wetranscripts | Entries tagged with empathy

Writing Excuses 18.21: The Empathy Gap: How to Understand What Your Publisher is Telling You

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-21-the-empathy-gap-how-to-understand-what-your-publisher-is-telling-you

Key Points: Bridging the Empathy Gap, between what publishers are doing and thinking, and what the writer experiences. Home cook or professional chef? Inevitable injuries or toxic conditions? Different people need different levels of empathy. How much of your blood is on the wall? Read between the lines, feedback isn't always clear. Assume they are writing in good faith, and if it's upsetting, give yourself a break. Rejection letters! Set rejection goals, and rejection plans. Send the next one out! Don't read too much into any one rejection.

[Season 18, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Empathy Gap: How to Understand What Your Publisher is Telling You.

[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.

[DongWon] So, this is an interesting one. I wrote an essay some time ago called The Empathy Gap. It was really a meditation for me on kind of what I'm trying to do with the newsletter, what I'm trying to do as… In my role in the industry outside of just like doing my job. Right? One of the things I really want to do is help writers understand what publishers are doing and thinking, and encourage publishers to think about what the writer experiences. For everyone to like build a little bridge of empathy between those two audiences. Right? So the metaphor I use in the essay is about the difference between being a home cook and being a professional cook. Right? Accidents happen in the kitchen. You're going to cut yourself, you're going to burn yourself. Right? If you're a professional chef working in a kitchen, that happens every day. You have scars, you have burns, you're like, "Ah. I burned myself again." You will watch like professional chefs grab a hot pan out of the oven and not flinch, versus, like me, as a home chef, I'm like I need every mitt in my space to like touch anything vaguely warm.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] So, for me, sometimes as an industry person, I feel like that professional chef, and a writer will come to me and be like, "Oh, I burned myself." I'll be like, "Huh. That sucks. So, what are you doing next?" Right? Or like, "Get back, we got orders coming up."

[Howard] Oh, you still have nerves in your hand. That's cool for you.

[DongWon] Exactly. So there is this difference of… Me, I see dozens of careers, I see dozens of books come out. I've seen every iteration of things going wrong. Right? So when it goes wrong, sometimes in a big way, sometimes in a small way, my reaction is… My knee-jerk reaction is sometimes like, "Yeah. That sucks. Tough luck. Bad day. What's tomorrow?"

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? So, for me, it's forcing myself to take a step back and remember what is this person experiencing right now. This is the book that they've spent 10 years working on, this is their career. Things look dire, they don't have my experience and know that tomorrow will be okay. That there are more books to be written. That there is a future for their career. So how do we communicate that in a way that is more rooted in empathy for the other person, but still communicating the important information?

[Dan] I really love this metaphor because I think it is such a neat way for the aspiring writer to think about it, like, you love cooking, but do you really want to own a restaurant? That's the step up that you're talking about. Becoming a professional writer and suddenly putting your work in front of people, having to constantly be critiqued about it. So if you think about it in those terms, think, "Well, yes, I really do love this enough that I'm willing to burn off all my fingertips and cut myself on the knife every day," Then, yeah. Take that plunge and become the professional chef.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] There's a difference between inevitable injuries… Like it's inevitable that if you are pulling out sheet pans often enough, that you're going to hit a rack at some point, versus toxic. Like, unsafe working conditions. Because there are also things that will happen in a professional kitchen that people are just like, "No. Of course. What you don't know that you have to step over the missing stair?" There are things that shouldn't be allowed, that OSHA would shut down, that people can get socialized into accepting as just like, "Oh, this is the way things are supposed to be, and I shouldn't try to do anything to fix it."

[DongWon] I've seen that a lot from both sides. I've been in work environments that were unsafe in certain ways, that had practices that we worked really hard to change over time. The industry has made a lot of progress. It's hard to see that sometimes, but the behavior that I saw coming up… I'm not going to call them out specifically, but stories that we would tell at drinks after work, there were some very intense things that people were experiencing that today it would be a huge scandal and the shock versus then, it was sort of everyday behavior. I remember we all went to go see The Devil Wears Pravda together…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] As a little bit of like solidarity. We went, "What was she complaining about?"

[Laughter]

[DongWon] "None of that seems out of pocket to us." Right?

[Oh, dear] [garbled]

[DongWon] "What a baby." You know what I mean. I'm like, I think, that is something to keep in mind at… A lot of us are coming from these experiences of having been in toxic environments growing up… Or coming up in the industry, not my household growing up. But, like, in a professional way. So, figuring out how do we make things safer for people, how do we build things with more empathy, is one of the big challenges I think the industry is facing today, and one of the conflicts that we're seeing. Right? So, trying to find that balance for myself in how I communicate with people is an ongoing challenge.

[Erin] Makes me think… Different people need different levels of empathy. As an author, you might need like… You might need a lot of care, you might be like, "I'm hardened to this world and I need nothing." How do you figure out what you need and who's the best fit for you? Working with publishing to make sure that, like, that the gap is matching the amount that they're able to leap? So to speak.

[DongWon] Totally. I think that is an important thing for you to know about yourself, and it's a hard thing to figure out. I have an explicit conversation about it with my writers. Right? Like, when I send something out on sub, I actually ask the writer, "Hey, how much do you want to hear about this process? Do you want to know every rejection that comes through? Do you only want to know the good news? Do you only want the news at the end?" Right? Some people will say, "Why don't you just tell me the good stuff." I also worked with one writer who's always… Every time I give editorial feedback, I talk about the nice things and I talk about the negative things. When I start talking about the nice things, she's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get to the other stuff." You know what I mean? She doesn't want to hear the nice stuff on some level. She wants… She feels it's almost insincere, her not getting into the nitty-gritty. So, those explicit conversations, I've been encouraging her to listen to the nice stuff. I think it's important. But those conversations about what people need in terms of like that communication style is really important. Finding an agent who will work with you on that, finding editors who will work with you on that, is really important. For me, sometimes when I'm picking what editor to sub to for a writer, I will think about, that editor's kind of rough in how they communicate, or like… Which isn't necessarily bad, it's just they're very direct. Right? I'm like, that writer, that's a bad fit. That is not a relationship that's going to be productive versus sometimes I know, "Oh, this person is really good with somebody who like needs a little extra care, who needs a little bit more of that deep dive in the emotional work," and that produces better fiction at the end of the day. So that's a really good pairing. Right? Those are things that I'm thinking about very explicitly. I am trying to draw that out from the writers when I talked to them. But it also helps me when the writer shows up having a little bit of that sensibility. How do you figure that out for yourself? That's between you and your therapist, I think.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think that's a little bit of like what your experiences are, that's learning from interacting with the industry, interacting with other writers.

[Howard] I think… Honestly, I think of it as an episode of Dexter, where you want to know how thick-skinned you are? Analyze the splatter patterns after you're done talking to your editor.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] No, seriously. Analyze it. How much of your blood is on the wall? Oh, a lot. Okay, this didn't go well for you. Write that down. Describe how you feel about it, so that you have a metric for it as time goes on. So that you understand, "Oh, wait. I actually am pretty thick-skinned, it's just that editor has a very, very sharp knife." It's something you have to learn about yourself, whether or not you have a therapist.

