Arin i Asolde

PSA: This journal will no longer be updated.

limyaael — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:49:13 GMT

I'm not comfortable with LJ's customer service, and especially the way that they're handling their latest PR disaster. The part that bothers me most is near the end:

* Do you plan to change the Terms of Service to reflect this policy?

No. The Terms of Service is not a document designed to detail every specific situation. Specifically, the content covered by this policy consists of various violations of Section XVI, Part 1, or content that is unlawful, harmful, abusive, obscene, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.

So, now that they've run into a few iffy situations with obscenity, they've decided it's much "simpler" not to clarify the ToS, even though there are apparently enough important new policies to warrant this post...

My head hurts.

None of this reflects on anybody else. If you're remaining on LJ, I don't think that's a stupid thing to do. It's just not what I'm doing. I'm not comfortable with them, and I'm not comfortable generating new content for them.

I will not delete this journal (unless it becomes imperative that I do so because LJ moves even further in the direction of failing like a failing thing). I'll still check my f-list here and use it to comment. The old rants will stay here, and may be more convenient to use because the new place I've moved them to doesn't have them memoried and tagged yet. But no new posts will be made.

For the immediate future, rants will be posted here on InsaneJournal, where my journal is already duplicated. I can't currently back up to my GreatestJournal because I'm visiting home and using a computer that's not mine, so I don't want to download new programs to it, but in a week or so, this journal will also be copied there. Feel free to friend them if you'd like, though since all the rants will be public in both places (eventually), you don't need to.

I've really enjoyed my time on LiveJournal, and my friends-list and the comments on the rants have been a large part of the reason why. Farewell wherever you fare!

ETA: I've checked now, and only paid LJ users can add syndicated feeds of a journal. Since I don't want to give LJ any more of my money, this is a conflict of interest for me. If someone does want to set up an RSS feed of my InsaneJournal, that'd be great; tell me so I can point others to it!

Thanks to the brilliant and lovely tortoises and pointytilly, there is now an RSS feed of the InsaneJournal. limyaael_ij will display all future public entries, which includes all the rants. Friend it if you want the new entries to drop in on your f-list.

Natural Child of ETA: This feed displays only public entries. If you would like to read friends-locked entries, please friend me on InsaneJournal; then you can read f-locked entries on the feed, as long as I add you back. If your username is not the same as your LJ one, please comment on one of the public posts to tell me who you are.

Third Child of the Son of ETA: Comments made to the feed will not show up in my journal. I will, though, check the feed regularly so that I don't miss them.

Grandson on the Wrong Side of the Sheets of ETA: kutsuwamushi is awesome and provides a link to familiarizing yourself with RSS feeds here.

Yet Another ETA, Its Family Is Getting Tired of Reproduction: I know some people are uncomfortable with IJ's layout, so the GreatestJournal will indeed be a backup of everything, including friends-locked posts. That won't happen until next week, but I can promise it'll happen.

Science fiction and fantasy hybrids

limyaael — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:51:24 GMT

Once again, I want to define some terms. I’m talking here about books with the “equipment” of both fantasy and science fiction: elves and lasers, for example, or magic and anti-gravity. I wouldn’t consider it a hybrid if there were a few machines that resembled magical artifacts but were fully explainable by any scientific laws and in any case were just named after the magical artifacts to be cute, or if there’s magic that seems like physics in disguise but turns out to be plain supernatural magic after all. And saying that a work can mingle the “attitudes” of fantasy and science fiction will just involve me in endless arguments, because you can always argue about what attitudes a book actually expresses. Equipment is the easiest standard to judge by, so I’m using it.

1) Know what role nature plays in your world. For example: is your magic considered a science, too, just in accordance with a different set of physical (or metaphysical) principles, or is science what’s done with the natural fabric of the universe and magic what’s done with the supernatural? Or do they mingle? What works where? How can your characters tell the difference? (Their knowledge can be limited, too, though not necessarily as limited as that of a reader who picks up the book for the first time. See point 2).

I think it’s necessary to know this because, otherwise, it will not be clear what your characters can depend on at a given moment and what they can’t. If it seems possible for them to use flying magic to escape from danger, but it really isn’t, then you’ll need to show why. Perhaps they’re in a place where purely natural laws hold sway, or the character’s flight magic depends on eating a certain kind of flower he hasn’t eaten in a while, or it depends on some other kind of magic which itself doesn’t work here. Make sure you know, because otherwise you have a special kind of idiot plot, where the characters conveniently forget what they’re able to accomplish so that the author can put them in more danger. It’s akin to a character being able to turn into a small bird at one point in the story, and then pretending that a cell with an unbarred window can hold her.

On an even more basic level, not knowing what works and what doesn’t can mess up the fabric of your world and render it incoherent. It might be possible to juggle a completely inexplicable system of science and a completely inexplicable system of magic, but it’s going to take more skill than simply saying, “Okay, science! Okay, magic!”

2) Multiple sources of knowledge are available. Perhaps the great discovery your characters are going to make is that science does work, when only magic was thought to; perhaps they’ll discover that the “magic” artifacts around them are really ancient technology that they can control once they combine them with, say, a mill-wheel; perhaps they’ll discover that they really are the descendants of an ancient galactic civilization. (That’s the premise behind at least two “fantasy” series I’ve heard of, though I won’t say which ones for fear of spoilers). Or perhaps they’ll discover that the technology they’ve just captured from apparently natural aliens in fact refuses to work for them, depending as it does on “exploded” arts among the humans, like sympathetic magic. Perhaps this is a post-apocalyptic world, and they’re being continually stunned by the emergence of magic in what was an ordinary Earth. Or perhaps magic is small and secret—I’ve noted before that one of the great differences between technology and magic is that technology is usually available to many people, or at least can be used by many people, while magic tends to be considered inborn and rare. So, while there are people who can actually conjure food into being, they live far away from the people who can’t, and the average citizen of the world isn’t aware of them.

What’s the advantage of this? It permits you to broaden the characters’ conception of your world slowly, so that it looks more complex than it appeared on the surface. It can resolve apparent contradictions or inconsistencies by promising further revelations. It can show the reader that your book indeed borrows some of the tricks of fantasy despite looking like science fiction, or the reverse, while the characters themselves might firmly believe they are living in one kind of world or another.

It also presents another solution to the problem I mentioned in point 1, how to keep your characters from becoming all-powerful if they have command of both lasers and fireballs. They can’t use something if they don’t know about it. Zelazny uses this solution in the Chronicles of Amber, the first series, where Corwin knows that he wants to create a certain kind of gun, but can’t simply make it himself, because he has no idea of the finer principles behind its creation. He instead has to seek out people who can make it for him. His use of the guns is based on something else unknown to the majority of his siblings: even though gunpowder doesn’t explode in Amber due to its becoming inert there, a chemical from another world does, which Corwin intends to prime the guns with. Thus, even though most of the people in the series are demigods, Zelazny can set limits on what they’re able to do.

3) Seeing what happens. What happens when you mix the different elements of the genres together—sorcerers and robots and dragons and FTL spaceships and werewolves and string theory? Possibly stew. Possibly a mess. But a great part of the delight is in trying, because the elements together enable the author to accomplish something that neither alone can.

The purest example of this I know is Simon R. Green’s science fantasy Shadows Fall. The town of the title is where fairy tales and old legends come to die. Thus there are Sidhe and talking animals present, but also androids, dead rock stars, Christian fanatics, and a threat that resembles magic but is contagious like a disease. It’s debatable whether this works, given that they’ve apparently been mixed with a lot of blood and emotional button-mashing in a blender, but the result is certainly striking. They were apparently all necessary to tell the tale that Green wanted to tell, so he stuffed them in.

Even if it’s not strictly necessary to tell the core of a limited tale, figures like these can haunt along the edges of the story. And they certainly present a challenge to the author who’s only worked in one genre to control them, justify them, and figure out what they’re doing there.

4) A change of worlds. A book that blends science fiction and fantasy is often post-apocalyptic (although sometimes the apocalypse gets shoved to the back of things and the series is mostly fantasy or science fiction on the surface, as in Terry Brooks’s Shannara world). It can also be a crossover, where one character is traveling to a different world—usually one where magic works—but is still capable of returning to a scientific or futuristic one. Thus, place is probably the easiest way to divide the elements of the hybrid up, if you want them divided and not mixed, so that magic only works in certain places and advanced technology likewise.

This can be done in any manner of ways. Different worlds, alternative universes—why not one where magic is real, at least in the sense of the natural laws taking on subtly different forms than they did in ours, or more responsiveness to a human mind?—a single place in the center from which other realities spread out (Zelazny did this with Amber), a metaphysical catastrophe that gave more prominence to one force on a single continent but didn’t affect the others, a city situated to take advantage of a “natural” upwelling of magic, a road that leads travelers through different countries where hostile magic or natural forces might await but which protects the ones on it, a country so inundated with gates and “invasions” from other worlds that it becomes a stronghold of different species in the midst of other nations that look quite different. And once you know what the place looks like, you can extrapolate metaphysics from it, or characters, or plots, or ways to break the boundaries, or imaginings of what a world would look like where all these things were true.

The next rant is apparently on “happy things about urban fantasy.” I’ll get to thinking of those right away.

Turning idealistic characters gray

limyaael — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 20:49:16 GMT

Before I start, I just want to make it clear that, in this case, I’m not lumping all characters who have strong beliefs into the idealistic set. This rant deals, instead, with protagonists or secondaries who have both strong ideals and a lack of information about how they apply to the pragmatic world, or about their consequences.

1) Identify the source of the lack of information. The most common source is innocence—lack of experience—or naïveté. A character like this will need a different graying from someone who has encountered the bad consequences of her ideals before but didn’t recognize them, or someone who already suspects that not everything is sweetness and light in the group she works with or has joined, but prefers to stick her fingers in her ears regarding it, or someone who can ignore the truth because it’s happening to people she doesn’t care about or at a distance. After all, a character with lack of experience can just be confronted with one bad thing and change her mind completely, while the others are harder.

Supposedly.

One reason I groan when the Terminally Innocent Boy (or Girl) crosses the page is that I know their natural mate, in most authors’ eyes, is the Single Heavy-Handed Epiphany. So we’re about to see a button-mashing scene wherein the author has the people the protagonist has always trusted beat children, or rape someone, or burn someone to death, and then the protagonist is going to scream, “How could you!”, and the people she has always trusted will defend themselves with stupid “arguments.” Then the protagonist runs away and joins the other side.

And that, right there, is the biggest problem I have with this “cure” for innocence. Too often, the protagonist simply becomes a convert as blind for the opposite side (who are, of course, always the Good Guys) instead of learning to see the nuances. Her naiveté is still present, and she is not a more complicated character than she was, since she’s still engaging in false dilemmas and black-and-white thinking.

If you have an innocent character who should not be innocent by the end of the story, then do something to attack the innocence. Don’t preserve it through an easy emotional reaction.

2) Use multiple epiphanies. Time to start deconstructing some common ways that authors get characters to pay attention. Many of them are not inherently bad ideas; they’re simply subject to bad handling (see the example above).

So the protagonist is someone who suspects that, yeah, the rebels who saved her life and gave her a sense of purpose are also the same people who kidnap nobles’ children and return them to their parents in bloody pieces, but she can ignore it if she really tries. After all, no one has said they’re using the nobles’ children that way; those might be false rumors planted by their enemies. And everything else they do is good. And it’s not as though anyone she cares about is being hurt, so why should it matter to her? And don’t the nobles kind of deserve it, anyway, since they’ve caused so much suffering and misery?

Set up multiple justifications for her beliefs, and then have multiple epiphanies go off like bombs at the base of them. Instead of having her stumble into the middle of a scene of slaughter—the Single, Heavy-Handed Kind—she might notice that she’s brave enough to ask some questions and not others; she might find out that the nobles’ reprisals against the rebels have begun to spill over onto people she does care about; she might discover that, while there are some aristocrats sympathetic to the rebels’ cause, they’re changing their minds as the attacks become more and more violent and personal; and she might develop a sense of duty through the tasks the rebels have assigned her which eventually pushes her to take responsibility for everything she’s involved in, not just the immediate actions.

Does this mean that she has to end up converting fully to the opposite side? No. (See point 6). But it’s a combination of things that, by themselves, don’t weigh much, but which pile up like snowflakes on a mountain until they start an avalanche. Who knows? By the time she begins to act, others in the group may have become disgusted, too, or at least eager to change the methods used for reasons of sheer practicality, and will back her. It’s her courage that inspires them and begins things, but not her courage that does everything.

In fact, that might be one of the very best ways to turn someone grayer.

3) Give your idealistic protagonists people to fight for and with. Show me a fantasy character who’s willing to die for a cause, and I will show you someone who, 99% of the time, is a loner. Probably, everyone she cared for is dead and the living hate her (since fantasy writers are far too fond of orphans and those who are despised by all the people in their immediate environments for no particular reason). She may have distant relationships with some people—like an employer, a foster parent, or an older sibling—but those people don’t greatly matter to her day-to-day conceptions of things. She can die safely because she has no one to live for.

I think fantasy protagonists in general should be more loving. And no, giving someone three love interests is not the answer. Show them able to build families, even if their blood families are dead. Show them able to accept what romantic love means earlier than the very end of the story, and in deeper senses than just physical passion. Show them able to have friendships in which the friends are not inevitably reduced to sidekicks. Show complicated bonds with others—parental figures, people who’ve blown hot and cold on them, past love interests, the people they serve or who serve them, neighbors, fellow prisoners or members of a minority—you know, the kind that most people have.

These are the people who can best open an idealistic protagonist’s eyes. If she sees that she’s hurting them in her blindness, then she has a legitimate reason to reconsider her actions (and add a twist to her bond with them). If she sees that consequences she never anticipated are falling on them and not her, she can shed that “Well, it doesn’t matter what I do because it only affects me” shell. If she takes large risks and then is forced to realize those risks matter to others, too, or that the others want to share them with her… well, now you’ve got the core of an ensemble cast.

People who care about others are more vulnerable and more a part of the world than people who isolate themselves. And being a part of the world is usually a required state for a person to become more nuanced and take other shades—not just gray—into her soul.

4) Take some risks with the audience “getting” it. If it’s important to take the Single adjective away from the Single Heavy-Handed Epiphany, it’s even more important to remove the Heavy-Handed one. There are some cases where an author can make a single experience traumatic enough to make the protagonist question her beliefs or open her eyes to what she’s actually doing with them. However, too heavy-handed and the author veers into preaching or melodrama, both of which are more likely to turn an audience off than sheer gore or unpleasantness in one part of the story.

So be subtler than that. If there are three important moments in the story that the protagonist has to pass through, then a third of the “message” can be in the first one, the second third in the second, and the final piece in the third—and so on. Maybe everything doesn’t make sense until she sees everything. The first unexpected secret knocks her reeling, but, well, she can put it down to tiredness or her mind exaggerating what she saw. (Believe me, people will make up excuses, even stupid ones, to avoid thinking that something fundamental about their belief systems needs to change). The second one is harder, but it’s still only one person who shares her beliefs acting like that, not everyone. And then perhaps the third one occurs as she crosses the line, and realizes that she is doing something she would previously have found unacceptable in pursuit of her ideals. This is the moment when she can start pulling back, reconsidering what she’s willing to do, or perhaps abandoning the ideas that brought her this far altogether.

The risk here is twofold: that the audience may think the character stupid and believe she should “get” it immediately, or that they may trust her interpretation of events completely and thus be shocked when she changes her mind and see it as a deviation from her actions so far. In the first case, however, you can show her exhibiting some of the same behaviors—making excuses, refusing to trust her senses, holding debates with herself—in other parts of the story, so that it becomes possible to see she’s simply a different kind of person than the readers are, not stupid. (It helps if there’s another part of the story in which she’s exceptionally quick, intelligent, or talented, to counter any impression of stupidity). In the second case, the pieces of her change are there; like a mystery story replete with red herrings or surprise twists, they simply need to be reread.

How can you know which line you’re treading? Let others read the story, of course. There will be some people turned off no matter how hard you try, but that’s true with everything. I still think the risk is less than the one you take with over-explanation, or the sudden lightning bolt from heaven that reveals all the possible problems with her values to the protagonist.

5) Isolation. What exactly is wrong with the protagonist’s idealism? This is the complementary question as to why she believes in the ideals in the first place, and needs as definite an answer. After all, it’s no good if you create your Terminally Innocent Girl (or Boy), mock her (or him) for not knowing everything yet, and then prove that there’s really no reason to change her (or his) mind at all.

So, isolate the problematic part of the idealism. Is it its extremity of beliefs, so that the protagonist thinks X group of people is always evil, no questions, no exceptions? Is it lack of knowledge of history or fact, so that the protagonist doesn’t know what’s likely to happen when she does a particular thing? Is it lack of foresight or too much abstraction, so that she’s incapable—or partially incapable—of realizing that consequences actually follow from actions? Is it exceptionalism, in that she knows problems with idealism exist, but believes none of them will touch her because she’s uniquely intelligent/uniquely talented/special in some other way?

Once you know this, then it will help you enormously in creating situations that will show the protagonist why she needs to change, or which actually change her. It also helps in not tarring an entire system of beliefs, or behaviors, or morals, or ethics, with the same brush. Consequences and the protagonist’s acquiring of other colors in her soul should make her more nuanced, yes; they do not mean that the only way to become more nuanced is to abandon one’s beliefs altogether.

6) Think about modifications she can make, once she knows something’s wrong. The protagonist has, unwittingly, done something horrible in pursuit of her ideals—perhaps agreed to what seemed a fitting traditional punishment for a crime, only to find out that the punishment caused far more suffering than the crime did. Now she’s found out, and she’s got to decide what she does next.

What she doesn’t need to do is abandon all her belief in and support of her culture’s traditions, and completely join the people who want to destroy them. Why? Or rather, what the fuck? As I mentioned in point 1, this is essentially saying that what went wrong was her system of beliefs, not the way she approached them. If she turns around and just as idealistically embraces the destruction of tradition, everything will be okay!

Except not.

This is the hardest part of the story, and—not, I think, coincidentally—the one many fantasies avoid tackling. The protagonist finds out something is wrong with her family, and runs away from them. There turns out to be a terrible secret at the heart of utopia, and the book ends with the protagonist deciding to remake the utopia, but not actually remaking it on-stage. The protagonist unwittingly makes a mistake, and perhaps the plot is her getting past her guilt, but we don’t get to see the atonement. (Some stories suggest that the atonement doesn’t really matter, which rather undermines the effectiveness of the mistake story in the first place). She changes her mind about what she should be doing with her life, and flies at once to the opposite side or simply withdraws from human contact in jaded bitterness, rather than acting, rather than deciding, rather than trying to convince others who might be just as idealistic as she used to be that their actions have consequences.

She can still love her ideals. She can still believe deeply in them. Her personal growth can change her personal attitude and approach to them; they don’t need to result in the destruction of them, or of her as a person.

And, really, isn’t it a greater, harder, and worthier thing to pick up the fallen pieces of something beautiful but imperfect and try to build that thing anew, rather than withdrawing from it, or running away, or criticizing it for being imperfect while never offering anything better?

Grayness need not equal cynicism.

The next rant will be on fantasy-and-science-fiction hybrids.

Showing different cultural viewpoints as not 100% correct

limyaael — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:09:04 GMT

Sorry for the very long delay. On the other hand, my written qualifying exams for my Ph.D. are done.

1) Use a fairly broad range. Opposing just two cultures makes it easy to fall into the trap of assigning one as the Good Guys and one as the Bad Guys—especially if these cultures have a long ~~enmity~~ history with one another. Perhaps the story really doesn’t have room for more than two, but if you’re dealing with a plot that covers several nations or a continent, I bet it does. There’s no reason that the pattern of history in your world has to have gone: Monolithic Culture 1 conquers a massive amount of territory; their empire collapses; Monolithic Culture 2 becomes new empire.

What schisms might these cultural groups have—religious, linguistic, geographical? What shared histories might connect people who now regard each other as competitors or enemies? (Geographical barriers are good for this one; a group that has “always” lived on one side of a mountain range or an island could easily have come from the same place as another, but short human memory plus the difficulties of crossing back and forth in a world without advanced transportation technology has effectively separated them). What ideals might have started out alike and then split apart under the influence of different thinkers, settlement patterns, governmental systems, natural disasters, and invasions? If you’re worried about your ability to come up with enough differing cultural patterns, start out with a few simple, broad ones, and then tweak them endlessly.

I think that writing like this gives the author a personal advantage, too: if she knows that her characters have a shared history far back enough, or if she’s done some conscious worldbuilding instead of aligning everything around one principle—whether that be Good vs. Evil, or “This is the culture that treats their women right, and this is the culture that doesn’t”—then she’s more likely to feel sympathies on all sides of the debate.

2) Hypocritical, deluded, and self-deceiving characters are glorious to work with. Banish those characters who are Wrong in some very obvious way from the beginning of the story, have everything in the world shout at them when they commit a mistake, and figure it out in five seconds flat. They aren’t your allies here. At best, even if they start off not 100% correct, they become that way once they learn about the “right” culture. I dislike them, the dumbass impediments to a complicated story.

However, there are many characters who can become incisive, insightful protagonists, quite able to give your reader a picture of the flaws of the alien cultures they enter, so that no one can accuse you of writing a utopia…and then make remarks that reveal their own cultures are truly no better, except that they don’t reflect on that any more than they reflect on breathing.

Some specific examples, admittedly simplified:

-A woman from a matriarchal culture who is indignant about the treatment of women in a patriarchal culture she visits across the ocean, and yet, while lamenting the lack of freedom for female artists and single women in the foreign country, never thinks to question why, even in her own homeland, a woman’s social reputation depends on how many children she bears. (Matriarchy literally means “rule of the mothers,” after all).
-A patriot who burns with indignation at the foreign culture that conquered his country—which itself used to be a conquering empire.
-A character horrified by the violent and bloody excesses of his neighbors across the river, who sacrifice a child every day so the sun will rise. Of course, killing as many people as there are days in the month so that the moon will come back from darkness, which his own culture does, is just common sense. But because that takes place only thirteen times a year, and anyway it’s only those fast-breeding peasants they take the victims from among, it’s a lot easier for him to ignore.
-A soldier who hates the fact that her unit has to serve under That Foreign Inquisitor the king has hired. Of course, when she tortures enemies she’s captured in the field for killing her sisters-in-arms, that is only just.

Your characters can be wonderful people and yet fail to see everything clearly courtesy of the Cultural Diversity Ray™. It takes courage to write people like this, but not, I think, any more than comes from writing a character who commits a morally ambiguous act in the first place.

3) Embrace relativity. Moral absolutes are common in fantasy, though not as prevalent as they used to be. (I hope). The character may have to learn better, and he may be confronted with choices which are personally agonizing because, say, doing the right thing leaves a friend in the lurch, but it’s still clear what the right thing is. And in a case with varying cultures, there’s generally a moral code underlying all of them which the author can trot out to prove that People Are Really Alike After All, Because Everyone Agrees That Murdering Children Is Bad.

It really helps if you can embrace relativity and step away from the absolutes a bit. Construct solutions where the right thing is not so clear. Give the characters choices that will both have very good outcomes—and very bad outcomes. Choose other conflicts than simply “individual vs. society,” because in those we always know which side we’re expected to come down on. If you have an omniscient narrator, use him/her/it to make remarks supportive of each side. If you write tight first- or third-person from a character’s viewpoint, enter fully into each person’s beliefs while you’re writing them, rather than heaping all the doubt on one protagonist, not because it makes sense for her to have them, but because she’s a member of the “wrong” culture and you have to “redeem” her.

Relativity drives some people crazy, I know, because of things like: How do we get any practical action out of it? And: How can I ever stop asking questions? And: How can we possibly get a permanent solution?

Try entering the mindset while writing that practical action, though possible, will always be fraught with difficulty and that signs of divine approval ~~do not exist~~ are very rare; that questions can go on existing even when you’ve done the best thing possible; and that no solution is permanent, since the next time this situation arises other circumstances may have changed and you might have to do something very different. And then drop your characters into a world like that.

It’s not comfortable, I know, and it’s difficult to write. But this will sterilize those pesky moral absolutes that claim one culture in a built world must be absolutely correct the way that nothing else can. If no cultural construct or ideology is always good or always true in your story’s universe, then none cannot match objective reality, which means none cannot be 100% right.

4) May your mistakes be fruitful and multiply. Or, in other words: Use the good consequences of mistakes.

Of course mistakes should have bad consequences as well; that’s why I want authors to let their characters make them, to show they’re not perfect in every deed and thought. But mistakes can be used to benefit the character, or at least the story, in a portrayal of cultural clash—and not by introducing a clumsily contrived Grand Epiphany.

How?

-A mistake can result in other characters changing their opinion of the one who made it—which might, in turn, show up more or less attractive sides of both themselves and the cultures they were born into, support, or represent.
-Think about the reason your character was mistaken in the first place. When it’s a case of cultural clash, most authors restrict it to something small like not knowing the table manners, or (hi, thing Limyaael does not like) have the protagonist interfere in something like an execution or ritual child abuse to show how right she is and how wrong the culture that performs the execution or ritual child abuse is. However, perhaps they are wrong because of assuming that the standards of their own culture apply to everyone. This can be useful, entirely understandable, troublesome enough to serve the plot and embarrass the character, and overturn what may have seemed an earlier case of one culture being entirely universal because the protagonist thought so.
-A mistake can make the character more thoughtful, hesitant, and willing to listen. This is always a plus in a story where more than one society is struggling to make its voice heard.
-Imagine that your protagonist is not just a normal visitor to this other country or culture, but holds a fairly high position. Negotiations, diplomacy, and even possible wars can start from her mistake, and this gives her an excellent reason to be involved in the action and to feel guilty over something she actually, if accidentally, did, rather than angsting over nothing.
-The mistake can justify explanations from kind people who wish to heal the protagonist’s rather massive case of Dumb. This gives you an opportunity to illuminate what could have seemed byzantine or alien earlier.
-The mistake can prompt lies from sinister people who wish to exploit the protagonist’s rather massive case of Dumb. After that there is, you guessed it, more plot.

5) Think about people thinking of others. There should be stereotypes of other cultures in your world. (Because no one is all-knowing and 100% correct, remember?) But the stereotypes need not be eliminated after just one casual encounter in which the protagonist somehow abandons everything she’s believed in from birth, or, worse, confirmed as true. Instead, you can think about how they influence the perceptions, and thus the actions, of the members of cultures towards one another.

Does your protagonist rest comfortably in what she believes is an intellectual superiority over strangers in her country because they speak her rather complicated language haltingly? Perhaps the strangers who’ve met her are confirmed in their stereotype that all people of her nation are rude and smug and smirk all the time.

Does your protagonist of the goddess-worshipping, Luddite religion just know that all people in cities are dirty, fanatically in favor of technology, and worship a male God? When he goes to the city, perhaps the street urchins recognize his disgusted looks, target him, and offer to give him a “natural” bed for the night in exchange for most of his farm produce—and said “natural bed” turns out to be the holding pen behind the slaughterhouse.

Perhaps your protagonist is highly educated. Among her reading, she’s learned that every single female child of the peasantry is beaten and brutalized by the men in her life. She therefore rescues a peasant girl and brings her home—and is completely confounded when the girl cries for her father, and accuses her of being a slaver who kidnaps children.

Sound fun? Relativity helps. Assuming that all cultures in your world have their own a) proportion of flaws, b) proportion of intelligent people, and c) subjectivity helps even more. At least make sure that b) and c) are not all concentrated in just one culture.

6) Be aware of the power dynamics. This applies especially if you’re writing empires. The empire that conquers other peoples will theorize about those people, coming up with reasons to explain why they were conquered. Among the more popular used in our own world: they were weak; it was God’s will; they deserved it for [insert cultural practice here]; they had some natural resource the empire can use more effectively; they’ll be taken better care of in dependence than independence; the conquest was not really that bad, because we let them keep some of their own religion/culture; look what horrible things they did with their freedom; it’s the law of nature; it’s right because it’s in accordance with [insert vague prophecy here].

The conquered cultures will think different things about the empire. They may not be free to spread those theories, especially if they are living in occupied cities and villages. Some will accept the empire’s explanations and internalize them, or mix the ideas of the two cultures.

Just remember that the empire’s explanations are not the only ones that exist, and they may have a substantial amount of propaganda, distorted information, and outright lies mixed in. That doesn’t make the truth of the conquered entirely right, either, but neither does it make it nonexistent.

The next rant is slated to be on turning idealistic characters gray, and should be up in a few days.

Book review post for May (part 1)

limyaael — Wed, 23 May 2007 01:14:21 GMT

So this is part one of a post logging the books I’ve read so far in May, because if I did all of them at once, this would be extremely long.

Julie Phillips, James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

So, as most people reading this probably know, Alice B. Sheldon wrote science fiction stories like ”The Women Men Don’t See” and ”Love Is the Plan The Plan is Death” under the pseudonym of James Tiptree, Jr., and stories like ”The Screwfly Solution” under the pseudonym of Raccoona Sheldon. She carried on both masquerades for several years before being unmasked—and during the whole time, nearly no one suspected that Tiptree was a woman, in middle age by then, who’d been an artist, a divorcee, an army officer, a CIA photointelligence analyst, a chicken farmer, and a psychologist, in approximately that order. Sheldon sort of set the record when it came to weird jobs for writers to have.

