A Parrot Flew into My Novel

Those of you who have been reading my blog for the last seven or eight months are aware that my new novel, Exit Velocity, is a fusion of science-fiction and political fiction and features a parrot from another planet. Because you are readers, I suspect that you’re interested in the usual fiction-analysis questions, such as:

What does the parrot want? What is its motivation for coming to Earth?

What conflicts does the parrot face? How are these resolved . . . if they’re resolved.

There are many more such questions based on the way a particular character functions in a particular novel. But perhaps there’s another question readers will ask, and that is: How/Why did a parrot get into Exit Velocity in the first place?

This is an excellent question, one that allows me to reveal how Deeply, the parrot, entered my novel.

I had, since the 1960s, when I was a college student demonstrating in the streets and reading all the Marxist literature I could find, wanted to write a socialist novel centered around the working class. But, also since the 1960s, I have worried about how (if I ever did end up writing such a novel) I could avoid the trap most proletarian literature and socialist literature falls into. 

Let’s label the danger as the exposition trap. Exposition is the revealing of information that’s necessary in order for a reader to understand the story. Information that is necessary, but, also, is not part of the story. This information does not advance the plot. It doesn’t help develop the characters. Exposition is simply something the reader needs to know and the author needs to reveal.

But, as you can intuit, the author needs to reveal this information briefly and quickly, and then cut back to the story, where the characters are experiencing conflict.

Much of the cause-based literature (think of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle), I read during my college years contained vast amounts of exposition — so much of it, so densely packed into the story, in such long stretches, that the forward-action simply stopped. In order to get to the story itself, readers had to wade through way too much exposition.

Not only did the exposition lengthen the story: it deadened it. When a story stops so that the writer can dump all kinds of information in, the story becomes less memorable to the reader. Less interesting. Less intense.

This is something I wanted to avoid. And I’ve known I wanted to avoid it for more than fifty years!  And so, when, late in 2019, the time came for me to proceed with the first draft of Exit Velocity, I knew that I needed to solve the exposition problem before I put word one to paper.

There were several ways to do this. I could have a naive child-narrator asking pertinent questions or pointing out exposition-necessary things. That did not appeal to me. I could use a time traveller to ask or illustrate the exposition-necessary information. That didn’t appeal to me, either.

While there may be many more ways of solving this problem, I didn’t think of them. What I could and did think of was a being from another planet. As soon as that solution entered my mind, I knew it was the one I would use. 

My first thought was that the ET would be human-like. Nah, too boring. Then I thought it would be computer-like. Nah, been done before. As I was assessing what the ET would be, Whoosh! A parrot flew into my novel.

That is to say, I had an epiphany: somewhere, somehow, out of the blue, I knew that my being from another planet would be a parrot. I was so certain of this that I never questioned it: I simply began to develop the character of the parrot.

Heracles inexpectatus

However, I suspect that I know why the being that flew into my novel is a parrot. First, just a year earlier (2018) I published a middle-grade free verse book, Cookie the Cockatoo: Everything Changes. The work was based on Cookie, the cockatoo who lived at the Brookfield Zoo for more than ninety years. It had taken me years and years and years to write this book, so I lived with Cookie a long time. He was and still is part of my consciousness.

Second, in 2019 the world learned that a newly discovered extinct parrot species had lived in New Zealand 20 million years ago. Scientists named this very large parrot Heracles inexpectatus. When I began to write Exit Velocity, this parrot was on my mind.

And that’s how and why a parrot from another planet flew into my novel.

As you have probably surmised, the parrot from another planet is free to provide exposition without that exposition bringing action to a halt. How does it do this? Read the book and you will see.

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You can purchase Exit Velocity wherever books are sold. In fact, the parrot encourages you to do so.