[DongWon] Share that with your team. Right? Especially your agent. That is my job is to manage not just what conversations are happening, but how those conversations are happening. I've had to pull editors aside and be like, "Hey. You can't communicate to this writer that way. It's not producing great results." Or, if I felt it was inappropriate, I've said that, too. I've been like, "I don't like that that's how you talk to my writer." Right? There are other times where I've been like, "Hey, we're going a little soft here, and they need to be pushed a little bit more. I need you to be more direct about what's going on, because they're feeling confused right now." Right? So, I can't do that work in less I know what's going on. So, as always, my advice is always please tell your agent everything. They need to know this stuff. Because we can't do anything unless we know about it. Right? So do that analysis, but then don't forget to share it.

[Howard] After the break, I have a story about how to read between the lines.

[DongWon] Great. Let's take that break, and then we'll get back to that story.

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen. So, this is a murder mystery set in 1950s San Francisco. It feels like something Dashiell Hammett wrote. It is also a coming-of-age story for an adult gay man. It is found family. It is glamour, it is steeped… Steeped with evocative descriptions. It's set in a soap family. Like, they built their empire with soap. So every page is just like laden with scent. It's so good. It manages to succeed on multiple levels. I loved it to bits. Highly recommend this whether you're looking for a heartwarming story about family, a story about someone who is finding themselves. He was a beat cop and they caught him in a raid, and he's now a private detective. Then there's a tightly plotted murder mystery. It is beautifully told. Highly recommended. The Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen.

[Howard] Okay. So it's early 2018, and I'm drawing Munchkin Star Finder cards for Steve Jackson games who is licensing the Star Finder intellectual property from Paizo. I had an art director, a game designer, and a Paizo IP editor all in the approval chain, but the only one who would talk to me was the art director. The art director kept coming back to me on this one illustration saying, "Uh, Matt says the wrench is too big." I do a redraw, Matt says the wrench is still too big. Matt's third time around, Matt says the wrench is still too big. Well, I was drawing a very small character with a cartoonishly large wrench. I realized it's not that the wrench is too big. It's that Matt doesn't like the idea of a cartoonishly large wrench in the hands of this small character. But Matt is not willing to tell me that he doesn't like the joke. He just doesn't like the… Maybe he doesn't know how to say it, maybe he doesn't want to say it. But I managed to read between the lines. I told this to the art director. "Shelley," I said. "Matt just doesn't like the joke altogether. He's wrecking the symmetry of the picture by changing the size of the wrench. So I'm going to replace the wrench with a flamethrower and fill the volume that the wrench was in with smoke. Ask Matt if that's okay. Then I will draw the picture one more time." What went through the approval chain was, "Oh, Matt loves that idea." The point here is that realizing that the feedback may be coming from a place that is not being accurately described to you is a critically important skill. Your editor may not always know how to tell you why something isn't working.

[DongWon] This is such a great point, because it's a reminder that the empathy gap goes both ways. We've talked a lot about how publishers or me can sometimes struggle to remember to be sensitive to the author's experience, but in the other direction, as well, I always appreciate it when I can feel that a writer has remembered that I'm just a person. Right? I'm not a single source of authority, I don't know everything, I'm not perfect. Shocking everyone, hearing now. But I think one thing that could have happened there was Matt may not have realized that that was the issue. He may have just been like, "Oh, I don't like this wrench." And not had the extra thought process of understanding why. So you putting yourself in Matt's shoes a little bit I think helped solve that problem. Writers can do that too. I think there is this idea that like, oh, publishers have all the authority, it's all flowing in my direction, I need to adapt to whatever they say. That's not true. It is a relationship between individuals. Right? You are interacting. They're representing this big organization. But you are a person, and the person you are talking to is a person. Sometimes you can like shortcut some of that by tapping into the humanity of the person that you're talking to.

[Mary Robinette] I find that when I'm reading something that's coming to me that it helps if I think, "Okay. Read this as if they are writing it in good faith." The second thing is that if I find myself getting angry about a lot of different points, that I will walk away from it, and then come back and reread. Because there's a fair chance that what's happened is that my defensiveness has just been triggered. Because it's hard to read people telling you unpleasant things. That I come back then, and then say, "Okay, now read it again as if it's written in good faith." Most of the time when I do that, it is something that I can then at least respond to in a way that's going to be productive as opposed to responding in a way that will be an angry escalation and a shutting down of conversation.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Even if my… Even if I come back and I'm still mad.

[DongWon] You can still be mad. Right? Responding that way is a valid response. Sometimes what you need to do is have the conflict. Right? But as a first step, remembering this person is busy. This person is overworked and underpaid. They're very stressed out all the time. Now, in that mindset, they wrote this email. What does that mean? Right? Did they intend to say the thing that I'm taking away from it? Or did they mean to say something else? That doesn't mean you forgive them for doing the thing. But it might help you understand a little bit what's actually happening. Right? So much of what I do is translate publisher emails to my clients, of, like, they said this. Here's what that means. Right? So much of my job is like a little bit of mind-reading and interpretation between those two audiences. Right? I think it's why I see this gap so much is because I kind of live in it.

[DongWon] I want to switch a little bit to something very specific and concrete. Especially for new writers, for people getting into the industry. Your main interaction in your early days is going to be rejection letters. So I want to talk a little bit about what it feels like to receive a rejection letter. And also what it feels like to send one. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, rejectomancy.

[DongWon] I know. Exactly. So, it's a point of conflict. It's a point of friction. I guess I'm a little bit curious, like, what was you all's like first experience of receiving rejections in the industry? Were those like really blunt, awful things? Were people cruel to you? Is there anything that really stands out from those early days?

[Erin] I think the thing that I remember the most was just collecting them in a cool way. Like, so one thing that I did with a group of friends really early on was we set rejection goals for ourselves, like, to get a certain number of rejections, and had a lovely little… Like, everyone picked a thing that they would do every time that they got a rejection. So, I will take a nice bath and collect my rejection and celebrate it with my peers. Then send the next thing, like, already have the next place maybe for a story that I want it to go. Basically, assume that rejection is a thing that will happen, that it's part of the process, and that it moves you closer to acceptance as opposed to that it is a thing telling you to stop, to leave, and to run away. So I remember sort of cheering on, like, with other people, "Oh, you went out and you sent it out." If you got 10 more rejections, that means you sent it 10 more places, and that's hard work. We will celebrate the work because that's what happened. So I remember that more than any particular rejection. I think it helped me to have something else to focus on. A piece of advice that I often give for dating, which is not what this podcast is about, is that when you go on a date, have a secondary objective. So, like I used to collect songs from people I went on dates with. So, if the date's bad, at least I learned about a new song, and that's interesting. It gives me a way to not live in like this date was a failure. But my song list went up, and that's a success. Similarly, in the writing world, by having, like, these rituals and these things that I work with other people, I can no longer remember any particular rejection, just the bath and the celebration with my friends.

[DongWon] I love that. I love that so much. One thing that's important is… We often fall into dating metaphors when talking about finding an agent, rejection, or placing a story or whatever it is, because you're always trying to find that exact right fit. The one thing that I want to point out that's really different from dating in the publishing process. There's many things that are different. But, when as an agent, I'm seeing hundreds of query letters. Right? There's an asymmetry to what's happening. When you're dating, it's like one to one. You're both hopefully seeing a number of people over time. Whatever. But, like, it's not one person submitting a thing amid hundreds of other things. I'm not spending two hours rejecting 200 dates. Right?

[Mary Robinette] The dating analogy still works, it's just that the slush pile is your Tinder profile.