The Phillips book is a biography, of course, and an excellent one. There’s some speculation as to Sheldon’s motives, but nearly everything Phillips says is backed up by something--Sheldon’s journals, Sheldon’s correspondence as Tiptree, people who knew her, the books her mother, Mary Bradley, wrote, or the stories. I knew nothing about Sheldon’s private life before I picked this up and half-assumed the only really interesting stuff would be about the stories, unless the person reading the book was a Tiptree scholar. But Phillips keeps just about everything interesting.

It helps that Sheldon’s an interesting person to read about: tormented about sex and gender, yet working the themes over and over in her stories; passionate about art, yet eventually totally abandoning her career as an artist; suffering deep depression and almost total mental isolation from other people, yet still capable of reaching out and trying to give others help and advice. By the time the end of the book comes, it’s possible to want to flinch at what happened—Sheldon shot her husband, Ting, and then herself, in 1987—and yet not condemn her for it, because Phillips made me feel as if I understood exactly why she did it.

An illusion, of course; but it’s an extremely well-constructed one. I wish more biographies I’d read were as interesting.

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

Ooh, this was a fun one.

So there are humans on another planet, many centuries in the future, who remember Earth—or, at least, they used to be human. They’re taken on the aspects of Hindu gods, and since they control the technologies that ensure other people can go on living in younger bodies, those other people work to worship them and not piss them off. Then one of the “gods,” Sam, discovers how strictly the others control this technology, and reinvents Buddhism so that he can change things and be a monumental pain in the ass with maximum efficiency.

It’s Zelazny, so, while it’s science fiction, the characters are larger-than-life in the way many fantasy heroes are. Sam, in particular, is fun because he’s larger-than-life, has so many people afraid of him, and yet makes so many mistakes. (There’s someone else in the story who’s very likely more of a Buddha than he is). And the other gods have the same moments where the narrative describes them as beautiful, overpowering, and awe-inspiring, and then reveals their failed love affairs, bloodthirsty selfishness, and fatal weaknesses. I understood both why the other humans worshipped them and why Sam wanted them taken down.

Most of the narrative is a flashback, about the first time Sam changed religion and what happened when he was caught at it. The present-time sections and intersections are sufficiently tied in that it doesn’t feel as though everything interesting happened in the past, however. There are giant hunting cats, fights with and against the God of Death, demons, thunder-chariots, the Garuda bird, battles and a wedding inside the domed city of the gods, and an enormous pun I’d been warned for and yet still didn’t see coming.

This is one of those books that probably wouldn’t work at a slower pace or with too much explanation; some of the events would start dragging, others seeming too unlikely. (I did find one extra plotline about Christianity a bit much). But Zelazny gets away with it by pure whipcrack pace and excellent writing skills.

Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

A short story collection by the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and set in the same world. I adored three of the stories; the others ranged from “meh” to being fun but puzzling.

“On Lickerish Hill” is a retold fairytale (I won’t mention which one, but it’s very easy to figure out once you start reading) told in dialect. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t understand the ending. “Mrs. Mabb” is a story about a young woman who’s lost the man she’s in love with; this is one of those where there’s simply too little explanation of what’s going on to dispel the obscurantism, which works so well in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I think, because it’s balanced with passages where you do understand what’s happening. “The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse” is exactly what the title says—cute, but very short. “Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower” sold me on the characters and the humor but not how the protagonist got out of his predicament. “Antickes and Frets” winds Mary Queen of Scots up in enchanted embroidery and is, like the Duke of Wellington story, very short. In this case, it works less well because the story is meant to be dramatic and serious instead of humorous.

But, as I mentioned, three of the stories were very enjoyable:

-“The Ladies of Grace Adieu”—Jonathan Strange appears in this one, but it’s really the story of three women who live in the parish where Jonathan Strange’s brother-in-law has taken orders. These women have rediscovered magic on their own, and they use it for far different purposes than the men. This story reminded me the most of the novel, or at least of what the novel could have been if female magicians had appeared before the end. Very poetic, but, unlike “Mrs. Mabb,” I felt the obscurity of what happened served the story rather than the other way around.

-“Tom Brightwind, or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby”—This story concerns the adventures of the fairy Tom Brightwind and the Jewish doctor David Montefiore, who are friends. Tom Brightwind resembles the “gentleman with thistledown hair” from the novel, but he’s most decidedly not him. He’s at once more charming and more dangerous, probably because his enchantments are largely calculated to charm, seduce, and give people what they think they want, rather than to enchant innocents. David, his poor patient human friend, attempts to explain human morality, especially human obligations to children, to him; Tom chooses not to listen. This story also has footnotes, but the “That’s the way fairies are” tone is what I enjoyed most.

-“John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner”—This story is partially online here.

This story does have the Raven King in it, but he’s not the hero. He despoils a charcoal burner’s clearing, and the charcoal burner sets out to get revenge on him by invoking various saints. It’s incredibly funny, especially since the Raven King was such a fearsome figure in the novel. I liked it especially because it shows that Clarke can laugh at her central characters, something so many authors aren’t able to.

Meredith Ann Pierce, Birth of the Firebringer

This is a YA fantasy. However, it’s a YA fantasy with a unicorn as the hero instead of a human teenager, and that seems to be all that’s needed to make me interested in reading it. I really am a sucker for intelligent nonhumans, I tell you.

Aljan, called Jan, is the son of the prince of the unicorns, but his father isn’t particularly proud of him; he plays stupid pranks and is consistently irresponsible. Luckily, Jan’s conflict with his father isn’t the only plot strand, or I probably wouldn’t have finished the book. And since one of Jan’s pranks, played at the start of the book, almost immediately endangers him and other people, he does start growing up pretty quickly.

Jan’s people were driven out of their ancestral home centuries ago by the wyverns, who poisoned their king and killed many of them before the unicorns chose to flee. However, they still need to bathe their horns and hooves in a sacred pool in their old territory and hold vigil by it, or they won’t be accounted true adults. Therefore, a small group of those to be initiated go to the pool each early spring with a guard of warriors, before the wyverns awake from their winter sleep. Jan is determined to make the journey this time, since his father has already held him back once before.

The writing is excellent, giving the world as the unicorns find it instead of sticking solely to human perceptions, and creating an atmosphere that really heightens the sense of danger in the story, even though it’s perfectly obvious where some plot strands are going. The plot also lets Jan make discoveries about the world around him that upset his perceptions several times. So he really has Learned Better, and the audience knows what he’s learned (which is sometimes a problem in bildungsroman stories; the character is supposed to have learned lessons, but it’s not clear what those lessons are).

I’m not entirely sure I want to continue with the trilogy, as the destiny-stink is pretty strong in the last pages, and I’ve heard the next two volumes aren’t as good. But I really enjoyed this one.

On possession, mind control, and hypnosis

limyaael — Mon, 21 May 2007 01:46:48 GMT

This is a broad general topic, admittedly, but each one by itself would probably be too narrow for a rant. Thus, we’re doing it this way.

1) Know how the minds in your story work. For example, if the people in your world use a division of the mind into id, ego, and superego, someone trying to possess your main character might be able to control their ego and superego, thus controlling the public face they present to the world, but the id would remain free and a potential source of trouble. Or vice versa, of course. That would be a slow, interesting way to make the character descend into insanity, actually: work from below and very slowly erode their control over the most selfish parts of themselves, while searches of their conscious minds would reveal nothing and the shift in personality would seem natural.

Perhaps you disdain anything this simplistic. That’s perfectly fine. What you need to know is how much of the mind is really available to the controller or the possessor, or subdued by hypnosis.

Why? Because it affects what the other people in your story can be expected to notice and what the controlled character can do about it. If a mind-controlled character regularly goes into fugue states and loses all memory of their actions while under, then, hey, that might be a great shrieking tocsin that something is wrong here—especially in a world where mind control is known to exist. If a bit of the character is left trapped and helplessly watching the actions of her body, then she might stand a chance of escaping that she won’t if she’s completely subsumed. And then there are the more extreme forms of what can happen to a mind. No one is coming back from what the slake moths do to them in Perdido Street Station, because their minds have been liquefied

Once you know how minds in your world work, you can answer other basic questions like: What happens when mind control is disrupted? How strong is the basic grip of the person doing this? If this is normal hypnosis, what happens to the people who are not readily suggestible? And so on.

2) Remember not to make any means of control infallible. Otherwise, these people would already have taken over the world, and even if you’re writing a secret-conspiracy-they-discover form of the tale, any battle the protagonists conducted would be foredoomed.

Perhaps mind control can be fought by those who have empathic and/or telepathic powers. (Perhaps mind control is an extreme form of telepathy). Perhaps it leaves behind traces that are easily recognized by a knowledgeable person. That’s one of the things wizards in Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy series do: their Sight sees the true psychic state of a person, which includes recognizing psychic wounds inflicted by mind control. The wizards promptly hunt down and execute the responsible parties.

Perhaps the hypnosis has limitations. If you’re planning on using a hypnotist with no magical powers, I would certainly suggest that. (Please pardon the bad pun). Fantastic claims aside, hypnosis cannot make people do things to which they are fundamentally opposed, such as making them murder someone when they deeply believe murder to be wrong. Nor can it readily affect people who are not very trusting; one of the tests used to determine receptiveness to hypnotic suggestion is to have the subject fall backwards into another person’s arms. Someone who can do it makes a much better hypnosis patient than someone who can’t. And people who can go deeply into somnambulistic states, so that the effects of hypnosis are permanent and strong, exist but aren’t the majority either.

What about possession? Well, as usually portrayed it seems to have no limitations; it can make its victims murder their loved ones, go on demonic sprees of terror, and fall victim to crosses. If you can’t bear to limit the strength of the possessor, limit the number of people who can do it and think about making it vulnerable in other ways. Distance is always my favorite for this, as for other mental abilities, because it’s so simple and yet can be used in a variety of ways. If the possessor can only control others from a mile away, people who knock him unconscious, dump him in the middle of a desert miles from civilization with no water or clothing, and then ride madly away are stronger than he is. He’ll likely die before he makes it into the vicinity of anyone he can control. Or they could be even smarter than that, and just kill him outright when they knock him unconscious.

Decide on the strength of these mental abilities early, and keep it consistent. Not doing that usually results in stories where the enemies are strong in the beginning, to build suspense, but then their abilities inexplicably weaken to let the hero/ine escape in the end.

3) Decide their place in the “ecology” of magic. For one thing: Who’s going to teach someone else to control minds? Even if an individual person with this ability isn’t bad-natured, I’d think it would make the people around her freaky. Can she develop and control it on her own? Does she do it accidentally, in the course of attempting to use her magic for something else? (The idea in Butcher’s books is that a lot of young wizards don’t mean to break their victims’ minds, but once they’ve done it, they begin to hunger after power to control other people and start down the road into black magic).

What’s the relationship of possession to mind control? Is it the same thing? What’s the mechanism for the control? Magic, telepathy, a process like hypnosis, an intense study of personality that attunes the person with the ability to just one other mind? Can people keep someone else from controlling them? Do they recognize the intrusion into their heads? What effect does the control have on the person exercising the manipulation? It would be fun to see someone who wasn’t just a Machiavellian mastermind, say a religious hermit who wanted his privacy to meditate on God and used his gift to drive fear into the hearts of those damn kids who kept trying to sneak up into the hills in search of adventure.

What good are these abilities? To commit crimes or take vengeance is the classic answer, but if they leave signs behind, then sooner or later someone will find out, and that’s not so good for the person controlling minds. Perhaps they should have tried good old-fashioned clever plans instead.

Other answers:

-Being the power behind the throne, changing minds in tiny ways to influence political decisions.
-Counseling, a way to introduce prohibitions against behaviors that people want to quit (some real-life hypnotists function this way).
-“Uploading” information; if a manipulator commanded someone else to have perfect memory, he might be able to learn a new skill faster or pass a complicated test.
-Putting on shows (another thing some real-life hypnotists do).
-Stopping criminals, and other people about to do something undesirable; imagine a manipulator on the city guard who could possess the fleeing criminal so that she turned her horse back around, or hold a person about to commit suicide hostage until someone else could physically reach him.
-Beginning the process of healing by letting people back away from their own emotions for a time, or embrace those they’ve long denied. (Please don’t mistake this for an endorsement of instamagical healing, which I hate. Limitations, remember?)
-War, especially messing up the command structure by making generals and key officers give the wrong orders.
-Spies. Assuming they can read any mind they take hold of, and do it fairly subtly, a team of manipulators could be terrifyingly efficient at figuring out where rebellions are fomenting—the Thought Police of 1984 embodied. They might also be able to make the potential rebel leaders march themselves to jail.

All of this still treads an uncomfortable ethical edge—as it should. I think these are abilities hard to write as completely neutral, unlike, say, creating illusions. People who work with the person they know can control minds might still be jumpy, no matter how many assurances of her good will they receive. But it’s more complicated than turning every character like this into a raving maniac or a greedy robber.

4) Know how you intend to depict mental battles. One of the major complaints in stories where a lot of characters are psionic is that mental battles are too fuzzy. So it’s a “titanic struggle”—but because these characters aren’t fighting with their bodies, the author is deprived of a great deal of her usual descriptive language, and she retreats into adjectives that could refer to anything. Or she tries to write it in the language of dreams. I think this is a mistake, unless the character fighting the mind control actually is asleep. The operations of the waking mind are hard to describe, yes, but many of them are a far different experience to the people inside those minds than dreaming is.

So: how to write it?

My favorite way is using analogues of physical conditions, based on fairy tales about two wizards who can both shapeshift, so that one takes the form of a grain of corn and one takes the form of a hen, and so on. The person trying to possess another might envision his attack as a tsunami, irresistible, but perhaps the defender dives to the bottom of the ocean of her own mind and hides. In this kind of battle, the person with the cleverest imagination wins.

Another way is to think about the physical structure of the brain. Can you describe the battle as flickering among synapses, lobes, ganglia? (This assumes a human brain, of course). Perhaps your characters don’t understand them in a scientific way, but they could still describe what they see.

You could also use their cultural conception of the mind. (This is where Point 1 is helpful, since hopefully you’ve already decided how minds, and mind control, work in your world). Many authors write about an astral Otherworld that has fairly consistent landmarks; why couldn’t a mental world be the same way? Everyone’s may be unique, but perhaps they share enough common features that the manipulator who intends to possess someone and make her into a helpless pawn knows he has to chop down all the trees in the Moral Forest.

If mind control is a big factor in your story, you should know how you plan to describe the time spent in people’s heads, battles or not. Description limited to “He was in her head” and “Then he bounced off her shields” gets old real quick.

And I suppose that, for now, that’s all I really have to say, since each point covers a lot of ground.

On nonhumans living with their nonhuman attributes

limyaael — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:25:20 GMT

Apologies that this is so late; I’ve had spotty Internet access for most of the last week and a half.

1) Know what nonhuman “normality” is. One common way to portray alienness is to constantly compare alien characters to human ones, of course—so the nonhuman characters have their own versions of schools, chairs, the nuclear family, unusual crops, stormy adolescence, and human art. And this works fine if your viewpoint, or your viewpoint character, is human.

The problem comes when you move into having nonhuman viewpoint characters. Why, exactly, should an immortal character describe herself as a “teenager,” or attach any particular significance to being thirteen or fifteen instead of twenty? Why should a character whose range of vision naturally extends into the infrared, ultraviolet, or both assume that the human range of vision is the standard of comparison? Why should a character from a species with three or four genders and a completely different means of reproduction assure her audience that she is exactly like a human woman and can’t wait to be a mother?

I usually see this justified with, “Well, you can’t be too alien, or your audience won’t understand anything.” But that doesn’t excuse the rest of the universe behaving as if being human were the natural or normal thing to be, when they have a substantially different reality (or, in the most extreme cases, when they’ve had no contact with humans at all and thus have no basis for the comparison).

There are ways to cope with showing the nonhuman normality—I’ll try to detail some in the rest of the rant—but first you have to make the commitment, rather than assuming that every race you demonstrate is simply a flawed version of humanity.

2) Develop rites, ceremonies, arrangements, and societies that make sense for that species. The case this hits the hardest is with immortals. Attempting to stuff the whole of an immortal life into a simplified human paradigm, with ceremonies for birth, passage into puberty, passage into adulthood, marriage, and death, but nothing else, really doesn’t work.

What does work? Coming up with times of life that make sense for that species. Perhaps these immortals keep no track of dates at all, and an individual’s passage into adulthood happens so gradually that the only truly society-wide important events to them are birth and death (assuming they only live until someone or something kills them). Perhaps these immortals do, in fact, record the years, if only to keep track of what mortal species are doing, and thus they date themselves by external events. Perhaps there are multiple stages of life for them, following personality changes, or alterations in the body that humans don’t undergo. Perhaps individuals largely make their own choices, so that, while a marriage can be celebrated, there’s nothing to prevent the individuals involved from celebrating a parting from one another and then marrying again, and single people are not seen as inherently failures in life.

The same thing happens with species that reproduce in a different fashion. Is there a need for marriage? If not, they may still form permanent partnerships to rear young, but there is no need for the partnership to be reduced to two parents, to replicate human masculine and feminine roles perfectly, or to imitate the life of a nuclear family. (I am deeply disappointed that nuclear family patterns are seen as the way of life in so much fantasy, to the point of assuming that any child character reared with a single parent must be deprived and/or obsessed with finding his or her missing parent). Extended families of many, many different sorts could come out of a situation like this, and the more delicate and complex the means of reproduction required, the more finding suitable partners might be a focus of the society. That’s a different kind of domestic fantasy. On the other hand, maybe the reproductive patterns of the species more closely mirror those of certain large mammals, with the males and females usually living solitary lives and the mating happening only during certain seasons. Human men and women are essentially capable of having sex most of the time; members of this species might not be.

What’s the purpose of their society? It may be to protect themselves, but, on the other hand, a nonhuman society may face far different threats than humans do. Perhaps they never war with each other, but face attacks from an outside species they can’t combat; thus, they train themselves in the best means of hiding and protection rather than fighting back. Perhaps they’re a migratory species, and thus they have separate settlements in north and south, the case in LeGuin’s story “Seasons of the Ansarac.” Perhaps they’re parasites, and, when they congregate together, it’s to discuss the best way of keeping their hosts alive without killing them—and they do so only when members of their host species pass close enough together. Perhaps they’re immortal and don’t need to eat and drink, but they live by the sight of vast patterns that make the universe into an artwork, and they go about arranging other species, plants, and the earth into the patterns they need to be in to make the artwork look the prettiest.

Basically, don’t assume that the nonhumans are living poor or incomplete lives just because they have a different set of steps in life than the humans do (all those stories of bored immortals and backwards alien societies that just need human intervention seem to stem from the idea that sentience enacted on any other scale than the human one simply is not plausible).

3) Vary their cultures. Another problem with nonhuman species can be that their cultures are far too monolithic. While humans in the same world have different nations, religions, languages, and histories, all elves live in forests, wear green robes, sing, and use bows, and all dragons are solitary and savage, with no higher ambition than hoarding treasure and fighting knights, despite their sentience. This is another effect of making the humans the center of the world. At best, nonhumans are a marginal presence in the world, or, if their society is portrayed as being superior to human society, they’re only role models to follow, without any complexities or self-contradictions to make them complicated characters. At worst, nonhumans are another kind of animal, but the kind of animal that only exists in the minds of people who don’t have much contact with them, having a few simplified behavior patterns to keep them running, and a few exaggerations for comic effect.

So show variation. If they do have different arts than human beings, that’s still no reason to have one art form consume the whole society. If they are immortal, don’t account time as important, and thus lack human “history,” what kind of plans, hopes, dreams, or plots drive their lives instead? If they have a “nature religion,” that’s still no reason they all have to be mindless slaves to a Mother Goddess. Consider how complex a “nature religion” could become that acknowledged a different deity for every species of plant and animal, or which was animistic and accepted each rock, tree, and creature as having its own sentience.

If they have elaborate systems, remember that they don’t just have to concern etiquette and court politics, the two areas that most writers think about. Think about what they may need etiquette for that humans don’t. If they can meet in the dreamworld, how do they behave there? What are the rules about entering someone else’s dreams, and how do young children learn them? If they have indestructible bodies and can harm themselves extensively, then resurrect at a moment’s notice, they may still admire people who undergo certain deaths more than others, and for reasons that human visitors wouldn’t necessarily assign at first glance.

Nonhumans may still be parts of the scenery if your story takes place primarily among the humans, but the parts of them on display should still be crafted with as much care as the human societies the book only briefly touches on.

4) Remember that their nonhuman attributes will influence multiple parts of their lives. Perhaps every member of this species has empathy, and they can only learn slowly to damp it; in fact, children sometimes go insane from the emotional overload. How would they deal with it? I found it doubtful that they would just refer to empathy in passing now and then and otherwise act (and expect others to act) exactly like people who didn’t have it.

Social rules would accommodate emotion and the expression of it; after all, if everyone knows what you’re feeling anyway, there would be little point in attempting to keep up a stoic front. There might be some areas in which self-control is valued, but those places would automatically have to leave out children and the people poor at suppressing their empathy—and even that might not be enough when, say, two old enemies or two reunited lovers met. Conversational give-and-take would reflect it, perhaps with pauses to see what impact particularly controversial words made on the partner in the conversation. How one experienced the empathy would also need to be given consideration. If it seemed like physical sensations, such as heat for rage and the smell of vomit for extreme anxiety, people might leave the person feeling such emotions alone for a time. Lying and honesty would have totally different meanings, and those who masked their empathy or emotions might essentially deafen themselves or draw suspicious attention from others. Anyone from another species without empathy would probably find some social situations confusing, or impossible to follow. Games of chance that relied on bluffing, like poker, would become impossible, and an art form like drama that depended on acting would be complicated in interesting ways.

The same thing should happen with long life, keener senses, illusory magic, a preference for a watery environment over an airy one, wings, the ability to shapeshift, and so on. The society that refuses to make accommodations for an ability everyone has is simply stupid (and/or the writer is once again relying thoughtlessly on human norms). Again, think about what the center of normality is in your society, and then thread the abilities, problems, and neutral differences from the humans that nonhumans live with daily out from there.

5) Remember that attitudes and concerns may not match up to human ones exactly. Another problem with trying to illustrate everything a nonhuman character says or does in exact analogies; what if this species simply doesn’t have war, or a conception of it? What if they not only know the exact time of their death but refuse to let that bother them? What if they live in harmony with fate and don’t have an obsession with individualism that assures them the highest goal is for every person to be unique and utterly free of will?

All of this is fine. And I think a skilled writer can extrapolate, again, outwards from such differences.

It may be impossible to write a story like this. But declaring it impossible beforehand is, I think, like a writer assuming that she simply can’t write protagonists of a younger age than herself when she’s never tried, or someone from a different religion. How does she actually know? She may mess up on some attempts, but others could be brilliant successes.

Since I find nonhumans the most personally fascinating part of fantasy, I may be giving this more weight than it deserves. But since I’d like to see some more attitudinal and cultural variation in fantasy anyway, I do not care.

More could be done with this, always. A story like James Tiptree Jr.’s ”Love is the Plan The Plan is Death doesn’t work for everyone and has not a human character in sight, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good story.

Rant on whores.

limyaael — Mon, 07 May 2007 00:43:22 GMT

And courtesans, harlots, streetwalkers, ladies of negotiable virtue, and other various hangers-on.

1) First, the practical necessities. I’m going to assume that, if you intend to have whores as major characters or otherwise intimately involved in the story (yes, do ignore the pun), you won’t be averse to thinking about and dealing with these. They’re ignored in 90% of the fantasy I’ve read, but that’s because the important characters there are, at least 98% of the time, not whores. (See point 2).

First! What kind of establishment is this? Can the customers hurt them? How many are they expected to bed in a day, or night? How long do they have in between customers? Does each whore have a room, or do they work in alleys and on streets, or do they work in pairs or in large rooms with several mattresses on the floor? Do they even have mattresses? This will affect things like the cleanliness of the work area, the physical health of the prostitutes involved, how many other people—such as bouncers who are there to stop the customers from hurting the prostitutes—are present, and how comfortable things are. If you’re working with a high-class courtesan (see point 3), then the room may be comfortable, private, and filled with carpets and silken whips, but it’s different if you’ve got a streetwalker whose one luxury is a cramped flat where she never brings her customers, since she’s working in the alleys.

Second, what about disease? I’ve remarked before that most common STD’s would take out most fantasy worlds like a wildfire, because in that 90% of fantasy I’ve read, no one takes any precautions. At all. And please don’t do stupid things like insist that everyone in this world is immune to STD’s because of being elves or something. It’s just lazy. In Victorian Britain, where a good number of the stereotypes and conceptions of prostitution come from, there were honest-to-god laws, the Contagious Disease Acts of the 1860’s, passed that mandated that prostitutes had to be medically examined because they might give diseases to sailors and other men the Empire needed in top working condition. And, of course, it was very easy to accuse a woman of prostitution even if she wasn’t one, and the women were not so much treated as detained until they were thought to be “clean.”

Were the men examined?

Don’t make me laugh. (See point 3 again).

It’s worth noting that the Contagious Disease Acts inspired people to act against that, and they were repealed in the 1880’s. But if the association of prostitutes and disease exists in your fantasy world—as it probably will if their status is not attended with respect (see point 3, again)—the subject should be dealt with.

Third, for female whores, there’s the issue of pregnancy to consider. They need not carry their pregnancies to term, but the same thing applies to this issue as to disease: with many partners and an absolute lack of precautions, it’s a bullet that no woman can dodge forever, unless she’s already sterile. (And, of course, not many authors are going to inflict sterility on their female characters, because then they can’t have cute little babies with the hero). Then there comes the risk of miscarriage, botched abortions, stillbirth, and death in childbed—not to mention the months when she won’t be able to work because of risk of damage to the child. If the woman survives the birth, then she’s got the trouble of considering how to raise it, with the chance that the child (at least, if a girl) will be forced into prostitution, too, or thievery, or other perils that attend lower-class life.

Fourth, how does she bear it? Alcoholism, and sometimes the use of other drugs, such as opium, was considered such a large problem for Victorian whores because they needed a way to escape the pain of their lives. But overuse of any drug will cut down the hours they can work, and probably the number of their customers. Yet it would be a minor miracle if your whore character came through the experience completely unchanged and with incurable optimism—one reason I find the “whore with a heart of gold” character so unrealistic. (Of course, there’s always the possibility that she doesn’t do this all the time. See point 4).

And yes, you can invent “excuses” for all of these, like the “everyone is an elf, and they never get sick or pregnant or discouraged” nonsense I mentioned earlier. But I think it’s more worthwhile to face the practical necessities and address them thoughtfully. If nothing else, it gives you more room for varying character reaction.

And that’s what you want, if you’re interested in writing about this, isn’t it?

2) Whores do deserve to have their subjectivity considered. If she’s just a nameless stereotype that appears once and never again, maybe you won’t do it for her any more than you would for any other minor character. But if she’s a fairly major character, or a viewpoint character, then yeah, you should pay attention.

Think of the whores as people. I probably shouldn’t have to mention this, no, but, once again, fantasy has a bad habit of making everything revolve around its heroes. Only their griefs, their pasts, their angst, their joys, their loves, their friends, are important. The minor characters are often, at best, ignored or made into stock types; at worst, they’re slapped down whenever they do something that takes attention away from the hero.

Whores are particularly bad examples of this, because, when they do show up, it’s practically to be stereotypes: to give the hero his first sexual experience, to give the heroine someone to weep over and rescue (without, of course, being in the least an inconvenience to her), to be the heart-of-gold stock character bracing the virgin heroine for her experience as a “working girl” in the moments before she’s rescued. (Heroines must be virgins! Or, at the very least, every sexual experience must be significant, even in a society where that’s extremely unlikely for a woman! I think the only major exception I’ve encountered is Phedre, the heroine of the Kushiel books, and even there, the best sex she ever has is with the “true love” character. Of course. The heroes can’t be poor lovers, either).

So now you have a whore heroine. How she’s going to think?

As a citizen of her world, I hope. (Point 3! With a large hammer!) Also, as the heroine of her own story. I find it highly unlikely she’ll notice one customer as different from the others just because he has violet eyes. Remember how many partners she’s probably had. He’ll have to do something more significant for her to notice him. Be nice to her, perhaps. Not make some crude remark. Give her an especially large payment. (See point 5). No matter how much you may wish otherwise, once you accept her as a viewpoint character, she’s got to have reasons for thinking thoughts that are unusual for her, given her background, station, mindset, and current life. I think the second most cowardly thing an author with a major character like this can do, after making her a stereotype, is to refuse to deal with her life. So all that nasty sex is left over to the side, and the only thing she ever does on-stage is sing, because, really, she’s a musician! (Why can’t she make her living at that, then?) Or she gets involved in adventures! (Doesn’t that leave her too tired to do her work?) Or she’s the foster mother of the prophecy child, and spends all her time noting this little girl’s specialness and wonderfulness! (So she’s never tired, snappish, ashamed of her work, or hungry?)

This is just damn stupid. Have some fucking courage, if you’re going to write a character like this. No one says you have to, no. But having said you will, try to get through it without making her into a nebulous, bodiless cloud.

This, incidentally, is my major problem with “courtesan” characters: they always seem to swank around on some gentleman’s arm, smile, sing, laugh, drink expensive wines, and maybe work as assassins in their spare time, but they never, ever have sex.

3) Know how they interact with the social fabric around them. If prostitution is considered exclusively a low-class activity, regarded with shame, I want to know where the hell those courtesans came from. Why do they get to be different? Why are they considered high-class instead of low and dirty?

