Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue

Jul. 12th, 2023 02:04 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue
 
 
Key points: Dialogue, conversations between people. Dialogue that doesn't sound like real people talk versus verbatim transcripts? Middle ground, that isn't accurate, but feels accurate. Writers convey to a human brain that a dialogue is happening. Every line of dialogue does two jobs, the authorial intention, why the author needs that line, and the character reason, which depends on who the character is talking to. Real life, um, or bantery fun? In real life, interruptions follow the actual word, but for punch, in writing you often interrupt at the word. Think of written dialogue as compressed talk, with the small talk stripped out. Pacing, accent, and attitude. Much of conversation is nonverbal. Pause points and body language. The rules in dialogue are much less rigid. Natural dialogue changes over time. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 28]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Conversational Dialogue.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] Today we want to talk about dialogue. How to do conversations between people. One of the things that will pull me out of a story faster than almost anything else are conversations, dialogue, that don't sound like real people actually talk. The problem is if you actually do write down exactly how real people talk, it is often unreadable and also just as bad. So there's a wierd middle ground that isn't really accurate, but feels accurate. We're going to magically somehow tell you how to find it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] By way of metaphor, in my audio engineering class, they explained... They sat us in front of a pair of speakers and played music, and the right answer to, "What are you hearing?" Is, "Oh, I'm hearing a pair of paper cones move back and forth powered by magnets." As audio engineers, we were taught we're creating the illusion of these things by using other tools. As writers, you are using patterns of dots, whether it's ink on the page or pixels on the screen or whatever, to convey to the human brain that a dialogue is taking place. It is a magic trick. At some level, you gotta lie.
[DongWon] Well, it's funny. We're kind of performing a version of that magic trick right now. I mean, this podcast is intended to be very conversational and it sounds conversational. But this is also not how the five of us sound when we're sitting around the dinner table and chatting. There's all this crosstalk, over talk, interrupted thoughts, pauses. Those are things that we, as podcasters, are working to [garbled]
[Howard] Wait, hang on. Is Dan allowed to have French fries?
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] No.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But we're ignoring that for the moment. I mean, exactly, that kind of interruption. Right? Like in… We do that a little bit here and there, but I think we're very deliberate about it. Unlike me, at the dinner table, I'm a huge interrupter, as everyone here has realized.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I think those are kind of things to think about is how are you going to manufacture the illusion of a flowing conversation, rather than replicating the absolute chaos that is a real conversation between friends.
[Dan] When we were talking this morning, and planning out exactly how we were going to do these episodes over breakfast, we were talking about this episode specifically, and I suggested one angle on it, and Mary Robinette suggested something else. Then we had a brief exchange that was mostly, "Uh... Ch... Oh..." Like, and we knew, because we've known each other for like 13 years, exactly what we meant.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] That's how we decided the topic for this was like 13 bizarre syllables in a row…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That come to us, made perfect sense.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's one of the challenges when you're writing is that every line of dialogue is doing two jobs on the page. There's the authorial intention, the reason that you, the author, need that line to be there. Then there's the reason that the character is saying that. The reason the character is saying that is going to change depending on who the character is talking to. So it's like I could not have that multisyllabic partial utterance conversation that I had with Dan, with the majority of the listeners, because we don't have any of that shared context.
[Howard] It actually… It wasn't polysyllabic, it was multi-gruntle.
[Mary Robinette] Multi-gruntle. Thank you.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Our multi-gruntle modality is one that is very specific. So when I'm trying to create dialogue for characters, I think about two areas of intention. What am I trying to accomplish on the page, like, what scenic lift is this doing? Then, the other is, why is the character saying this? What is my character's goal? What's the [garbled]? Again, that shifts for me, depending on who they're talking to. So if I swap characters out in a scene, my dialogue has to shift as well.
 
[Erin] I think one of the interesting things about that is that sometimes your authorial intention can be to replicate conversation as best you can on the page. Sometimes it's more stylized. Any sort of dialogue can have a range from being almost completely fidelity to the way that we speak, with um's and pauses where you're trying to show that this feels like real life too, like, very bantery where it's completely… No one actually speaks like that, but there is a fun in it. I think about Dawson's Creek when it came out a zillion years ago, and no teenager talks the way that they do, but there was a fun in hearing teens use this like very complicated language that they wouldn't in real life. So, sometimes your intention is also in showing something with the dialogue style, in addition to the dialogue itself.
[DongWon] Or, I think about Deadwood a lot, with this… Where most of the characters spoke in a very vernacular way. Then you have Ian McShane playing Al Swearengen who talks in these elaborate Shakespearean just foul mouth paragraphs, where he'll just be talking and talking and talking. But it's one of the most delightful things to witness, and all of the other characters seem to understand him, even though I, as the audience, I'm like I barely figured out what he was trying to say there, but…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It was delightful. So you can use that to great effect to communicate things about character in ways that play with what is naturalistic. But how the other characters listen and respond to that, I think, can also be very powerful.
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to talk about one mechanic, just to start us off. As an example of something that I see people doing on the page, and it was something that I would do, is that you want the character to interrupt some other character. In real life, when we're speaking, that interruption comes several words after the word that causes the character to want to interrupt. Most of the time on the page, you do the interruption right at that word. So if you want the dialogue to see more natural, then you go ahead and you let the character carry a couple of words past that interrupting thing. If you really want to put a punch underneath that word for some reason, then you would have them interrupt right at that time. So, like, if I were saying, "Uh, we're going to be going downstairs," and someone interrupted me on the page, and the downstairs was the thing that I wanted to underline, it might be, "We're going to go downstairs." "Downstairs! How dare you say downstairs!"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Whereas in real life, I might say, "We're going to go downstairs to…" "Downstairs! How dare…" And it doesn't play the same. So you can think about that. Like, why are you doing that interruption and how are you playing with it?
 