[DongWon] Right. Exactly. So for you, I think submitting it feels really important, and that rejection letter feels so significant in that way. So I love taking the sting out of it a little bit by making a ritual around it and celebrating getting rejection which I think is also important. But, from my perspective, it's like I spend 100 of these in a row. Right? So I think understanding a little bit what that process looks like for us on our side will help frame a little bit what is actually in that letter. I see writers sometimes on Twitter being confused or pushing back on particular phrases that you see in rejection letters a lot of the time. Which is… Or, something along the lines of, like, "I'm sure you'll find a home for this elsewhere," or "I really love this, but it's not a good fit." Not a good fit is a thing I see a push back on a lot, when it's probably the most honest thing in the letter.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Actually. It's the thing that saying, "It's not that this is bad, it's just that it's not right for me." Often times I haven't even seen enough to know whether it's good or bad, but I have seen enough to know I'm not the audience for it, I'm not the agent for it. So I think understanding that a little bit, that this letter's coming from somebody who's in a position who's trying to accomplish specific goals can help quite a bit.

[Dan] Yeah. The it's not a good fit… I think one of the reasons that authors hate that one so much… I should say, aspiring authors hate that one so much is because there's really nothing they can do about it. Right? You get that and you realize it doesn't matter, all the work and the effort I put into writing this and to revising it into making it the best thing it could be, none of that mattered. Because this person just doesn't like it. Like…

[Mary Robinette] You can't revise it… [Garbled]

[Dan] Yeah. I can't revise it and solve this problem. The only solution to this problem is to keep doing the submission process, over and over again, which I'm sick of already and I hate. As an experienced writer, who's done this several times, I love getting that, because I know that I don't want my book to be with someone who doesn't love it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] That is such a hard thing for the new writer still trying to break in to really get their head around. They think, "No. Please. Even if you don't love this, take it anyway. I'll do anything, I just want to be published." No, you don't. It is worth waiting for the right fit.

[Howard] We had, in 2006… I say we. Sandra and I, we shopped Schlock Mercenary with an agent to see if anybody in the sci-fi market would pick it up and publish it. After a few months, the agent came back to us and said, "Well, we got two kinds of responses. Response number one was oh, Schlock Mercenary. I love this comic strip, but we have no idea how we would publish it. The second response was I don't know what Schlock Mercenary is, but it looks like a comic strip. We have no idea how we would publish it. That was actually super useful feedback, because what it told me is there is a hole in the sci-fi publishing space that maybe I'll have to fill myself by printing our own books, and the sci-fi market is ready for Schlock Mercenary to be a thing that they love, because editors are already reading it and enjoying it.

[Erin] I think that's a gap that can exist in many different ways.

[Oh, yes]

[Erin] I think one of the reasons that it's not a good fit can have a sting to it is that sometimes it really just means, hey, it's not the right fit for me, and sometimes it's a surface level that can hide some deeper inequities, an inability to read marginalized folks in the way that they should be read, and to identify where an audience is for a book in the way that we wish the publishing industry did.

[Totally]

[Erin] So sometimes hearing that time and time again sounds like there isn't space for me at the table versus that I haven't found that seat at the table yet. It's hard to tell what the difference is when you're just reading these words on the page.

[DongWon] So, I think the thing that will encourage people a lot is not to try and read too much into any one rejection letter. Right? I think one of the hardest… Listen, we're all storytellers. Right? We all want to build little stories about anything that we see. So, sometimes when you see that in a letter, as Dan was talking about, like, you want to do something about it, you want to say, "Oh. Then I can edit it this way. I can do that." When the reality is you've been given no data. That's fine. Right? I was having this conversation with a writer just the other day that, like, no, numbers were not exactly where we wanted them to be. They were talking about, like, "What can I do about that? I want to do something." And all this. I said, "There's nothing to be done at this time. We have a plan, we're going to continue with that plan, because we don't know enough yet to change." Right? I could really lay it out. Here are the buttons, here are the levers that we have to pull. These are our options. We're not ready to make a decision on any of these things yet. So what Howard's talking about is when you have the full set of rejections, when you've gone through a number of people, you're getting consistent feedback, that tells you something. What Erin is talking about in terms of like realizing that there isn't space in the market because of this reason, because publishing isn't making space for it, that's a different response. For an individual letter, though, I would really encourage people to be very careful about thinking that this form letter or this short rejection letter is telling me something very specific. If an editor has written you something longer, has given you very specific feedback, that's something you can respond to. But when it's something a little bit more general, I'd caution you to be careful of over indexing on it.

[Mary Robinette] There's a… I took a workshop with Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She told this story. Which is that she had… She keeps a meticulous log of where she sent stories, and for reasons, she doesn't do revisions after she starts sending them out. So, she sent it to a place, and then accidentally sometime… It got rejected. Accidentally, sometime later, she sent it to the same place. As she was reaching out to say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to send it to you a second time," they emailed her with an acceptance. The acceptance said, "I really loved the changes that you made to the story." To a story that she had not revised at all. What she learned from that was… The take away is not that you should keep submitting things to the same place. It's that when a story is rejected, it is not the right fit for that market and that editor on that day. That it's not the quality of the writing… Sometimes it is, to be clear. When you're early career, sometimes it is the quality of the writing. But it's not that, it's whether or not it is serving the need of them on that day and what mood that they're in even when they read it. So just be gentle with yourself.

[DongWon] One way in which I approach the empathy gap is making sure I'm hydrated, fed, and rested when I'm doing… When I'm looking at queries. Right? I don't want to be in a bad mood. I never… If I'm like… I am grumpy, this is not the time to be looking at queries. Because I won't be fair. Right? But something to remember on the other side of it is, and I know that hearing things are so random can be very difficult to hear. Again, I have empathy for that. I get it. It's frustrating. But the person on the other end of that, the person sending the rejection, whether it's a short story, whether it's an agent, whatever it is, they're going fast, they're doing this, they're doing their job. They're in a workflow of processing the pile of rejections that is… Or pile of submissions that is building up, then trying to get them out the door. Right? They're trying to get responses back to you in a timely way. That's the other thing is there's a lot of pressure on me to do it fast. In addition, people want responses. I'm very busy, I got a lot going on, I've got hundreds of these queries to get through. It takes me time to do it, because it's hard to find a block of time that I can sit down and do this. So, there's all of those like pressures on it that I would encourage writers to think about when they receive that letter. You feel that disappointment, but then remember, this may not mean anything. This isn't a critique of the story necessarily even or of me as a person. This is an interaction I had with an individual at a point in time. That's okay. Let's move on to the next one. Let's take that bath. Let's celebrate with my friends. Then, what's the next step? So, on that note, I would love to move to our homework.

[Erin] Perfect. Because, the homework is to put yourself on the other side of the empathy gap. Find a piece of fiction that you really, really enjoy. Then write a kind, personal rejection for it. Think about what you would be doing if this wasn't the right fit for you, despite the fact that this is something that you really, on a personal level, love as a story experience.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we discussed the difference between mentorship and solidarity, and how to be a gate opener, not a gatekeeper. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.47: The Linguistics of Disability

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/11/20/17-17-the-linguistics-of-disability/

Key points: Two models of disability, the medical model, where disability needs to be fixed, and the social model, where society and the environment need to change. When someone isn't comfortable with the chairs at the table, do you fix the chair or the person? Empathy, putting yourself in the other person's shoes, or sympathy, making yourself feel a little better for being such a nice person? Empathy asks how can I help you. Empathy is about listening. Why don't we make spaces accessible?