There can be answers to this, of course. Perhaps an especially beautiful woman can achieve heights that most whores won’t get a chance to, because they’re worn out and broken down with their constant work and their battles with disease, poor sanitation, and alcoholism. Perhaps there’s a polite fiction in place that a courtesan’s “real” work is providing entertainment and witty conversation to her lover, so she can’t be considered in the same class as a woman who just grunts when you work her over. Perhaps the courtesan really does provide that entertainment. Perhaps a courtesan is trained, while the common prostitutes just spread their legs for anyone.

You can make it work. But you have to make it work, especially if in other parts of the story you have your protagonists sneering at those low-class harlots without even noticing the contradiction.

What about men? Can they also be whores? There might be some, but, in a typical patriarchal fantasy society, there will be more women. Why? Because there will be fewer opportunities for women to do other things, and because the double standard that’s practically required as part of patriarchal societies punishes women more for things like pregnancy. (One source of prostitutes in Victorian Britain was women who became pregnant outside wedlock and were left to bear the shame alone). Men can fall into some of the same traps, but you’ll have to explain why they couldn’t get out of it, especially if they have other skills. (See point 5, once more). If your society is gender-equal, the prostitution might be split another way, say along class lines, and thus might include more equal numbers of men.

What are the sexual morals in your society? Perhaps there are different classes of whores based on how many lovers they have; two or three is all right, even commendable for a noble widow, but have more than that and you’re a woman who opens the door of her boudoir for anyone. Perhaps people are more sympathetic to a woman who uses her body to buy bread for her children than one who uses it to buy opium to soothe her dreams.

Perhaps you have women who sleep with strangers for religious reasons, such as “temple prostitutes.” However, I remain skeptical that “temple prostitutes” are any such thing, based on most incorporations of them into fantasies I’ve read. If they don’t actually have sex with strangers for money, just for love of the gods, what makes them whores? Perhaps they’re considered that way by hostile strangers, or because they sleep with people who promise to make large donations to the temples for the favor, but most of the time, this strikes me as another way to avoid dealing with the reality of what prostitution involves.

In Victorian Britain, sexual morals were tied up tight with fear of disease, hence the Contagious Disease Acts, and fear of women’s desire—“fallen women” were often considered creatures of insatiable desire, because, of course, “good girls” didn’t feel nasty emotions of that sort and would never give in to men—and fear of women going about on the streets. Any woman walking alone in London during some parts of the century was liable to be accused of being a prostitute, and perhaps treated like one. Rape was not largely acknowledged as a social problem (it was often called “seduction”) and men’s sexual desires were considered natural and sometimes discreetly admired. All of this produced a large class of working prostitutes, with the majority of the people who weren’t working as prostitutes steadfastly ignoring the real causes of the problem.

Is it legal? Again, some kinds might be. Perhaps even streetwalkers just get hauled off for the night when caught and released the next morning. But if there’s a large sense of shame and disgust towards prostitutes in your imagined world, there will probably be people pushing for harsher laws. And whatever sexual morals you decide on should link to their legal treatment, too.

Is there homosexual prostitution? Maybe, maybe not. It will probably depend on how male and female homosexuality are treated in your society; many homosexual men in Victorian Britain had to be far more discreet than men who visited female prostitutes, and most people at the time didn’t consider that lesbians could have “actual” sex. And it will also depend on how much freedom the members of each sex have. If a noblewoman wants to have sex with her own sex, but she’s restricted from leaving the house and has nosy neighbors, it would be easier for her to just indulge herself with her maid, not order a pretty girl brought to her or creep off to a prostitute.

How are prostitutes treated in art and literature? In Victorian Britain, the sense of sin was strong in the artistic depictions. Here is a collection of several paintings about the subject, often tied in with some Biblical or religious reference. If your fantasy society also connects the subject with religion, it should show up in the art.

In novels, the motivation was often treated as a personal weakness on the part of the “fallen woman.” Mary Barton, a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, has a prostitute character, Esther, who’s described this way by her sister’s husband:

”Not but what beauty is a sad snare. Here was Esther so puffed up, that there was no holding her in. Her spirit was always up, if I spoke ever so little in the way of advice to her; my wife spoiled her, it is true, for you see she was so much older than Esther, she was more like a mother to her, doing every thing for her….You see Esther spent her money in dress, thinking to set off her pretty face; and got to come home so late at night, that at last I told her my mind; my missis thinks I spoke crossly, but I meant right, for I loved Esther, if it was only for Mary's sake. Says I, 'Esther, I see what you'll end at with your artificials, and your fly-away veils, and stopping out when honest women are in their beds; you'll be a street-walker, Esther, and then, don't you go to think I'll have you darken my door, though my wife is your sister.' So says she, 'Don't trouble yourself, John. I'll pack up and be off now, for I'll never stay to hear myself called as you call me.' She flushed up like a turkey-cock, and I thought fire would come out of her eyes; but when she saw Mary cry (for Mary can't abide words in a house), she went and kissed her, and said she was not so bad as I thought her. So we talked more friendly, for, as I said, I liked the lass well enough, and her pretty looks, and her cheery ways. But she said (and at that time I thought there was sense in what she said) we should be much better friends if she went into lodgings, and only came to see us now and then."

Esther ends up irrevocably fallen, a sad lesson for her niece Mary Barton. Once again, this isn’t an unusual depiction for a society that regards prostitution as a source of sin and shame.

Whatever the dominant attitude(s) towards prostitution are in your society, the culture should reflect them, either straightforwardly or in order to argue with them.

4) Break up the idea of prostitution as some sort of monolith. The dominant view of whores in British Victorian society was the middle-class one. One book I read selections from in one of my classes—unfortunately, I don’t remember the title of the book—had a letter that a woman who had been born in a village and had become a rich man’s mistress wrote to the newspapers. She revealed that she felt no shame, because her occupation enabled her to earn money for her family, and give extra treats, like ribbons and candy, to her younger siblings. She had been lucky enough to have a rich man fall in love with her, and also give her education in reading and writing. She had been raised with a far different view of prostitution than the middle-class one, and retained it into adulthood, because it benefited her.

So: Not all prostitutes are the same. Some will feel shame, if that’s part of the society’s view of them. Some won’t. Some will neglect their children. Some won’t have children, because they’ll take precautions against carrying any to term. Some will love their children and make shift to raise them. Some may avoid speaking to any “normal” women; others will seek them out, perhaps to show that they are still human.

They may not be prostitutes all the time, either. Closer study of streetwalkers in Victorian England has revealed that it was a seasonal occupation for many women; they became prostitutes in winter, when it was difficult to earn enough money for shelter and warmth or when their regular jobs closed up, and then returned to those normal jobs when the weather grew milder. They passed in and out of the different classifications under the middle class’s nose, because the middle class was too busy explaining to itself that any woman who “fell” would remain that way forever.

Likewise, perhaps a prostitute does exceptionally well for herself, puts money by, and changes employments as she grows older. Or she supplements that source of her income with others—not enough to keep her alive without the prostitution, but sufficing with it.

There are all kinds of possibilities. Combine this with point 2, and you’ve got a living, breathing class of characters, which works a lot better than just accepting another society segment’s word about them as the gospel truth.

5) Prostitution is sex for money. Of course.

But, as I’ve noted before, a lot of authors go out of their way to avoid actually tackling this subject, even when they’ve made their characters its subject. Thus the courtesans who seem to do everything but have sex. Thus the heroines who inexplicably remain virgins in the middle of whorehouses. Thus the prostitutes who never seem affected by their lives and remain cheerful and smiling and able to dispense good advice left and right.

Thus the characters who become prostitutes when they could live by other means. This strikes me as a case where the author wants angst and nothing else. Can the character pick pockets, play music, juggle, sew, or work in a factory? Then why is she subjecting herself to the risks of sex with strangers? Maybe her other job won’t keep her by itself, or is subject to seasonal variation, as mentioned in point 4. Then it’s reasonable for her to act as she must to survive. But why is prostitution ever a first resort for someone, unless she’s done it before? Consider this before your character spends her first cold, hungry night on the streets, and then decides that she absolutely must become a whore, nothing else will do!

And if you’ve chosen a prostitute as a major character, show the sex for money part, hmmm? Once again, no one’s forced you to write about this subject, but once you do it—just as happens when you choose to write about rape and torture—it’s dishonest to the story to flinch. If you’re uncomfortable writing straightforward sex scenes, there are plenty of ways to elide a bit and still suggest the character’s feelings.

And please, none of this “she doesn’t take payment, she does it for love!” nonsense. If this is her livelihood, she can’t afford not to charge. If she really likes the guy—and why is that?—then maybe she doesn’t accept his money, but if she did that all the time, she’d starve. Besides, if he loves her, why isn’t he insisting that she take a hefty payment?

Basically, if to you, sex always equals love, perhaps you shouldn’t be writing a prostitute character.

Anything but pretending that your prostitute character, who has sex for money, is really doing something else.

I think fantasy could use more whore characters—with their own voices, thanks.

Class/caste systems

limyaael — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:44:15 GMT

So the little poll said, so shall it be.

1) What sustains the system? Magic? Age? Customs and traditions lost in the mists of time? Religion? Blood? Inertia? A combination of all or some of the above plus other factors? (I personally think authors, especially fantasists, underestimate inertia as a social force. Sure, there will be people burning for more than they’re given in every society, but there will also be plenty of people convinced that all they need is right here, and at most they want to make a few minor changes to ensure their own personal happiness).

Once you know what holds the system in place, you should have a much better idea of how the classes or castes interact, what small outlets for steam and change are permitted (see point 3), what the points of contact—and slippage—between castes and classes are, how they act internally (see point 4), how conscious people are of it (there’s going to be a difference between power constantly reinforced by flashy displays of magic and power that has sunk into the fabric of everyone’s everyday lives to the point where most people don’t notice it anymore), the age of it, how extensive it is (see point 2), and so on.

If you don’t have the slightest clue what sustains your class/caste system, I suggest you find out. About now.

2) Where does the system stop? Sometimes it ends at a nation’s borders, but sometimes not. For example, caste systems of some sort or another prevailed in many of the Spanish colonies in the New World; the “pure” Spanish were on top, the “pure” Native Americans and Africans were on the bottom, and in between were all the various possible combinations, with different positions depending on which color which parent was, how rich a Spanish parent had been in Spain, how long ago the mixing of “other” blood had been, what language a person spoke, where they lived, how great their chances were of actually leaving the colony and going back to Spain, and so on. The system stopped, for obvious reasons, at the ocean, and did not cross over to Spain partially because Native Americans and Africans were rare enough in that country not to make it necessary. (Spain was also the only European country to have been conquered by the Moors for centuries, so that perception also influenced the way the hidalgos and conquistadors responded to people around them in the New World. Not to say that Britain, France, and Portugal were much kinder).

Other times a system might extend across cultures, say if you have classes substantially established in a home country and then carried to another by colonizing powers—and then the natives in that area are weak enough not to become a major factor in altering the system as it reestablishes itself. This was the case of many British North American colonies where the Native Americans were weak enough to provide, at most, a feared or admired enemy on a few occasions, but the colonists were more concerned with their own internal affairs and their relationship to the colonizing country. (Disease had given them that luxury). It’s not to say that the people involved have to recognize what they’re doing, or end up replicating exactly the same relationships; the United States has famously been a “classless” nation.

Know what limits the class/caste system, whether it’s bound to place, culture, society, or a mixture of them.

3) Know your ventilation system and your carnivals. What are the outlets, the places where the steam and the anger of those who suffer within the class or caste system can leak out? They might be carnivals, or days when the master and the servant switch positions (as April Fool’s Day sometimes used to be), or the acceptance of a few “talented” or “special” or “unique” individuals who rise up the ranks and so become less dangerous when they’re at the top. If the dissatisfaction is widespread, it might erupt into riot, revolution, or civil war, but any class or caste system that has lasted generations will have mechanisms in place to help prevent that from being the inevitable reaction.

This is a good place to consider what exactly the place of social mobility is in your world. Is it accepted for those few talented or special individuals? (A deeply cynical part of me wants to write the story of the peasant hero who becomes king from the point-of-view of nobles who decide that he really has aristocratic blood against all the evidence, because that’s the only way they can accept someone from a lower class ruling over them—if he’s “really” one of them. This is also why I want to drop-kick authors who reveal that their “ordinary” person actually has the blood of kings or gods after all. Even urban fantasy has its variant, where the “mundane” heroine turns out to be descended from fairies, as if it doesn’t make sense for her to have achieved her victories on her own). Is the mobility denied, but happens anyway under the covers? Is it considered possible through a mechanism that no one has ultimate control over, like reincarnation, destiny, a god’s favor—possibly someone could fake this—or the sudden choice of sentient magic to hang around a certain person? Does it happen without existing as a concept, so people who rise from one class or caste to another don’t conceive of themselves as part of a process that others can access? And what about downward motion? Can you commit a sin or crime or loss of fortune that makes you Erzenkangran where you had been Ezzeran? If you have children with someone not of your caste, whose standing do they take on? (In British North American systems of slavery or indentured servitude, it was usually the mother’s; the child of a slave woman was not born free). And how many people are incapable of accessing whatever mechanisms for social mobility or softening the blows of the system exist, and have to stew their lives away in helpless frustration and anger?

Those stories of frustration and anger aren’t ones I see often. And while the people who are “special” enough, and potentially troublesome enough, to rise are great, I’d like to see stories of endurance, survival, and coping, too. Or people who can rise, but don’t take that as permission to cut off every human connection with the characters around them who aren’t as lucky.

4) What is the internal reality of each caste or class? Again, most fantasy is slanted. We get to see the internal reality of the highest class, or the royal caste. We know how they think of themselves and how they interact among themselves as well as what they think of others below them. Yet when lower-class characters appear, most of their energy seems to be taken up hating or adoring those above them, so the whole story is nothing but a mirror of a mountain peak. We rarely get to see the lower-class people interact with their own families, friends, and neighborhoods. We don’t know how they think of themselves.

So, consider. What kind of internal realities does the class/caste system you’re working with create? They might be pleasant, but try to explore the unpleasant ones, too. And know what the context—in this case, the system and the forces that created it—might make pleasant and unpleasant for different people.

And that means including both mental and physical conditions. When lower-caste characters do appear on their own merits, they can starve, have sores or diseases, scream and bleed, hold starving and dying children—but we don’t get to hear them think or speak. So feel free to contrast material conditions, but try to take on their personalities. (See point 7)

5) Remember that relationships are more complicated than just “top” and “bottom.” If the class/caste system you’re building is immensely complicated—the way it often was in the Spanish colonies—then the extreme top and the extreme bottom aren’t the only ones that can interact. Take a family with five siblings, and the youngest and the oldest don’t just relate to each other; they have their own relationships with the middle child and the second and the fourth. A system with five castes or classes should do the same thing. Meanwhile, all the ones in the middle have their relationships with everyone else, too.

How do they think of each other? How do they react to one another when individuals meet? How often do they have occasion to interact? (How far apart do the different classes and castes live? Even in large cities, classes often separate themselves). What stereotypes (probably more important than realities) exist in the heads of people from certain classes/castes as they think of other classes/castes and govern their reactions? What narratives do they tell about each other, and who gets to imprint the narratives as more than stories on the behavior of others? If there’s a crisis—a war, a famine, a plague, an alien crash landing—who’s the cannon fodder, who’s the scapegoat, who’s the protected and cherished victim?

And how often do they get to break through and see individuals?

6) Know how class and caste interact with other factors in the society. Among those, but not limited to them:

-Gender.
-Age.
-Race/ethnicity.
-Occupation.
-Religion.
-Politics.
-Economy.
-The legal system.
-Nationalism (if it exists in your world) or identity politics of other kinds.
-Art.
-Culture.
-Science.
-Mythology.
-Physical realities of the world (hunger, thirst, disease, need for shelter, cleanliness, geography).
-Magic.
-People’s sense of themselves as individuals.
-Other narratives that may oppose the class- or caste-bound one.

Even if your system is based on one or more of the above—if it has rankings based on who acts more masculine and feminine, for example, or if the most powerful mages rule, or if religion has dictated that certain people are pure and holy while others are not—it is not identical to those things; there can certainly be aspects of gender or magic or religion that the system names only vaguely, or not at all. I think one way that a class- or caste-based fantasy can fail is to assume that this system is the only defining factor in everyone’s lives (it never is; if nothing else, physical realities have got it beat). A second way is to assume that it only acts in isolation and is utterly immutable, and nothing can challenge, change, modify, or bend it. Point 3 gives one example of why that’s not true; that list up there is another.

This is another recipe for enormously complicated fantasy, I know, when perhaps you wanted to write a simple story about a three-tiered class system based on magic that the protagonist travels on a picaresque journey through. Sorry. I appear to be incapable of not leading it back to complication.

7) Think yourself into it. This is a place where a deeper sort of body-centered writing helps. Normally, I think body-centered writing depends on trying to feel what your character does, see what she sees, try to imagine what it really is like to climb down a cliff or ride a dragon. For a fantasy with a class or caste system wildly different from the society you live in—and this only gets more urgent if your class or caste position is not particularly important to you—try to think of the character’s body and mind as a citizen of that system would think of it.

If women of a certain caste are considered violently ugly and unclean at all times, but it gets worse when they’re menstruating, then try to imagine how a female member of that case would feel when she starts bleeding, and how she would think of herself. It’s not pretty, but it’s necessary, and it’s probably the best route to avoiding caricature and exaggerated reactions that, once more, will make the lower-class character into a stereotype while leaving the higher-class observer untouched.

If your character is on the fringes of her own class, in an occupation that makes her have to deal with those of other classes a lot—say, a dressmaker to fine ladies—she might need to be exquisitely aware, at all times, of what clothing and look and posture and tones in the voice suggest. Think like that while you’re writing her. Deciding it’s not important because it’s not important in your own life creates falsehood, again.

If you say that your system encourages citizens of certain classes or castes to think about their minds and bodies in certain ways, then show it doing so.

Books I read in April

limyaael — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:30:37 GMT

(Along with others, but these are the ones I had interesting reactions to).

Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel

Ned Marriner has gone to Provence with his father for six weeks while his mother works in the Sudan, with Doctors Without Borders. His father will shoot cathedrals; Ned will, supposedly, have the time of his life, even if has to write school papers while he does it. First he meets a girl named Kate Wegner, and then he meets a man who lifts up grates in the cathedral and somehow knows that a centuries-old image of the Queen of Sheba is not really an image of the Queen of Sheba, and then things get weird.

Ysabel is the first novel with anything like a contemporary setting that Kay’s written since The Fionavar Tapestry, and perhaps YA, since it has a teenage main character. (I didn’t feel as if it were YA, in the sense that it didn’t seem as if the sole focus of the story were Ned’s growing up. But then, several other reviews I’ve read complained that Ned is not like a “real” teenager—which may have helped make him more appealing to me. Take this as you will). There are still mystical, magical passages, dense foreshadowing, grand passion and love hanging about in the background, and a keen sense of history; it’s Kay, after all. But they’re not the only things in the story any more, as they also need to contend with the mystical world crossing over into the daylight, Ned’s increasingly weird life, and danger to his friends.

I liked it. (But you may not; see aforementioned warning about Ned not being a “real” teenager). It didn’t feel as passionate as Kay’s other novels have, especially the Fionavar Tapestry, but I was never bored with it, and there are several passages that overcame my extreme distrust of Anything Celtic and got me to roll with them. If there are inaccuracies about the contemporary technology, another complaint in some reviews, well, I have a tin ear for them, so I didn’t notice. And I adored Ned’s aunt and uncle.

However.

This is the first book where Kay’s writing tics have driven me quite mad. In this case, the most prominent of them is that he starts calling everyone by first and last names about halfway through the book—Ned is the only major exception I can think of—so that Ned’s father is almost never just “father” or “Edward” or “Marriner” but “Edward Marriner.” All the time. In the narration. I can’t tell you why that made me want to scream, but it did.

As with the ending of The Last Light of the Sun, the ending of Ysabel felt like there were threads in place I didn’t understand, or threads I hadn’t noticed until then, or ones I’d missed because I read too fast, or—and I don’t want to think this—Kay was relying just a bit too much on plot coincidence. I can’t say more without spoiling it.

And finally, for a personal pet peeve, there are a few too many times when Ned shocks the immortal characters into silence. They’ve lived centuries, they would probably have asked themselves these questions, okay?

But other than that, enjoyable book.

Virgina Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, reread

I first read this five years ago, and have occasionally glanced into it since then, but never sat down and read the whole thing start to finish. It’s worth doing so, and if I think about it I might make a once-yearly tradition of it. Or something.

As everyone who’s familiar with Woolf probably knows, this book is based on lectures she gave when asked to talk about “Women and Fiction,” and concentrate primarily on what women need in order to write. “A room of one’s own and five hundred pounds a year,” is the way Woolf puts it. Throughout this, she wanders through a good deal of English literature, talking about the low reputations of writing women before the nineteenth century. Women wrote under pseudonyms, or were considered crazy for wanting to write, or never wrote at all and went mad and died. The most famous part of the book is probably “Shakespeare’s sister,” where Woolf imagines Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, a woman just as talented as he was, but unable to express herself because of her gender, finally dying by suicide. A letter-writer or a diarist might have escaped, but not a poet or a playwright. The second most famous part might be where she points out that conversations between men, or between men and women, are relatively common in books, but conversations about women (when they’re not about men or children) are nearly nonexistent.

Since this was written in the 1920’s, most theories and conjectures concerning writing women have changed, and most people studying it no longer consider the British canon of women writers the only one that can exist. They’ve found authors Woolf knew nothing about, or rescued the reputations of those who might have been mocked and laughed at in her time. But I think it’s still valuable, if only because too many of the freshman students I know now tend the other way, and believe there was never a time when men and women weren’t equal, or treated equally as artists. So the silence about women is preserved by denying it ever existed, while, just coincidentally, still treating male authors as the center of the canon (because “men wrote all the good stuff,” of course). Woolf’s is the kind of book that makes me think I’d like to spend a few months or years only reading books by women, to see if there is some sort of qualitative difference, and for the pleasure involved.

Ian McDonald, River of Gods

This is a book I’ve heard so much discussion about that I wanted to read it, even though I normally don’t go for “harder” science fiction. I’m glad I did, if only because I went in cat-stepping and thinking I would understand almost nothing, and wound up understanding much more than that, so it’s broken a barrier that was preventing me from reading “difficult” science fiction. It also helps that this book tackles a theme I love: the coexistence of the human and the nonhuman.

It’s set in 2047, in India, or the nationalized remnants of what was once India, the one place in the world where aeai (A.I.) superintelligences still have some chance of existing. The U.S. and most other countries have created laws that mandate the destruction of all A.I.’s above a certain level. One of the main characters, Mr. Nandha, is a Krishna Cop, who “excommunicates” rogue A.I’.s, but “wild” programmers still exist out in urban jungles, constructing the rogues or protecting them when they find them.

This is an enormous novel, ranging through all sorts of characters who become connected to each other by weird, tangential currents. One viewpoint character, Najia, is a newspaper reporter who’s gradually caught up in the growing currents of a fundamentalist Hindu revolution and so meets Tal, one of the “nutes,” the engineered third non-sex. Mr. Nandha and his lonely, country-bred wife, Parvati, eventually collide with government officials, and from there the story spins out towards collision with two Westerners: Thomas Lull, who’s come to India to get lost, and Lisa Durnau, who’s come to find him. Tal and several other characters are involved, more or less by accident, in local politics themselves. And so on.

My favorite character was definitely Tal. Yt (this pronoun is used for nutes throughout the book) wanders more or less innocently into the larger story, but then fights to keep yts feet, survive, and understand what’s going on through yts personality traits like courage, rather than super-powers or government contacts. I also liked Parvati, but, perhaps because she’s not in as much danger, she doesn’t get as much chance to change. Najia is a bit creepy—a blood junkie, who gets sexually aroused by watching bio-engineered cats tear themselves apart—but she has strength when it counts. None of the plot threads were boring, though I found some harder to understand than others.

Definitely can see why this was a Hugo nominee. This is exactly the kind of “big” story that I like; it becomes the story of a whole world, with the “position of central importance” moving from one character to another, hovering on them like a spotlight, and then darting away again, rather than artificially being shoved back to concentrate on just one person with innate advantages. Good stuff.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

(I finally discovered that my campus library does, in fact, have a good pile of LeGuin books. For some reason, they were listing them under G, as if her last name were Guin, which was why I had never found them).

I knew most of the concept of this book before I started it: that it takes place on a planet largely without gender, as the natives remain sexless except when they go into kemmer once a month, and then assume either male or female form depending on the hormones of people around them. They can become pregnant with children or father them indiscriminately. And the major storyteller is an outside observer from a coalition of worlds, sent to Gethen as an ambassador.

It’s been a while since I read a LeGuin novel I was unfamiliar with, and I’d forgotten that she does characters, as well as language, really well. Or well for me, at least. I liked both Genly Ai, the ambassador, and Estraven—which is a last name or title, rather than a first name—the major Gethenian character. I hadn’t realized both told the story, first-person, with smaller chapters in the form of research reports from the Ekumen, Genly’s coalition of worlds, or Gethenian history-stories. That expanded the scope of the story, and kept it from seeming too much like just a fish-out-of-water book.

The basic plot: Estraven, who’s risked a great deal trying to persuade the King of Karhide to listen to Genly, abruptly falls from the royal favor, and is exiled to the neighboring nation. Genly inevitably comes there, and finds out that the Gethenian society isn’t as perfect as he pictured it. The politicians there can be as stupid as the politicians elsewhere, and, partially because of fear about the Ekumen but also because people are stupid, a war is brewing, for the first time in Gethenian history. Genly and Estraven stand a chance of stopping it, if they can only get people to listen to them.

Gethen is a utopian world in the sense that they haven’t had a war before this and their technological revolution has been spread out over a long period of time rather than crammed into a century and a half, but lack of gender most of the time doesn’t solve all the problems. I appreciated this, as part of my problem with some feminist fantasy and SF has been the idea that if you just invert everything, all the problems are solved, which does not make allowances for the idea that stupidity and stubbornness are not limited to one gender. (And if your idea of women were to be drawn solely from the female protagonists of the worse kind of fantasy novels, you would probably conclude that women are far more stubborn then men, as well as far more unforgiving). LeGuin describes the story in one of her essays, “Is Gender Necessary?”, as a step sideways rather than a solution. She wanted to see what was left, what was human, if she stripped the idea of gender away. (It’s debatable whether this works).

My favorite part of this story was, believe it or not, the description. Estraven and Genly spend a lot of time traveling together, but the travel is exceedingly difficult and dangerous, not the light jog it is in many journey plots that’s meant to give characters time to bond. And yet, Genly and Estraven manage to bond anyway. And far more effectively than most people just stumbling through a fantasy wonderland manage, too.

If science fiction is solely considered to be about starships, chemistry, and physics, I’m less likely to get on with it. I’m a lot more interested in biology, anthropology, history, and sociology. And The Left Hand of Darkness does all of them well.

Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

(Digression: I want to say I read this before. I distinctly remember checking this book out of the library about eight years ago. It was at a point when I knew no one who called herself a “feminist” in my high school years and the only people who did so in my undergraduate experience were crazy. I mean, seriously crazy. “Believing that Ronald Reagan gave people seizures with his voice” crazy. I’d decided that the only way I was ever going to learn what feminists believed was to go find books about it, without the anti-feminist people and the crazy people getting in my way. If the arguments were convincing, they would convince me; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t. I met the arguments, and they convinced me. Alas, I can’t remember if I ever read this book all the way through, or finished reading it).

This is an anthology of letters, interviews, poems, and essays—though a few pieces border on short stories—by “women of color” in the United States. This includes African-American women, Latina women (of various nationalities, including Cuban and Puerto Rican), Native American women (of various tribes), and Asian-American women (again of various nationalities, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). I’ve heard of some of these women outside the feminist history classes I took a few years ago, a few others inside them. Others I’ve never heard of.

The book is divided into various sections addressing different topics, such as “Racism in the Women’s Movement” and “El Mundo Zurdo [The Left-Handed World],” or visions for the future. The “Racism in the Women’s Movement” section is probably the most disturbing to a white feminist, such as I consider myself now. The idea that white American women need to educate themselves on other cultures, not rely on Third World women to do it for them, is the most prominent concept here, appearing again and again. Many of the authors in this book received regular calls from white feminists for a list of “experts” they could put on paper or call on to appear at conferences, thus reducing them to tokens.

Notes on individual pieces that greatly struck me:

“An Open Letter to Mary Daly” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” by Audre Lorde—Lorde first addresses Mary Daly, author of Gyn/Ecology, on the disturbing issue of why she purports to represent all women in her study of religion, but then leaves out African goddesses and non-European women in general. (The only quotes from African women in the book are in the chapters on FGM, thus reducing them to one of their cultural practices). In the second essay, she nails the white women who remain in universities and use tools that belong mainly to white men. They are being coopted by, not coopting, the tools around them. They are still afraid of difference, and cannot educate themselves about Third World women. Why not? Lorde’s answer is the title of the essay: the investigative methods they are trying to use are inherently racist, sexist, imperialist, and homophobic. Their only chance is to actually listen to Third World women and do the hard work that the academies are designed to simplify.

“Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” by Cheryl Clarke—This is partially general, as the statement “For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance” makes clear, but mostly focused on the intersection of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the African-American community. African-American men, in Clarke’s view, had been told they had special privileges by virtue of being male and heterosexual, but those “privileges” really meant very little without white skin and money. Thus a black lesbian challenged the men of her race in ways they weren’t used to being challenged, because while she could join them in anti-racist struggles, she would not give in to the practice of male sexual domination.