[Howard] I like to think of conversational dialogue, conversational moments in books, as a compression algorithm. My favorite compression algorithm is the GIF, or jif, or we're not going to have that argument, where you pick key colors and you say this color for this many pixels, this color for this many pixels. When I had a breakup conversation with a girlfriend in high school, we talked for like three hours. When you read a breakup conversation in a romance novel, when you see one in a rom-com, it is not three hours. What got compressed? What were the key colors? How many pixels did they run for until the reader knew that that was the color that they needed. I don't know what the right compression algorithm is for everything, but I know that it has to be compressed. Because real conversations take a lot longer than they take in books.
[DongWon] There's the way that nobody says goodbye on the phone in a movie unless someone is about to die. Right? Like… Because otherwise, you don't need that note of we are concluding the conversation. All of the information has been communicated, we're moving on from here.
[Mary Robinette] This is, I think, as a side note, one of the reasons that so many people in fandom have difficulty with dialogue is because they have… In real life, is because they have learned it from film, television, and books where all of the small talk has been stripped out.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Intriguing]
[Howard] Also, so many things in romance and rom-com and drama, people will say such cruel things without any sort of warm up or even any sort of justification. Because, wow, that's the punchy bit. I'm sorry, people, don't learn to talk by what you see on TV. Because those people aren't being nice to each other.
[DongWon] Well, it's also dialogue in fiction is designed to communicate the emotional state of a character. Right? You are very rawly and directly trying to get what the character's actually feeling across to the other character, but really to the audience so they understand what's happening in this conversation. When I am in conversation with somebody about how I am feeling about something, it is rare that I am directly stating it. Right? I'm talking about effects, I'm talking about consequences, I'm talking about all kinds of other things that are ways to get them to understand what my experience is. But coming out and saying it directly is actually not a very effective way to get them to understand what it is that you're experiencing.
[Erin] I'm thinking back to that idea of the compression algorithm. One of the things I like to do when thinking about dialogue is trying to read more uncompressed speaking. Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright, her style of doing plays is to actually go interview people and then turn it into a one woman show. She does some compression, because otherwise it would be endless, but her technique is trying to remain fairly faithful to the way that people talk. Like, so… Listening to her do her shows, I'm like, "Well, that's pretty true to what a mildly compressed speech is. Now what do I want to look at?" A Marvel movie might have like super compressed bantery stuff. Then, trying to figure out where do I want to fall in between. Repetition is a great example. When I listen to her work or other things that are more uncompressed, we repeat ourselves. When you broke up with your girlfriend for three hours, I'm going to guess you said the same thing 18 different ways. That's some of the stuff that happens in real life, but on the page, it gets repetitive in a bad way. Because you're not in the same moment. So you want to use… You can use repetition to make things feel more real, because that's what happens. We forget where we were, and then we come back to what we were talking about.
[Dan] Well, this goes back into some of our previous conversations about format and about different types of writing. There are things you can do, for example, in a script that don't work on the page because of all the extra um's and so things that we kind of add-in that sound very natural to us, but reading them become very onerous. Let's pause now and come back later.
 
[Howard] I did not know how much I needed Cunk On Earth until I watched the first episode of Cunk On Earth. This is a comedy documentary, faux documentary of human history presented by Philomena Cunk, who is a character played by the actress whose name I've now forgotten.
[Dan] Diane Morgan.
[Howard] Diane Morgan. Diane Morgan so brilliantly stays in the voice of Philomena Cunk. That's where half the comedy comes from. Her uncertainty when interviewing people, her… The self-consciousness coupled with the absolute certainty that she's right. "Oh, my mate so-and-so shared this with me on YouTube. No, really, the moon is a lie. I'll send you… You just need to see the video." I love Cunk On Earth. 30 minute episodes, which is the perfect length for this kind of comedy. Available right now on Netflix. If you've ever wanted to learn lots and lots of things about human history mostly correctly while laughing, Cunk On Earth.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back in, I want to talk about a couple of tools to make your character voices distinct. Because when you've got two characters speaking to each other, in an ideal world, they sound like different people. Coming out of narrating audiobooks, there are five things that make a character voice, roughly speaking. Three of which can be replicated on the page. I'll tell you the other two, because it'll annoy you that you don't know them. They are pitch and placement. But the three that can replicate on the page are pacing, accent, and attitude. So, pacing is something that you control with punctuation. It is someone speaking with very long, fluid sentences, or somebody who's talking with lots of parentheticals. I mean, sometimes they talk with parentheticals, but sometimes they don't. Like, that kind of thing. Accent is about your sentence structure. It's not about replicating someone's like phonetic distinctions on the page, it's that the sentence structure is going to vary based on where they're from. When I'm talking to my parents in Tennessee, I will… My pronunciation doesn't change that much. But I'll do things like, "I'm going to go on over to the store." I'm like I don't know what all of those extra…
[Dan] Syllables.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Mono-gruntal.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I don't know what all of those extra prepositions are actually doing. On over to? Like, what are we doing there? But that is, rhythmically, that is… That's built-in part of the accent. Then, attitude is about your word choice. So the words that you pick when you're mad at someone are very different than the words that you pick when you aren't mad at them. It's kind of an all of the above scenario, too. Like, if you take, "What did you say?" And you're mad at somebody, it's like, "The actual did you say?" That changes…
[Erin] Yeah. I love that where people come from impacting the way that they speak. One of my favorite things is that there are many languages where at the end of sentences, you basically say, "Are you with me?" Some sort of phrase, like, yeah, got it. It's like different languages have different words that go at the very end, but it's basically like, "Are you still with me as I am speaking?" If you have someone who comes from a culture like that, or you've invented a culture like that, you might have more check in words at the end of sentences, because that's part of their way of speaking. That will come through. I think something that's really important and interesting to consider is that none of us just speak in a vacuum. Everyone is… One of my sort of pet peeves is everyone has culture including you. So, as opposed to thinking of changes in language as something that just other people do, it's why do you speak the way that you do? Then think about for your characters, why do they speak the way that they do, and what are they conveying about themselves that they may not even realize through the way that they speak?
 