[Season 17, Episode 47]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Linguistics of Disability.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today, we're going to be talking about how to talk about disability. There's a couple of different models out there in the world. We've got another essay for you to read as a supplement to this, which is also The Linguistics of Disability, Or Empathy and Sympathy, that Fran has written. I highly recommend that you listen to that as a supplement to this episode. But let's first talk about the idea of a medical model versus a social model when talking about disability. So, medical model means that when you're talking about the disability, that the disability is something to be fixed, it is an illness, it is something that needs to be repaired or corrected. This comes from the medical community. The social model of disability holds that the problem is actually the way society is structured. That society itself is what disables people. For instance, someone who is a chair user, totally fine on flat surfaces, but if you have something that has a ton of stairs, the stairs are the problem, it's not the chair, because there's definitely ways to navigate without that, without stairs. So the idea is that you have two different ways to do that, and one of them basically says this person is less than human and needs to be made human. The other says this person is totally human, but maybe we should build our buildings in other ways. Does anyone want to, like, talk about some ways that that reflects in the fiction that we see for that we write, some failure modes that we can sometimes run across in fiction?

[Fran] To tie this to the previous episode, especially the body horror episode, the problem that needs to be fixed, the thing that is too scary to be embodied except in horror is kind of at the extreme end of what we're talking about, and what we were talking about. When we were asking in the previous episode for people to shift perspective and think about what it's like, to be inside and still have agency and still have choices, we're talking about shifting it to a more social model of horror, actually.

[Howard] I think in terms of linguistics, the… When we wrote the second edition of Xtreme Dungeon Mastery, we talked about ways to include everybody at the table. Sometimes, coming back to the word chair, sometimes the chairs at the table are not one-size-fits-all. Somebody needs a special chair. We did a little role-play in the book, where someone says, "Hey, I… That chair doesn't work for me. I'm sorry to be a problem." The host says, "Oh, you're not the problem, the chair is the problem. We can fix the chair, we don't need to fix you." I come back to that all the time, when someone apologizes, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm not good at stairs," "Oh, I'm sorry, I need to stop and take a breath." I'm sorry, you're not the problem. The problem is this context that we've created that renders you unable to participate at the level that the rest of us are participating. So let us, as a group, try and change that. I'm circling back to that, not because it's a fiction, but because in my own head by making that change in the way that I talk, in the way that I write about myself, I am positioning myself hopefully, fingers crossed, to write better about it when I put it in my fiction.

[Mary Robinette] There's a great TikTok that I recently saw by Jeremy Andrew Davis, which were going to link to in the liner notes. He explains it by saying when Superman comes here, he has a different set of abilities than humans do. He has super abilities. But if you imagine that… If you flip things and adjust canon a little bit, and humans have to go to Krypton, and everyone on Krypton has Superman levels of ability, then you have things like people are able to stop a locomotive. So you go to try to pull a door open, and as a human, you can't pull the door open because it's designed for someone who can move something with a thousand pounds of force. Leap over buildings with a single bound, there are no stairs because everybody just jumps up. They're like, "Well, why don't you just jump up? What do you mean, you were late to this meeting?" That's the kind of thing that you're thinking about with the social model is that the person's normal is their normal and they are trying to exist in a world that is designed for someone else's normal.

[Fran] I think absolutely that. And stemming from that, that existing in the world where that is normal, there's a really great essay up at the SFWA website where Valerie Valdez talks about why writing in second person is important for marginalized people. This is particularly true for disability narratives, including my own. When I wrote Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand, it's narrated by a very angry Fiji mermaid in the middle of a cabinet of curiosities. But she's narrating for the audience an experience where second person's invoked and the reader loses agency over time. That experience of… That particular use of second person and loss of agency is something that I wanted to invoke as sort of an empathetic reaction to what it feels like to be disabled, in certain ways. That was sort of shifting gears a little bit on people, and it made a lot of people, including a couple reviewers, really uncomfortable. I kind of am okay with that. I'm actually very okay with that. In part, because that's the difference between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is something that I'm doing to make myself feel better, a little bit, and empathy is something that is much more about the person's experience that is having the experience.

[Howard] Empathy is inherently uncomfortable. I hate it a lot. When the people around me hurt, I hurt too.

[Fran] Yes.

[Howard] What a stupid sense. I don't want it.

[Chuckles]

[Chelsea] But you do. You do want it.

[Howard] I know I do want it.

[Fran] Why do we want empathy, Chelsea?

[Chelsea] We want empathy so that we know… Like, I rely on my sense of empathy to understand… Okay, everybody's really happy. I feel their happiness too, and that everything is good. But there's also, like, bored and frustrated. I feel that, too. So, that's like a cue. It's like, what do you need?

[Fran] Yes.

[Chelsea] At this point. It's like, okay, I get that you're feeling frustrated here. How can I help you? If you don't have that, then you just continue to sail on with your whatever. Then you're a jerk.

[Howard] A world with no empathy would be like driving at night and nobody's cars had headlights or taillights.

[Fran] If you do proceed without empathy, if you proceed with something else, that's when you find your… Let's say, if your character has no empathy, but they want to express some sort of concern or connection with a person who is going through a thing, that's when things like, "I think you're such an inspiration," or "You must be so strong," start to come out of people's mouths. That, Chelsea, what you said about how you are feeling about this, what can I do to help you, puts that agency back in the hands of the person who needs it, rather than sort of getting the kudos, gold star stickers, for being someone who's forcing an opinion on the person who doesn't need the opinion.

[Mary Robinette] Well, something that you said in your essay, Fran, when you were talking about the "You must be so strong," is that it's a distancing thing.

[Fran] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] I had not thought about it in that way, but it is about… When you're approaching things from that angle, it is about reframing them in a way that you are comfortable engaging with them, rather than the ways in which the person needs you to engage, and that empathy is much more about listening. It's like that is such a good simple frame, for, like, evaluating my own choices about things that I say in response to people.

[Mary Robinette] Shall we take a moment to pause for the book of the week? Then, Chelsea, I want to see what it was that you clearly had a thought, and I want to see what that was when we come back. So, our book of the week is Being Seen by Elsa Sjunneson. This book, Elsa is a deaf blind activist. This is a memoir series of essays. She's… She fences, she writes, she does all of these things that you would think… In a book, you'd be like, "Oh, really?" But this is her real life. This book has been… It's just recently won a major award in Washington state, it was nominated for a Hugo, it's been up for major awards all over the place. She just had a documentary, a short documentary about her life, and covers some of the ground that is in this book. It is wonderful. Highly recommended. Being Seen by Elsa Sjunneson.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, coming back, Chelsea, what's on your mind there?

[Chelsea] Well, I just… The wheels are kind of turning, right? Because I'm always thinking about the social model of disability. Because a lot of times, like our physical spaces and our environments are not designed for everyone. It bothers me. Because, before I moved in here, I lived in a building that was like accessible. All public areas were designed with accessibility in mind. This was the point that really drilled it home to me. Accessible spaces are accessible to everyone. They make using this space easier for everyone. So why don't we do it? Why do we not do it? So I'm always thinking about this now. I'm always thinking about this when I'm doing world building and design. I'm like, very deliberately thinking about, like, how good is the design of this environment. When I say good, I mean how many people can just use it without thinking about it or having to do anything special.