“I Come With No Illusions” by Mirtha Quintales—This is an open letter by a Latina woman to her white lover. She is leaving her and going back to her Latina sisters, because that is the one place she can really breathe freely, work freely, talk freely. She’s a bit sorry for this, but most of the letter is about her chances, her need and longing to make a connection with people who share the same experiences she does (when for most of history it has been the other way around where white and Latino/a people are concerned). “It is after all, great personal need, not political analysis that drives me to take this stand, to turn away from my American sisters and put all my energies into creating a community with my Latina sisters.” The letter is much less like a confession and much more like a declaration of freedom.

“Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers” by Gloria Anzaldúa—She talks openly about the terror of writing, how Third World women tend to be silenced because they’re constantly told that their words mean nothing. Anzaldúa has felt that herself; “Who am I, a poor Chicanita from the sticks, to think I could write?” Third World women also tend to have a lack of time to write, because their jobs, caring for their families, and their constant terror of exposure and annihilation oppress them. But Anzaldúa urges them to do so anyway, and to write from the body, from their experiences, with all the “noise” that American white culture has silenced because it doesn’t like it.

“Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman” by Mitsuye Yamada—This is a personal essay. Yamada is a Japanese-American woman who managed to “fit in”; she was an English teacher, middle-class, the mother of four children. Then she started to stand up against discrimination, and everyone white around her was startled, because “she wasn’t like those noisy women” [the white feminists]. Some of her employers actually thought she was being used as a front for the white feminists at first. Yamada realized she’d fit not only into the middle-class, but into the stereotype of Asian-American women as perfectly submissive, contented, and invisible. The rest of the essay is about reflections on the internment camps used on the Japanese-Americans during World War II. Her brother was forced to leave college because he was considered a threat, despite being a pacifist, but no one made Yamada leave. She now thinks it’s because she wasn’t perceived as a threat at all, being a Japanese-American female.

C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, reread

I also got this from my campus library. (They have a lot of speculative fiction authors, as long as they’ve crossed that indefinable boundary into “literature”).

I read the Narnia books first of any kind of “fantasy,” as opposed to fables and fairy tales. I read them because of the Talking Beasts. I was pretty much interested in any kind of story when I was a kid as long as it had nonhuman characters. After Lewis came McCaffrey and Tolkien. But I hadn’t read any of the Narnia books through again in years, and since Dawn Treader had been my favorite of the lot, I wanted to see how it held up.

The answer was: pretty damn well, for me. That may be childhood nostalgia talking. But I still like the description of the sea serpent and the process Eustace goes through to become a dragon, and the adventure of the Dark Island still gives me shivers, and for years the meal served on Ramandu’s island was my standard of what a fantasy meal should look like:

There were turkeys and geese and peacocks, there were boar’s heads and sides of venison, there were pies shaped like ships under full sail or like dragons and elephants, there were ice puddings and bright lobsters and gleaming salmon, there were nuts and grapes, pineapples and peaches, pomegranates and melons and tomatoes. There were flagons of gold and silver and curiously wrought glass; and the smell of the fruit and the wine blew towards them like a promise of all happiness.

I wonder now if the Narnia books weren’t the source of my fondness for intense but short passages of description. That passage I quoted above says a lot more in a lot fewer words than many of the descriptions of courts I’ve read in, say, Robin Hobb’s books. Lewis’s books are short on character development compared to Hobb’s, but the description is much more to my taste.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, reread

I have The Ladies of Grace Adieu coming, but I read Strange & Norrell only once, two years ago. I wanted to refresh my memory before stepping back into Clarke’s world.

And again, I loved it, though there was much more about Clarke’s book than about Lewis’s which I’d forgotten. The exact character of Jonathan Strange, for example, or why I don’t think the ending is very sad.

And the gentleman with thistle-down hair! He’s a nasty fairy, and he actually does nasty things. This is a change from all the books with “malicious” fairies who brag and threaten, but then never actually hurt anyone, or only people the narrator doesn’t care about. The gentleman with thistle-down hair gets into everything, and he’s the only fairy I’ve read about that genuinely seems to have no moral code.

This book also helped me clarify what kind of stories involving secrets I like: Mr. Norrell gets in trouble and gets other people in trouble because he lies about the kind of magic he’s capable of and done, in his fear and his desire to be regarded as the sole source and fount of English magic. I much prefer this to stories where characters misunderstand each other by coincidence, or don’t tell each other the truth out of sullen pride or mistrust that the characters involved have done nothing to earn. (For example, the hero hates all women because a woman once betrayed him, so he will tell the heroine nothing, naturally). Those stories make me want to tear my ears off, particularly when the secret-keeping character is treated with kid gloves. But Mr. Norrell’s punishment comes from his fear and what he costs other people and himself, so this is perfectly acceptable.

Finally, a personal note on sentence rhythm: I do not know why, but to my ears British nineteenth-century novels have a rhythm to the sentences, from Austen down to Wilde, that sounds perfect. I don’t hear it in eighteenth-century work, and sometimes I think Joyce has whatever the opposite of it is. But nineteenth-century novels kind of drown me, and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell does that exact thing.

Ursula K. LeGuin, Changing Planes

This is a short story collection mostly written like a series of ethnographies. The idea is that, once you get bored and disgusted enough in airports, you can visit other planes—a method of travel introduced in our world by a woman named Sita Dulip in the initial story. The rest of the stories are about the other planes, and not connected other than by the method of travel and the Interplanary Agency who run the hotels and sometimes keep members of other species out.

Mostly, the stories are formed by adding an extra feature to or subtracting something from what we consider essential to being human, such as a tendency to grow wings (“The Fliers of Gy”) or the ability to keep our dreams to ourselves (“Social Dreaming of the Frin”). My two favorite stories were the ones where the implications went deeper.

“Seasons of the Ansarac” is one of those. The Ansarac are people whose main physical difference is beaks and bird crests instead of human faces, but they also have the imperative to migrate, spending the autumn and winter of their world’s very long year in the south, but the spring and summer in the north, raising children, farming, and making love. There’s a brief description of the people who tried to interrupt the migration by telling the Ansarac they were behaving like animals, and they should be able to do whatever they wanted all year and have as many children as they liked, but the main focus of the story is the description of their world as it is.

Nobody interferes with the older couples, recourting, refashioning their marriage. But Kimimmid had better look out. A young man comes across the meadow one evening, a young man Shuku never met before; his birthplace is some miles away. He has heard of Shuku’s beauty. He sits and talks with her. He tells her that he is building a new house, in a grove of trees, a pretty spot, nearer her home than his. He would like her advice on how to build the house. He would like very much to dance with her sometime. Maybe this evening, just for a little, just a step or two, before he goes away?

He is a wonderful dancer. Dancing with him on the grass in the late evening of early spring, Shuku feels that she is flying on a great wind, and she closes her eyes, her hands float out from her sides as if on that wind, and meet his hands…

This really is domestic fantasy. And anyone who says that a story needs a war to be interesting has never read it.

“The Nna Mmoy Language” is the other I loved. It’s also mostly description, taking place on a plane with very little ecology—only a few insects, trees, a single species of human-like people, and the bacteria. The Nna Mmoy language is virtually impossible for outsiders to learn, because each syllable can mean dozens of different things depending not only on what comes before it but what comes after it or might come after it. Their writing is

not linear, either horizontally or vertically, but radial, budding out in all directions, like tree branches or growing crystals, from a first or central word which, once the text is complete, may well be neither the center nor the beginning of the statement. Literary texts carry this polydirectional complexity to such an extreme that they resemble mazes, roses, artichokes, sunflowers, fractal patterns.

Their ecology is reduced, and so their language has become complex, in response. Since I love both other species and complexities in writing, you can imagine how powerfully this struck me.

I have a whole pile of books and am not sure what I’ll begin with next. Maybe the biography of James Tiptree, Jr. Or Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Or Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light.

Attitudes towards killing and violence.

limyaael — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:05:45 GMT

Since this deals with attitudes, I won’t be addressing strategy and tactics here; it’s mostly about the social and cultural associations of battles, duels, and other methods of killing. Also, it has few separate points; most of the ideas I wanted to present are gathered together under general ones.

1) What is justified? Usually, “socially approved” methods of killing in fantasy are restricted to duels, self-defense, executions, and killing in war. There are also deaths that get looked the other way from—say, if a noble murders a poor man who has nobody to complain about his death—and deaths that are justified to a limited number of people—such as assassination. But if those get actual social approval, and rhetoric exists to justify them and support them all over the place, and people speak openly about it, and those who kill that way aren’t cast into prison, you’ll need to work harder on the makeup of your society.

I think this puzzles me most with assassination. It’s worst with assassins who wear some symbol, like a tattoo, that identifies them that way. People just treat them like anyone else? While knowing that the assassin’s blade could be turned against them the next day if someone else paid enough money or they committed whatever offense the Secret Assassin Code deems worthy of death? Um, okay.

Seriously, even executioners usually didn’t have that great a reputation. People tend to exhibit some of the same uneasiness around pathologists, too, and morticians. Death makes people uneasy. Now, perhaps the assassins will cause some discomfort and still be admired anyway, as a successful duelist might be, but to have their profession cause no ripple at all is damn fishy. (This is one reason I liked the double reputation of swordsmen in Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint; the work they do is flashy, and so some characters applaud it, but others consider them no better than common killers, and they’re often poor, crude, and violent men).

Likewise, think about self-defense, and about executions. Try to avoid making your criminal codes a perfect replica of the ones you live with. Would they put a woman to death for killing her abusive husband? That might seem like a horrible idea indeed, but that defense hasn’t always worked even in our world; at one time in some European criminal justice systems, a woman who killed her husband committed petite treason, a worse crime than murder. In a fantasy society where a husband has a right to do whatever he likes to his wife, her killing of him would probably not be put under the category of self-defense.

Think this through carefully. Are duels allowed? Does your justice system have a category for war crimes, and if so, how does it distinguish them from soldiers’ normal activities? What are the common methods of execution? How heated are arguments over them? What level of authority does someone have to have to kill, and how clear should the proof of the crime be? (For example, would a farmer be tried for murder if he shot a chicken thief he caught red-handed?) I think nearly any combination can work, but gaps and holes will show up if no thinking is done, particularly if the hero commits a violent crime said to be worthy of execution but then is not punished for it.

2) How does death by violence affect the afterlife? Assuming, of course, that the religions you design have afterlives.

Perhaps the body of someone who died by violence can only be disposed of in a certain way. Another historical example: Suicides were usually not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground, since suicide was a terrible sin. Perhaps suicides in your world are burned, or sent off to the afterlife with a pinch of salt under their tongues to symbolize the tears they should have shed instead of turning their hands on themselves.

Does the ghost of someone who died by violence return? With some reason, many ghost stories concern the spirits wanting revenge on their murderers. Perhaps they need to get the living to help. Perhaps, if violence between members of the same people is a horrific thing in your world, the spirit will be satisfied with the murderer’s repentance or surrender of a good part of his worldly possession, instead of demanding that he die.

Can executed criminals go to heaven? What happens if they’re found to be innocent after death? Does it depend on whether they were hanged, stoned, drowned, burned, pressed to death? Perhaps the site where they usually die is considered unlucky and people keep away from it, rather than coming in droves to witness public executions.

What happens to soldiers, assassins, and others whose daily business concerns death? Are they put in a separate section of the hells or heavens? The Viking afterlife was famous for honoring its warriors, but other religions might feel rather differently; perhaps soldiers are viewed with some distaste, and they have a middling place in the gods’ halls at best. Meanwhile, assassins who have caused the deaths of so many are delivered up to their victims when they finally perish.

I think this is worth thinking about, simply because fantasy religions so often seem bland and underdeveloped. Adding a few customs tied to violent death or being the cause of it can give them real character.

3) Remember that violence against others of the same species isn’t easy. At least, if you’re working with mammals. It might be different if you’re writing about dragons or large birds.

Most large mammals don’t tend to kill “con-specifics,” those of their own kind. Predators often live far enough apart from each other that they don’t regularly get into battles—like jaguars and leopards—or, if sociable, have hierarchies of conduct that preserve the lives of those involved—like lions and wolves. Sometimes adults will kill cubs and young adults, as is the case with male lions, but it’s easier to drive out troublesome adults of the same size rather than battle with them. Herbivores can have mating contests, as male deer tend towards, but those are even less likely to result in death except by an unlucky accident, such as the points of an antler getting caught in another stag’s chest. And soldiers have to go through long and rigorous training processes to make them into the kind of humans who can kill other humans. Even then, they may find themselves frozen when they have to actually commit the deed. For people who haven’t undergone the mental preparation, it’s much more difficult, which is why you hear more stories of criminals shooting and killing their victims than the other way around, unless, as with the large herbivores, it’s accidental. Nerving yourself up to kill someone else is really, really hard.

That means that having a society where death is “constant” needs a rationale. If everyone involved is a psychopathic and crazy killer who cares about no one but herself, how the hell can they have a society at all?

The easiest way to do this is to have such a strict hierarchy that some people on top think of the people on the bottom as literally less than human, a technique also used in some kinds of army training. “Oh, you killed him? Well, he was only a commoner.” Or: “Oh, you hit her too hard and she died? Well, she was only a servant.” Or: “Yes, it’s too bad she’s dead, but she was only a woman, after all.” Meanwhile, people on the bottom could be badly off enough that they need to turn to desperate kinds of work where death is common and murder barely blinked at.

Another way is to have everyone in the society accept death as a risk that could happen to them at almost any time—which would mean that the hero expressing spluttering outrage when someone killed a friend of his is right out. This is the tactic Steven Brust pursues in the Khaavren Romances, though his style, which mimics Dumás, also helps. Duels take place at the drop of a hat, and when the main characters, city Guardsmen, set out to pursue a murderer, she’s a murderer mostly because she did not obey the rules of dueling in killing her victim. (She’s a painter, the murder victim criticized a painting she spent years working on, and she killed him for it). Later on in the story, the dead man’s son and the painter become good friends, because this is a society where you really can have honor between enemies. It also helps that the characters involved aren’t human and some have genetic predispositions to violence. It’s not a comfortable world for many readers, but it does make sense.

I’d be as interested in reading about a world where people went around murdering each other all the time as I would about any other world setup, I think. But it has to make sense, or people raising children to adult age without murdering them would be unusual, and the society would have no means of replicating itself (certainly people of other places wouldn’t want to visit!)

4) Know what horrors are unique to your society. I don’t mean methods of killing; I mean what things about death by violence will make it particularly disgusting or gut-wrenching to someone who lives in that society. It’s sort of the opposite of point 1. What makes a death unjustifiable?

For the United States—and possibly other places, but the only in-depth coverage of criminal cases like this I’ve seen has been in the United States—the big bugaboo seems to be the deaths of children. And the worst of the worst are mothers who kill their own children. The uneasiness that swirled around discussions of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates was desperate. There had to be something “wrong” with them in the way that there wasn’t with male serial killers or even men who killed children. They were insane. They were sick. They were incapable of realizing what they were really doing. It seemed, at least from the people I talked to, that no one could comprehend a mother killing her own child for reasons that might apply to any other murder. These were unique because they had to be.

Likewise, murder connected with sexual violence hits a lot of people harder than murder without it. Add children to the mix, and people tend to go a bit crazy, arguing for the relaxation of principles they would uphold at any other time. Or add another broken taboo—cannibalism, say—and the screaming gets louder and worse. There are some killings twenty-first century Western society doesn’t want to think about and cannot consider as self-defense because they basically push every button we have, big-time.

Now think about that in terms of fantasy worldbuilding. What is the ultimate horrible death?

For a highly religious society, it could involve someone being killed in a way that desecrates a church. For one that buries individuals in coffins, being buried alive could be a quiet but persistent fear. For a society that uses magic based on wind, perhaps a magician can kill from a distance, and undetectably, simply by freezing the air in his enemy’s lungs—and no one wants to go out that way, thank you, with no ability to know when she’d die or who might want to kill her. If the people involved live as much in dreams as in the waking world, perhaps sleepwalkers fear battling enemies and then waking to find their loved ones dead around them.

It’s easy to kill a child on-stage and thus appeal to the reader’s sympathies (one reason that a writer who does that is often accused of emotional button-mashing, particularly if the child character has no role in the story but to die). But I think the greater challenge is to bring the imagined society’s buried fears as close to the surface as possible, so that by the time the horrific death comes along, the reader will understand why the characters, and not just she herself, find it terrible.

Class/caste systems is next, according to the poll.

On using non-Western influence in fantasy.

limyaael — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:24:40 GMT

1) RESEARCH. I don’t necessarily think people will neglect this one, but the sources of the research might be questionable. If all you’ve ever really read about South American native tribes are fictional books set in Peru before the Spanish Conquest, and you’ve only watched fictional movies, keep in mind that certain things have been exaggerated, left out, or maybe outright distorted for the purposes of a good story. It doesn’t mean that you have to be completely faithful to history. It does mean that claiming X is true, when the only evidence you have for X is that it’s a convention or fetish common to several stories, is really problematic. (See point 2).

Read history, read reputable books and articles, read social history, and read, as much as you possibly can, the words and works of the actual people involved, rather than Western colonizers or conquerors. For some cultures, this is much easier than others; someone researching Japan, for instance, is not in the same boat as someone researching the Aztecs. But read widely anyway, and cross-reference, and ask questions, and recognize that those few traits that have fascinated Westerners, especially Americans, in general, are not all there is to the people involved.

Where does the research stop? What is permissible to include or ignore for story purposes? I think those are questions that each author has to answer for herself, and possibly answer differently for each individual story, but think of it this way: if you cut research short just for the sake of making something appear “exotic,” or if you do less research because you think that the culture you’re looking at is a homogeneous monolith, those are bad signs.

2) Recognize the stereotypes. The one that’s been on my mind most lately (probably from reading Orientalism by Edward Said) is the idea that “Orientals” are completely cool, enigmatic, and all-knowing. I’m sure you’ve met characters like this in fantasy, often in the nations that have vaguely Chinese or Japanese names. They drink tea, wear different clothes from the Western-based characters, and probably have different methods of fortune-telling and fighting. But they’re all the same in personality. Certainly no hint of cultural difference, schism, change, disagreement, or reality is to be found there—unless one character decides to become the hero’s sidekick, or break away from a family who “just doesn’t understand” his or her desire for power, freedom, and individualism. The society as a whole remains a Borg, much like elves and dwarves can become.

Yeah, you’ve probably seen this stereotype before. Yeah, it’s common. That doesn’t mean you’re justified in using it.

How to recognize the stereotype? It probably won’t be hard as you do the research in point 1. Pay especial attention to the differences between fictional and historical portrayals, and between the words that non-Westerners speak of themselves and the words that Westerners speak of them. It doesn’t mean that every nation, culture, or society is exactly the same. It does mean that the real people are, well, real people, not the neat and tidy ciphers that too often get substituted for characters.

Other possible, and very broad, stereotypes:

-The lazy, dirty Indian.
-The poor, ignorant African—just “African,” of course, because there aren’t differentiated peoples and histories—who treats every white character like a god.
-The highly sexualized and delicate Asian woman.
-The bobbing, terrified, chattering Mexican who falls perfectly into the role of sidekick.
-The dark-skinned cannibal island tribe who are all cruel, all torturous, and all wear necklaces of human teeth.
-The perfectly-in-tune-with-nature, perfectly wise shaman who only exists to give the white characters spiritual advice.

And so on. Again, it doesn’t mean that you can never have a non-Western character who is wise, or lazy, or sexual; the conflation with the role and the stereotype is the problem, so that they become no more than that. And, given the history of the stereotypes at all, it’s at least worthwhile to question why you want your female Asian character to be a geisha, or your male Asian character a master of an obscure martial art vaguely associated with monasteries. Do they really have to be?

3) Get out of Western Europe. This will not cure everything (see point 4, for example), but it’s a start. One possible reason that so many fantasies sound the same is that they share the same country. With the big exception of urban fantasy, most subgenres take place in a temperate zone, with cleared fields bearing a typically Western European agriculture, “wild land” in the shape of deciduous and coniferous forests, rivers of a certain size, a round of seasons that are all about the same length and almost never have extreme temperatures, precipitation in the form of snow and rain only, and perhaps mountains as background.

This ignores the majority of the biomes on Earth, most of which have had humans living in them. Where are the fantasies set in the tundra, the taiga, the dune desert, the clay desert, the scrubland, the grasslands, the jungles, the mountains, the broad river valleys in tropical zones? And, since this is fantasy, why aren’t fantasies set undersea and in floating cities more common?

Switching to such a location will not destroy Western attitudes or cultural influence (again, see point 4), but it will shake the physical aspects of worldbuilding up. The land and the climate influence architecture, food, and clothing. Buildings will have to look different in a climate where their roofs are not being built specifically to resist the impact of heavy rain and heavy snow. What do bread and alcohol look like in an environment where people don’t grow wheat and grapes, because they can’t survive? (This is another matter worthy of research; most fantasy worlds do not have the specialized agricultural science and technology capable of ensuring that all non-native species grow wherever humans want them to). In a tropical environment, what do people wear?

One can, of course, fall into stereotypes this way, too; if you assume that people living in an environment like the Yucatan must build pyramids and eat nothing but fruit, there’s a problem, because it’s more complex than that. But at least it will mean more than unthinking obedience to the idea that every fantasy world is, at most, Western Europe given a light makeover.

4) Remember that the attitudes of your world do not have to be post-Enlightenment British. (They don’t have to echo Western Europe in the sixteenth century, either, for that matter, but the moral code of most fantasies seems at best as old as the Victorian period and distinctly Victorian British or American, when it’s not actually the one twenty-first-century Western humans live with).

What are the attitudes towards sex? Research the culture you want to bring in. People may marry older or younger than is “typical” in the West. They may marry for different reasons. Arranged marriages may not be the norm for most modern white British couples, but they’re more often discussed in the South Asian community living in Britain. And no, that’s not an invitation to include arranged marriage in the book simply so that the heroine can refuse to have one and thus show herself completely superior.

What are the attitudes towards politics? Fantasists tend to assume that Machiavellian principles are the one and only standard to apply. No, they’re not, because they were made to fit a specific political context, and in a different situation—say, one where several small groups of people are living close to one another and consider themselves descendants of the same ancestors or cultural group—the idea of grasping for power and destroying enemies will work against what the situation prioritizes. Look carefully at the political structures of, say, the Iroquois, if that’s the group you’re researching. Don’t assume that oh, yes, all people are naturally selfish and will behave like “people” do, since in this case “people” actually means “powerful Western European white males in a certain political structure heavily focused on rivalry and accumulation of secure power vested in one individual.”

What are the attitudes towards war? Again, most fantasies assume war is inevitable, and at best diplomacy and negotiations are treated like a flawed if noble effort to hold off that inevitable. (At worst, diplomats are treated like cowards, and people who don’t want war are condemned as idiots, while the very prettiest rhetoric goes towards justifying atrocities). But what if, again, what the cultural group you’re studying values is the continuing sense of kinship and history, rather than having one group dominant and powerful all the time? War might still happen, but killing one’s kin could be a last resort rather than the immediate first option.

What are the attitudes towards the future? The Western idea of “progress”—where “progress” is not, say, the growth of a specific kind of knowledge or technology, but much more amorphous and general ideas of “knowledge” and “technology”—relies on a historical situation truly amplified during the British Victorian period and worried about even then. That doesn’t mean a non-Western culture will have no idea of the future. It does mean that it might very well value a different kind of progress, or be intent on achieving it by spreading the resulting knowledge or technology around equally, rather than having a rich elite racing ahead of the rest. (This is the kind of structure LeGuin sets up in The Left Hand of Darkness, where the Gethenians conduct an industrial revolution spread across time, rather than crammed into a few decades, so as to minimize the impacts on their society and planet).

Investigate attitudes, before declaring that Western ones must be inherent to the culture you’re looking at, too, and the only things truly different are a few trappings.

5) Keep the power structure in mind. Said mentions in Orientalism that, while the exact expression of the Western attitudes towards Orientals could vary, the one thing all the expressions shared was the knowledge that the West was on top. The West was more advanced, more powerful, more enlightened, more rational. “Oriental wisdom” could be respected, admired, and then incorporated without substantially changing the mind of a Western listener. Thus “Oriental” cultures could be made exotic and a fetish rather than completely destroyed—but if someone recommended complete destruction, it would come out of the sure and certain knowledge that the West would win any such war.

When writing a non-Western culture, therefore, especially one set in an alternative Earth or otherwise closely based on our world, look sharply at the relative positions of the cultures to each other. Do the Western characters, or the characters from Western-like cultures, consider themselves and their beliefs always more powerful and valuable? They might. That doesn’t mean that you, as author, should agree with them—particularly if you’re writing people from inside the non-Western cultures. This again will just lead to those people becoming sidekicks. Try to get outside the West and see it with critical eyes. That doesn’t mean diminishing the good points. It does mean noticing the faults, which a good deal of rhetoric in our own world works to obscure, excuse, and evade.

And then turn and look at the non-Western cultures on their own, without always putting them in relation to the West. What are their good points? Their flaws? Their completely neutral impacts? Their attitudes? Their relationships with other non-Western groups? This can be refreshing, because then you’re not always putting Europe and the US at the center of the world.

6) Be willing to give respect. Watch how you use your narrative voice. If, for example, it remains completely silent on the subject of a Christian-like religion but begins to sneer the moment it comments on an Islam-like religion or animism, there’s a problem. The author doesn’t have to believe in any religion she’s writing, but she should at least be aware of implying that one is worse than the other, just because it doesn’t resemble the one she grew up with.

Likewise, watch what happens when you compare two cultures to one another. If the culture that hauls people across the ocean and puts them to work as slaves in cotton fields is “misguided,” but the one that enslaves prisoners of war is “cruel, wrong, evil,” the author’s prejudice is showing. Likewise if it’s horrible to sacrifice people so the sun will rise tomorrow, but perfectly understandable to burn heretics at the stake or pull out their nails because they supposedly conspired against the government. If you want complicated ethical situations, you have to let them be complicated ethical situations, rather than implying that torture is always wrong if an Aztec-based culture practices it, but an interestingly sticky situation when a character with an English name is torturing one with an Arabic name. Characters can misunderstand and excuse their own cultures. That doesn’t mean the author should.

Another good reason to practice empathy and thinking of everyone as people, rather than the roles they play in the story: It can help in eliminating one’s own inherent contradictions as an author and actually living up to the attitude one claims to approach the story with.

And so far, it looks like attitudes towards killing and violence is next.

Poll

limyaael — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:05:25 GMT

There are two questions here, but that's just because one question can only include 15 options; the rants that are most popular will come first no matter which question they're listed on. I tried to respond to people in the suggestion post itself when I didn't think I had enough knowledge to talk about a subject or when the suggestion fit a rant I've already done, so if this poll is missing your suggestion and you didn't get a reply, try checking the thread you posted in on the last entry. Thank you to everyone who made suggestions.

View Poll: I like this rant idea

Suggestion post

limyaael — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:07:07 GMT

I've been trying to come up with new ideas for rants so I could do a poll, but unfortunately my brain seems to run best on prompts at the moment. If you'd like to see a particular rant, go ahead and suggest it here, and it'll probably make it into the poll. (Feel free to second/third/etc. someone else's idea that you like).

I may not do rants just because I don't feel I have enough knowledge in the area. I may also not do them because I've covered the subject before. If you want to know whether it's been ranted about, here's the list of all of them.

Suggest away!

Characterizing animals

limyaael — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 04:06:17 GMT

This is meant to apply as broadly as possible—to normal animals, telcoms (telepathic companions), shapeshifters, and author-created fantasy animals. Some of it does assume that you’re writing from the animal’s point-of-view, but it could also be useful for describing them from the outside.

1) Watch how they move. Supposedly, people base a large part of their evaluation of animals on this characteristic. It’s one reason that we admire horses so much, even though evidence persists that horses are pretty dumb compared to, say, pigs. It could also be a reason that so many people feel revulsion around spiders, snakes, beetles, rats, and bats.

This is an especially important feature if you’re making up a species of animal. How does it move? It might be damn impressive if it can run a hundred miles an hour, but how would its body have to look for it to do that? (Hint: a huge pair of feathery wings dragging behind it is not the best idea).

Likewise, imagine that your character’s suddenly caught in the middle of a swarm of small dragons. How are they moving around her? How quickly can they turn in midair? Do they fly like bats, crows, hummingbirds, bumblebees, dragonflies? Can they stop? Can they turn corners swiftly? Can they lash out with a claw as they go past and hook her in the face, in which case she should protect her eyes? Can they cooperate, lift her a hundred feet in the air, and drop her to break like an egg? It’s kind of important to know this, I should think. (Again, this is something the author should know even if the character doesn’t).

Perhaps your character is riding a horse madly away from a mountain lion. Now, it’s true that cougars cannot run anywhere near as fast as a cheetah, and they’re not as heavy as true lions. But, on the other hand, they’re among the best jumpers in the feline family, and can often jump at least twenty feet horizontally. If the horse is not far ahead of the pursuer in this case, perhaps just starting the dash away from camp, your character stands an excellent chance of having an enraged cat crashing into her horse’s hind legs, and perhaps jumping straight onto her shoulders. Cougars also like to hang around on high ledges, and drop off onto prey passing beneath them—and they can kill horses. Likewise, if snow falls and freezes into a glaze on the top, horses and deer will find it incredibly difficult to move, since their hooves break through the crust, while a cougar’s paws can glide along on top of it. That’s something you don’t want stalking after you through a forest on a winter evening.