[DongWon] Love that. One of the things that I've been thinking about in the course of this conversation, I actually don't have a great answer for, but so much of conversation is nonverbal. It's facial expression, it's gestures, it's eye contact, it's all of these things. I think one of the struggles that we've all had living our lives mostly mediated by Zoom these past several years is these tools got much more difficult to apply. So when you're doing just verbal dialogue… So, like, in Dark One: Forgotten, we're not getting character gestures, body language, eye placement, all of that. All we're getting is what are they actually saying. So what are some of the tips and tricks to communicate the things that would otherwise be communicated by like a tag that's like, "He sighed, he shifted, he…" Whatever that happens to be. He broke eye contact in some way. Like…
[Mary Robinette] So… The thing is that we've actually been doing nonverbal dialogue… Dialogue decoupled from body language since the invention of the telephone. So we know how to do that. We're familiar with those patterns. What I find is that when you're trying to replicate that on the page, you want to look for the natural pause points. Because anytime you put in body language, that's going to slow things down. So instead of saying he paused, then you would say he scratched his ear. What I find is that… Again, the body language is, as you say, part of the communication. So, he looked away… Well, what did he look at? What is that actually conveying? I'm very bad in my books. My characters do a lot of sighing. I have to go back in and do a search and find/replace to swap that out for other pieces of body language. Because it becomes in-specific.
[Dan] So, if you want a really great example of how important all of these kind of nonverbal cues can be, get on… Jump on YouTube and go look up what I'm going to call the mother F-r conversation from an early episode of The Wire.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Which is two characters who are doing what is essentially like a…
[Mary Robinette] It's a crime scene.
[Dan] Crime scene investigation…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Trying to figure out how a woman died, where the bullet is, all these things. The only word that they say, over the course of about five minutes, is not one we can say on this show. But because of their attitude, because of their vocal inflection, because of the way that they look at each other, you know exactly what they're saying and exactly what they mean. It is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. Flipside of that, another one of my very favorite shows is Justified. One of the things I love about that is how distinct the dialogue is. So, yes, of course, it's a show and so they're doing some visual cues. But, going back to what Mary Robinette was talking about, how do you make all of your characters sound different, watch an episode of Justified. Pay attention to, for example, the way that they threaten each other. Wynn Duffy is kind of an outsider, he's not really a Southerner, he doesn't have that kind of slow laconic way of talking that so many of them do. He's very clinical. At one point, he says, "If I see you again, I'm going to get a blow torch and make you as small as I possibly can." Which is just very direct and to the point. When Raylan Givens, who's the main character, wants to threaten somebody, he says in this very slow way, he… Actually, to Wynn Duffy, he pulls a bullet out of his gun, drops it on his chest, and says, "Next one's coming faster." Which is such a beautiful way of encapsulating his personality, the way he solves problems, his absolute economy of words, but in a way that's completely different than Wynn Duffy's.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things about threats in particular is that they often say more about the character who is making the threat than the character who is receiving the threat. Because most of the time when people are making threats, their actually signaling this is something that I would find upsetting. They are not necessarily signaling this is something that would be a problem for you.
[Erin] Thinking back to what we were saying about the difference between, like, when you're putting something on the page and dialogue and when it's spoken, I was thinking that sometimes it's… Think about this sentence. I don't know about that. Right? So I'm thinking if I don't know about that and I am saying it in a conversation with people who can see me, I might sort of pause, think, and then say, "I don't know about that." On the page, you might say like, "She furrowed her eyebrows," or something much better than that, but in…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] In a dialogue, I'd be like, "I… Don't know about that." That's what I would do on the phone. Because what I'm doing is taking that space where you would see me do the furloughing and putting it in a vocal… Like, I'm doing it vocally, because you can't see me. That's what you do on the phone. So, something that's really interesting is just pay attention to the things we do when we're talking on the phone and figure out is there a good place to put those in text. When do you lower your tone and whisper? When do you get louder, when do you extend vowels and when do you get more clipped in the way that you speak, maybe because you're upset.
 
[Howard] This circles back to what I think is kind of a 101 level, but we should all be reminded of it, writing and editing rule as it might be for dialogue, which is that the rules for grammar and punctuation and spelling and whatever else for dialogue are much less rigid than for other things. Because we don't put commas where they necessarily are supposed to go when we're speaking. Play with that. There've been a lot of times when I've had to step something from a copy editor because my grammar has been egregious and I have to go back in and say, "No, that was meant to be egregious," because of the way this is supposed to read. But in checking what the copy editor has written, I am like, "Let me make sure that that reads correctly. I didn't accidentally spell a bad word, did I? No. Okay. We're cool."
[DongWon] One other thing I want to point out is that what feels like naturalistic dialogue also follows trends and evolves over time. What was naturalistic in the 1950s was the screwball comedy, which is incredibly fast-paced, had a very specific accent, and cadence. Then we entered the 70s, where there was this very like naturalistic like thing is how people really talk. As audio changes, as technology changes, as our expectations change… Right now, we're in the era of mumble core movies, where it's almost impossible to tell what anybody's saying because of the way the sound is mixed in the way dialogue is written right now. You find that in prose, too. In text, how people talk in different eras, different genres. What feels like natural language, natural conversation, those shift depending on what you're trying to inflect. So I think what really we're circling around in so many ways is conversational dialogue, natural dialogue, is highly stylized. It is approached to great effect through a real character, through a real tone, through a real genre and category, in all these really powerful ways.
[Erin] I think I love that. I love that I think it's both what you're trying to inflect and also what you're trying to reflect. Because not all folks talk the same. So I think one thing that's really exciting is to not feel like you need to force yourself into the way that the dialogue that you're used to reading or use to seeing is, if that's not the story that you're trying to tell. I really love the way that like, an author like Susan Palumbo, who's a short story writer, uses dialogue in a different way. She's from the Caribbean, and, like, there's a different style of writing that she's doing that is amazing and completely natural. But just natural to a different storytelling ethos than the one that we're use to, specifically, in the United States.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you some homework this week. What I want you to do, and it's a very simple exercise. I want you to take dialogue that you've already written and delete every third line. This is going to give these gaps in the conversation, that you are going to have to then bridge with the body language that you use and having the other characters make the deductive jump that we would make in natural conversation. It's not going to be a perfect thing that you need to do with everything that you write. But it's an exercise in making deliberate choices for what you're doing in your dialogue. Try deleting every third line of dialogue.
 
[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we discuss the different sounds of collaboration, and learn about two of our hosts experiences building worlds with Brandon Sanderson. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes

Jan. 16th, 2019 11:38 am
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Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes
 
 
Key points: Where do you start when you are worldbuilding geography or a world? What do I need the geography to do? Sense of wonder is different than mystery. Start with the familiar, with components that you know really well. That gives you authenticity. The familiar can be immersive for the reader. What kind of geography suits the story? Then dig into the ramifications of that. Biomes can help you build a world. Biomes are kind of packaged ecosystems. Pay attention to transitions, too! Be aware, the map is not the territory. Go out and look at the actual landscape if you can!
 
[Mary] Season 14, Episode Two.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Geography and Biomes.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.
[Brandon] Mahtab, thank you so much for coming and being on the podcast with us.
[Mahtab] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[Mahtab] All right. Well, first of all, let me start with my name. It means moon… In Persian, it means moon light, and I was named by my grandmother. I have done everything from hotel management to credit card sales to IT sales and writing is actually my fourth career. I think I'm going to stick with this one. I absolutely love writing. Science fiction, fantasy… Though I have written fantasy before, in my Tara trilogy, trying to work on science fiction. I'm just looking forward to continuing writing for as long as I live.
[Brandon] We're super excited to have you. Mahtab is going to be helping us on the second week of the month episodes…
[Dan] All year long.
[Brandon] This year. So you'll be able to hear a lot from her.
 