[Howard] The reason we don't do it is that the people doing the design don't have needs that stray very far from what they perceive the baseline to be. It's the… What was the show? The IT crowd or something, where the… All the motion detectors that keep the lights on won't detect people with brown skin. So you had to have a white person walk into the room periodically to keep your lights on. Why? Because we're not testing these things with the full range of people that are going to be using them. Because the designers are not comprised of a demographic that fits who's using it.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing that we talk about is, like, people… One of the things that happens is that people will designed for the one… People that they see around them. If you are designing spaces that people cannot access, then, of course, you are not going to see examples. It's like, well, how often do we really get people who have problems with stairs coming here? It's like, well, we'd get that more often if you didn't have stairs.

[Howard] They stopped coming.

[Chelsea] The answer to the question is built right in. One of my more local examples, the apartment that I live in is directly in front of a separated bike lane. It's one lane across wide, they took an entire lane out of the road and turned it into a bike lane. It's two way, and it's actual. There are like clear directions as to how you cross intersections when you're using the bike lane. Notice that I don't say when you're a cyclist. Because what happened was, when the downtown cycle network started introducing these things so that we get across downtown using these safe bike lanes, all of a sudden wheelchair users and motorized scooter users came out of the woodwork. There's always somebody on the roll in the bike lane. It's so great.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I saw that.

[Chelsea] Because sidewalks suck.

[Fran] Sidewalks suck.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Saw that in…

[Howard] Well, when we… When we threw a pandemic and the whole world came, we started doing conventions and meet ups and things remotely via Zoom. We met people we had never seen before. People who have always been with us, but have never been with us, because they couldn't attend in person, because they couldn't commute. They couldn't, for whatever reason, they couldn't get there before, but now that they can get there with a camera and a microphone, they're part of the community again. Boy, howdy. If we learn nothing else from the pandemic except that, I will count myself happy, because that's so important to us as a society.

[Fran] But did we learn it? Did we learn it, really?

[Garbled]

[Howard] I want to think some of us did.

[Fran] No, because when the pandemic is over, and we're not like… We're doing it in person events. I mean, me personally, I'm so glad to see people's faces, I'm so glad to be in their visible spaces. But I kind of also wish that I had like… Kind of like an iPad strapped to my chest so that I could bring somebody who couldn't come visibly.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Fran] Yep.

[Chelsea] With me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is, having been doing some con running during this year, the big barrier to that is actually the Internet because… Specifically, the amount of money hotels want to charge for Wi-Fi. To do, just as an example, Dis Con 3, we had to spend $40,000 just on Internet, which a smaller con can't do. So, all of these things are complicated, but most of them are complicated because someone has decided this is a way that they can make money. Also, that it is a problem that doesn't apply to them. So, let me wrap this up with a science fictional example that is also a real world example. When the astronaut program started, astronauts had to have 2020 vision, because all of the requirements were based on being a test pilot. Then a funny thing happened. In the 2000s, when we started doing long-duration missions, astronauts eyes changed on orbit, and they started to require glasses. They no longer had 2020 vision, and also, the astronaut corps started to age, and become middle-aged, people in their 50s, and they suddenly needed bifocals. They changed the requirements to become an astronaut, because it turns out that you don't need 2020 vision to function in space. But really what it turns out is that the people who were making the decisions suddenly had the thing that they had considered previously to be a disability. So when you are thinking about your own fiction, you need to be thinking about it from a couple of different places. As we've talked about, be thinking about it from an empathy point of view. You're thinking about it from the social model point of view.

[Mary Robinette] That brings us around to our homework. Chelsea, I think you have the homework for us. Right?

[Chelsea] I do. I do. Now, if you go all the way back to episode two, we had the homework that was write a scene with two characters. One with a disability and one without. Write it from each character's POV, paying particular attention to setting. What I want you to do is I want you to write as an insider versus writing as an outsider, or writing a medical model approach to the setting versus writing a social model setting. Take that setting and the person with the disability and the person without the disability, and write those spaces again. See what happens when the world building shift changes.

[Fran] I love that assignment so much.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It'll be a lot of fun. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/11/13/17-46-monstrous-awakening/

Key Points: What does it mean to wake up monstrous? Body horror and body humor play with our fears of losing ability, of losing agency. That could be me? To be scared, to be horrified at helplessness, rope and duct tape could do it, too. Watch out for the sideswipe at disability. Think about ripple effects. Consider the metaphor of apartment life as a disaster! Pay attention to the point of view, and authorial empathy. Make sure your character keeps their humanity and agency. Don't grab that wheelchair, don't just help without asking.

[Season 17, Episode 46]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Monstrous Awakening.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are here to talk about this idea of monstrous awakening. One of the things that I'm going to ask you all to do before you listen to this episode is actually to pause and to go read an essay that Fran wrote that's called You Wake Up Monstrous. We will be here, and it's fine if you don't have time to listen to... to read that before you listen to the episode. Totally fine, you won't be lost, but if you have time, it will give you some important framing, I think. So, let's dive in and talk about this idea of body horror and body issues. Fran, and you kind of sort of for those who have not had time to listen, sort of sum up what we're talking about with body horror and body issues, using some of the metaphors that you use in your wonderful essay?

[Fran] Um… Yes. I can. I… So, body horror and body humor as well, and even a little bit of inspiration for it, all use these sort of there but for the grace of whatever universal entity is out there, that that happens to me. You see that in movies like The Fly, you see that in Kafka's Metamorphosis where the character wakes up and they are transformed into a bug. Or they are… They lose their… Not just their ability to speak, but their mouth disappears. In The Matrix, for instance. Those are all forms of body horror that play with and on sort of vestigal fears of losing ability, agency. They also play with the discomfort that we see each other go through when we become either ill or disabled.

[Mary Robinette] So when we're thinking about these things, a lot of times, we see authors reach for disability as shorthand for evil or helplessness. But it doesn't have to be that way. What are some other choices that a writer could make?

[Chelsea] I have a slightly different angle for how to get ahead in advertising. I'm thinking about like the body thing. I was kind of just forming a thing in my head about Neil waking up with no mouth and that helplessness. Like, I was trying to connect it with something else. I was trying to connect it to, like, you can wake up and you can have no mouth and stuff, and all of a sudden, everything is very different and there's a bug on you, and all those other horrible things. It's like you're doing this because you want people to be scared and you want people to kind of be horrified at the helplessness. But I'm also thinking about like… If you want people to be horrified by the helplessness, that's fine. There's always like rope and duct tape. Then nobody is like missing a mouth. There isn't like this kind of this weird symbolism about other disabilities going on. But they are helpless, and it is scary, and that maybe thinking, "Do I need to do this in this way specifically or can I do this and not kind of take a sideswipe at disability?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. What you're talking about there is thinking about the area of intention, like, why are you making this choice? It's not that these choices are always forbidden and you can never make one of these choices. Because there are times and places where it's appropriate. But you have to think about it and not just default to it because it's something that you've seen in media, because you're not thinking about the larger ramifications of it. That's usually where people run into problems, is that they don't think about the ripple effects, and they don't think about those areas of intention.

[Chelsea] I honestly believe that if you take something like that, and you're like, "Okay, I saw it on TV," and you think about the stuff that is lying underneath it, and if that causes you to go, "Mm, no. I need to do this because this has entirely different things lying underneath it," you're actually going to end up with a story that you actually want instead of one that winds up going astray because you didn't think about, like, three layers of implications about a device that you're using.