If you’re designing a riding animal, know how it bears the weight and still moves. Some descriptions of dragonflight don’t sound comfortable or possible because the dragon would practically have to be carrying the rider on its wings, especially when it has a row of spikes down the center of its back. Also, most of the time an extra rider will be a drag on the animal’s speed and stamina, which is why people don’t just ride double or triple on horses all the time. Take this into account if you’re writing normal travel, let alone a chase or other desperate circumstances.

The motions of trained animals are something else again. Border collies are trained to herd sheep with, among other things, stalking motions that make them look like wolves and evoke fear in the sheep. An untrained dog would be likely to just dash at and scatter them. A trained warhorse might try to rear and buck an unfamiliar rider off; an ordinary one will probably accept one rider who knows the tack as well as another. Captive dolphins can swim in complex patterns that will not occur except by chance in wild pods.

So know what the animal you’re writing is capable of and what it’s not. And remember that training is much easier when it incorporates the animal’s natural motions than when it goes completely against them.

2) Know the sounds and the communicative gestures it makes. This is true even when you’re writing animals who are telepathic. There’s no reason that every animal sound has to be “translated” into a human “equivalent,” like a smile or a laugh or tears or a roll of the eyes. What the fuck? Many animals have a range of vocalizations and movements that will serve quite well. (The only ones that seem to be widely known are the snarls, whines, howls, whimpers, and so on of wolves, perhaps because wolves are among the most frequently-used bond animals and the most frequently used shapeshifting beasts).

To return to cougars: They can’t roar. They can scream, a noise that is usually reported to sound like a woman’s voice in fear or pain and to scare the shit out of most humans hearing it without preparation. They can also keep completely silent, because of those padded paws. So, you know, just because you can’t hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Animals can also use the vocalizations of other animals to serve them. Hence, if a jay cries out because a human’s moving through the forest, it’s not just the jay that’s warned, and not just the jay that’s going to be difficult to catch for supper. There are also some large groups of several kinds of monkeys that travel together in the jungles of South America, and when one particular species cries out on seeing a jaguar, the others take notice and use evasive tactics.

Learn how animals sound, even if they’re background species. At least it will make a difference if you’re able to make your wood-savvy hunter pick out different birds by voice, instead of just operating against an undifferentiated background of “birdsong.”

3) Keep an animal’s senses in mind. Perhaps the human character has hidden himself very carefully from the antelope he’s stalking, and also arranged himself so that his scent isn’t blowing to it. Yet the antelope still has ears. He’s not moving silently enough. Off it goes—and since many species of antelope run extremely fast and bound or leap or zigzag at the same time, good luck to him in hitting one even with a bow or a gun. (This is why a waterhole or river is a good place to hunt such skittish animals, because the sound of the water tends to muffle a hunter’s movements—but, of course, the antelope are especially skittish when venturing in to such places).

Wolves and other canines are not the only species that have keen senses of smell, either. Nearly all the mammals have noses smarter than a human’s. And even if a hunter is careful, the wind can switch, or a member of the local group can come back along the trail where the human footsteps and scent are prominently displayed and raise the warning.

Know how other animals see. Many birds will turn their heads to the side when looking at someone directly in front of them, so as to see with one eye—a fact that should have implications for people who transform into birds. Humans have an excellent central line of vision; other animals are better at seeing the periphery, which is another reason hunters who think they’re concealed from their prey can still be seen. Cats can see better in dimness because their eyes gather more light, but that doesn’t mean they’re seeing exactly the same thing that humans would in the daytime.

Finally, be prepared to realize that some animals just don’t have the standard complement of five human senses. Snakes don’t hear the same way; they feel vibrations. Some species of viper also have pits in the front of their heads that let them sense the heat of warm-blooded prey. Sharks can sense vibrations, too, and know from certain frenzied patterns of movement when a wounded fish or mammal is thrashing about. Cats apparently don’t have a taste for sweets. There’s no reason that a telepathic animal or a human transforming into an animal should perceive the world exactly as a human does.

4) Realize that food is a very high priority for most animal species. I pity most telcoms, as it seems unlikely they ever get enough to eat. All that hither-and-yon dashing for their human friends leaves them next to no time to hunt (and when they’re shown hunting, the narrative often makes simply wrong assumptions about their speed; see point 5) or graze or scavenge. Even a falcon that flies over 200 miles per hour in a dive is going to need the food to power that dive. It’s not just a matter of doing and doing and doing, and many animals don’t have the human option of carrying food with them.

Definitely know what your species eats, and if you have a species that has special needs traveling with your human characters, it’s up to your human characters to provide for them. Is that half-tame coyote actually going to be satisfied with the bones and scraps tossed him from the table? Unlikely. Coyotes are among the most adaptable of the predator/scavenger species—the United States government has devoted an awful lot of time and trouble to killing them, and yet they keep stubbornly hanging on—and they’re clever at figuring out the way into, say, a guarded henhouse or a garden where a small dog is yapping its head off at them. There goes what might amount to an arrest or a diplomatic incident, and all because the character couldn’t be bothered enough to think about feeding his pet.

This is especially prominent with telcoms, I think, because the preference among writers of telepathic companions is for the big ones, the major predators and herbivores, so they can carry the character. (I think it would be funny to see someone riding on an ostrich, but I also don’t think they’re glamorous enough for most authors). Problem? The food problem. A horse can and will eat its head off. Even the smaller antelopes, zebras, ponies, and donkeys need fodder, and their need increases when they’re hauling people about. As for wolves, they can eat smaller prey, like mice, and often do, but then they have to find a lot of them. They can also go for a few days without making a major kill, but that’s because they’ll swallow up to twenty pounds of meat at a time. And don’t even get me started on dragons, and why they somehow inexplicably never oblige their embarrassed human owners to go pay for those sheep and cattle they just devoured. (That was, at least, one thing Anne McCaffrey got right about Pern: the landowners were understandably hesitant about sacrificing a lot of their animals to feed these monstrous reptiles that were, at that point in their planet’s history, doing nothing in particular).

Animals resemble love, in this sense. (I liked typing that sentence). The cool aspects are played up, just as the supposedly deep and meaningful word love is used between characters who have only known each other for two days, and all the nasty, inconvenient problems—is it really meaningful if it happens so fast? Is it really a cool pet if you have to take care of it?—get left behind.

5) Nature is not perfect. This point includes several vague but connected points that I couldn’t think how to phrase on their own.

This applies most to hunting. Predators miss most of their kills, especially when hunting large herbivore species. So the hunting animal in a fantasy novel who can go out and “feed himself” won’t be back in five minutes every single time, any more than a human hunter can go out and be assured of coming back with game within the hour. This can cause problems if your character’s on a strict travel schedule, and the more times the character calls off the hunt and orders the hunting pet or telcom back to her side hungry, the more and more snappish the pet or telcom should get. Ideally, the sixth or seventh time she does that and then reaches out to pet the critter, she’ll lose a few fingers. Keeping hungry animals around is dangerous.

Likewise, no, your horses can’t just live on grass forever. What happens if the characters are moving through a scrubland or semi-desert where there’s simply nothing for them to eat? And if they’ve been raised on a variety of fodder including oats and mash, they’ll get sick if forced to subsist on whatever they can snatch.

This is not even saying anything about water, of course.

Keep this in mind if you’re designing a fantasy species, too. You can’t just invent one that will be perfectly suited to every environment. If you could, they would already have multiplied out of control and destroyed many neighboring species, because there would be nothing to keep them out of other niches. The adaptations that make it so admirable for some things should work against it in trying to accomplish others, particularly if the species is captive-bred. Yes, your character may have a pet bird with a beautiful fanned tail twice its length. But that doesn’t mean a whole flock of them would do well in a jungle where their pretty feathers would show them off against the leaves, and where their tails would catch in branches and hinder them in flight and make perfect targets for carnivores coming up behind them.

Likewise, remember that it’s not just predators that keep species from spreading. It’s also the presence of other species that are better-suited to other ecological niches than they are, weather, disease, geographical barriers, and the consequences of overpopulation. If the same species of horse lives on two different sides of an ocean, how did they get there? (Horses died out in North America; the ones that came with the Spanish conquistadors were the first ones to walk the New World’s shores in centuries). Humans can, of course, have spread them (see point 6), but then you’ll have to have that explanation to hand. Traveling vast distances should, believe it or not, change the fauna.

6) Animals can adapt to humans—and not always in ways that humans want them to. For example, the European colonizers usually meant to bring domestic animals like horses with them. They did not mean to bring all sorts of other animals, like insects and rats, but that’s what happened. Any attempt to exterminate them from shipping failed. Even today, humans generally can’t keep rodents from entering homes if they want to, and having a completely insect-free building is impossible.

Animals also take advantage of human structures. Some falcons nest on the ledges of skyscrapers, for example. Turkey vultures circle over highways. Foxes come up on the porches in rural neighborhoods to eat the cat food, and raccoons get into garbage cans. Crows and jays are bold enough in many areas to steal food from campers and hikers. Pigeons are a menace and a nuisance in New York City. Feeders attract plenty of birds that the people who put them up want to see, but they also attract squirrels, and sometimes hawks take the opportunity to use a lot of little birds in one area as a free buffet.

Concentrated efforts to exterminate them can work; other times, they don’t. I’ve already mentioned how coyotes have hung on. Cougars are moving back into cities in the American West, and black bears back into the Eastern States. They’ve lost their fear of humans through the very living in the midst of their habitats which we assumed would kill them, and so they’ve started making cities and rural communities part of their ranges, leading to danger for pretty much all involved.

Consider this when writing about your characters in a fantasy world, who most of the time will be living a much more rural existence than your average Western twenty-first-century person. Species that don’t directly benefit humans don’t receive much notice in fantasy, other than rats in dungeons, but they’re there, and they can add funny moments, diversions, plot points, and local color to writing that may otherwise be thin and anemic, relying too much on clichés or an antiseptic human worldview.

Writing fantasy about oppression

limyaael — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 03:07:19 GMT

All right then.

Frankly, this rant was difficult to write. Part of it is simply that I’m afraid I’ll leave something important out. The other part is that I’m white, middle-class, and American, and so I’m approaching a lot of this in theory, not in the experience of living with it. Given the time period I live in, I don’t even have to deal with some things that would have been de rigeur for an American white, middle-class woman a few decades ago. So, if you see something in the rant you think is biased, ill-chosen, wrongly-worded, or offensive, please correct me. The nice thing about using an LJ post as a format for this rant is that I can clearly show the correction of mistakes by strikeouts.

1) Remember that people believe in this. This might seem like a really stupid thing to lead off with, but I’m thinking of the idea that some evil politician characters in fantasy don’t “really” believe the rhetoric they may use to gain power; they’re just using it as a front for their true goals of money, world domination, or revenge. Thus bigotry is sometimes treated as not real at all, because who would believe that shit, right?

Except that cheapens the exploration of oppression in fantasy. Oppressors in our own world have not solely consisted of cynical liars using the tools at hand to get what they want and the gullible fools who believe them. (See points 2 and 3). There have been many quite intelligent people who believed quite sincerely that people of a different class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, language, or sexual orientation were inferior. They may have questioned certain specific beliefs—for example, many British scientists in the nineteenth century sought for a “natural” reason to believe that other races were inferior to whites, rather than relying on Biblical ideas—but that doesn’t make them free from bigotry. And in a fantasy world with a considerably different set of mores and values than our own, especially one based on alternative history, identical attitudes to twenty-first-century Western ones are going to be the exception, not the rule. (At least, I hope they are. I’m a bit sick of reading worlds that are different and people that are not, as if everyone in that fantasyland were adopted).

To write from inside the head of a person who believes like this is often disgusting, frustrating, and exhausting. It can also seem like an endorsement of the attitudes involved, which is a nightmare for many authors. Yet setting up differentials of power in your fantasy world and then insisting that no one really believes in the rhetoric that supports them is a cheat.

And, by the way, lack of true belief in a certain variety of bigotry is really not an excuse. (See points 4 and 5).

2) People in the oppressor class can have positive/”positive” traits existing side-by-side with the negative ones. All right, so there are people in your fantasy world who are sincere racists, or sexists, or whatever. Then the temptation comes along to dismiss them all as the stupid ones, the working-class people (hi, subtle form of classism on the author’s part), or the uneducated.

Which. Uh. Not really. After all, the British Empire, an enormous colonizing power, depended on the soldiers, but it also depended on the functionaries and bureaucrats, who were often middle-class and used to comforts and education. They had the traits that could, apparently, have carried them into egalitarianism. And yet most of them didn’t get there. Why? They tended to grow up in a culture that hardly encouraged it. As they grew more educated, they just invented new reasons to keep believing what they always had—thus the scientists in the first example—elaborated the old ones, or believed that their new technology and knowledge confirmed that, yes, British white males were the absolute center of the universe, because otherwise they wouldn’t deserve the blessings they had. Such closed-loop thinking is one of the reasons that power differentials can persist at all.

As for why people who believed otherwise tolerated it…well, consider people you may have known who believed something that drove you absolutely crazy. My father tends to be highly racist while insisting he’s not, to the point of believing that intelligence differentials exist between African-Americans and Caucasians. My brother is highly homophobic. My sister drove me nuts for a while by believing sincerely in the Rapture. That lessens my respect for them, but, on the other hand, declaring, “Get thee behind me,” is not an option. Characters who do want to change things in a fantasy novel, just like real people, can have ties of affection, blood, and duty to others who have beliefs that drive them crazy. That’s an extra level of verisimilitude there that I think is lacking when, somehow, the revolutionaries have (self)-righteously snapped ties with everyone who disagrees with them. The snapping of ties can also easily lead the revolutionaries towards caricaturing and dehumanizing their opponents, which are not attractive traits in heroes any more than they are in villains.

And it makes the story more difficult and complicated. And, in the case of writing about oppression, I think every level of added complication is probably necessary, to come somewhere close to representing the reality—even the reality in a different world.

3) Internalization happens, too. Someone who lives day and night with messages telling her that she’s inferior because of her gender can start believing those messages, not because she has some internal weakness, but because they’re so constant, and voices telling her otherwise are muted, not as common, or nonexistent in her personal sphere. To take a limited example, British women who did have an idea that they should be equal to men were often treated as if they were crazy before the nineteenth century, and even during it. The situation was worse if they were writers, because of the belief that writing put a woman out into public view—like a prostitute—and thus imperiled her chastity. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, quotes Dorothy Osborne, herself a letter-writer, on the subject of another woman’s book: “Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never be soe ridiculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that” (62).

Likewise, people of another race living in a society of whites receive constant signals about their own inferiority, and it’s incredibly hard to resist that, to come out of it without self-doubt, or sometimes self-hatred. Else, why the need to begin a “Black is Beautiful” campaign, if dark skin was all along considered just as beautiful as pale skin? It can be worked against, but it’s so subtle and so pervasive that it can be hard to know when one is expressing an attitude of one’s own and when one is expressing something picked up from the dominant culture.

Bilingual American children and adults who receive the label of “dumb” because of an accent in their English may not think themselves dumb, but they will have native English-speakers speaking to them slowly and loudly under the impression that language is somehow linked to intelligence, and that impression persists into writing. (How many times has poor spelling or word use convinced you that the person who wrote what confronted you was not very smart? And yet, there’s no particular reason that intelligence or coherency of ideas should be correlated with written language skills). Such behavior naturally wears, and it’s a constant worry whether strangers will judge them by what comes out of their mouths.

Breakaways take an enormous amount of psychic work precisely because of such influence, everywhere. (See point 6). And in a fantasy society that’s relatively large, as empires will be, the same thing should happen. Characters reared outside the oppressive structure’s influence might be relatively free, but that doesn’t mean they can just march in and change things; there will be internal barriers among the people they want to help, too.

4) Institutionalized power is still power. Perhaps your protagonist in your fantasy novel truly believes all people should be equal. She speaks it, thinks it, writes pamphlets about it, dreams it. She goes into the working-class slums and encourages them to fight for their rights against the aristocratic class she was born into.

And yet, she never undertakes the chore of providing for herself, she’d be lost without the servants who know just how to tie her dress and braid her hair, and somehow her vision of working-class people fighting for their rights has never extended to what will happen if they do and suddenly the aristocrats are reaping what they’ve sown. She’s never had to live any other way. Meanwhile, in daily life, she makes constant small judgments about the intelligence, character, and morality of the people she passes in the street who aren’t as nicely dressed as she is, or who serve the cakes and tea at the dinner parties and charity balls she attends. Somehow they are less “real” to her, less “people,” than the ones she talks to at the meetings.

This character is not consciously being a hypocrite, but she’s still benefiting from the class structure she claims to want to tear down. Thus, she’s still wielding power she would not have if she were as working-class as she likes to think. She’s still classist in a way supported by, and which supports, the institutions of the society she lives in.

This is the same thing I referred to in the rant on gender-equal societies when I talked about noticing the small ways that your characters of different genders may not be equal, like insults and proverbs. The character can say and believe one thing all she likes. Her actions may say something quite different. And since so many of the characters in fantasy are (that world’s equivalent of) aristocrats or at least the upper gentry, this is a contradiction that needs to be taken into account if you’re going to write about oppression.

Does that apply to our own world? Of course—probably moreso, given capitalism and consumerism specifically, and how powerful institutions are in general. Individual members of the white race in the U.S. may have quite crappy lives, but they enjoy advantages, and lacks of disadvantages, that members of minorities do not. (For an example I think is especially important, see point 5). Cries of “reverse racism” tend to be a crock specifically because of this. As a race, American Caucasians do not suffer from oppression the same way. Besides, claims that they do tend to be aimed at rhetoric and actions that make them uncomfortable—like evidence of institutionalized racism. That does not mean those actions and that rhetoric are in and of themselves right; it’s simply stupid to claim that the discomfort of whites in general is equal to the suffering of others in general.

So, if your protagonist or viewpoint character is supposed to be a member of the dominant group but not involved in the oppression in any way, shape, or form, there are some snarls to work out.

5) Members of the oppressor class often have the luxury of being judged as individuals; members of minorities often do not. Thus, someone white called Bernard can be perpetually late to appointments and gain an individual reputation as lazy, but that does not generally lead the person expecting him to think, “All white people are lazy.” Instead, Bernard is the lazy one. Whereas, if someone African-American is late to an appointment, there is a stronger chance that the (white) person expecting him will decide that all African-Americans are lazy.

This leads to a very specific problem in fantasy novels: tokenism. Thus the writer includes a character of a different race, ethnicity, species, religion, sexual orientation, or what-have-you, but instead of being portrayed as an individual, that character gets heaped on them all the responsibility of standing in for their group. The single character of the outsider religion becomes All Members of That Outsider Religion, not herself. The single elf becomes Typical Elf. The bisexual character becomes The Author’s Views on Bisexuality, Right Here. This is especially bad in terms of race; since fantasy tends to be, still, a genre with both a lot of white authors and a lot of white characters, the number of non-white characters remains small, and when one does appear, they carry a freight that they would not if there were more of them. To a certain extent, the same thing happens with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered characters re: heteronormativity.

What can be done? Well, for one thing, increase the number. That helps lessen the freight. There’s no reason, in a fantasy world where there are large nations of dark-skinned people, that the reader should only ever see one person with dark skin.

For another, have that “difference” be an element of a character, not the whole thing. Are white characters defined by their whiteness, or heterosexual characters by the fact that they have heterosexual sex, or men by their penises? Not most of the time. (They have the luxury of conforming to the “normal” type). Yet for some reason, it’s often A Law that a gay character must be a ball of angst that goes directly back to the fact that he sleeps with other men. He can angst about other things. Really. Even more, he can be frequently bored, charming to random people he meets at dinner parties, have a love of betting on racehorses, be distinctly unenthusiastic about taking over his father’s business, and have a male lover. You know. Ordinary things. (This is another place where the common tendency to exaggerate a character’s emotions and personality traits in fantasy is fatal to nuanced characterization. People who do not go through only cataclysms and intense victories are better-suited to avoid tokenism. *waves ordinary characters banner*).

For a third, question the automatic tendency to set the story among those “normal” characters. Does it have to be true that your female protagonist sleeps with men only instead of both men and women, or women only? (There’s a distinct lack of lesbians in fantasy, still, even as gay male characters become more popular). In a world that does not share Earth’s history, must all the dominant nations be white? Or human, for that matter? Or practice a suspiciously Christian religion? Are the only interesting stories to be found among people who never have to work? (Hint: no). Does your protagonist only have to speak one language, or might she “code-switch” between one language at home and another outside it because her parents are immigrants? Changing the assumptions will, it is true, create new problems for you, especially because then the temptation to tokenize is there where it might not have been before, and maybe some stories have to be written with the “normal” characteristics intact, but I think it much better to ask the questions than never ask them.

For the fourth and fifth things that can be done, see points 9 and 10.

6) The influence of oppression is not confined to one corner of the culture. This is especially true if you have a society with advanced technology and communication systems. Unless the people spouting such beliefs are truly a fringe group—in which case, they’re not the majority and are unlikely to have much power, though they could take it—then the consequences, messages, and themes that support the power structures will be constant and easily available. They’ll be in literature, gossip, mass communication if it exists, nonfiction like conduct books and letters, behavior, gestures, proverbs, snap judgments, the arrangement of cities, transmitted history, music, art, and so on.

It’s not a conspiracy theory (and I think it loses something when it’s portrayed that way, as if one could solve every problem just by eliminating a small group of people). Oppression and its means of support evolved over time—which is why point 8 is so important—and they grew in mind after mind, the same way that religion grows. Some people will be more conscious of them than others. Some people will fight them more than others. Some people will reject certain parts of the belief structure utterly; others will accept them. But there should be no way to escape by just not reading certain books or talking to certain people, because, again, that cheapens the idea of oppression.

Writing characters who figure out the falsity of their own received beliefs, are appalled, and start struggling against them is fun! Because it’s complicated. Certainly more complicated than writing plaster saints who never let such an idea enter their heads.

7) Oppressions can be multiple. Thus the concept of “double jeopardy,” where, say, an Asian-American woman is oppressed by not just racism or sexism, but both. If she is a lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered as well, she may go through “triple jeopardy,” because heterosexism than joins the other two.

In a society that acknowledges concepts such as religion, race, ethnicity, linguistic difference, sex, sexual orientation, and so on, having just one system existing to oppress certain people while everything else is equal is silly. Why wouldn’t someone who is both a member of a despised race and a member of a despised religion have problems from both, instead of just one? She might feel one more than the other, say if she identified herself more with her religion than her race, but she wouldn’t cease to suffer the effects of racism because of that.

Now you put all these multiple oppressions into play at once in a created world.

Now it is a whole lot more complicated, and you’ve got a whole lot of balls to keep in the air.

But having multiple structures of oppression and exploring the effects of all of them is much more complex than just one. Just one can make a point, but it will not be as complex as two fully elaborated structures. Of course, maybe you’ve decided to banish a certain set of power differentials from your world altogether (in the world I’m writing right now, no one cares what gender you sleep with, but humans sleeping with members of other species nauseates two of my human viewpoint characters and a good number of other humans), but if they’re there, deal with them.

8) Know the history of ideas, institutions, and groups in your world, so you can decide what the oppression is like and how it arose. Say you have a racial minority in a country far from their point of origin. Did the minority arrive in that country as part of a wave of religious refugees? Were they forcibly brought there as slaves? Were they voluntary immigrants? What was their reputation as a racial group before they arrived? How long have they been there? How many are they? Do they/did they have a different language? What are the majority and minority’s attitudes towards interracial marriage, children, contact, schooling, church attendance, meetings on the road? How different is their culture, and what ideas have they retained in the new country, and what did they not? How strident is the fulmination against them in the minds of the majority? What was the most recent violent contact? Are there intelligent enemy minds peering at the country, and deciding to use the split in races as a neat little point of “divide and conquer”?

Alternate history may give you a baseline idea for this, if you’re following a particular country’s history, or dealing with a situation that closely parallels an Earth-specific one. That doesn’t mean you can get away with not thinking about it, and deciding how the differences in your timeline/otherworld affect events like this.

Building a fantasy society from the ground up and including ideas and history like this is an even bigger challenge. That’s because it deals with how people think, and I firmly believe that portraying how people in another world think is the greatest challenge that fantasy worldbuilding has to confront. Perhaps it will wind up paralleling an Earth-specific situation, too, but it has no particular reason to do so.

So. Get to thinking.

9) Be prepared to question yourself. Writing about a subject like this is fraught with tension. (Gee, you think?) You can do research; that’s always something to be encouraged, I think, if only for the stray fact that may become a key detail of a created world or character. But for a white First World author, or even someone who has lived through oppression and is facing it head-on now in a fictional context, writing fantasy with this kind of theme brings him or her face to face with his or her own thoughts on race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and on and on.

Does it have to be done? Yes. Otherwise I think a fantasy author can replicate stereotypes with the best intentions in the world.

Is it easy or comfortable? Not on your life.

Does it always work? No. I know I’m still excavating my own attitudes, trying to figure out whether particular thoughts I have are racist or sexist. (Some I know are). I’m fairly certain I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life.

Should it be done anyway?

Of course. If nothing else, it offers two inestimable advantages: greater self-knowledge and more notice when you’re twisting the conventions of a narrative to pander to “normality” and stereotypes. My default when I first imagine characters is to imagine them white, even when I know better, or when I’m creating a character I want to have a different skin color. Likewise, many conversations about race twist away from race as soon as they can to focus on white people. (Yes, this includes conversations about oppressed white minorities such as the Irish; the people in the conversation may still be discussing oppression, but they are no longer discussing people who are not white). It is damnably hard.

But that is no reason not to do it.

10) There are some tests through which only your own courage can carry you. Participating in a conversation this complicated does run the risk of offending people. And not always people who are oversensitive. Even the writer who questions her intentions, looks as hard as she can at ideas and stereotypes, and tries to write honestly and imaginatively can commit cultural appropriation, stumble and fall, recycle stereotypes, and extend the conversation in non-productive ways as well as productive ways.

What’s to be done?

Get up, talk to people about what went wrong, sift the criticisms, absorb the useful ideas, and try it again.

Avoiding the conversation, perhaps by avoiding the portrayal of, say, non-white characters altogether, may be a tactic some authors need or want to practice, but it does not solve the problem of the representation of non-white characters. Nor does demanding a way that certainly works before you try to write about oppression, because there is no way that certainly works. There’s only working as hard as you can to build your wings and then trying to fly, then getting up when they’re wrecked, as they certainly will be, and building a better pair.

There is no immunity from criticism. Really, a writer ought to know that, given what critiques books already get subjected to. Yes, you can be blamed if you never write about themes of oppression and you can be blamed if you do. This is not a Catch-22; it is an opportunity to keep trying, and keep trying, and keep trying, and maybe get better.

All right. After all, I am hardly immune from criticism, either.

Tell me what you think.

PSA: The list of rants

limyaael — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:19:14 GMT

If you want to find all the fantasy rants I've done, you can look in my memories or at Coyotecult's Handydandy Reference Index. If you want smaller numbers of rants at a time, I've also tagged them. (I'll be linking this post in my profile).

By Posting Date

fantasy rants: winter 2003
fantasy rants: winter 2004
fantasy rants: spring 2004
fantasy rants: summer 2004
fantasy rants: autumn 2004
fantasy rants: december 2004
fantasy rants: winter 2005
fantasy rants: spring 2005
fantasy rants: summer 2005
fantasy rants: autumn 2005
fantasy rants: december 2005
fantasy rants: 2006
fantasy rants: winter 2007
fantasy rants: spring 2007

By Topic

Specific Topics

Author's Darlings (my invented term for characters who are not Mary Sues but have many of their worst traits- including over-the-top power, being the apple of the narrative's eye and the center of the story's universe, etc.)
author-specific rants (focusing strongly on praise or criticism of one author)
character life rants (things like occupation that are not necessarily part of the foreground to the plot)
character type rants (analysis of roles- the comic relief, the assassin, the mentor, etc.)
conlangs (constructed languages)
didactic fantasy (or, as I tend to call it more sneeringly, message fantasy)
gender rants
ordinary people rants (limited characters, the opposites of Author's Darlings)
pay attention to: class
pay attention to: race
political fantasy rants
rants on angst
rants on change
rants on education
rants on nature
rants on nonhumans
rants on power dynamics
rants on romance
stupid clichés rants (according to me, of course. The first one I ever did was on destiny and prophecies, which should give you something of an idea).
subgenre rants
war rants

Story-Building

characterization rants: groups
characterization rants: protagonists
characterization rants: secondaries
characterization rants: villains
empathy rants (mostly on extending authorial sympathy)
plotting rants
rants on style (prose, exposition, diction, dialogue)
self-editing rants
setting rants
story structure rants (endings, beginnings, placement of various setpieces)
viewpoint rants
world-building: culture (literature and art, usually)
world-building: history
world-building: law
world-building: magic
world-building: medieval
world-building: metaphysics
world-building: politics
world-building: religion
world-building: society

Others

everybody's different (rants where the advice is more personal)
idea rants (assemblages of "things Limyaael thinks are cool," lists of suggestions, rants that don't fit anywhere else)
the story is the story (the unity of setting, character, and plot)
themes I turn to (ideas that matter to me in an itchy personal way)

And now, it will be a much simpler process just to tag and memory them as I write them.

Looking through the older rants was...an experience. I would no longer state some of the things I said then in the exact same way, and some rants overlap. But, in the interests of leaving in various wordings that might aid someone more than a more recent rant, I won't be revising them. According to the memories count, there are 372 of the damn things, and if I started revising them, I'd never write a new one.