[Brandon] We're talking geography and biomes this year. I figured starting off worldbuilding, we would start right at the fundamental, the actual geography of the worlds that we create.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So I want to ask you guys, where do you start when you're building geography, when you're building a world, what's your start point?
[Howard] I ask myself… And I'm going to go back to elemental genres… I ask myself what I need the geography to do.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] If I need sense of wonder, that is a very different geography than if I need… Then if I'm writing a mystery and the geography is factoring into the mystery. In large measure, that is because if I want sense of wonder, I have to break out the wordsmithing, and I have to talk about the colors in the sights and the smells and the feeling of the air and all of these things in a way that's very different than if I want it to be puzzling.
[Brandon] Yeah. I've seen a lot of sense of wonder in your writing. Give me an example of geography you might use if you were doing the mystery, instead?
[Howard] [breath] Uh.
[Brandon] Put you on the spot?
[Howard] No, no no no. That's fine. I'm writing, right now, a novel set on a desert planet which has a thriving atmosphere, even though there is nothing growing on the surface.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] Part of that mystery is… Everybody's afraid to go outside, and you don't go outside because it's radioactive. There's not enough… There's not enough electromagnetic field. The science behind this says if you go outside, you will eventually die of cancer. Why is there an atmosphere? So you have this fear of being outside, and this puzzle about what is it underground that keeps pumping fresh oxygen to us, that keeps drawing carbon dioxide in? That puzzle is central to the whole book.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Howard] But there's also going to be sense of wonder in there, because [garbled they all does]
 
[Dan] I do a very similar thing, actually. I will look at what I need the world, what I need the geography to accomplish. In the middle grade that I'm writing right now, I was trying to figure out… They have… It's science fiction and they've arrived at a brand-new planet. So I looked at the outline and realized that the actual function… Like, the size of the continents, what their land around it is like, wasn't as important as like the physics of the world. I wanted to have very low gravity, I wanted to have very high density in the atmosphere… Things like that, in order to make certain things work.
[Brandon] Can you tell us what any of those are without giving spoilers, or… Just curious.
[Dan] Yeah, well. This is actually the sequel to Zero G, which is my big middle grade audiobook. In that one, they are going to a planet and it all takes place in zero or microgravity. You can fly, basically. I wanted to have a similar feeling in the second book. So I actually talked to a bunch of physicists. We came up with a combination of gravity and atmospheric pressure and things that would basically allow you to fly on muscle power. Then, looking at that, realized, "Oh, well, okay, if the atmosphere is dense enough to provide buoyancy, it's also going to be narcotic." So how can we work around that? Basically, producing an environment in which the little middle grade protagonists could have a lot of fun and do a lot of cool things. Making sure that I had the atmosphere chemically composed so that it would be narcotic rather than poisonous. So that it would make you kind of loopy and giggly, rather than kill you, was very important for the middle grade, as well. Whereas if I'm doing the fantasy series that I'm trying to write, that isn't as important. What I need is different kingdoms that can be at war with each other. Why are they at war with each other? Well, there's a geographical answer to that, as well.
 
[Mahtab] When I started writing, I wanted something that was more familiar to me, so at least my first four novels are set in India. I just feel that because every component of a story, whether it's setting or character or plot or pacing, everything has to work together. It would be easy if new writers, at least especially for me, to start with one component that I knew really, really well. So, which is why… I mean, I don't have to spend too much time, all I have to do is close my eyes and I can imagine myself in India, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, tastes, everything. That is why… That is one component that's kind of taken care of. As you progress towards getting better at writing, at making sure that everything works, then, I think, you can start working on fantasy lands where you do need to do a bit of research, go to experts that could probably tell you a little bit more about that. I mean, you could probably put some more effort into the geography. So, for me, I like to start with the familiar. In fact, the next novel that I'm going to be working on is set on Mars. Now, that's a little bit difficult to try and figure out what the place is going to be like.
[Chuckles]
[Mahtab] You have to rely on lots of stuff. So I like to start with the familiar, and then moved to something that's made up.
[Howard] There's so much to be said for the familiar as something that is immersive for the reader. The sugar sand beaches in Sarasota, Florida, where I grew up. Some details. One, when you walk barefoot in that sand, it's hard. It pushes out of the way. You end up taking different kinds of steps. You sort of do this shuffle step. The humidity is cloying. Every time I've stepped off a plane in Florida, I've taken one breath and realized [sniff] "Oh, that's right. Oh, that." Then… And this is something that people often don't think of. We get on those beautiful white beaches, you can have a snow blindness from the glare. These are all things that I've experienced, and I know well enough that I can write about them when I am talking about a desert. Because they all fit just well enough that I can leverage that.
 
[Brandon] When you were writing about India, were you picking a specific city that you knew or were you creating a made up one?
[Mahtab] It was made up. I mean, the little town of Morni in northern India was made up. But everything else, it's like the foods or the smells or the cultures and the customs of the people, that was… I mean, I've lived in India. So I know. Then, of course, you could tweak a little bit, but it started out with a familiar base of what it is like, and then I kind of changed it around. I put a lot of Indian mythology in it. Which kind of added a bit more texture and flavor to the story. So, yeah, I mean… Of course, India is vast. It's got lots of languages, cultures, so what happens in North India doesn't happen in South India, but the fact is that you… Because it was a made up little town, I could add bits and pieces and still get that authenticity in the narrative.
[Howard] I recently watched a documentary about the monsoon season in southern India and the way it shapes whether all over the globe. It was utterly fascinating. The documentary… You look at the towns, the villages, the communities in that area, and how… Yeah, they really have two times of the year. Which is monsoon, and everything else.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for the book of the week.
[Howard] Oh. Yes. I have a history book for you, written by my friend, Myke Cole. It's called Legion versus Phalanx. It's his first history book, and I am absolutely in love with the voice that he uses for teaching us history. Specifically, teaching us about the Roman Legion and the Greek, the Hellenistic, Phalanx, and how those two related. The fundamental question is well, who would win? We all think we know the answer. Well, the Romans would win because…
[Dan] They did.
[Howard] That's who would win because they did. But the why behind that is kind of the meat of the book. Myke takes all kinds of angles in discussing this, including… And that's why I want to do that one this week… Including geography. One of the fascinating facts is that the Roman Legion can turn more quickly than a Phalanx can. So if you're fighting on the flat, maybe it's a level… Pardon the pun… Playing field. But the moment there are hills, or trees or whatever, the Legion has an advantage. That's just scratching the surface. The book is awesome, I think you'll love it. Myke Cole, Legion Versus Phalanx.
 