[Howard] Let me approach this real quick from a different angle. If you totally un-ironically tell a story about a disaster in someone's life where they can no longer afford their mortgage and they have to move into an apartment and that is just a terrible disaster. You're playing it not for humor, absolutely un-ironically. Everybody in the world who already lives in an apartment and gets by just fine looks at this story and says, "Why is my way of life horrible or evil or whatever?" You've othered an enormous portion of your audience. I bring this up not to say that we should all live in apartments or we should all live in houses. I bring it up to say that this is how you need to think about these things so that you don't come across as age-ist or ablest, when you are trying to accomplish something else with your story.

[Fran] I think what Chelsea was talking about, too, about that implied helplessness, the lack of mouth, the lack of things, it does depend, in the story, on (a) the point of view, and also a certain level of authorial empathy. Not sympathy, but empathy. Because what a lot of horror tropes rely on is a sense of that other is not part of the human pattern anymore. They've lost their humanity, because they've lost their mouth or, to go back to a previous episode of Writing Excuses, they've lost their hand, and it's been replaced by another body part. But we have this opportunity to explore the fact that in… And this is something that actually Kafka does pretty well, is that because the point of view is internal, you don't see that character as, Gregor Samsa, as helpless. He's rationalizing how to get through this situation and just to have… Take a moment to think… When you're writing body horror or body humor, and think about what it feels like to be that other person and acknowledge their personhood, acknowledge their humanity, and the fact that they have agency in the situation as well, whatever the horrific situation is, they still have choice. They still have the ability to maneuver in different ways. And so does the audience who's reading this. Just like, to go back to Howard's apartment metaphor, in the essay I wrote a little bit about what it felt like to be wearing a back brace that was exactly the same as the back brace that was being joked about in the movie that I was watching. There's a character in Say Anything who's trying to get a drink of water out of a water fountain while wearing a Milwaukee-based brace with a neck support. I didn't have a neck support, but it's impossible. It becomes this long-running joke in the middle of the movie. I just sat there and felt like, "Wow. This… I was enjoying this movie until just this moment." Just like the apartment metaphor that Howard gave us, it really does not necessarily do service to your story to have a whole bunch of your audience suddenly feel like you're operating against them.

[Howard] Done well, it's R-rated for language and so much language, I Spy with Melissa McCarthy… I think. Maybe it's just called Spy. But Melissa McCarthy plays the chair guy, the chairperson, for a spy who is suddenly pushed out in the field. She is very competent, but she is very inexperienced. At no point in the show do we make fat jokes about Melissa McCarthy.

[Fran] I love that [garbled]

[Howard] People make fun of her clothing sometimes, because maybe the clothing choices are weird. But it is never about her being overweight. It is daring. It is a daring movie to make that choice. I love it because of how well it does it.

[Fran] Also, she's a fantastic actress.

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

[Fran] Her entire use of every inch of that screen is amazing.

[Howard] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we pause for our book of the week. That book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monstrous… Monsters and the Monstrous. Fran, you want to tell us a little bit about that?

[Fran] Sure. This is a collection of horror stories edited by Ellen Datlow. It came out in the late spring of 2022. It came out from Tor night… Nightfire. It contains a whole range of ways in which monsters, both familiar and new, interact with the world. A lot of them are intentionally horror stories, because that was the purview of the book. But some of them actually do some really interesting examinations of what it means to be monstrous in a human world. I really like that as well.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So that book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, as we come back in, let's talk about some things to do that are a little bit more interesting. One of the things that I have noted in stories where I feel like it's done a little better is that the person's disabilities are not the source of the horror, it's the people around them and the environment that they find themselves in. So it is someone else grabbing the wheelchair. That's the removal of the agency, it's not the chair itself, it's someone else trying to take control.

[Fran] Helping.

[Mary Robinette] Helping.

[Chelsea] Oh, it just gives me the shivers. The angry shivers.

[Fran] I had somebody without asking help me off of I believe it was a bus. I was just… I was moving slower than they thought I should be, and that I needed help. They pulled me by my arm and dislocated my shoulder. Which I then popped back in right in front of them to the most disgusting degree I could, because I wanted to let them know that they had not in actuality helped me at all.

[Howard] See, if you had a sword cane, you could have just [garbled] at them.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Fran] [garbled] say, why does no one let me have a sword cane?

[Howard] The drubbing.

[Fran] But it really does… People think of themselves as providing assistance without asking. The grabbing of the wheelchair… The maneuvering of someone… It is a lack of agency is horrific. In… Again, in the point of view of someone who is experiencing a lack of agency, whether it is through cosmic horror or the deep and abiding horror of someone like Steven Graham Jones's stories where every house sort of seems to build out horror around his characters. I think that there are distinctive shifts in point of view and authorial empathy that can avoid some of the pitfalls and really build some… Like Chelsea was saying before, really interesting layers and depth in there. That's only going to make your story better and scarier, or, if you're doing body humor, funnier.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] A lesson I learned from Mary Robinette, gosh, eight years ago. It's one of the best ways to introduce that horror is not to make the removal of agency related to someone's weakness, you make it related to their strength. Their strength can serve them… It can do nothing for them in this scenario. The wheelchair is not a weakness, the wheelchair is a perfectly good mobility device. In fact, you're a Paralympic basketball player in that wheelchair. Then you are in a situation where that agency is removed.

[Mary Robinette] The… In The Spare Man, my main character's a cane user. She has chronic pain from an old injury. One of the scenes that I am… The day where she's like, "Oh, this is definitely a cane day," and she has to grab that, that's just part of her life. She grabs it, it's no big deal. When she gets to the set of stairs that is built to go up a centrifugal well, so they change angle every single step, and she has to climb them, that's when she's like, "Oh. No." That is the problem. It's not… It is coming from the environment and her need to interact with that environment.

[Howard] That is one spoon per stair. That's a…

[Chuckles]

[Fran] One of the things that I think about is… This is sort of elevating out of body horror a little bit, is something like Pat Cadigan's The Girl Thing That Went out for Sushi, which has body augmentation which we talked about last time and a little bit of body horror in it, in that these are people who are working in space and have augmentations done so that they can better work in space, so they become starfish and they become… They have… Different ways of gripping or different ways of appreciating which way is up that is really phenomenal. So I think that's an interesting thing to look at. Horror, especially, tends to end up with the characters and the reader trapped in a situation or trapped in that like depth of imagination where you're not sure if they're ever going to get out. Whereas sci-fi and fantasy find a way out quite often. Howard, you were going to say something there?

[Howard] Oh. Yeah. It's just I… For those of you not benefiting from the video feed, sometimes I raise my hand to let people know that I'm ready to talk when they're done.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was not trying to interrupt. Lois McMaster Bujold, I mentioned her in a previous episode, the novel Freefall. In which there is a whole race of people who have been engineered so that their lower legs are arms and so that their hearts and metabolisms and everything function really well, just fine, in zero gravity. This group of people, genetically engineered, and they have their own little space station and everything's cool. Then, artificial gravity, energetic artificial gravity is introduced, and they are sort of this little evolutionary dead end. They're still perfectly awesome in their own little world. When, in one point of the story, a couple of them end up on a planetary surface, yes, there is our lack of agency, there is our body horror, and it is from people who… Or it is experienced by people who, in their own environment, are perfectly suited and beautiful and wonderful and awesome. I like the way… I really love the way Bujold handles that.

[Mary Robinette] This has been a great discussion. Let's go ahead and talk about our homework. Chelsea, do you have our homework?