Moments When the Protagonist Awes Other Characters, Curing the Addiction To

limyaael — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 01:36:04 GMT

As ~~threatened~~ ~~promised~~ hinted at.

1) Let other characters react. The single manifestation of this that bothers me the most is the part where the main character says something witty, shocking, clever, or whatever, and everyone else responds with…silence. Because, of course, no one has ever said something that witty, shocking, clever, or whatever before.

Oh, please. And that goes double when the line in question is simply unexpected, or not at all amusing (since so many fantasy authors have this bad disease of mistaking something like “Bite me!” for the height of wit, especially in urban fantasy. At the very least, the werewolf or the vampire should take the heroine at her word when she says that).

Here’s the rule: You get one of those a novel. And that’s being generous. The rest of the time, the other characters get to snap back, responding with a scolding, a burst of passionate outrage, a laugh, a roll of the eyes, or, my favorite, something that totally cuts the ground out from under the protagonist.

This gets even worse when the characters taken aback are immortals, whom you could expect to have seen and heard things much more shocking than this mortal teenager who thinks she’s such Hot Stuff. There were far too many moments in Kay’s Ysabel, which I just finished, where the teenage character, Ned Marriner, shocks the immortals who have returned for twenty-six hundred years into silence, or asks a question they then claim to have never thought about. Yes, it happens in Kay’s other books, but there, the power balance is more in order; the protagonist is the one verbally slapped across the face just as often, and by people much closer to him in age. Kay likes the dramatic potential, obviously. Yes, him and far too many other authors.

Another obvious consequence of this problem, which ought to be employed far more often than it is, is that the protagonist so often fires her mouth off in situations where she really should not do it. Yeah, that’s a hell of a way to win allies from iffy people or make sure the villain doesn’t torture her and her friends, let’s insult them. You are such a genius, Typical Fantasy Protagonist. And instead of standing around in stunned silence, the iffy people or the villain should make you suffer for it, but do they? No. They gape, because the author is far too fond of you.

Just quit it, all right? Let other characters have their say, too, or respond in-character to the hero/ine’s defiance. I think it’s noticeable, especially as a contrast, that when Frodo offers to take the Ring to Mount Doom, he’s immediately given an outpouring of support, rather than people just gaping witlessly at him. But then, Frodo is a fallible character, which is something that many fantasy authors do not seem interested in.

2) Power is nothing without context. This is for all those moments when the protagonist awes someone else with Mad Skillz, whether they be magical or with weapons. What strikes me about them—and annoys me about them because, really, what else would you expect in this rant?—is when they show off their power in a void, without showing how it will be useful. The author acts like the protagonist is someone special just because she can do something that no one’s ever done before. Well, guess what, I bet somewhere out there is someone who can eat five pies in a minute, which I cannot, but this is not necessarily awe-inspiring to me.

So the protagonist can control Earth and Fire and Air and Water, while every other person in the world can only control two elements. Wow. /monotone And will this actually help save the world, or find the quest object, or defeat the enemies trailing them, or earn her money? (The last is a motive that 90% of fantasy protagonists never think to use their magic for. Dumbasses). If the magical power is unconnected to the main plot of the book, and there’s no way in which it will help her in everyday life, either, I have to wonder why everyone’s standing around slack-jawed. Pretty special effects! Yes, and?

One interesting facet of this is how often fantasy protagonists have destructive magic, as opposed to creative or protective. I honestly think it’s only that way because authors get trapped into a certain mindset: the protagonist must be able to kill people. Forget having her heal them, or be an artist, or be able to halt famine in its tracks by creating food, or alter the face of the earth to stop a quake, or negotiate with an alien species. No, it’s killing. And sometimes saving small furry animals, but that’s usually just to Demonstrate Her Compassion and not linked to the magic. (See point 3).

It affords me some bitter amusement, in fact, thinking back on those series which have groups sworn to the defense of a kingdom or country. How do they defend them? …By killing people, usually. You can have a bunch of people with various telepathic and magical gifts, like Lackey’s Heralds, but the focus of the books is often on blasting people apart, not dealing out justice or protecting the refugees that the wars create. And, when a moment arises where the protagonists could, say, choose between killing the enemy and constructing a defense that would keep them out, most of the time they choose the first option.

And that slides into a consideration of power that’s usually applied to villains, but treated as distinctly secondary when it comes to protagonists: the other people the power affects. Okay, so the protagonist decides to practice with her magic, and calls a storm. Does she think about the crops ruined, the rivers flooded, the homes swept away? Nope. She needed to practice, and, because her heart is pure, her faceless victims do not matter, even when the villain’s are the main tool used to get the “good side” in motion. At least, if you insist that this Mad Magic is necessary for defense during a war, show the protagonist going in and using the same Mad Magic to clean up after herself. If she’s willing to accept the consequences of her power, that should be part of it.

3) No act is worth anything unless it is extraordinary. The protagonist cannot, for example, just rescue a drowning kitten. She has to rescue a magical kitten, and cry the purest tears ever over it, while the rest of the characters either admire her in whispers or snipe at her for rescuing the kitten, only gradually becoming accustomed to its presence and admitting she was right. No other character helps take care of it. No other character thinks of rescuing it.

I know it’s hard to imagine, but the presence of a fantasy protagonist with some character trait like compassion, courage, wisdom, a hot temper, or a quick mind does not turn the other characters into shells. I promise, they can also demonstrate some of the same traits, and they are not “competitors” working against her. Really.

They can also demonstrate “lesser” versions of the same act, like rescuing a kitten that might have swum away on its own, or the protagonist can perform an act like that and the rest of the cast can just accept it as part of who she is, instead of the awed staring, or the stupid opposition that will be proven stupid over the course of the book. You can have character development without holding a ticker tape parade every time it happens. If enough things like that happen in the course of a story, then they will help create a picture in the reader’s mind by sheer multiplicity. The parade is just obnoxious, and one of the clearest signs that the author is desperate for the reader to like the character.

Even better, and rarest, is having the protagonist perform some act she thinks is grand, having another character oppose it, and having that character turn out to be right. Guess what? It really was stupid to run away in the middle of the night with the mad idea that she’d infiltrate the mind-reading enemy’s camp, because she got captured and the location of her friends got yanked out of her mind. It really was stupid to try and make a pet of a large and dangerous beast; now it steals food from their camp and snaps at them, because it’s lost its fear. (The best depiction of that one I ever saw was a mainstream YA book, the title of which I unfortunately do not remember, that showed a teenage girl who lived in Africa dreaming of taming a leopard—and then she came face-to-face with a wild leopard, and, well, she learned a leopard is not a kittycat). It really was stupid to swear that oath just because she was convinced by a stranger’s sob story, because now it’s making her oppose and attack the rest of her friends.

And, again, such humility does not have to be the whole of the story. The protagonist can be right and wrong several times each over the course of the narrative. It’s simply really fucking obvious when the author lets the hero/ine be applauded all the time for an action that would earn a shrug from the narrative, at best, if other characters did it.

4) Remember that sometimes awe is just not appropriate. Maybe your protagonist really has stunned or shocked, awed or impressed, another character. That doesn’t mean it’s the appropriate time for her to tell him so.

Why? Those sorts of situations often aren’t the ones where showing off such emotions will readily benefit the other character. During sparring practice, a teacher impressed by a student has excellent reason to keep pressing, to assume that, now that he’s arrived at this level, he’s ready to go further. I’d think she wouldn’t fling her sword away and embrace him while declaring that he’s learned all she has to teach, if only because of the potential being-stabbed-in-the-chest risk.

An enemy in the midst of battle is not, I hope, going to waste breath or show weakness by pausing to ask the protagonist how he got so good. In fact, when the main purpose in life of the villains becomes to praise the protagonist and lament how they’ll never be that great, the story is ready for the trash heap.

A political enemy, likewise, stands an excellent chance of embarrassing herself if she gapes like a fool at some unexpected move of the protagonist’s. And, hey, she’s used to a world populated with people more cutthroat than the usual protagonist is allowed to be. Why couldn’t she counter such a sudden, awe-inspiring move with a sudden and awe-inspiring move of her own, or some icy cold contempt?

People who don’t share the protagonist’s Mad Skillz might be awed, but they could just as easily not care, or be calculating what this means to them. Is she dangerous to be around, for example?

As for friends and lovers, I don’t think those can be true relationships of equals if one party is constantly in awe of the other. And someone who takes great delight in always doing something better than everyone else at all times is fucking annoying to be around. Take it from me; I have known two people like that, one who sought to impress with her intelligence (she had always just won a new scholarship or a new contest, or gotten a better grade than you on a test), the other with his suffering (anyone who complained of a cold got to hear about his cutting, his stalker, and his numerous allergies). They both found it very difficult to keep friends, I noticed.

Sometimes the problem is not so much the awe itself as having other characters constantly express it.

5) Cure the root of the addiction. Why do writers want protagonists who don’t just do cool stuff—which is the basis of a lot of good fantasy books—but who constantly reduce other characters to a state of gibbering shock over it—not the basis of many good ones? There are a few answers. I think a large part of it is the addiction to underdog heroes. The majority of fantasy protagonists face their demons, and their villains, alone in the end. They never work well with groups. They are almost always emotionally scarred and reluctant to trust, such that most secondary characters have to go to insane lengths to prove they’re good people. They don’t have strong support networks, and they’re deeply unappreciated by the world at large. And the natural tendency to writing—or being—an underdog is to want the character’s triumphs to be larger-than-life, instantly acknowledged, and the cause of humility in others. Earning respect by doing more than one thing, or acknowledging that people had their reasons for doubting the protagonist in the past, is somehow never part of the process.

Does the underdog hero really need triumphs like that, though? Not all of them, I think. Maybe one, but leaving a constant trail of stunned people behind him is very wearing. And if he never, ever took the trouble to correct people about their mistaken perceptions of him, I’m not going to think that he really deserves to instamagically wow them now.

Another addiction is that I’ve mentioned before: the commitment to absolutely piling the protagonist with abilities, honors, titles, relationships to powerful and important people, and other “gifts.” Most of the time, she never gets to explore the full implications of them all, because too much else is going on in the story; she might never use some of them. Or the powers might actually cause plot holes at convenient moments (like the author putting her in jail because it makes a good plot, while forgetting that, earlier in the story, she had the ability to walk through walls). The awe in this case comes from people hearing who she is or what she can do and going white in the face.

This is just so stupid that I don’t really have much sympathy for it. I’m more interested in the interactions and intersections of powers, duties, responsibilities, and so on, and to explore those, the sheer number has to be kept at a manageable level. Being a princess and the wielder of Power X is enough for a good, crowded story, I would think, without the protagonist also having to be the granddaughter of the most powerful witch in the world, the wielder of a magical sword, the Sekrit Heir of the evil witch, and the lust object of the three most powerful men in the world. You are just asking for huge sticky lumps of exposition and contrived plots to explain why she can’t wave her hand and make all her problems go away if you do this.

So look for what awing the other protagonists is designed to accomplish, and think about other ways to accomplish it.

6) Become interested in other characters. Yes, not everyone is going to love your central character, and you can’t really control the reader’s reaction on that; the most you can do is influence it. But I think it is imperative that the writer is interested in other characters in the story beyond her central one.

This represents the most complete and thorough wiping of the impulse to make the protagonist the center and complete winner of every interaction and every relationship. If you’re just as interested in what her boyfriend did last night, her best friend’s struggles with her own magic, her mentor’s past, and the anti-hero’s non-protagonist love interest, then you won’t have them falling down to worship at the protagonist’s feet every time she has a slightly witty comeback. No, you won’t spend as much time focusing on those plotlines. You won’t have to. This part depends more on what’s in your own mind, your own attitude to the characters, than what you put down on paper. They can be represented as leading very full existences just beyond the page, and so the protagonist becomes part of their lives as much as they’re part of hers, rather than their giving up everything that makes them individual when she has a moment of triumph.

Who knows? They might even awe her in turn.

The next one might be on oppression, though the Invisible Pink Unicorn knows it’s a rant I’m wary of writing.

Mentor rant

limyaael — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 01:09:15 GMT

A few people have asked for a rant on mentors, so here it is.

This is meant to apply to teachers and trainers as well as mentors—just about anyone who stands in an instructional relationship to another character, in fact.

1) Teaching is a performance art. The most useful advice I ever received about going up in front of a class is to treat it like acting. It has several advantages. It enables a teacher to act calm and professional, or stern, or enthusiastic, as the class/student calls for, when she might be very far from feeling those things. It lets her conceal personal opinions or problems that would interfere with her teaching. It sharpens her focus, and can partially remove her from the setting, so that, if a student gets upset with the bureaucracy and not with her, she can avoid taking it personally.

In a fantasy setting, where the instruction is most often done one-on-one, the biggest use of this would probably be to remember that what your student sees is not necessarily what he gets. Just because the teacher might be supernaturally calm with him doesn’t make her supernaturally calm with everyone. It doesn’t mean she’s only ever cared about teaching, or about delivering this Special Chosen Orphan to his destiny, and has never had a family, friends, lovers, a spouse or children, or other students. That’s the main place where fantasy characterization of mentors falls down, I think: it makes them far too one-note, replacing them with the role of Teacher instead of a person. If you think of them as actors instead, with one facet showing in the classroom or training ring but other facets visible outside them, then they inevitably become more nuanced.

2) Teaching can be improvisational. Yes, some training plans are detailed years in advance—and a lot of fantasy mentors do seem to be the kind of people who would do that (which doesn’t explain why they always seem to lose track of the Hidden Heirs and only come dashing in at the nick of time to save them from the Dark Lord, instead of properly and calmly collecting them months ahead of schedule). But even then, a difficult, swift, or slow student can necessitate changes to the plan. Other teachers will create their lessons on the fly (hi), or start off with one and alter it when they realize it’s not getting a response from the students. This can help liven up training scenes that are far too mechanical, such as potted lectures given to characters who’ve already been shown to have poor memories and little interest in long conversations, or a series of sword drills that repeat over and over and bore the reader. In an academy or school, granted, one teacher might handle so many students that she’s forced to create a kind of assembly-line process. But many encounters with mentors in fantasy are individual, on a journey to save the world or while preparing in one particular skill, apprentice-to-master. It makes no sense to have the mentor ignore all signs of individuality in her student and just steamroll ahead without ever turning aside, unless she’s meant to be a bad teacher.

Such non-scripted encounters can also bring out more depths of characterization in the mentor. (Characterization of the student is usually not a problem, because most of the time the student is the protagonist). Go off the rails for a little while. If the mentor is supposed to be a good teacher as well as a master of whatever it is the student wants to learn from her, believe me, she’ll notice when someone grows bored of her lessons. She might not always know the best way to fix it, but that will not prevent her from trying.

3) Yoda the sole model for mentors is not. I find the mentor who is always calm, detached from his student, and perfect in his advice an irritating stereotype. (The second most irritating one is in point 4). No, he doesn’t have to be like that. Really. Nor does he have to be the absent-minded professor, or the teacher who cares so much about a less talented counterpart that he neglects the brilliantly talented protagonist. (Tangent: Can we please stop it with the students who are wonderful and brilliant but unfairly denigrated by their jealous teachers and classmates? Strange as it may seem, sometimes there is an actual reason for a poor mark on a paper or a refusal to pay as much attention to someone as they’d like that is not based in jealousy. For example, the other classmate may need more help, or the paper may be brilliantly written but lacking in original thought).

If the teacher and the student have a relationship that lets the student see more than one facet of the mentor, then the mentor should be less than perfect some of the time. He may try to cling to his professionalism, but lose it because he’s being called on to play a parental role as well as a professional one. He may try to bullshit his way through areas outside his expertise and wind up totally screwing them up. He may encourage a student to try something he thinks is beyond her abilities, not because he secretly wants her to fail, but because he thinks the challenge will make her draw on hidden reserves of strength—and then she fails, instead, and the teacher has egg on his face, too. He may split his time and responsibility between his student and someone else, like a child or friend, and not deal well when his student comes to him whining yet again that she can’t get this spell right, and can he pleeeease help her?

The ideal of calm, enlightened serenity may be another reason that so many mentors appear less than human in fantasy fiction. Break it, and an interesting, actual, fallible person can emerge.

4) If he keeps secrets, he better have a damn good reason. Gandalf did. Telling everyone in sight about the Ring would have jeopardized Middle-earth, and some of those who did know the truth in safe circumstances (like Boromir) didn’t understand why they shouldn’t just take it and set up against Sauron.

On the other hand, as soon as he had the truth about the Ring pieced together, Gandalf came and told it to Frodo, because he had to know about the danger. None of this nonsense of holding secrets over his head and saying, when Frodo asked why he had to leave the Shire, “You are not ready to know yet.”

Meanwhile, characters like Jordan’s Moiraine, Goodkind’s Zed, and other “wise mentors” in fantasy run about holding knowledge that could help their students secret, because God forbid the protagonist, and thus the audience, find out about the information when it is actually useful. No, the Dark Lord’s soldiers have to attack first, the protagonist has to show off magic that nearly gets her or someone else killed, and their lives have to be torn to shreds and the people who raised them revealed to be only adoptive parents, before the mentor releases even a scrap of information. And even then, is it something like, “Here is the magic you have and how to control it?” No. Instead we get, “Here is the history of the world going back 6000 years.”

Most of the time, the only reason that the mentor doesn’t tell the protagonist that he’s really her grandson, or that he’s really the savior of the world, or what he has to do to control his powers, is because of the author’s ill-advised attempt to set up a mystery plot. Oooh, we must save the knowledge for later in the book and a Dramatic Revelation!

Bah. That goes against the primary responsibility the mentor usually has (keeping the protagonist alive), because, stumbling blind through the dark, he can’t protect himself or other people as well. And a teacher who hides information from his students and then blames them for failing the test because they lack it is automatically a bad teacher.

In case you can’t tell, I don’t think the standard reason—that the information is dangerous for the protagonist to know—works well at all. Usually, the protagonist is in danger already, and the only way he can get a handle on the confusing and mysterious events happening around him is to know more, and the frustration over being told not to ask questions leads him straight into the heart of more danger because he tries to solve the mystery on his own.

…Come to think of it, that might be another reason that fantasy authors are addicted to this sort of plotline. After all, a hero blundering around blind makes for Dramatic Moments.

Ask yourself whether your mentor is fulfilling the duties of his or her position. It’s always better to keep characterization consistent than to create an Idiot Plot just for the sake of delaying a revelation.

5) Know why the mentor is teaching the student. Sometimes the answer is, “Her parents are paying me rather a lot of money.” But, since that is refreshingly simple and honest, it is, alas, not common in fantasy.

Does he love teaching? Then show that he does. And no, the way to do that is not to have him just agree with and admire the student. He’ll sometimes frustrate her, or trip her up, or challenge her, and that does not make him a bad person, much less a bad teacher. The teacher who just claps his hands and smiles is a cheerleader, not a mentor.

Is he doing this to save the world? Then have him act in a way consistent with that. That, again, allows for a wider range of behavior than mentors are usually permitted to have. He might care more about the world than the physical or mental condition of the savior at the end of the saving, and bam, you have a gray character right out of the starting gate. He might be working to fulfill a prophecy, and in that case he’ll probably pay attention to what the prophecy says, or at least pay more attention to that than the whims of himself and his student. He’ll probably try to protect her, rather than just letting her wander away from the campsite Because That Makes A Good Plot. He may work to discipline her as well as protect her, so she learns not to be stupid. That in and of itself would make an astonishing change of pace for all those books involving rebellious teenagers or sarcastic adults who never recovered from something that happened twenty years ago. Most of the time, the teenager or sarcastic adult is Right, and discipline is inherently Unfair. (A lot of the time, I think a distinctly high-school mentality pervades books like these).

Did he make a promise to someone else? Then he may have unrealistic expectations of his student; maybe he knew her mother, and he expects this girl to act just like her, and is rudely disillusioned when she doesn’t. Maybe he does grow to like his student as a person, but still holds that promise as more important than her desire to chase the mysterious stranger into a high canyon with lots of places to hide in ambush. Maybe he wants to pass on his skills and get out of there as soon as possible, and thus he keeps their relationship as one-note as possible.

Not knowing the mentor’s motive makes the whole thing much trickier—and, most of the time, stupider—than it needs to be.

6) Where and how did the mentor learn her skills? This will make a difference to how she tries to teach her student. She may favor the method she learned by, and impart it exactly. She may dislike it intensely, and go in a diametrically opposed direction. She may think its time has passed, and try to update or modernize some parts of it. Whichever way you choose, it involves thinking about her schooling and her personality as well as about what the protagonist needs to learn.

Also, just a point that thinking about the mentor’s training can prevent: Most of the time, the mentor will be more experienced and knowledgeable than the student, unless she is teaching something she can talk about only in theory, while the protagonist has actual practice (like the protagonist possessing magic she’s studied but can’t wield). I am wearing the Ms. Obvious cap again, but another thing I’m sick of in mentor stories is the student jumping miraculously past his or her teachers, and forcing them to respect his or her Mad Talents. I promise, the story will not be ruined if your hero is not perfect at everything the first time around. In fact, he can actually take more than a few days to learn, and that’s okay, too. Yes, really. Really.

If nothing else, think about this: Why do you need teacher characters if your protagonist is just going to surpass them the first time out? And too often, I think the answer is: so that there can be people standing around slack-jawed when the protagonist does something wonderful. I could write a long entry under: Moments When the Protagonist Awes Other Characters, Curing the Addiction To.

No idea what will be next, yet.

Non-villain rant

limyaael — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:10:01 GMT

Both digoraccoon and marumae asked for a rant like this. And, after all, there’s no reason that you need to assume a villain in order to have a story. Mainstream fiction and many “classic” novels get away quite handily with having no villain, or only one truly despicable character in a populated world where many other shades of morality exist.

The only thing I do assume for this rant is that your non-villain is a fairly important character, and therefore you’ll be thinking about how his or her activities matter to the story as a whole; obviously, if they appear onstage in only one scene, your concerns in developing them will be different.

1) Empathy. This doesn’t mean that you have to like both characters, your protagonist and your antagonist, equally (though, speaking for myself, I largely find it impossible to write a believable contest between two people where I don’t like both of them equally. I have the same problem with writing romances; if I can’t see them both as people, I have no business writing this story). It does mean that you need to be able to see the antagonist’s subjectivity as more complicated than, “Hero! Me smash!” or even the more sophisticated version, “I will now bend all my clever and coordinated resources to getting rid of the hero.”

Why? Because the protagonist usually gets the same treatment; he has worries and goals and relationships that are not solely tied to one end. If the antagonist obsesses about him and only him, but he doesn’t obsess about the antagonist in the same way, the story is unbalanced from the beginning, and it’s far too easy to slide down the slope into the dichotomy between Shining Human Hero and Petty Evil/Monstrous Dark Lord once again.

The best way to avoid writing a villain is to make your antagonist a person. This isn’t simple in execution, of course, but I think that, at bottom, it’s really a very simple idea. Why isn’t it followed more often? Perhaps because the dichotomy between good and evil in fantasy writing is so strong (see point 2). Perhaps because the hero usually comes to the author as a character first, and/or the author is more invested in that person, and it’s hard to invest a comparable portion of oneself in the person opposing the hero. Perhaps because far too many people think that the world is actually divided into “stupid!” and “smart!” factions. They’re on the smart side, of course.

So write a story about people. I think that will be better.

2) “There are two sides to every argument” just doesn’t cut it. People will parrot this back all day. Specifically, my students tend to parrot it back at me all day to get out of doing actual work like evaluation. But just because they’re aware of the existence of the other side doesn’t mean they respect it. And just because you give the villain one scene where she comes across as something other than an amoral psychopath doesn’t mean that her side of the argument will seem convincing to someone else. (In fact, most of the time, this perspective is used to exalt the hero’s moral sense without giving any idea that the villain herself actually believes it).

So, what do you do?

Have an argument with three sides. Or four. Or, much better, more than that. Have other people who are powerful, influence the action (even if not as much as the non-hero and the non-villain), and represent subtly different perspectives. Stories where the hero/ine needs to work with a council, aristocracy, or coalition are great for this. Or have them help the protagonist or antagonist, but for their own reasons. Then you can have interesting ethical debates about whether doing something right for the wrong reasons is still right. Say Spartacus is a bastard and takes great delight in abusing the self-confidence of people around him, but he uses those insults to make the hero/ine try harder, as well as for his own pleasure. At least it’s something different than mindless jealousy or hero-worship, and it’s a sign that people can believe the same thing as the protagonist while not agreeing with his personal interpretation.

Now give the non-villain friends like that, too.

This is one place where political fantasy absolutely excels. Yes, of course you run the risk that some people will be bored by the politics. But, here’s the thing, you write them well, and I bet some other people will find them interesting.

3) Reduce the supernatural aspect of morality. Here comes the theme I keep harping on. But, see, if people stopped writing moralistic fantasy universes tomorrow, then I would stop harping on about them. So they can stop writing them any time they please.

If you’ve got a world with a clearly defined Absolute Good and Evil, or black and white magic, or one action that is believed by everyone—even the antagonist—to be wrong under any and all circumstances and which a divine lightning bolt will fry your brain for, it’s kind of hard to have a non-villain. People will fall into classes based on what they believe in or what they do, and it’s not a set of ideals or principles that tells one side the other should be destroyed; it’s the “natural design,” or a set of beings acknowledged to be better than flawed humanity ever can be. Or Destiny, of course. Or, if you are a Terry Goodkind character, the cackling of the evil chicken.

Does this mean you need to get rid of gods? No. (Although I would like to see a fantasy that did that. Hint, hint.) Does it mean you need to reduce the presence of gods in your story and stop them showing up at every turn to announce that the heroine is the Destined Ruler of the Kingdom of Froofala and, incidentally, the Possessor of the Diamond Magic? Yes.

Give personal reasons for both non-hero and non-villain to believe what they believe. Show their reasoning on the subject (and make it non-stupid. See point 4). Show the cultures, friends, books, and religions that influenced them.

What you don’t want to do is show that one person is objectively right and one person is objectively wrong, “objective” here being from a perspective that no one can doubt. Leave that up to the reader to decide as much as possible. Yes, you can believe one is right or wrong. That doesn’t mean you need to drizzle this opinion all over the page, so thickly that your reader wonders why the villain doesn’t wake up and smell the bacon grease. My ideal is that, while I may suspect very strongly what the author believes, I can never tell for certain.

4) If argument is a factor, give powerful orators to either side. I’ve noted before that it’s often hard to write good philosophical argument of any kind, let alone good arguments where one character is supposed to be right and the other wrong. But that does not mean it is impossible. And if ethics is a prominent part of your story, and characters convince others or themselves by means of argument, guess what? You have got an obligation to write the arguments, damnit.

They don’t have to be conversations; they can take place inside the characters’ heads as they seek to justify their own ethically iffy decisions or begin the long, agonizing process of changing their minds. But they have still got to be convincing. If a five-year-old can poke holes in the logic, it’s back to the drawing board, just as the Evil Overlord List advises you to do when a normal five-year-old child can point out holes in your villain’s “brilliant” plan.

What’s the best preparation for this? Crib. Read philosophy, and not just from the side you agree with. Learn who are considered the subtlest thinkers, the cleverest writers, the producers of the most poetic prose, on the Other Side, and become familiar with their arguments. I guarantee you, unless you’re writing about something like the ethics of dragon-breeding, your issue is nothing that some philosophers haven’t chewed over at one time or another—and even then, the dragon-breeding will have its counterpart in things like animal rights.

“Those who don’t know their opponent’s arguments do not truly understand their own,” goes one saying I’ve seen attributed to several people, and sometimes left unattributed. Damn straight. And reading with as open a mind as possible, and trying to understand why people find these arguments convincing even if you don’t agree, is great practice for empathy with your non-villain.

5) Vary the emotional reactions, always. Perhaps logical argument does not play a huge part in your protagonist/antagonist conflict. A lot of it has to do with emotions, and personal background (which, I betcha, includes abuse or betrayal of some kind), and politics and war in the outer fantasy world.

Righty-dighty. Your job in that case is to make sure that the antagonist gets to feel as much as the protagonist does.

I’m thinking of both kinds of clichés here, incidentally. The story where the villain moans on and on about his horrible childhood, and it’s the reason for everything he does, is just as annoying as the one where the hero is at home to every kind of ~~complex emotion~~ angst while the villain only gloats over rotting flesh and braided intestines. Do I find the endless dwelling on one part of the past interesting when it’s coming from the “opposite” side? No. Can rape, or the loss of a family member, or nearly being killed, at some point in the past justify someone in rape or murder or trying to subjugate a country for no reason in the present?

Geez, I hope I don’t have to answer this question. It may explain their actions. It cannot justify them.

So. Have the non-hero and the non-villain alike able to moan, but also cry, find contentment in the company of a friend, feel righteous anger, execute successful plans, have minor failures that irritate them for a day or two, grump at the universe, and discover unknown phobias at the most inconvenient times. This doesn’t mean a mechanical match-up; “Right, he just felt terror, so now she should.” It means letting both people be people.

6) Do not become obsessed with narrative patterns. Perhaps I should explain that I distrust archetypes like a mad thing. Though you may have noticed that by now.

I don’t care if things like the “Hero’s Journey” are universal. If they really are universal, then you don’t need to make a special attempt to put them in the story anyway; they’ll show up because they’re part of our collective (un)consciousness as human authors. Using them as a map for the story, and thus insisting that the villain must behave in a certain way because That Is What Villains Do, is fucking mental.