[Brandon] Dan, you said something earlier that relates to this idea, with Legion versus Phalanx. Where you said if you're designing a fantasy world, you would take the geography into account for developing the politics, the governments, the systems. Talk a little bit more about that. How would you do that?
[Dan] Well. Um. In this particular instance… This is the book I've been working on for a long time, and it still is not out, and may never be. But I needed… the premise is that the fantasy world is also a reality show that people from other planets watch. One of the main shows that got everyone's attention was this kind of ongoing War of the Roses style thing. Where there was the constantly moving border. You look historically at the War of the Roses between the French and the English, and the definition of what is French and what is English changed constantly, and who was who and who was in charge. So I wanted to create the kind of geography that would (A) give you something to fight over. Some kind of resource or power that made that land worth a multi-generational war. But that also allowed for that kind of fluid border and fluid national identity. So that the people could… We used to belong to this, but now we belong to this, because that King won the last war. Which is different than just I want to have two kingdoms fighting. In my case, I ended up giving them a religious component. There was a religious lake that was central to the religion shared by both of these kingdoms. So they were kind of fighting over that, Dome of the Rock style. We want to make sure that this belongs to us, because it is very important, and not to those other terrible people on the other side of the border. Then figuring out, well, okay, this is therefore the kind of place that has a lake. What does that signify about the surrounding area? I love thinking about it in these terms because then, once I have a premise, I can spin that out. What are the ramifications of that? What is this lake used for? If it's religious, do they fish it or is it off-limits? How is that going to affect the culture? Are they going to be a fishing culture or not? All of those questions can be answered as you follow yourself down the rabbit hole.
 
[Brandon] I want to touch briefly on the idea of biomes. Next week, we will come back and talk about a fun concept called world of hats. This is where…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Sometimes a planet will express only one idea. We'll talk about that next week. But I want to talk about the idea of different biomes in your stories. Because specifically, when I started to really get into worldbuilding geography, there was so much to learn. In any of these topics we'll be talking about this year, we could spend an entire year's podcasts just on geography. As a newbie coming into it, I often felt as a fantasy author, I needed to have working knowledge of so many different things, it sometimes felt overwhelming. When I started to learn about the idea of how biomes interact and why they are where they are, that helped me to start to be able to build some of these fantasy worlds and kind of make some sort of short hands. So, what are biomes? What do I mean by that? How does that shorthand help?
[Dan] A biome is kind of like… This is a generalization that a bio scientist would be upset with. But it's kind of like the ecosystem. It's kind of like, say, well, this is a desert biome versus a tundra versus a jungle versus a forest, whatever. It's a really good thing to think about, especially if you're writing fantasy. Because we come from such a strong kind of overpowering tradition of medieval European fantasy that everyone tends to have the rolling hills and forest biome, with maybe some snowy mountain peaks where the barbarians live.
[Howard] I've got a great example of that. I've recently been reading up on the Judean wilderness. There is a word that they have in Arabic, wadi, which is a dry riverbed. Our word for it in English is dry riverbed. In English, you say this because it's something that… Your river broke. It's not… The river doesn't exist anymore. Something went wrong. In Arabic, it is a word for a feature of the landscape. So you have the geography directly impacting the language. What's interesting is Guadalcanal and Guadalajara get their names from Arabic, wādī al-qanāl and wādī al-ḥijārah are the original names of those places. So in reading this, I quickly realized that Arabic geography, Arabic peninsula geography was influencing language and place names where there really weren't that many dry riverbeds. Really cool stuff.
[Mahtab] The other thing one also has to remember is that you… When you're also thinking of biomes, you just do not have hills, and then you have a desert, and then… There's a lot of gradual transition from one to the other, so think of the hybrids as well. Like, the mountains rolling into foothills into some kind of a desert land and then into the river or the seashore or something like that. So don't just think when you're building a biome or when you're thinking of your geography or landscape that, okay, it's just gotta have mountains, it's gotta have this. Try and do a gradual transition. That's why sometimes it's necessary to know a lot of stuff and then combine it together to see what is necessary and where your city or your town or your protagonists are located.
[Dan] Yeah. That's a really good point to make, especially because, not only are we very heavily influenced by old European fantasy, but also by Star Wars. So we do tend to have this concept of, "Oh, well, this is the snow planet, and this is the desert planet." Those transitional areas are not only more common, but they're much more interesting. Utah is a desert, and we have a big, nasty Salt Lake. But what that Salt Lake also provides is an incredible saltmarsh wetland that's one of the coolest bird preserves in the country. That often gets forgotten, because we're just kind of broad brushed is a desert. So when you do your research and figure out what all these transitional states are, there's a lot of cool stuff in them.
[Mahtab] That could actually inform your story or your character or could be a point of… Plot point, conflict, what have you. So you gotta research that.
[Howard] There's a quote from Robert De Niro… Actually, I had to look this up. The movie, Ronin, 1998. They're doing this tactical map on a whiteboard and talking about this plan. De Niro says, "The map is not the territory." They all go out and look at it, and everything changes as they realize that these sightlines are not two dimensional, this is… For me, having the whiteboard translate to an actual landscape, I realized, "Oh. All these fantasy maps that I love drawing, which was a thing that I loved drawing in 1998, are not the territory. I'm going to have to go outside to get a feel for this."
 
[Brandon] Let's wrap it up here. Mahtab, you have homework for us.
[Mahtab] Yes, I do. Normally, when we start describing geography or describing a setting, we tend to rely mostly on our sense of sight. So the homework for you today is when you… Take your setting, your fantasy world, whatever it is. Take out the sight. Out of it. Just describe it using sounds, smells, tastes, and feels. No sight. So, for example, if it was a blind person who was describing a setting, how would you do that? That's… Yeah, that's your homework.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.32: How to Handle Weighty Topics

Aug. 16th, 2018 02:00 pm
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Writing Excuses 13.32: How to Handle Weighty Topics
 
 
Key Points: How do you decide to tackle characters who are suffering from difficult things like racism, sexism, or people who are different from yourself in your fiction in an appropriate way? Start with who you are, your worldview, your writer voice, and be authentic. How do you handle it carefully? Start with "everyone knows what it's like to bite into a piece of fruit," and remember that we have more in common than not. Start with the things you have in common, don't make your character just differences and marginalization. Start with empathy, and let the character teach you something. Be careful when writing about something you do not have a personal connection to, to avoid damage. Will getting it wrong damage people? Am I reiterating something learned from the media that already reinforces issues that the community has to deal with on a daily basis? Watch for the pressure points, where people are already bruised. See the other as people. Readers are not a monolith. Where do you draw the line between what is my story to write versus my need to write the other? Think about why you feel that you have to write this, what do you think you are doing with it? Remember that your life experience may be the exotic thing to your reader. Representing diversity does not always mean pain, marginalization, and trauma. Sometimes people just want characters who look like them and talk like them to have adventures and be the protagonist, going on the kinds of adventures and interesting things that we love in science fiction and fantasy.
 