[Chelsea] I do. Your homework, if you should choose to accept it, is to rewrite a scene with body humor or body horror. It can be one of yours or it can be somebody else's. So that the character with the disability is not the butt of the joke or the source of the horror.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great homework assignment. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.50: What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/16/13-50-what-writers-get-wrong-with-zoraida-cordova/

Key points: We don't need just one of something, we need multitudes. Seeing yourself as a caricature all the time hurts at a very basic level. Don't just throw in random Spanish words, like Abuela. Different Latin countries, different families, have different nicknames for things. Subvert stereotypes, think about how you are going to make your character different. Read 100 books about a culture. Be aware that Hispanic and Latino has a lot of variations and range. The Dominican Republic and Ecuador are very different. Representation in what we create is important, both for the people who have stories about them, and the rest of us to have empathy with them. "Good representation is good craft."

[Brandon] Hey, guys. Just breaking in here before we start the podcast. This is Brandon, and I have a new story out that I think you might like. Little while ago, Wizards of the Coast came to me and said, "Will you write us something? You can write anything you want in any world that we've ever designed." So I was excited. I sat down and wrote a story called Children of the Nameless which is kind of a horror story-esque thing. It starts off with a blind young woman in a town listening as everyone in her town is murdered by something she can't see. So, you can find links to that on my website. It's called Children of the Nameless. Or you can go to Wizards of the Coast.com, wizards.com.

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm usually getting it wrong.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We are live at ComicCon Salt Lake City.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Brandon] We have special guest star, Zoraida Córdova.

[Zoraida] Hi, guys.

[laughter]

[Brandon] Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[Zoraida] Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited.

[Mary] So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Because one of the things were trying to do is make sure that people know that culture is not a monolith. So what's your background?

[Zoraida] So I am originally from Ecuador. I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I came here, I came to the United… Not here. We moved to New York when I was five. So I'm… I consider myself a… New York made. I am a writer, I write urban fantasy. I love painting, I love Star Wars, I love food. I do speak Spanish, but I don't… I no longer think in Spanish. That's a little bit about me.

[Mary] So, out of that stuff, are we gonna talk about Star Wars, are we going to talk about writing? What are we going to talk about?

[Zoraida] A little bit of everything, I guess. Whatever you want.

[Laughter]

[Mary] We're going to talk about being Latina in America?

[Zoraida] Yeah, let's talk about being Latina in America. I think that, especially right now, it's a little complicated because I grew up in a very, very diverse neighborhood in Queens, New York. I'm from Hollis. You recognize the song, It's Christmas Time in Hollis, Queens. I never felt like an outsider really. Because I… Everyone around me was a person of color or… Even if we had like white kids in school, they were like neighborhood kids, right? So I didn't… I was never aware of my otherness until I got into publishing. Because publishing liked to segregate books and genres for a little while. Like, my first novel went out on submission when I was 18…

[Mary] Oh, wow.

[Zoraida] Actually, 19. It was a quinceañera story, which… quinceañera are 16s, but with more pink and more cake and more family…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] And heels. But we got… It was the same time that Jennifer Lopez was published, like, had published a quinceañera collection, and there were a couple of other quinceañera novels. So our rejections were, "This is really funny, but we already have a Latina book for the season." I feel like… Nobody says that anymore. They say it… They use more coded language, but it's almost like… It's like the Highlander, right? There can only be one of something. Because I as the Latina, in publishing, represent all other Latinos in publishing. That's wrong. It shouldn't be that way. We should have multitudes. So that's… Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I never… I mean, I get some rejections, and they're never, "We've already taken books from bald dudes."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] Never comes up.

[Dan] We filled our white guy quota for the season.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] Yes. Yeah. So I don't… I think that things are changing a little bit, and I think that that has to do a lot with We Need Diverse Books, the organization that came out in 2014, I believe, May 2014. It started out as a hashtag. I feel like it's not to say let's replace white authors with people of color. It's just let's make the table bigger so that we can all have a seat. I think that that inclusive… Like that inclusive mentality is what's desperately missing from publishing. My book, Labyrinth Lost, is about a girl who is… She doesn't want power, so she casts a curse to get rid of it. Instead, she gets rid of her family, and sends them to another dimension. Oops.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] Now she has to go in get them back. But, above that, it's also about a Latina family, and how witchcraft is different from this culture. Right? Because they're brujas, which is the Spanish word for witch. At the end of the day, it's still a universal story, it's about family and sisters and having something bigger than yourself. But, it's still one Latina character.

[Dan] So, one of the things that… One of the side effects of this is that often when you see Latino characters being presented in media, they're not being written by people who actually are Latino. I'm guilty of this. I don't know if guilty is the right word. I've got an entire series where the main character is Latina. But. What do you see when you watch TV or you read books, and you're like, "Oh. That guy's never met a Mexican in his whole life." Like… What do people get wrong?

[Zoraida] People get the accents… In TV, people get the accents wrong, right? Like what is an accent… Ecuadorian speaking Spanish sound like? You've probably never heard it. But you've heard like Mexican accents or Colombian accents. If you watch Narcos, some Colombian people are upset because all the accents are wrong. But then again, you have a show, like Narcos, where like… They're drug dealers. Yay.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So that portrayal, the drug dealer, the… A book recently came out where a girl goes to Ecuador, and I'm like, "Yes! Ecuador's in a book. Finally. That I didn't write." She gets kidnapped, right? By these drug lords. I was like… It makes me… Like, it hurts. Right? On a very basic level. Because, like, seeing yourself as a caricature all the time… Latinos… Like, every time you watch a TV show, here comes the maid, and her name is Maria, and she gives you some wisdom. So it's the same problem with African-American people who have like the magical Negro who all of a sudden gives you a bunch of wisdom. Now you know, like, "Oh, I can finish my quest." That goes for all different cultures, right? We have these stereotypes. For me, and YA, it's always like the sassy best friend, or the super like curvaceous Sophia Vergara look-alike. Like, I'm sorry, I don't look like Sophia Vergara, like… If anyone's disappointed, like when you meet a Latina author. So, those are some stereotypes. I think that other ones that really bother me are when you can't establish a character… Your character's ethnicity, so you just throw in random Spanish words, right?

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] I recently read this sci-fi book, and the only way that you know that this character is Latina is because she randomly says the word Abuela. I have never used the word Abuela in my book. Because I don't call my grandmother that. I call her mommy. Because she's like my second mother. So that just shows like not doing research. Because different Latin countries use different nicknames for things. Like, different families use different nicknames for things. So that's really frustrating.

[Dan] My Latina character totally calls her grandma Abuela.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's the one she was talking about.

[Howard] That's a Puerto Rican or a Cubano…

[Zoraida] It just means grandmother.

[Dan] It's different in every culture.

[Howard] I know, but if there's a cultural thing… I saw this in a comic book recently. I wish I could reference it directly. Where a Latino writer put a very, very Latino Abuela in the book, and it is a beautiful, beautiful moment. I think it might actually be in a Hulk comic.

[Zoraida] Really? Well, the new Groot… Groot's grandmother is Puerto Rican. He comes from like the Ceiba trees, and… You know…

[Howard] I think that might be it.

[Zoraida] Are you thinking that?

[Howard] I think Hulk was in the book.

[Zoraida] Oh, okay.

[Dan] Oh, that's super cool.

