Don’t Tell me the Meaning – Exhalation: Stories vs. The Story of Your Life and Others

Let’s jump right in to it. This is going to be an essay about how to explore themes and big ideas when writing fiction. It’s going contain some minor spoilers for some of the stories in the two Ted Chiang short story collections Exhalation: Stories and The Story of Your Life and Others (also known as Arrival).

Ever since I heard that Ted Chiang had published a new short story collection, it’s been near the top of my to-read list. Though the writing was mostly just okay and the plot and characters clearly came in second to the ideas, The Story of Your Life collection blew me away. The way Chiang came up with unique settings and premises and used them to explore big ideas in new ways, the way his stories just radiated originality and deep toughts, it made for a truly amazing reading experience.

So, yeah, I was really looking forward to reading the Exhalation collection. Now that I’m done with it, though, I have to admit, I’m disappointed.

This, of course, begs the question, why? Why did Chiang’s first collection work so well for me, when most of the Exhalation collection didn’t?

It’s certainly not because of a lack of big ideas/themes or interesting and unique premises set up to investigate them. Chiang’s hallmark remains as strong as ever. The difference lies in where the stories goes from there.

The Story of Your Life (the story, not the collection) focuses on the idea of how having a non-linear language might affect the way we think, if it will makes us see time in a non-linear way as well. Though, it does so through a much more down-to-Earth and personal conflict, a mother who’s lost her daughter. The story doesn’t have the same twisty ending as the movie, but it’s still, in my opinion, a great story. It uses the speculative element of the aliens to gradually change the way the protagonist thinks until she basically gains the ability to see the future (while being unable to change it). To me, that’s seems like the first big difference between the two short story collection, how the big idea and premise are made more interesting by grounding them in more relatable and personal conflicts.

In the Exhalation collection, stories like The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and The Lifecycle of Software Objects do have more grounded conflicts as well, but in both cases they enter the story too late to really matter and help make the stories entertaining. Also, both some of Chiang’s stronger and weaker stories omits this personal conflict, so clearly that’s not the only difference.

The really big difference comes from how Chiang explores the big idea/theme in each story. While there is internal monologue, that’s not the main way in which the big idea of The Story of Your Life is investigated. Instead, it’s the characters’ actions that highlight the central idea/theme. It’s the protagonist’s interactions with the aliens and the scenes with her daughter which shows us that what language we use affects how we think (at least in the world of the story).

Likewise in Hell is the Absence of God (Also from The Story of Your Life and Others), it’s the events the characters experience and the way they chose to react to them which shows us that God being real doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place, that what’s good and evil depends on perspective, and that since God works in mysterious ways, his decisions might appear evil to some. None of this is explained at length by a character or the narrator.

Exhalation (the story) does this well to some degree, which is why it was, by far, my favorite in the second collection. Especially in the early part of the story, it’s the protagonist’s experiments which show how the story world differ from ours and, more importantly, how it doesn’t. This way, Chiang creates the very original and interesting analogy between differencial air pressure in the story world and entropy in our world. In the latter part of the story, though, Exhalation consists mostly of the narrator telling us of the discoveries they made and how it will affect the world. It becomes one long monologue explaining the theme to the reader.

The rest of Exhalation: Stories suffers even more from this. Chiang nicely adds a few comments at the end of each story, explaining how he came about the ideas and what the stories are all about. I listened to the collection as an audiobook, and at times I thought that I’d reached the author notes while I was actually in the middle of the story, because what I was listening too was the narrator telling me exactly what the big idea was and what it meant.

In the end, it comes down to the old writing addage “show don’t tell” and to trusting the reader to figure out what you’re trying to say without bogging the story down by telling them directly.

It’s all too easy to have a character stand around and say that, “Climate change is bad and it will alter our world for the worse. Humans won’t step up and prevent it in time, but we will adapt to the change afterwards.” If you did the research, this could be turned into long, well thought out exploratory monologue. It wouldn’t make for a very interesting story, though. Show us how the rising water levels affect a city like Bangkok instead, add some gene editing and greedy food companies trying to monopolize crops, and you have something as magnificient as Paolo Bacigalupi’s Hugo Award winning novel, Wind Up Girl.

If your story is basically a character telling us about the big idea/theme you want to explore, then you might as well have written a thesis or an essay about it. Don’t try to stuff it into the thin disguise and call it a story. If you want to show it through a story, focus on the characters’ actions and decision, because that’s basically what stories are about, the choices made and how they changes thing for better or worse.