Yes, you may be unable to help archetypes. That doesn’t mean the damn things can justify piss-poor writing. “Look, I used her to explore the Madonna/Whore syndrome, so it doesn’t matter that her actions make no sense!”

Besides, there are some archetypes that you don’t really want to obey all the time, or what is the point of reading this rant? What would be the point of ever trying to write stories where women, non-white people, or villains behaved in different ways than what the stories the theorists studied said they “should”? We could just repeat clichés forever and ever, with no changes or twists or the deepening complexity that can justify redeeming them.

Don’t become obsessed with forcing your characters into narrative roles. That is, don’t write the story as if your characters knew they were Hero and Villain. They may think that, but, just as in point 3, their believing that and the author planting giant neon signs all over the place about how, indeed, they are Hero and Villain are different things.

As I said above, if there are truly universal patterns, they’ll come through. I sincerely doubt symbols so powerful need special help.

The next rant will probably be on ways to focus and tighten stories.

Six ways of using the insider

limyaael — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:37:37 GMT

Now that the reading for my exams is finally letting up a bit, I can write another rant!

The “insider” in the title of this post means someone who’s a native member of the culture/world you’re writing about, or at least familiar with it. A common worldbuilding trick in fantasy is to bring a visitor, a sheltered innocent, or sometimes a complete alien, as in modern-day people crossing over from Earth, into the picture so you have someone who will ask questions about aspects of the culture and can be Explained At. But outsiders have problems, too, the most pernicious of which is limiting the stories you can tell. Using the other half of the equation and telling fantasy stories with insiders is very far from impossible. And no, it does not need to involve the characters telling each other in monologues what they should have known already.

1) Stories of discovery and revolution. Instead of discovering an entirely new world, stories like this take a comfortable, complacent insider squatting in the middle of her social networks and toss a few home truths at her. Perhaps she finds out that, hey, those lovely contented peasants singing in their fields? Totally a figment of the upper class’s imagination. Her sister’s blissful marriage to a high-status artist? Actually a slow, sadistic strangling of her sister’s spirit. Her big project that’s about to change the face of her science? Dangerous or offensive to someone in the government, and it’s been shut down.

Granted, these kinds of stories often work best with high-status insiders—those who haven’t had to come face-to-face with fairly basic truths about their world in the daily struggle with survival, until now. But they combine the appeal of the new, and of the character change often desired in outsider stories, with the fact that you can actually write about someone who has connections: a job, a family, friends, communities she’s responsible to or a part of. And now she has to do something about what she’s just learned. Hello, conflict and plot.

It’s a very different perspective from the wandering maverick or the jaded former hero or the orphaned savior of the world, and it will challenge and stretch the fantasy writer who has only ever written from those eyes.

2) The pseudo-epic. In some ways, I feel bad using the term “pseudo-“ here, as that usually has negative connotations, but, on the other hand, I refuse to call a story “epic” merely because it’s long and has a large cast of characters. I think epics should involve fundamental ripples or changes in the larger world; they should be stories of events. So, here you are.

The pseudo-epic is the story of a communal mind, such as a nation, a province, a few nations, or even just a town or extended family. The world and the characters create one another, and different perspectives are seen and taken up. (Note that this doesn’t automatically mean multiple viewpoints; well-done omniscient will do, as well). The exploration centers on what is already familiar to the characters, but, in the daily operations of their lives, some will change, some will fail, some will triumph, and, in the meantime, the reader is being invited to peer into this miniature created world.

The best examples I can think of technically belong to “realistic” novels, such as Dickens’s London. However, one could also argue for some of Kay’s novels as coming into this genre (though tentatively, because they nearly always involve some grand change in the society, too); he attempts to filter the light of a historical age through a fantastic lens, and show us how characters think about more than magic or what will happen tomorrow. I also suspect, from what I’ve heard, that Islandia would fit here, but I haven’t read it.

A pseudo-epic is nearly impossible to write from the eyes of any character but an insider or an outsider becoming an insider, I would think. An outsider protagonist just passing through, or permanently alienated from the world around him, isn’t going to allow himself to sink into the communal mind and detail it this way.

3) Negotiation fantasy. This is the, also tentative, name I’m giving to what could be a fantasy bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, that didn’t involve journeys and wars and quests and attempts to save the world. The character comes to maturity—by upending her world, not the world of everyone around her. And her actual inner self changes and is changed in response to the forces she negotiates with, such as economy, politics, nature, family relationships, disease, science, art, and religion.

I briefly thought about saying this is like fantasy of manners, but every single definition of fantasy of manners I’ve read is different, and anyway several of them include a kind of coldness or detachment towards the characters. The kind of story I’m envisioning couldn’t have too much of that, or it would replicate the outsider perspective all over again. This is the kind of tale where an outsider becomes an insider: puts away some of her childish things and accepts the responsibility of interacting with other people, not running away from them or breaking off ties with them. Like the pseudo-epic, this would be concerned with both setting and character; unlike the pseudo-epic, it would be more tightly focused.

(Did I mention that all of these ideas are provisional, shifting, and in the nature of perspectives I’m trying on to see what happens? Yeah.)

4) Culture clash. In this case, the insider does meet up with unfamiliar beliefs and ideas, but she does it while ensconced in her own beliefs and ideas, not so separated from everything that she’s a blank slate for the new culture to write itself on. What she learns is variously argued with, investigated, poked at, wrestled with, embraced, accepted, shoved away, treated with a cold shoulder, and so on. This is a subgenre about halfway between pseudo-epic and negotiation fantasy; the protagonist is probably not the only one changed, but you probably won’t show every single variety of change that occurs in everyone in the two cultures.

The best example I can think of here is Joy Chant’s The Gray Mane of Morning. The protagonist, Mor’anh, is the chosen of a god, and he travels to an alien culture to acquire better metal weapons for his very low-tech people, who are facing an enemy who already has them. On the other hand, though he admires the urban culture he encounters and stays there for some time, he doesn’t simply shed his prior beliefs and accept the new ones wholesale (which often seems to happen with fantasy protagonists who enter another culture, unless it’s evil; “everything you know is a lie” is disappointingly prevalent, as if one cannot meet another culture without the prior one becoming a conspiracy theory). Mor’anh goes back home, marries and lives and fights among his tribe, and uses his new knowledge mainly to taunt his tribe’s enemies with glories he’s seen and they haven’t. The trade of ideas and goods occurs, and more is promised in the future, but one culture doesn’t simply absorb the other.

I like this because it’s more complicated than adoption, absorption, obliteration, or the turning of one culture into a secret group whose main purpose is to hide underground, raise the Chosen One, and complain about how much better things were back in the good old days. Complication is a definite bonus for me, because it’s harder to write and make intelligible, and things that are harder to write make me try harder.

5) Showing of everyday life. This is the kind of story I’m trying to write right now, and struggling with. The insider protagonist demonstrates her world’s philosophy, social class, and belief structure in what she implicitly assumes is true. The constant interjections of new ideas might be considered, but they’re as often rejected. She knows what she believes and clings to it. If she changes her mind, it’s for good reason, not just because the new ideas are shiny or because some old woman is telling her a tale of a lost kingdom in a stentorian voice.

In other words, this is the story of the average person in your fantasy world—not the breakaway genius, not the unfortunate exile who will be summoned back to a new position of power, not the amnesiac with a mysterious and tragic past just waiting to burst on him like a flood. The kind of person who, in fact, usually ends up acting as a jealous rival to the genius, a stupid guard or henchman chasing the exile, or the nearly witless local person a little uneasy about the amnesiac. You know. Them. The normal ones.

This kind of story is hard to write—for me. It can be hard to make interesting—for authors who are trained in the outsider story (like me), who assume that the only kind of worthwhile story is about the outsider, or for whom “normal” is a fighting word. But it is teaching me all sorts of things both about how often I tend to rely on protagonists who question more than this and thus provide me with an easy excuse to explain, and what stubbornness looks like from the outside, when it’s not someone righteously refusing to be cowed by enemies who want her dead or silenced, but someone who just wants the politics to go away and leave her alone because she doesn’t have anything to do with them and she knows it, thanks. If it breaks new ground, it’s at least an effort in a worthwhile direction, a lesson that can help me, or maybe someone else, write better stories like this in the future.

6) Making the status quo human. I’ve remarked before that it seems most fantasy heroes are rebels—sometimes literally so, sometimes only against conventions forced on them by their society. (This is the part where “normal” is a fighting word again, because of course conventions are forced on fantasy heroes! Who would obey them by choice?) This isn’t necessarily a problem by itself. The problem comes when the hero being a rebel implicates anyone fighting for the opposite side as not-a-person.

If I had to pick one thing that I’m trying to accomplish in writing, it would be, “Nothing human is strange to me.” Or, just this: empathy. Sometimes that means a nonhuman perspective, sometimes a questioning of my own biases, sometimes taking a side that’s perfectly available and has a voice but which is usually ignored. (Someday, I will have to put my money where my mouth is and write a fundamentalist Christian character who is not a parody or a caricature). Trying to humanize a character working for the status quo, an insider who may be working for reform and not revolution, or even someone who distrusts reform altogether, is a case of the third.

There are plenty of reasons to oppose revolution. The character you write can do so. Maybe she distrusts the rebels’ methods. Maybe she’s just cynical enough to note a lot of similarities in “revolutionist” rhetoric to what’s already propounded. Maybe she’s one of those people who is eager for change, but, as the change evolves, realizes that she’s far too iconoclastic to belong to the hero-worship, conformity, or simplification of complex issues demanded. Maybe she finds absolute fulfillment in what she has already, like her artistic career, and sees no reason to run off and join a mass movement. Maybe she’s one of the people indicted by the change; the polytheists naturally blame the monotheists who oppressed them, and she’s a sincere monotheist. There are so many reasons beyond EVIL EVIL EVIL.

Take out the revolutionary component, and you still have a story. What about writing a fantasy where the protagonist already has power and struggles to use that power responsibly, instead of growing into it over the course of the story? There’s sometimes an implication—largely given by ending the fantasy story just as the hero/ine takes the crown or the reins of government—that what’s truly important is the journey, not the destination. That’s kind of unfortunate when the destination is a new force of law under which other people have to live. So, imagine an insider who has influence. What does he or she do with it? How is he responsible? What moral or ethical dilemmas does she struggle with that can’t be solved simply by waving a sword in the air and yelling a lot?

Once again, more complications.

I’m open to suggestions about what to do next.

Casual worldbuilding

limyaael — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 02:23:25 GMT

This rant is similar to others I’ve done—particularly in that it’s a means of getting around long infodumps—but I hope it’ll help to contribute to a sense of a detailed, living world and culture (or cultures!) on a level other than philosophy and metaphysics. After all, not all your characters will be given to those kinds of abstractions, and others will have no opportunity to come into contact with them, and your world might lack the printing press, academies of philosophy, and other easy ways to transfer them. Yet those characters are still part of the story and in contact with your created culture and world, and ideas can exist outside theories.

1) Remember lies and mistakes and stereotypes. If one underpinning of your created world—such as a point of history, the truth of which your protagonist will discover—will turn out to be important to your story, of course you should know what it is. But your characters don’t have to be right about it.

Perhaps your story centers on a village in a deep forest, so thick that journeys to another village take a monstrous effort, and people who venture into the forest often vanish. Why wouldn’t wrong, and varying, stories spring up to explain the disappearances? Only one of them might be right, or none. The right story doesn’t have to be the only one that exists. Show people believing different things, and there’s a brand new sheen of verisimilitude added to your writing.

Or what about lies? Not necessarily malicious ones, either. A “well-traveled” sailor who, in fact, has only been to an island a few miles off the coast might still brag about the unusual creatures he saw there to impress his audience of younger siblings who have never been off-shore. And maybe those unusual creatures do exist; they’re just not quite as strange as he describes them. But, hey, it helps make him more interesting, and who’s going to be hurt by them?

Stereotypes are another good one. A troll comes to a town, and puzzles everyone by being clean and polite, while the stereotypes say that his kind are always dirty and rude and deceitful. But then someone else remembers another story that trolls are capable of appearing polite and clean when they want to, and doesn’t that only prove that trolls are doubly deceitful? Oftentimes, people will go through quite a lot of contradictory experiences and evidence manipulation before they give up their prejudices.

And none of these lies or mistakes or stereotypes has to be the centerpoint of a novel (though they could work as the centerpoints of short stories). They can easily polish the facet of a small conversation, or make a small setting more real.

2) Remember that people play. I’ve read some critiques of fantasy stating that relatively few fantasies have games or sports in them, though they’ve obviously been important to human societies throughout history. Including a game or sport could vary your setting—in more than one way, since having characters meet each other at, say, a gladiatorial contest could work better than having them run into each other randomly on a side street. And adding more than one (as you’ll see, I think variety is a great antidote to the “one culture” syndrome of some worlds) can give you characters with opposing obsessions, ambitions, factions, and hobbies.

No, the game doesn’t have to turn out to be a history of your world in miniature. No, the sport doesn’t have to be a blood-sport. It really can be fun, part of the worldbuilding without insisting that the characters Take Everything Deadly Seriously At All Times. If few fantasy protagonists have a healthy sense of humor, even fewer of them have a healthy sense of play.

3) Casual references. Just as not every sport mentioned has to be the center of the story, not every reference has to be explained. Yes, you do want a balance here, because if you explain absolutely nothing about the world, your readers will be lost—just as if you explain too much, they’ll be bored. (There are sacrifices to be made everywhere, though I prefer thinking of them as choices). Also, as a good rule of thumb, if a piece of history, a legend, a myth, a story, a riddle, or an event in the life of your character will be crucial to the plot, I think it should be explained in detail before the point at which you need it to spring out and save the day. Declaring that your hero knows how to joust beautifully just before he wins the joust the story hangs on, when he’s never before shown or mentioned any talent, is bollocks.

But there are the many small references that swim through people’s minds every day which their lives and their livelihoods don’t depend on. Those are the references I’m basing this point on.

Why can’t a villager think, on first seeing the heavily armed strangers ride into his village, “They had expressions on their face that would have curdled Mrs. Flint’s milk”? The reference itself hints at what it means, and marks out a character called Mrs. Flint as existing without having to make her vital to the action or devote sixteen paragraphs to explaining who she is. Likewise, a character can think of a parable in his religion, or a song her nurse used to sing, or a point of history that her tutor tried to drum into her head, without making them into secrets of the universe. They’re simply oral culture, things repeated so often that they’ve become lodged in the character’s consciousness.

The trick, of course, is to use a great many of these. If only a few appear, and 90% of them are vital to the story’s plot, your audience is justified in treating the ones that don’t get explained as red herrings or dropped plot threads. To mark out your casual references—your pop culture, if you will—as there to be neat, you need to scatter it all over the place.

4) Metaphors they live by. These might well be the supreme example of small points in the story that repay a deeper search, but don’t make the whole fantasy world so dependent on them that anyone who doesn’t concentrate on them has a poor experience. (I am a firm believer in the idea that a story cannot be good solely because of its in-jokes and things swimming under the surface and obscure allusions. It has to be a good story on more than one level. If someone reads it through breezily and quickly and without a disposition to search the depths, or, for that matter, from a mental context so different that he or she doesn’t share the author’s preoccupations, it should still repay the reading, if only as light entertainment. If the other level shows up, that can deepen and enrich the story, but it is not utterly necessary. Authors who write only for people exactly like themselves limit their own scope).

And now that I’ve finished the parenthetical aside that was longer than the actual main sentence of that paragraph, I can return to my subject. What metaphors do your invented cultures use to talk about things like disease, relations between the sexes, international politics, natural objects such as the sun and the moon, the creation of the world, the height of praise? Such metaphors, if worked out coherently enough, have all sorts of deep and resonant implications for a fantasy world. But, once again, you needn’t write a scholarly lecture about what they mean. Your readers who are interested in delving into them and reading for more than the surface of the story are probably also interested in figuring out the significance for themselves, not being led by the hand.

To take an example from twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture, we tend to talk about disease as war. The immune system attacks the invading viruses. We take medicines to kill or subdue the sickness we have. T cells destroy the cells of tumors. Disease is the enemy to be eliminated. And so on. Most of the time, this military language isn’t employed because people think war is the only possible way to talk about disease; it’s just the prevalent metaphor. And yes, that does have implications for the way we tend to think about disease, treat disease, and regard people who are sick. Think of the differences that might result if you had an imagined culture that thought of disease in terms of demon possession, or in terms of an ecosystem.

Metaphors can easily structure even the lives of people who decide they “know better.” One example is Wicca; for a time, most magical systems were based on a balance of male and female energies, since, after all, a God and a Goddess created nature. Some Wicca practitioners were startled or shocked when women-only covens formed, or when gay, lesbian, and bisexual worshippers started altering the “polarity” in circles. Many of the systems have adapted now, but it wasn’t an obstacle they foresaw when first working with their prevailing mythology. If one fantasy culture has a religious tradition based on sexual creation of the universe, its religious rituals and symbolic gestures may be very different from the culture next door that believes the universe hatched asexually out of an egg, or the one on the other side that thinks two goddesses created everything together, by shaping it with their hands.

Once again, no need to bring these to the fore and have every character thinking about them—the conflict of your story might concentrate on something else entirely. But having them hanging around in the background can point the way to a whole different way of reading the action.

5) Objects have implications, too. Quick. Your protagonist walks into the home of a typical magician in your fantasy world. What does he see on the walls?

In stories where the author has thought about this, the objects he sees could very well be utterly strange to him and never explained, but they won’t be the same stereotypical clutter that is usually picked up and dumped into stories where the author has not bothered to think about this: for example, crystal balls, tea leaves, and wands. For one thing, crystal balls and tea leaves tend to be strongly associated with divination. But what if magicians in your world don’t practice divination? What if they don’t use wands? Why shouldn’t you have them use blue feathers and red ochre instead?

Or perhaps magicians aren’t free to leave the tools of their trade lying around in your fantasy world, so the objects look utterly innocuous, or the dangerous ones are hidden away. If your protagonist is a stranger, maybe he has no notion that he’s visiting a magician at all, and won’t until this person learns to trust him.

Objects in homes are also a great way of quietly mentioning the technology level of your world, something many readers will want to know. If every home, even a poor one in a shabby street, has electricity, it will be a far different world from one where electricity is confined to the homes of the rich alone. You can also use this to talk about what’s important to your culture. If several homes in succession have huge kitchens, the reader can assume that the typical family spends a lot of time there. If the typical accoutrement of an elder daughter is a bunch of keys, the reader can assume she’s trusted with a set of responsibilities that may include safeguarding the family’s valuables—or perhaps keys and elder daughters are important in a social or religious way. If the people here don’t shake hands until after they’ve shared water with a stranger, this can show the importance of water and a connection between it and hospitality. (Yes, even in a culture that’s not in a desert. After all, these people may have migrated to their present home from a desert several generations ago, and the custom could have survived because there was no particular reason to change it. Don’t assume that every single gesture and ritual must have been of recent adoption and the product of conscious thinking; many casual ones tend to be the other way around).

Objects talk, if you ask them questions.

Maybe the next rant can be on the history of cultures. If so, it is entirely the fault of that last point.

Gender-equal societies

limyaael — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:41:09 GMT

A few people asked for a rant on gender-equal societies. Like the rant on domestic fantasy, this is much more of a ‘how-to’: considerations that might help you, rather than “Lord, I am so sick of this” (though there’s a bit of that). I’ve read relatively few gender-equal fantasies in comparison to fantasies where one gender is dominant, though, so, like domestic fantasy, attitudes towards this kind of fantasy are more my targets than the books themselves.

I do not believe it is possible to write about gender without criticism. That means that your gender-equal society is not everyone’s gender-equal society, and you are almost certain to have readers react badly to it and notice biases that you did not even realize were there. The same thing happens with depictions of race in fantasy, and culture, and sexual orientation, and (though perhaps less explosively) with class and nationality.

Is this preventable? Absolutely not.

This is because, again, I don’t think an author can control a reader’s reactions to what she writes. The only things she can control are her own writing and her own reaction to criticism. Thus, trying to be honest as possible and interrogating her own biases and beliefs about gender is commendable. Sifting through critiques and taking the ones that seem insightful or useful into account is commendable, as is being able to explain one’s reasoning. Writing perfectly is impossible, and trying to explain away every single critique—as opposed to explain—is useless. Flying off the handle just makes people more inclined to laugh.

If you put a story out there that does its very best to talk seriously about equality of the genders, it enters a conversation, not a void. The desire to silence criticism and declare that you are Enlightened and Above It All is silly. After all, if you want to continue writing stories about gender, you can take the valid critiques and do it even better next time.

Thus, what I propose here is a set of techniques, and they won’t and can’t escape criticism in and of themselves. They won’t all be useful; in particular, they won’t all be useful in combination. My gender-equal society is not yours, after all. But they may be useful if taken and twisted, or in the sense of sparking new ideas, even more than in and of themselves.

1) Know thyself. This is where interrogating your own beliefs and biases about gender comes in. It’s easy to decide that you’ll write in a world where the genders are equal to avoid clichés like the heroine being a frail, mopey, weepy reward for the hero, whom her boyfriend rescues at the end of the story. And then all the women “just happen” to take care of the home and the children, and all the men “just happen” to be the rulers, the soldiers, and the politicians. Rhetoric in a story means very little if there is a huge lump of background evidence looming to show that, well, yeah, the author has not thought this through so very much.

So how can you interrogate them?

-Think, honestly, about what you do believe. Writing the beliefs out consciously could be a good start.
-Read other writing you’ve done, looking specifically for comments you’ve made in-story on gender, or how the gender of the characters matters to what they do.
-Think about why you want to have a gender-equal society. What will it add to the story? If you can know the reasons for your own writing about this particular theme, it might help you to know why you write the way you do about other themes, too.
-Track the sources of your biases. If it’s a particular belief set you’ve ceased to think is valid, that might make throwing the legacy of it out the window easier.
-Visualize characters. What image comes to mind when you hear the terms “nurse,” “general,” “mother,” “spouse,” “bishop,” “frail,” “handsome,” “happy,” “contented,” “useful”? (This can be useful in other particulars, too. A mental image of a mother as female might be shrug-worthy, but if you’re always visualizing a mother with hair-curlers and a pinched mouth, why is that? It can also work with characters of different race; many Western people tend to visualize them automatically as white).
-Accept that there are biases you won’t be able to change. Then you can work around or with them instead of denying they exist.

…Sorry, I think that part was the freshman composition teacher in me coming out.

2) What are the sexes’ relationships to nature and culture? The neat thing about anthropological theories when applied to fantasy is that they do not have to be true to give you an interesting jumping-off point.

The commentary I’ve most recently read about this (that is, the most recent commentary that was new to me) was an essay by anthropologist Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” She complicates the idea that the equation is as simple as male-culture being above female-nature by pointing out that women are obviously human, too, so it’s often philosophically impossible to assign them the exact same status as animals, plants, and rocks. So, in her theory, women occupy an uneasy position between the male—who supposedly transcends his body and is wholly free of its influence—and nature itself. Women are assigned some cultural duties, such as teaching children and cooking, but these are often low-status; Ortner uses the example of nearly all kindergarten teachers being female and nearly all university professors being male, as well as women cooking at home versus the high-paid male chefs. If a cultural activity can be moved out of the house and made into an “art,” suddenly it’s much better for men to practice it than women. Women are tied to nature in ways that men aren’t—giving birth is the example Ortner uses here—and thus “pulled back down” into their bodies, seen as more immanent than transcendent. Rhetoric employed to convince women that they do have power in these areas is usually aimed at preventing women from achieving high status and may serve other evil ends, such as the British Victorian rhetoric that Englishwomen really ruled the Empire by staying home and teaching their sons morals. This just happened, by fortunate coincidence surely (here is the dripping sarcasm bit if you missed it), to serve the ends of imperialism as well as maintaining gender status.

Does this theory have problems? Obviously. Societies who do assign women the exact same status as rocks, animals, and plants, or who have a high proportion of women and men sharing the same duties, would both violate it, and such societies have existed (though perhaps not always as easily as they appear to; see point 5). But it could be a really interesting spin to building a gender-equal society from the ground up. What is your society’s attitude towards nature and culture? How does it separate them? What cultural duties are accorded high status? What “natural” duties are, if any? A move towards a gender-equal society might be to place both men and women in between the two poles, or both close to culture, or both close to nature.

3) Don’t neglect the domestic. Here I go again. I mentioned the attitude that home and family are somehow “boring” in the last rant. And, sure enough, a few people commented that they were, and that fantasy has better things to do with its time.

Ursula K. LeGuin, who wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in an attempt to see what life might be like for a society whose members were neuter most of the time and became male or female only for reproductive purposes, says in an essay about the book, “Is Gender Necessary?”, that her neuter protagonist spends very little time with his/her children, or in any kind of domestic situation. Instead, activities that you could call “male” dominate the novel. LeGuin doesn’t regret that so much as wish that she’d shown more scenes of roles that could be called “female,” so that Estraven seems more manwoman than man.

Thus, devaluing the domestic context, leaving it out of the novel altogether, or having women and men speak scornfully of raising children, cooking, cleaning, and so on is, well, unfortunate. It might still be a gender-equal society on the surface—but it becomes so by valuing one set of roles over the other. It’s a gender-equal masculine society, and it once again says that it’s men who shape the world, and women should wish to join them, rather than having both sexes share equally in all roles in life. Except that, if everyone does that, who’s raising and teaching the children?

Is it possible to say that you’re only interested in writing about activities outside the domestic context? Sure. But that’s another one of those interesting coincidences just like the one that says people “naturally” prefer to read about male characters, and perhaps unquestioned bias at work. You can’t know if it is until or unless you think about it.

4) Realize that cultural attitudes are not immutable. Really, a lot of the ones we have today are the nineteenth century’s fault.

The division of sexual orientation into heterosexuality and homosexuality is only 100 to 150 years old, as are a lot of the stereotypes. Yes, the stigmatism of behavior, such as sodomy, existed before that, but there were plenty of other ways of talking about it. For example, in the case of a male servant in an upper-class house, the male employer might decide to have sex with him, and still have sex with his wife, and that could easily be a privilege of power, not “bisexuality.” Or a man and woman might marry only for political or economic reasons and have same-sex affairs on the side, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean they were “homosexual.” Since so many people in earlier centuries spent the majority of their time in the company of their own sex, the same-sex affairs would have been easier to hide, and didn’t have that ultimate “oops” revelation of infidelity, pregnancy. Victorian sexologists started classifying sexuality by gender of both giver and receiver of affection, and then came the trial of Oscar Wilde in the 1890’s, and then here comes Freud, and what you have is a new consciousness of sexuality.

Can you still deal with sexual orientation in your story? Absolutely. But do you have to deal with it? No. The modern primacy of straight/bisexual/gay has not been universal for all times, all cultures, and all places.

Nor has the concept of separate spheres been around forever. Once again, the nineteenth century gave it its biggest push, especially with concepts like “the angel in the house,” popularized by Coventry Patmore; the proliferation of “conduct books” intended to instruct good young ladies how to behave like good young ladies; the equal proliferation of negative stereotypes like “fallen woman” that happened when women broke the rules (the depiction of prostitutes in many fantasy novels is stride for stride with their depiction in many Victorian novels); and the development of a middle-class lifestyle where more and more people could have families where the women didn’t have to go out to work. (The idea that women should stay at home has never held with the same force among the oppressed. Victorian working-class women did earn money in factories and have jobs like dressmaking. Female slaves in the American south worked in the fields. Just because the Victorian middle class liked to think of itself as the whole of the world does not mean it was).

So don’t feel compelled to have your female characters making remarks about how they have special permission to do “manly” activities, or that they’ll spend the next decade sitting at home and being bored out of their skulls. Here, it may never have applied.

5) Yes, let’s talk about power. Another too-easy way to make a gender-equal society is to insist that women are equal to men because there are a few women in high offices, or because women “rule behind the scenes” and secretly tell men what to do. (This is me staring at Robert Jordan). Excuse me. If they’re really, completely, totally equal, why would they need to hide their power?

Likewise, take a very hard look at those offices the women occupy. Lots of times, they’re ceremonial. Okay, so the chief needs the blessing of the women of the tribe before he goes out and fights. But does he actually send out the diplomats or surrender to the enemy if they refuse? How much of the blessing is literal, powerful, magical, religious, a force of will, and how much is symbolic, a set of empty gestures? Once again, there’s an unfortunate coincidence of granting women “power” that keeps them out of the field of battle and out of the decision-making.

Likewise, the most powerful officer in your army may be a woman, but if all the lieutenants and drill sergeants are male and all the other women are clustered at the bottom of the ranks…yeah. And does this powerful woman officer actually make decisions and lead, or is that left up to the men who surround her?

How much does the queen get to rule? How much do people listen to the woman who doesn’t fight because “that’s just not her way”? How much does the priestess control the future and influence people, and how much does she play symbolic roles and stand around sadly shaking her head because “the Goddess will not let me interfere with the world”? (This is me staring at The Mists of Avalon. I would like to read about a truly respected priestess, actually). How much is the female healer up to her arms in blood and guts, and how often does she just lay her hands on the victim and mutter a pretty little prayer? How much does she work, even if it’s stereotypically “female” work like sewing, and how much of what she does is pure entertainment, relaxation, because she doesn’t need to worry her pretty little head about a thing?

I’ve read a few stories that kept men out of the army because they were too “violent,” and had women as soldiers because they were “gentle.” This is me putting my head in my hands. Come to think of it, it’s hard to remember a story like that where the female soldiers fought, as opposed to made arrests and got drunk and told naughty jokes to show how liberated they were.