( A bite of fruit, waiting for a bus, and more... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How to Handle Weighty Topics.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] [pause] Oh. And we're not that smart.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] Don't mind me. Don't mind me.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm laughing. I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
[Brandon] We are going to talk about dealing with very weighty topics.
[Amal] We are off to a great start.
[Brandon] We got off to a fantastic start.
[Mary] This is called nervous laughter. That's what this is.
[Brandon] So I wanted to make sure we did a podcast about this this year when we're talking about character because it's going to come up in your writing, and you're going to think about it, and we want to deal with, on the podcast, how and if you should and these sorts of things, tackle characters who are suffering from difficult things like racism or sexism or people who are very different from yourself suffering from prejudice or whatnot or even just kind of approaching someone very, very different from yourself in your fiction and doing it in an appropriate way. I wanted to actually pitch this at Maurice, first, because I know you've done weighty topics a lot in your stories. How do you make the decision to do this, and how do you approach it?
[Maurice] Well, part of it is just a function of who I am. Honestly, I mean, it's part of my worldview, it's part of what I consider my writer voice, so it's a matter of… I don't know, when I sit down to write something, it's like what am I feeling at the time? Where is my heart space? Where is my head space at? Then I just sort of dive in from there, because that's obviously what I'm thinking about, it's obviously on my heart, and that's the space I try to write from. That, I think, is what plays out as authentic to people when they read it. Well, there are two examples I have that's actually not for my writing, that are two stories I read earlier this year that just stuck with me. One is up on tor.com. It's by Kai Ashante Wilson. It's called The Lamentation of Their Women. It is a powerful, absolutely raw story. It tackles racism, being marginalized, and police brutality. All in one novelette. It is kind of a tour de force of rage in a lot of ways. But it is one of those things where it's like we're now past writing, we're actually… You can actually like see Kai's heart at this point. I mean, it's just all over the page. The second story is by Chesya Burke, and it's called Say, She Toy. It's a story that's up on Apex Magazine. It's about a robot that's black. Basically, it's an advanced black sex doll and the abuse that's heaped upon this sex doll by its users. It's just this… Almost like this monologue of this is what I am experiencing. Is this all to my existence? That sort of thing. It's just… It's a heavy story. Like I said, it's tackled so brilliantly and Chesya has such a deft hand with this sort of writing. It's like… We are… From the opening on… I can't even tell you the opening line. It's… You will know when you encounter this story, from the very first line of this story, and it hits you right in the face, and it grabs you right there. This is what we're talking about. You're going to go with me for this ride.
 
[Brandon] So, let me kind of expand on that and ask the why. This is for any of you. Or the how, I mean. What are these authors doing that is making these stories work? You say deft, words like that, and handled so carefully. What are they doing? What can our listeners learn from them?
[Amal] So what you were describing, Maurice, seems to be like… These are two instances of people… I mean, so Kai and Chesya are both black and they're writing about experiences that are… Like the black people experience. But I think that when it comes to writing people who are different from you, I always, always think of something that Nalo Hopkinson said on a panel at ReaderCon a few years ago, which was that, "Yeah, people are different from each other, but most everyone knows what it's like to bite into a piece of fruit." From that example, and from that… She goes on to say, "Most people, we have more in common than we have not in common." If you try to ground… At this point, I'm just extrapolating. I'm no longer paraphrasing what Nalo said. But if you are approaching writing a character who is different from you by focusing exclusively on the differences, it's just going to happen let that character is not going to be fully rounded. That character is only going to be whatever marginalization you've given them. As opposed to if you try to ground your character in the things that you have in common, in the things that you can imagine, in the fact that, yeah, you both know how to bite into a piece of fruit, you both know what it's like to have to wait for the bus, you both know what it's like… All sorts of different things, and to maybe try to whenever you're building a character and trying to get out their experiences, build out from the things that you feel you have in common. Then, from that point, think about how the differences inform those same experiences. I mean, if you're at a bus stop and you're white, you're probably going to have a different experience than if you're at a bus stop and you're black and something… Some inciting incident based on race takes place all of a sudden, right? But you're still… You can still know what it's like to be tired and annoyed and frustrated and aggressed and all sorts of things like that. So it's… I mean, writing is so entirely about empathy. I think that when you're talking, Maurice, about the writing from your heart space, as well as your head space, and things like that, it sounds to me like what you're saying is, you're also writing from a place of empathy, you're writing from a place of… I almost want to say love, honestly. Like, write from a place of love for these things that are different. If you approach writing a different character from a place of humility, as well, a recognition that… That you don't know everything, and that you almost want a character to teach you something. This maybe sounds too facile and didactic, but that when you're approaching a character with a background that differs from yours, approach that difference with humility and care as opposed to as a science project. I mean, sure, some people approach their science projects with humility and care, but… Look at my humanities background here.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] But just to have that care is so important, I think.
[Mary] One of the things that I'll see people going wrong, and I say this as someone who has done this in my earlier writing, and I'm sure it's something I will do again unwittingly, where there's a topic that is current or something that I'm thinking about, but not necessarily I have a personal connection to, so I will want to write something that comments upon that. But it's impossible for me to talk about it with the same… With any degree of nuance, because I haven't experienced it. That's not to say that, oh my goodness, you must experience everything. Because Lord knows, I've never experienced spaceflight, either. But… But when you're dealing with a really weighty topic, one of the things that is going to happen is you will be expressing your opinion about it. If you're not in the group that you are expressing opinion about, the chances of that opinion being damaging increases disproportionately. So when I am looking at something, about whether or not I should tackle something, the thing that I look at is not whether I'm going to get something wrong, but is whether or not getting it wrong will damage people. Like, getting something wrong about spaceflight, that's not actually probably going to damage anyone. Getting something wrong about someone else's lived experience, the chances of damage increase disproportionately, especially if it is a piece… If the wrongness that I am delivering is something that I have inherited from media that I have consumed that is already reinforcing issues that that community has to deal with on a daily basis.
[Amal] I completely agree. I think that maybe one way of thinking about that problem is that maybe when you're approaching a new character, a character with a different background, be aware of the fact that you're not writing in a vacuum. That as much as you feel like you're alone with the page and with this character, part of the reason I think we called them weighty topics is because there is a disproportionate amount of pressure in the world surrounding these things. Like, I'm literally imagining the world as a body with pressure points, and the pressure points are these weighty topics. So if you touch very lightly even on one of those pressure points, the pain or the shock of it is going to be, as you say, disproportionate. Whereas on places where that pressure isn't, it isn't already there... I often talk about it as sometimes friends want me to see a movie that is popular, and I see the trailer and I'm like, "No, I'm good. I don't want to see that movie." They're like, "But why? It's so great." I say, "Well, it… I'm pretty sure that it's going to punch me where I'm already bruised." It's like that thing that there are a lot of people who walk around carrying a lot of bruises, and that even a light touch on a place where you're bruised is going to really, really hurt. You want to try and recognize that.
 
