitzgerald attended wild parties in the 1920s. The desperate decadence of those affairs drove him to pen The Great Gatsby.
What do all of these inspirations have in common? Randomness. The best ideas strike like lightning out of the blue, when engaged in some other activity. The more mind-numbing the task the better, or so it seems. Bored with the everyday routine, your subconscious roams the sunlit fields of your mind, idly picking daises. Occasionally, those daisies form the beautiful bouquet of a great idea. Sometimes those fields aren’t sunlit, but storm shadowed, if not a spooky midnight scene. Then, as Stevenson found with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Orwell with Animal Farm, and Fitzgerald with The Great Gatsby, the result is a thought-provoking tragedy.
The real danger of TRIZ-driven, AI-written fiction lay in the fact that no room is left for the truly new idea, the bolt from the blue which only an untethered subconscious can attract like a promiscuously upright lightning rod. (Nothing Freudian in that phrasing. 😉) Rote methods and formulaic outlines will no doubt deliver salable, even wildly popular, stories. But that builds a fence around storytelling. The author is funneled along well-trod paths, wearing a rut that gets deeper with each passage. Before long, you can’t even see past the sunken road.
What’s frightening about waiting patiently for lightning to strike is that it’s not predictable, let alone controllable. Unpredictability is anathema to bean counters. And bean counters run businesses, even the notoriously eccentric publishing business. They’d rather be miners, following a proven rich vein, than prospectors, wandering the mountains in search of likely spots to dig and maybe engaged in questionable relationships with their mules. But there are no strikes without prospectors, regardless of whether they ultimately benefit from the claim staked.
Fair warning, the first part of this essay covered the inspirations for a number of famous novels. The next 4 paragraphs will discuss what birthed some of my novels. So, please feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you don’t want to wade through that. 😉
My first published novel, A Grand Imperial War, bubbled up from a book I bought at a second-hand store. The War for a Persian Lady (Barbara English, 1971) recounts the history of the Anglo-Persian War of 1857, in a snarky, gossipy narrative. Ms. English based her book on reading the largely-unpublished diaries of the British officers involved in that short, silly, Victorian conflict. And some very unkind things they had to say about each other as it turned out. Laughing as I read through the book, it occurred to me that it provided the perfect model for a humorous tale of a short silly war with an alien empire.
Next came Fool’s Paradise, my second novel, about a futuristic spy tasked with a rescue mission on a planet descended into primitive anarchy. In 1977 Analog Magazine serialized a George RR Martin novel, Dying of the Light, a mystery set on a once prosperous planet doomed to slow decay as it spiraled out of a solar system. The mental image the background setting of a world fallen into chaos lingered in my mind for decades, until my subconscious supplied a plot that fit.
Late one night, I couldn’t sleep. I came down stairs and turned the TV on, in search of distraction until drowsiness returned. I watched a bad sci-fi movie, Space Truckers. Not even Dennis Hopper could save this flick, in which the spaceships resembled 18-wheelers. Granted, Space Truckers is a parody, but I felt I could write a better story. The only question was, why would you use a diesel engine to power a starship? A wrinkle of diesel engines is that they don’t use sparkplugs. The fuel/air mixture in diesel cylinders is ignited by the heat generated when the mixture is compressed. So, I simply needed to concoct a fictional faster-than-light star drive that wouldn’t tolerate an electrical circuit. The only practical way to power the darn thing is to bolt a diesel engine to it. Voilà, the Diesel-Powered Starship. People can travel to other stars, but have to start over with pre-electrical technology on each new planet. Another book about the infant US Navy informed me that it focused more on commerce raiding than fighting the British Royal Navy. That provided a story for the diesel-powered interstellar setting, outer colonies attempting to break away from a central Earth government with merchant ships converted to privateers. Those threads took years to knit together.
A single short story I wrote, The Departure Lounge, about a con man opening a bar on an alien planet precipitated 2 separate novels. The main character seemed overly complex to me, because he held 2 different threads. Not just more story than could be properly told in a short story, but more than could be told in one book. I split them up, and let them grow. The con man blossomed into Planets 4 Sale, about a fast-talking flimflam man, cursed with a troublesome heart of gold, scamming his way across the galaxy one shady real estate deal after another. The bartender became Smitty’s Guide to Interstellar Bartending, the tale of an itinerant bartender abducted by aliens who opens a tiki bar on an alien space station orbiting a stormy star which might go supernova at any moment. There was no way I could’ve planned that out ahead of time. The 2 stories had to disentangle themselves in seclusion.
Where do story ideas come from? Out of the blue. From a murky, churning subconscious. The word “novel” comes from the Latin for “new, strange, unusual,” because the author is telling a new story. The muse chivvies inspiration along in the messy backrooms of the brain, like herding cats. It’s an enigmatic process, which laughs at goals and schedules, hiding Easter eggs and gift boxes for us to stumble over at random. TRIZ, AI, and organized, systematic methods can puke out facsimiles of true inspiration, but fall short of true new, disruptive ideas. Maybe they’ll eventually come close. But I doubt they’ll ever achieve the mystique, what the kids call “the rizz,” of the bolt from the blue.
END.
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