I don’t know one way to get around all of this. The ground I’d personally choose to start on is that of voluntary limitation, where people don’t take all they could or hold some of their power back because they want other people to have some power, some material, some freedom. If both sexes practiced that, with the amount of limitation varying depending on individual, or class, or other factors, then the power and influence might cease to settle on males alone in those fortunate coincidences.

6) There are other ways of dealing with children. There seems to be an idea, sometimes, that you’d better limit female characters in fantasy from having children, because otherwise they’ll be forced to settle down and raise the kids.

In a gender-equal society? Really?

If they’re high-class, they might have them raised by nurses and servants, which tended to happen an awful lot in our world. If they’re busy, the father might take care of the kid, while if the woman has a second kid in a less busy period, she might do the lion’s share of raising it. If the period of childhood is very short in this culture and children are seen as miniature adults, the child could be riding along with the mother as soon as she was strong enough to move from bed and sharing her duties as soon as it was a few years old. If they live with goats or cows or a dog bitch who’s nursing, the child might feed there instead of from its mother. If the society’s less fast-paced or more home-oriented, the idea of children as “a hindrance” might not even exist. (This is where fantasy could benefit from not insisting that only stories where people ride about and fight with the speed of comets are interesting).

If the child’s sickly, it could die. If the heroine doesn’t want a baby, she could use natural spermicides—they don’t have to be magical—or abort it. In a gender-equal society, abortion might very well not be the big-ass deal they are here. (Is that raising a hot-button issue for your audience again? You betcha. But that’s the point of speaking into a conversation again, and learning to sift the criticism that comes. You can’t take a position where no one can criticize you, and why the hell would you want to?)

Consider the culture’s attitudes towards children in more than the light of, “Children= no story.” That’s not inherently true.

7) Gender-equal societies don’t have to be utopian. After all, maybe the genders are equal, but their class structure is horrific. Or their theology strangles them. Or they’re supremely racist.

I’ve heard a few complaints that making men and women equal is “too perfect.” Not if that’s the only or most prominent kind of equality. Men and women being equal does not guarantee equality everywhere.

8) Pay attention to the small ways that people are equal, too. This is why I don’t buy the female soldiers who make randy jokes about men, while the men meekly sit home and don’t dare to raise their voices against women, as being part of a gender-equal society. Equality depends on more than conscious rhetoric. That’s why people can say they’re not sexist and yet display casual sexism on a daily basis, such as automatically assuming that a woman who’s angry is on her period. The perception of people as part of their sex, or gender, and not as individuals still exists.

So look at things like the following, as well as writing grand, high-flown speeches about how no woman in this society bows and scrapes to a man, and none wears dresses:

-Jokes.
-Who has power to speak, when, and where.
-How many degrading terms exist for each sex (even some of the “male” ones in English, like “son-of-a-bitch,” still refer the man’s angry attitude to the female).
-The existence of stereotypes that tie all good character traits to one set of genitals and all the bad ones to another.
-How much labor people are expected to perform.
-Disease classification (hysteria literally derives its name from the womb and was/is considered a predominately female affliction, while Victorian women went to bed of “the vapours,” and even if a man displays the exact same symptoms as a woman with PMS, no one claims he has PMS).
-Purity and taboos (if something is considered unclean because a menstruating woman touches it…)

Making characters consider themselves as equal on the daily, unconscious level is more challenging than having them philosophize about it.

I’m sure there are some I’ve forgotten, and I’m sure I have biases showing through here I’m not aware of. I hope some of these are still useful, given that.

Rant on domestic fantasy

limyaael — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 01:53:23 GMT

This is part rant, part how-to. One reason I think not very much domestic fantasy is written is the sheer lack of models; it’s much easier to walk the paths of, say, the save-the-world plot because there’s so much of it out there to show you how to do it.

How do I define domestic fantasy? Very simply, as centering on home and family. The home doesn’t have to be a house or the place where the person was born; you can make excellent stories out of exiles returning home, or people migrating or immigrating to new countries. And the family need not be blood kin; it can be a chosen family or an adopted one. One thing I think doesn’t make the story necessarily domestic is falling in love. That will give the protagonist a spouse, but not parental or sibling figures or an extended family, and usually no children on-stage in the story.

And there are models out there, though it’s rare compared to the world-saving stuff:

-Pioneer novels (for example, the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and books like Willa Cather’s My Antonia, which deal with the protagonists traveling into newer and wilder country to establish homes). Also, pioneer nonfiction, like Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, which chronicles the journey of an English gentlewoman into the Canadian countryside; she both loved and hated the land, and her family had to face really harrowing poverty.
-A lot of nineteenth-century “realist” fiction is closely concerned with marriage, inheritance, bastardy, family fortunes, and other plots bound to the house (Austen, Eliot, Dickens and Trollope all wrote novels like this, and even “sensation” novels by authors such as Wilkie Collins dealt with intrusions into the family circle by lower-class impostors).
-Some animal fantasies, like Watership Down, which has a quest at the heart of it—but it’s a quest for home and safety, not for power.
-Ursula K. LeGuin’s Tehanu (I used to think I hated this book. But, after thinking about it, I realized I hate the ending. It’s a deus ex machina, and it betrays the themes of the book so far, which concentrated on what happens in the home while the “hero’s” gone and after he “comes home.” Ignore the last chapter, and it’s quite a fine domestic fantasy).

All of these have various points in their favor, and if one isn’t to your taste and you want to write a domestic fantasy, another might be.

Below are more general points that might be useful.

1) Family, home, and domestic labor is not inherently boring. As I mentioned before, it might be easy to write about sword-fights, magical training, final battles, and romances because you’ve read about them more often. But they’re not inherently more exciting. Ask anyone who’s been dragged through a long battle sequence that spends more time dwelling on tactics and gore than infusing a sense of emotion into the scene. And romances that use clichéd dialogue and the exact same means of characters falling in love with each other that a hundred other novels do are just treading the ruts more deeply.

Think deep. Think about the collective secrets in a family, the in-jokes and shared experiences no outsider can understand, the vagaries that people live with or idly chide each other about without expectations of ever making a permanent change in the family members who have them, the power politics that come into play, the fact that three siblings can have six different bonds depending on the views of each person, the small wounds that fester untended for years, and how the family faces the world.

Think about what does make a place home. Many fantasy heroes are so eager to escape home that I wonder how they’ll ever choose a place they actually want to dwell in. No, it doesn’t have to be the place they were born—in the case of a chosen or adopted family, it probably won’t be—but few fantasy plots contribute much to letting the character develop a sense of home. He discovers his heritage, his magic, his love interest, himself if he’s really lucky. But where he ends up living is often enough just the place where he needs to be to rule the country or where his ancestors lived, whether or not he ever has a personal feeling for it. Thus it’s a complicated question that many fantasies ignore altogether. (In this sense, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana might also qualify as a domestic fantasy, since it deals with the notion of “home” for many characters born in the titular country, and what people are willing to do for a place they haven’t seen in years. Likewise, the Lord of the Rings establishes the Shire as a home the hobbits will fight to protect).

And finally, domestic chores. Yes, they’re the bane of dreamy young teenagers who just want to go somewhere and be someone else, but so? They can also form bonds between people (see point 2), and they’re necessary to make sure the dreamy young teenagers can eat, stay clean, sleep, and be taken care of. And the description of chores that the protagonists do to stay alive can be fascinating if it’s done with technology that isn’t that familiar to modern readers, the way it is in lots of pioneer novels, or if it’s braided together with amusing incidents. I think what makes it so boring in a lot of fantasy novels is actually a combination of the uninterested viewpoint character and the writing style, rather than because it’s not an interesting subject.

2) Domestic fantasy lets you have roles for characters based on their relationships to multiple people, and their activities. Consider “mother.” This implies that she gave birth to children, and/or takes care of them. It doesn’t imply that she’s evil, or that she’s thoughtlessly self-sacrificing, or that she favors one child over the other. That only comes when you start forcing the character into the stricter role of “evil stepmother,” or “abusive parent,” or “mother who makes home life so odious with her complaints that the protagonist is glad to get away from her.”

I find that second set of roles uninteresting. Start out describing the character that way to yourself, and you’re much more likely to write her as a stock stereotype. Evil stepmothers are not considered in terms of what they might be to the husband. Nor are the mothers who favor one child over the other ever treated as though they had a reason for it; no, the favored child is always stupid and/or ugly, and the talented, beautiful child is the one ignored. There’s the wish fulfillment aspect again, and I wish to shove that aspect out the window.

The same thing often happens with adoptive parents. Somehow, the people who raised and tended and loved the child are not the “real” parents; the couple who died or gave her away as a baby are. This makes me bang my head against the wall. This is the same mindless valuing of blood that turns “peasant” heroes into the secret descendants of royal lines. It as good as says that nothing anyone does for the heroine is enough; only what she carries inside her matters. And then the adoptive parents are said to not love her enough or to be massively abusive (which makes me wonder why they wanted to adopt her in the first place; usually, there’s no motive given), to make it easier to get her out of the house and on the quest. Cue an equally massive rolling of my eyes. I refuse to read any more adopted child stories unless someone can reassure me that the child parts from her adoptive family with a heavy qualm. The pitting of the dead against the living is never a fair contest.

Likewise, I’d like to see more sibling relationships developed in terms beyond “jealousy of the protagonist’s talent ohmygod.” I may be the only fantasy reader in the world who finds jealousy boring—unless the protagonist gets jealous, too, sometimes, and has an actual cause—but if so, I’ll stand up as a minority of one. Sibling relationships should have more than one dimension, I think, and brothers and sisters can certainly be a mixture of playmates, enemies, caretakers, unwanted tagalongs, and pains in the ass. The careful working-out of a really complicated sibling bond is as fine and fit a subject for fantasy as saving the world.

3) Limitations and living with weakness are an inherent part of the genre. If you keep a protagonist in the family, he can’t just assert his will every time he wants to and escape contradiction. (At least, I hope not. I suppose a domestic fantasy modeled on Heathcliff and his relationship to the rest of the family in Wuthering Heights could be interesting, but I’d hope that the character acting out then ended up getting at least the comeuppance that Heathcliff did). The trend of many fantasies is towards power, the individuation of the protagonist, the acceptance of free will—well, the protagonist’s free will; that of the people who oppose him is regularly ignored. The trend of domestic fantasy leads somewhere else. To keep the family revolving and the home intact, the characters need to learn to live with compromises and doing things they won’t always like.

Does this mean that you can’t play politics, or deal with power? Heavens, no. The parent-child bond, the bonds between spouses—and between men and women, if you’re dealing with a society where the genders aren’t equal—the bonds between siblings, the environment, and factors that will be disparate among the family members, like age, degree of freedom, and personality, will give you a boiling nest of power politics. What it does mean is that one character shouldn’t accumulate all the power to himself, as that will severely unbalance the story. Some fantasy novels are rigged like contests; who will become strongest in the end? Who will have the most magic talents? Who can do the most awesome things? The characters who “win” are most often the heroes and the people approved by the narrative. I don’t think a domestic fantasy can be set up this way.

If you have contests in the family, try to have them constantly changing, with some people winning most of the time but not all the time, or power passing back and forth almost daily. The adults may create certain models for the children even without realizing they’re doing so. A bond may form between two people that’s atypical of, or impervious to, the ongoing war of the rest of the family, like an older sister doing her best to cheer up and take care of a younger brother who doesn’t have a playmate because their other siblings are twins. And, once again, as per point 2, two people may have two very different takes on what their relationship actually is. Add group dynamics in again, like the relationship between three siblings, or between two children and one of their parents, and the balance shifts yet again.

This wouldn’t function in most fantasies, because travel and the constant meeting of new characters work against establishing balance. But if you’re writing a relatively closed home circle, you can have fun with it.

4) The family can give protagonists rare experiences in fantasy, such as comfort and happiness. The sense of home might also go here, but I’m saving that for point 5.

Comfort and happiness are not incompatible with conflict. If a fantasy writer thinks they are, she’s probably tumbling headfirst into the well-worn track of, “The only way to do conflict in fantasy is BATTLE. And running through the wilderness! And making them angst! So, no comfort and no happiness.”

Oh, bullshit. There’s no need to go to extremes (the last rant on managing angst loses its complexities if I summarize it as, “All things in moderation,” but there are ways in which that’s accurate). You don’t need melodrama and constant tortured passion to write fantasy. You can have drama, but that’s a different beast. Drama can spring from perfectly innocent and perfectly humble origins. Think back on your own life, and how much of the drama actually came from things like people dying as opposed to spats and bad days.

Nor do you need abuse. You really, really don’t. The majority of fantasy heroes don’t have comfortable relationships with their families, but even if the requirements of the story say things have to be strained, there are other ways to do it than abuse:

-Silence. A great one. Two people can both believe something horrible when they interpret each other’s words wrongly and then don’t talk about it openly. And contact in a family gives lots of chances for misinterpretation.
-Growing apart. The child might have chosen a career the parents didn’t approve of. The parent might have married a spouse the children don’t approve of. The sibling might have gone wild, or started to run with a crowd the other sibling thinks is bad.
-Inherent distance and lack of time spent together. Maybe one parent was a workaholic, for example.
-A grave disappointment. If the family lost all its money suddenly—this happens in Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda--and had to grow up with a different mode of life than they expected to have, the children might resent their parents for not making as much money as the parents of friends do.
-An argument. You can have a family argument in a fantasy novel about something other than abuse, I promise you. The original object may be quite small and stupid, but a storm that’s been building for a long time can pierce all those silences and drag the hurtful words out.

And the relationship doesn’t really need to be strained, does it? Nor do the parents need to be dead. That’s often done for ease of plotting, but such plots are usually falling victim to those things you “need” to have in a fantasy novel, like a protagonist with no attachments to anyone. Try writing with the attachments instead.

Try writing a protagonist who cares for her family. Try writing one who loves her mother. Try writing a teenager who’s got beyond the rebellious stage and is now playing smugly at “trusted adult” with his younger siblings, combining with his parents against them. Try writing a parent harassed by the cares of many small children in a frontier setting. So many things are possible when you discount that small insistent voice in the back of your head saying, “But her mother must have died of childbirth and smallpox at once! Because her life has to be SAD!”

5) Rooted protagonists are neat. They’re neat for the same reasons as duty-bound protagonists are: because the limitations are what create the story.

Say you start out with someone not in the midst of establishing a home, but with one already established. That’s the position of Tenar, the protagonist of Tehanu. She’s had her time of excitement and danger; once she was a priestess, and had the option of letting the hero of the Earthsea Trilogy live or die. But she came to the island of Gont, far from her own home, and married, and had children, and now she’s dealing with an established home. She adopts a horribly burned girl in the course of the story, but that’s not her first experience as a mother, and it doesn’t necessitate her creating a completely new home life.

This protagonist won’t pull up stakes and gallivant off at a moment’s whim. The people and the place around her are important to her; her stake is in their future welfare, which is also hers. Her connections to people in the nearest village, town, or country farm are in need of tending. She can have friends already, instead of needing to make them along the way. She can think about things other than where her next meal is coming from—or, if that’s still an overriding concern, as in a pioneer novel, she knows what means to get it are at her disposal, and she usually has other people who’ll share the meal. Work is involved. She has roots.

That does not make her boring. How can it? I would wager that, to most authors, not only rootless wanderers are interesting, or more fantasy protagonists would go on wandering instead of rooting at the end of the novel. Don’t let sheer lack of practice—because the heroine’s home life is usually beyond the purview of the novel—deter you. Try writing someone who has a home. Once again, you can find experience in your own life. This is the place where “Write what you know” can make a smashing good fantasy.

6) Domestic fantasy is bound to larger cycles. The largest is probably the cycle of the seasons. When and where and how you plant, harvest, herd, and gather on a farm are products of the season involved. I’ve mentioned before how some fantasy authors seem prone to ignoring nature altogether; their protagonists are forever traveling or making war in winter, eating whatever food comes to hand, and are perfectly comfortable no matter what the temperature. Domestic fantasy demands you pay attention.

The environment has equal influence. A farm in Nebraska is far different from a farm in Canada; Susanna Moodie’s experiences make it clear how hideously hard some of the soil there was to work, and traveling through the woods to reach home will mean different kinds of transportation and different concerns than traveling across open plains. If this is a herding or village economy—as Tehanu is, for example—some commodities may be immediately available, such as wool from family sheep, while others, like cheese and butter, have to be bargained for from people who have cows, and still others, like spices, have to brought from a long distance. The protagonists can’t just have whatever they want, whenever they want. A domestic fantasy is also highly likely to be a fantasy of economy.

Then there’s the human round of the year: festivals, holidays, funerals, weddings, births, the intercourse of neighbors, local scandals, trips to town—which can be momentous indeed when your protagonist lives far out in the country—rounds by doctors and businessmen and preachers, parties, social alliances, gossip… I can’t possibly describe it all. The communal mind hums in domestic fantasy in a way it can’t when the protagonist leaves it all behind to travel.

These cycles are opportunities for development, not wasted chances to give the protagonist a flaming sword.

I think there should be more of this kind of writing, if only because it would vary the deeper parts of fantasy novels—plot structure and pacing, for example—as well as the kinds of events and protagonists available.

Ten ways of managing angst

limyaael — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 04:11:46 GMT

I didn’t intend to write another rant this soon, but this one just kind of tumbled out.

But there’s no reason you can’t use cattle prods on it.

1) VARY THE ANGST. Such simple advice, which is why it goes first (and because it’s stolen, in a way, from the last rant). Come on. Must the character angst in the same way about everything? Must everything that ever happened to him be traumatic? And must every angsty character have suffered the same kind of angst?

-People are capable of actually reacting in different ways to, say, different varieties of abuse. (See point 9). The character doesn’t need to break down in tears every single time. (Or always do the things targeted in points 2 and 6). Angst bores me most often because it’s redundant. We’ve already seen her play this mind-game with the people trying to reassure her, yawn. Can we get some other stance from her now?

-Pile on trauma after trauma after trauma, and it hits the point where, I’m sorry, I just refuse to believe any more. (See point 8). Yeah, you can argue that that happens in real life, victims passing from pissy situation to shitty situation to neck-deep-in-shit situation, but guess what? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s allowed to be. In fiction, you do have to show that these events make sense and have a reason for being there—and you have to make them interesting, too. It’s too easy to turn to nonfiction if we want to read a chronicle of endless suffering. So, when the character’s already been sexually abused, seen her little brother die in a fire, been singled out as “different” and beaten up because she’s telepathic, told she could destroy the world with a stray thought, had her first love betray her, been physically abused by her next caretaker, and cast out from her new village, reconsider having her puppy get stabbed to death. Please.

-It’s way too easy to just keep hitting the same angst button over and over again, even when you’ve gone on to a different story or a different protagonist. You might not notice, but I assure you the readers will, if nearly all the protagonists you ever write about anymore are adult female survivors of child sexual abuse who also happen to be Speshul (hello, Charles de Lint), or all short angsty beautiful women who “just happen” to be madly attractive to tons of men they don’t really want to have sex with but must for “plot” reasons (big fat hello, Laurell K. Hamilton), or angsty pretty violet-eyed gay men who are all physically abused (if an author fits this, no one tell me who it is). Just trying to write about someone with a normal life once in a while is a good antidote to that. If you find that impossible, at least try going for a kind of angst you haven’t played with already.

2) Having your character distrust the motives of people trying to reassure her has to make sense. I think this is the second biggest reason that fantasy angst gets so redundant (the first is just the fact that authors often write the same scene or conversation or inner monologue over and over again). When the protagonist’s friends do try to reassure her that she’s innocent/beautiful/a good person, she distrusts their motives and endlessly dismisses their reassurances.

…Because, of course, your friends always take such joy in lying to you.

Laurell K. Hamilton is a prime example of this. Anita Blake, her major series character, began the books admitting she wasn’t that physically attractive. Now she’s surrounded by dozens of different men who tell her over and over again that she’s beautiful, and she believes none of them, so once again they must tell her. And she disbelieves them, so they reassure her. And on and on the circle goes, until I want to gnaw Anita’s arm off, so she could at least ask if she still looks beautiful with a limb gone.

Look. Yes, the character may have psychological reasons to doubt her own beauty/innocence/skill/goodness/whatever. But remember what I said in the first point about fiction not being reality? Yeah. Whereas, in real life, people may have no choice but to cope with that psychological reason, in fiction it gets really fucking tiresome as the author plays it out, no matter how “true” to real life it may be. (And, of course, there’s the question of whether angsty fantasy novels are “true” at all in how they deal with their characters’ issues. See point 7). If the protagonist has reason to doubt the person trying to reassure her—he’s a pathological liar, for example, or someone who’s made fun of her in the past—fine. Otherwise, this is just a mind game that makes the angst repetitive, and eventually makes your protagonist seem like an utter clingy limpet who can’t go anywhere without a Greek chorus of praise.

3) There is nothing wrong with saving some dark secrets. This especially applies if you’re writing a series. Again, one reason I like Jim Butcher’s Dresden books is that he doesn’t dump a Boulder of Angst on Harry’s head in the first book. There are hints that Bad Things have happened to Harry; very few of them are specified. Then, in the second book, he gets some disturbing hints about his parents’ past. The third book uses the Triple Whammy of Harry doing something horrible (yes, genuinely horrible; see point 10), something horrible happening to a friend of his, and bad consequences lingering around from a case that was solved before the book begins. The fourth book lets Harry recover somewhat, even though he’s in danger. The fifth book involves an enemy of his psychologically flensing him by exposing a lot of his own dark secrets to him—still one of the scenes I like best. The sixth book clamps down again by flinging Harry’s past straight at him. Then the seventh book is a more introspective, recovering one again.

It’s a nice balance of fictional progression and trauma. No, it might not be completely realistic to give Harry pauses every now and again, but without them, the series could become unbearable in the amount of suffering Harry endures. And thus Butcher neatly avoids that trap of piling on so much trauma the reader just starts laughing.

4) You can add a touch of horror to it. And yes, I think horror is different from angst. Angst is often handled with a mixture of tears and sarcasm (see point 9 again). Horror raises fear and disgust, as well as a sense of the unknown and the idea that the victim won’t necessarily escape.

The example that leaps first to mind for me is Stephen King’s The Shining. You know pretty much from the start that this little family has problems; one thing King always does is give you a lot of character information. But not every consequence of it is yet visible. The main characters aren’t just whimpering relics of their dark pasts, the way that far too many fantasy heroes are. Worse things happen. Foreshadowing happens. Then worse things happen. And then worse things happen. Yet those consequences are linked to the problems the family already has, as well as the place they move to. And yes, there’s fear and horror rising, instead of just angst. That’s one reason the atmosphere of that book strikes me as so choking; escaping the darkness is not as easy as blurting everything out to someone in a wave of tears, and having that person rub the character’s back and resolve to tell the abuser off.

This is another way of avoiding the trauma-piling trap, this time by varying the angst as per point 1. Worse things can happen because the response to them is emotionally more complex than simple angst.

5) Simultaneous suffering. This ties in tightly to a point I’ve made many times now: while the protagonist is acting, the rest of the characters do not just freeze. They still have their own lives, and their own actions. So, while the hero sits in his prison cell and broods, someone else might be rushing around gathering an army to rescue him. At least, I hope so. I hope they’re not all standing around helplessly because their leader was also their brain.

So, while one character is suffering, other characters can be suffering, too.

This sounds pretty simple, and I think it is. But when the book centers on an angsty protagonist, it’s less likely to happen. Often, other people will have dark pasts, but that will be in the past. They don’t have bad things happen to them while the protagonist is angsting. They aren’t living through the consequences of their abuse while she’s living through hers.

Dumb. The world does not halt when a bad thing happens to one person, and why should it? The usual example of this is the sun shining even on the day of a funeral. But somewhere, people are starving on that day, too. Bring that simultaneous suffering onto the stage of a fantasy novel, and you have automatically varied your angst.

6) Please don’t play the “Who’s More Tormented?” Game. Oh, please. This is the mechanism for prolonging angst and making it repetitive that I hate the third most (whiny inner monologue and irrational distrust of every comforter’s motives are still the first two). Here, it seems as though the author is about to obey the principle of simultaneous suffering; another character mentions that X bad thing happened to them.

And then the author has the angsty protagonist think, “Oh, but that’s not nearly as bad as what happened to me!” And her mind jumps to the memory and we’re chewing it over like stale vomit again, or she talks about it, and the other character lowers their eyes in shock or shame. To dare to have complained about their own puny lives, when she’s suffering so much!

A variant of this is when one character says, “What do you know about [Problem X]?”, and then the protagonist shows the scars on her back, or tells her traumatic story. This always shocks people into silence. I want to know why it’s silence. Surely, if she intends to use that story or evidence of torture as a political weapon, someone else will jump on it and try to wrest it away from her, not just stand there with jaw dangling. (I really hate it when usually witty and articulate characters can’t say anything because of what the protagonist says or does. Most of the time, it’s not that shocking).

Comparing suffering and having your protagonist automatically win is just cheap. Besides, I bet that some of the things other people survived would have broken her. People have different tolerances. (Point 9, again).

7) Because Destiny makes it all better! Occasionally, angst is in a book because the author feels very strongly about the source of the angst—sexual abuse, the suicide of a loved one, or abortion, say—as a real-life issue. So she puts it in her book to increase awareness.

Fine. Fiction does that. Sometimes it even works.

But fantasy has a special problem with this portrayal of real-life angst generators. Consider: is the means by which your character overcomes this issue in your fantasy world actually applicable outside the book?

Because, of course, people who are sexually abused in the real world don’t have grand destinies showing up all the time. Or sympathetic wizards who tell them they have magic. Or “mind-healing” that makes their problems better in just a few days.

This is why I want more fantasies that focus on the actual healing, instead of the suffering. The characters suffer, and suffer, and then have a wand waved over their heads, literally, and suddenly they’re stronger and past their issues and in a position of power to take revenge on the people who hurt them.

Except that, you know, it usually doesn’t work that way in the real world.

If you want to increase awareness of an issue you feel strongly about, consider increasing awareness of how hard it is to recover from, too.

8) There has to be a basement. Sooner or later, your protagonist has to have an untainted memory. Or a good thing happen. Or a limit to the number of bad things, instead of talking about a horrible memory and then hinting darkly, “There’s still more that happened, but I won’t tell you about it yet!”

Yes, the suspension-of-disbelief issue is the primary reason. The character who only exists to have more and more angst heaped on her is just as much a cardboard cutout as the one who exists only to have good things heaped on her. I start seeing a body that’s abused at the whim of the author, not an abused person.

Another reason is that the author often contradicts herself when she gets too excited about all the horrible things that happened to her character. The protagonist has “no friends.” Oh, no, wait, she has one friend! That’s the person she goes to for help about the middle of the book, when she needs a place to hide. But I thought she had no friends? Make up your mind, author.

Likewise, she has “no escape.” And then we find out that she had a private place to escape to, or an artistic talent that sustained her and freed her mind for a while. Okay, so her life was not 24-7 trauma. Then why did you say it was?

It’s hard to write without a basement to the angst. I think it’s probably impossible to do it and still have the character be a) a real person and b) interesting.

9) There are other reactions to trauma than tears and sarcasm. The most common mentally scarred protagonist is the one who has flashbacks and nightmares, and cries a lot. If she has a defense mechanism, it’s sarcasm. And that. is. it.

You have got to be shitting me.

Where are the people who manage to partially heal, so that they might be triggered but they’re not constantly having nightmares anymore? I’ve met more of them in real life than people as scarred as most fantasy protagonists are. Frankly, a lot of those protagonists strike me as unable to cope with their own lives, so severe is their angst.

Where are the people who go numb, repressed, emotionless? Oh, sure, sometimes you get the “emotionless” assassins. Except they turn out to be angry and sarcastic. Anger’s an emotion, dearest author.

Where are the people who cope by becoming abusers themselves? The cycle of abuse can continue from one generation to the next so easily because victims learn to strike out and inflict fear and pain on others, or actually think that treating others as they were treated is fine. Yet it seems every abuse victim who’s a fantasy protagonist retains her compassion, and never hurts anyone else. If she does, the author excuses it as striking back at those who deserve it (for God’s sake, point 10), and justified vengeance, not abuse.

Where are those who become callous, and decide this is just the way the world works? Some fantasy assassins do touch close to this, but almost always, they turn out to only kill those who “deserve it,” and they won’t kill children or some such nonsense that gives the lie to their hard skins. (Point 10 needs to be drummed into the heads of people who write assassin characters). Also, while fantasy protagonists of this stripe will kill and steal quite happily, they aren’t rapists, they aren’t bigots, and they are almost never non-monogamous. Awww. Isn’t that cute? (It’s also nice to know that rape is off-limits, but murder is okay!)

Consider some other response. Not all people who survived trauma are broken angels.

10) If the character’s angst comes from horrible things he’s done, don’t excuse every single one of them. I start vomiting when I encounter the aforementioned assassin who only kills people who “deserve it’—I’m glad he personally communes with God to determine that, then—or the woman who thinks she killed her whole command because of a stupid decision and then it turns out she did the right thing and is a hero after all.

Can no one ever just make a mistake? No, because they must be protected from the consequences of their actions at all costs! If they angst, they must never have caused their own angst! Redemption is only for villains and people who oppose the protagonist!

I swear, I want to write a fantasy novel where the character does a horrible thing in the first chapter, is tormented by guilt, and makes up for it. Instead of sitting around in the guilt and wallowing which, you know, helps absolutely no one at all.

If you’re going to tarnish your character’s soul, please don’t scrub that tarnish out of existence and claim he was always the purest silver.

...My, that one got bitchy.