[Brandon] So, this sounds to me a little bit… I think somebody could listen to this and say, "So you're saying just don't do it?"
[Amal] Noooo!
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So, what's the difference between what you're saying and just don't do it?
[Amal] The flipside of this is… I'm going to recommend this really, really amazing article by Kamila Shamsie called The Storytellers of Empire. In it, she is doing a whole bunch of things. It's a brilliant, brilliant essay. She starts out by talking about how… Her background is Pakistani, but she writes novels by like one image coming to her mind and she really… Like, the image kind of guides her into the book she's going to write. The image that kind of burned itself onto her brain was about Hiroshima and how when the bomb went off, patterns from people's kimonos were burned onto their skin. She suddenly got this really vivid image of someone with a kind of kimono pattern on their back and stuff. She wanted to write from that. So she dove into teaching herself about the history and the culture and everything, but in the rest of this article, what she points out is that for North America, for the West if you will, she has this amazing line that says, "Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won't." It's so, so striking. Like, it seems like she's actually saying the flipside, she's saying, "well, yeah, why aren't you writing people who are different from you?" Whenever I see another horrible hot take on the idea of cultural appropriation, people are often saying things like, "Oh, cultural appropriation doesn't exist because everyone is always appropriating, and also, we should try to understand each other." Those are two different topics as well. What I want to say here is, yes, do the thing. But ask yourself a lot of questions, and recognize that the thing is hard. Recognize that there are pressure points, and that sometimes you are going to do damage, but that you should try to decrease that pressure. If there is pressure all over the world, then ask yourself how can you siphon some of that off? Because I do think, we all have a responsibility to be as empathic as possible with each other. So, not trying is not ever going to solve that problem, it's just going to reduce the space in which you can operate. When instead, we want to try and expand that.
[Maurice] so, I actually felt like reading… Like, when I was writing Buffalo Soldier. That was my novella from Tor… tor.com. I was really nervous, because like the last half of the novel takes place in Native American territory. So I have Native American characters, I have reimagined Native American culture, the technology, their cityscapes, everything. It's a complete reimagining. I was nervous. Because I did not want to get this wrong. In fact, actually, it kept me… Actually, that nervousness actually attributes a writer's block in me, so I actually set the project down for I think like three months, because I was ahead… I was already picturing the social media backlash on me. So that alone kept me from writing. I was like, "Oh, man." But then I had to like trust myself as a writer. Like, I'm doing the job of a writer, I'm being empathic and I'm doing my research and I'm being careful in what I'm doing. Then, I'm going to turn it over to a beta reader who's Native American and go, "All right, if I got that wrong, let me know where and why and how." Because my job is… I don't want to add to that hurt. I want to… Well, I want to set the story here. So that's what I ended up doing. I have a friend whose Lakotan. She agreed to read it for me and she gave it her blessing. Actually, she really liked what I did in terms of dialogue and the reimagining, because she was just like, "You see us as people." That's all I wanted. I was like, "I wanted to… That's what I… That was my end goal." I wanted to see them as people.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for a book of the week. That's actually one of your books, Maurice? Tell us about The Voices of Martyrs.
[Maurice] So, The Voices of Martyrs is my short story collection. In a lot of ways, it mirrors my career. So there are stories set in the past, stories set in the present, stories set in the future. Basically, it is… It's almost like a collection of weighty stories. But part of it is… I realized, you know what, as part of my writing process, I realized I am a black nerdy male. Unless I'm going to write all of my stories about being a black nerdy male, I'm going to have to write the other. But I even appro… Because of my background, coming from being born in London, my mother being Jamaican, and raised in a predominantly white culture in a lot of ways, I treat everything as me writing the other, even if it's writing about other black people. That's how I approach all of these stories. So even the stories set in the past. Like, the first story opens up in ancient Africa. But then we moved to stories of someone being in a slave ship, or on a plantation, or in the 20s, going through a boxer battling… Basically battling his own demons at this point. Then moving into stories of the present, with urban fantasy stories. But then ending with Afro future tales. So basically, I'm going from dealing with these sort of issues of culture identity and just hard history to a time of hope. Not… The past is there. The past is what it is. The present is where I am. Now, I get to dream about the future. That's the way I approach all of that.
[Brandon] Awesome.
 
[Mary] So, one of the things that I was thinking about before we took the break, when you were talking about doing the history and getting beta readers, is… And I've talked about it on the podcast before, that I had a novel that I chose to pull because I, at the very end, I had a beta reader who had a very negative reaction to it. But you actually have read this book. One of the things that I remember when I was making the decision was… And coming back to you and saying I'm getting this reaction was that you said that you felt like you had done me a disservice because you hadn't flagged things. So I think one of the things that I want readers to be… Or listeners to be aware of is that even when you try to do all of these things, you may still have a project that is fundamentally flawed.
[Maurice] That is a fear. So one of my mottos has always been, you know what, I will learn my lessons, and then fail better the next time. Because when I think about doing you a disservice, I was like, you know what, there was stuff that I flagged and stuff that I didn't flag. I was like, "Ooo, I wonder…" It kind of goes like, "Is it my place to flag certain things?" That was actually what… It became a wrestling exercise on my end of things, too. Which is like I'm having different reactions. But I'm going to have certain reactions as a black male versus if you have passed a reader through a black female, for example. I'm going to have a certain set of biases, and there are certain things I'm not going to see, for example.
[Mary] Even within that, like I… One of… Because I had about 20 beta readers on that, and tried to get people that I didn't know, to eliminate that… The sympathy aspect of it. One of them, when I went back and said I just wanted to let you know that I pulled the book because damage, she was upset because the book spoke to parts of her life. But her life experience was very different from the life experience of some of the other people who had read it. That's one of the things… Recognizing that your readers are not a… Your readers are not a monolith anymore than characters are. Which is why I've begun using the metric of what is the damage. That's… That is… It's a tricky, tricky thing. Like, there's… I don't think that there is actually an amount of research that you can do to make a book that will be flawless and harm no one.
[Amal] This is a thing, too. It's so difficult to control for what will harm or what will help people. I think about this a lot. Because partly, because I'm a critic as well. So, a lot of the time, the way that I have seen discussions in publishing shift as to whether or not a book should be published, a lot of the time, I look at that and go, "But surely there is a… There is room here, or there is a role, for discourse to play?" For people to actually have a public conversation about the elements of a book that are harmful or helpful in how. I… But… So my instinct is, I would rather, in the abstract, see books published and talk about them than not. At the same time though, to make a hypocrite of myself, I have read books or started to read books that were so terrible… Like so hateful in what they were portraying or so damaging in what they were portraying that if I could make a recommendation... like it's not just a matter of panning it. Like there was one time that I read something that was early enough in its production that I made the publisher aware that this is like horrifically racist and maybe you weren't aware of that, but I would like to make you aware. They actually did the work of consulting other people on that and deciding, "No, you know what, it is actually really, really awful, and we'll just pull it."
[Maurice] I…
[Mary] I had that happen as well with a book that I blurbed. The author was like, "Oh. Ha. You're right." I actually didn't blurb it, but they asked me to blurb it. I was like, "I can't, because of these things." The author… They actually told the author… They didn't tell the author who, but the author went back and corrected things. Sorry, you were going to say something?
 
[Maurice] Oh, yeah. I was wondering like, what you were saying, Amal, where do you draw that line between what is my story to write versus my need to write the other?
[Amal] I guess that's a really good question that gets to the core of it. Most… I mean… Here's the thing, too, I think we're covering a lot of ground and sometimes I'm wondering if our listeners, some of these things will sound so contradictory, but the reason they'll sound contradictory is because this is really complicated territory, and there are so many different situations and so many different scenarios, and sometimes something is an exception, sometimes it's a rule. Like, for me, personally, I can think of a lot of different controversies that happened around whether or not a book should be published, especially in the last few years. I've had different opinions on every one of them, given the context around them. Maybe not every one of them, but certainly on several of them, given the circumstances surrounding them. A lot of that will hinge on that question of why did you feel like you had to write this? What did you think you were doing with this? A lot of the time, when I see these things done… I'm going to pick an example which… I'm going to just name it, because I really, really hated this book. Which did get published, and it got published to great acclaim, which made me feel a lot less bad about how vocally I hate this book. It's called Your Face in Mine by Jess Row. I mean, here I am, giving it publicity. It's just… It's basically… It's a book that is tackling a premise which is… Feels weighty, feels like, okay, this is a complicated issue and will engage a lot of intense feelings and it's because it's got this core of racial reassignment surgery, basically. That you can just… You can change your race with surgery. It's a very, very near future thing. But what pissed me off about it was that it was entirely… Entirely about a white middle-class man's kind of complicated feelings of guilt about race and stuff. This was just a device… Just a device that wanted to demonstrate ultimately how much res… But there's literally… There was a bibliography at the back demonstrating how much research this man had done on all of these things. But reading it, I just kept wanting to throw up. I just kept wanting to be like… I… This is… You've done so much work to so little purpose. Or to such a… Just a terrible purpose, a purpose that uses trans discourse to terrible ends, to ends of basically equating trans peoples' difficulties and the things that they live with with something that is speculative and… Anyways, I'm sorry, I'm going to get on my… I should get off this soapbox. But the point is that all of this work was done, and I kept going, "But why did you do that? Why did you feel this burning need to write this book about… Like… Ultimately, to kind of exonerate your white guilt?" It just made me so angry when I read it that I resent it.
[Mary] There was something that I was talking with Mary Anne Mohanraj who was one of our guest hosts last year, and she said, "You know, Mary, I never see you write Southern characters." It suddenly made me go, "Huh! You're..." I mean, I do, sometimes. But I think that there is a thing that we do what we tend to assume that… That we… We always talk about how you will assume that your own life experience is normal. But I think that there's a thing that white writers are particularly prone to which is that they will want to write the other because it is exotic, and that they will forget that to other people, their own experience is the exotic thing. So I actually think between that and something that Desiree Burch said on the podcast a couple of years ago, I actually feel like a lot of the things that people could do is simply be more specific about writing their own specific experience and writing about the topics that affect them specifically instead of wanting to go and play with someone else's life because it is set dressing that seems new and exciting to them.
[Amal] That's a really good point. I think, to come back to the question that Brandon was asking before about this sounds like you should just not do it, I found myself going, what is to stop you from writing a character that's just in your books? Like, totally determined by your plot, your setting, and so on, but make them a different ethnicity or make them a different gender or make them… This is, I guess, you could call it the aliens version of doing… All right, so you've written a character as a dude, and now you just make that dude a woman. There's criticism about this, about that kind of approach, but I think that one of the reasons that people react so strongly to the absence of diversity in books is that a lot of the time, people just want to see not their pain or their marginalization represented, but people who look like them and talk like them and experience the world like them getting to have adventures or getting to be the protagonist of a novel that isn't about pain or getting… Because there's a sort of ancillary thing to all of this, which is that one of the unfortunate results of these conversations when people don't… Are too afraid to do the work of representing whoever is other to them, it falls on those people, those who are of underrepresented ethnicities, backgrounds, and groups, and so on, to only be able to tell the story of their pain, and to only… Like it's to have their pain be the only currency they have in the marketplace of ideas. That really disturbs me. I could go on and on about. I won't. But it just… That's something that I would like to see lifted as a burden as well, to just be able to have characters of all different backgrounds going on the kinds of adventures and interesting things that we love in science fiction and fantasy.
[Mary] You don't have to equate representation with…
[Amal] Trauma.
[Mary] Trauma.
 
[Brandon] All right. We could go on forever. This has been a 30 minute podcast already.
[Whoops]
[Mary] Sorry, guys.
 
[Brandon] Amal, will you give us some homework?
[Amal] Yes. So this is… Basically, this is a little tricky. It's maybe more of a sort of shift in perspective than it is about generating something new. Basically, if you've ever… This is more of a revision exercise. If you take something that you've written where you represented someone from a group that you are not part of, and write a scene in which a person of that group is reading the thing that you wrote. This kind of forces you to imagine the fact that someone of that background will probably encounter your work, and see where that takes you.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 7.18: Discovering Your Voice

May. 1st, 2012 03:20 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.18: Discovering Your Voice

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/04/29/writing-excuses-7-18-discovering-your-voice/

Key Points: Be authentic. Don't try to impress other people. Don't overwork it. Voice develops naturally. Give yourself the freedom to write what you want. Learn the techniques and get out of the way to let the art happen. Look for the cookie that can only be baked in your brain. Nurture your voice -- find what you love, and go with it. The narrative voice of a book or series isn't the author's voice.
( Diction, Pronunciation, and other vocal tricks? )
[Brandon] Why don't we make that our writing prompt? I want you guys to try that. Find a writing buddy and swap stories halfway through. James, I want to give you a special thank you for being on the podcast and for sharing so many stories with us. We're going to have to end right now, but this has been Writing Excuses. Thank you guys so much. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Applause!]
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