[Zoraida] Yeah. I think that's really beautiful. There are ways to do it. But that's just craft, right? Like, as writers, we want to subvert stereotypes and we want to be like, "yes, maybe I do want to write about a sexy Latina and… But how am I gonna make her different?" One of my favorite stories is Selma Hayek, when she was in Dogma, she almost didn't get cast because Kevin Smith just saw her as like, "Oh, she's just like a pretty body and face." Then he actually talked to her and was like, "Oh, maybe there's more to you than this outer shell of what you're supposed to be in Hollywood."

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, although you've already kind of pitched it to us. Do it again. Labyrinth Lost.

[Zoraida] Labyrinth Lost is about a girl who sends her family to another dimension and then has to go and get them back.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Excellent. And… Um…

[Mary] So I had a question that I wanted to ask. As you were talking about some of these things that… They hurt and… I was wondering if you wouldn't mind… And the Selma Hayek story made me think of this. Can we dig into some of your own personal pain there a little bit? So you've… I'm going to extrapolate from a friend of mine who had grown up in San Francisco… Actually, no. She had grown up in Texas, as a Japanese-American in Texas. She had friends from San Francisco who were Japanese-Americans. They all went to Seattle to this very small island. The San Francisco women were going, "Why do these people keep staring at us?" She's like, "What? Are they staring?" Because she was so used to being stared at that she had just stopped noticing. So, growing up in a very diverse community, when you leave New York, what are the things that you experience that you think are probably media-based? That the… Experiences where it's like, "Oh. Oh, you've just explored…"

[Zoraida] So, I think… I haven't… I've been traveling for… I haven't been home in two months. I went home for a day last week, and then I came here. So traveling in different cities has been strange. I was in Atlanta, and I think that… Like, I don't know the Latino communities in Atlanta, but it's… People do look at you. Most of the time, I'm on my phone talking to… On my headset, so maybe that's one of the reasons. This girl's talking to herself.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] But sometimes it's just like maybe somebody has never seen somebody that looks like me walking in their neighborhood. I won't really go to Arizona, because I'm afraid of like somebody asking… Racially profiling me or something like that. Like, I just won't go there. So when I leave New York, I… I don't always feel unsafe, I don't… It's not that I'm afraid of being around other people. Like, I'm literally surrounded by you guys right now…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] But you're great. So I think that the problem is the language in our media right now about Latinos and about Mexicans and about like Puerto Rico and things like that. I think that has caused me to feel more guarded than I would have two years ago, right? Like, I'm always on the edge, and sort of like standing near somebody, like, "Are they going to say something inappropriate? Are they going to like…" If I'm on the phone with my mom, should I talk to her in English or should I talk to her in Spanish? Because like, if I'm talking in Spanish… You see these videos that go viral where somebody's like, "It's America. Speak English." I'm like, "Well, go back to England and speak English."

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] So like, it's just being afraid to do things that were normal to me two years ago.

[Mary] Right.

[Zoraida] That are a little frightening. If you look at the things from the earthquake right now in Mexico, there are these people… There's a photo of a 90-year-old man carrying boxes to help his neighbors. So, like, these are the people that our leader calls like rapists and murderers? Meanwhile, there are some of the most helpful people like coming together for a tragedy. Where do I fit in that? Because I'm not Mexican, but if you… I don't know what people see when they look at me. Because I only know what I see when I look at me. Hopefully, it's like good things right now.

[Mary] Your hair is fantastic.

[Zoraida] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Sorry we had to put the bandanna on it.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Zoraida] I like it. I feel like I'm at Woodstock.

[Brandon] So, say we've got a listener who says, "I really wanted to add some Latino/Latina characters to my book." Where would you say they begin? How do they go about that, doing it the right way?

[Zoraida] So… Just with writing, there is no one right way to do things. Right? I think that Cynthia Leitich Smith, who… She's a native American author. She says if you want to write about somebody, read 100 books about that person, about that person's culture. If you can't find 100 books, then are you the person to add to this? Right? That's one way. I think that with Latinos, you have to figure out… Don't say… Like, I'm not telling you how to write, how to say Latino, how to say Hispanic, but there are very, very different connotations. Like, I am Hispanic and Latina, because part of me is from Spain. But there are some Latinos who have no Spanish blood, they're still indigenous, or they're Afro-Latino. So, like, figure out what those things mean. Figure out what country they're from. Because even though we speak a similar language, although our accents are completely different, we have completely different histories. The history of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean is going to be different than the history of Ecuador in South America. So figuring out that there is no way to look Latino… That's one of the things that really bothers me, because when people think Latino, they think light skin or tan or… They don't think Afro-Latino. They don't think of somebody like Rosario Dawson or Zoe Saldana. They think of Sophia Vergara. I'm sorry for using her over and over again, but I'm blanking out.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] On my Latina actresses. So, I think it's doing a research that doesn't feel like anthropology, because anthropology also is about studying a culture to then destroy it, right?

[Mary] Yeah, we can… If you're not clear on that, go back and listen to our colonialism episode, and that'll help clear that up a little bit.

[Zoraida] Colonization, yay!

[Howard] One of the things that is… Doesn't get said enough is the importance of representation in the things that we create. My oldest son is autistic. We were watching an episode of Elementary in which Sherlock Holmes is talking to the woman who becomes his girlfriend, who is portrayed as autistic. It's different from how my son's autism manifests. He stood behind the couch watching the episode for about 15 minutes. For the first time ever… Ever! Watching TV, he said, "They're kind of like me." That moment! There are kids who are Latino, who are black, who are female, who are all kinds of ways, who never get to say that. We need to hear… We need to hear your voice. We need to hear diverse voices so that these people have stories about them.

[Mary] Well, it… Just to use a… Not… A non-loaded example, the… Oh, shoot. I've just forgotten her name. Astronaut. Um. She just did…

[Howard] Mae Jemi…

[Mary] No. No, no, no. She's white. Which is why it's a non-loaded example, because white is the American default. Sorry. But she just got the record for the most number of days in space. And said that being an astronaut had never been on her radar at all, until NASA picked… When she was in late high school, NASA picked the first class of female astronauts. She was like, "Oh, I want to do that." If she had not seen that role model, she wouldn't have pursued that. For a lot of people, the role model comes from fiction. Learning through fiction that, "Oh, that could be me," or "I could do that." Or just "I am not alone. This experience that I'm having is not alone." There's… While you were surrounded, there are also… When I was going to elementary schools, I would go into elementary schools in Idaho and it would be a sea of white kids and one little brown kid. One child. So that child was getting everything through books.

[Zoraida] Right. I think it's a… It's not just important for us, for like diverse people to see themselves in books, it's also important for like white kids to see other people in books.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Zoraida] Because that creates empathy. Like, as writers, our biggest thing is to create empathy through our works. When I lived in Montana for a brief period of time when I was in college, I'd never seen so many blonde people in my life.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So, I would… But the people who would come up to me were native people who were like, "What tribe are you from?" Because I was confusing to them. I'm like, "I'm from the Ecuadorian tribe."

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So…

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] So, it's… We confound each other as people, but I think that as long as we create inclusive stories… You don't have to make it a point to say like… You don't have to make a checklist of I have a disabled character and I have a character who's queer and Latino. You… It has to be organic to your story, too, right? You don't want to create two-dimensional characters. But that's just craft. So good representation is good craft.

[Mary] Can you give some examples of some good craft? Some books or media where you've been like, "Ah, yes. Thank you. Thank you for using your craft to do this well?"

[Zoraida] I'm a really big fan of Leigh Bardugo and Six of Crows. I think that that is an example of a really diverse cast of con artists…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] I'm trying to think of lately… Benjamin Alire Saenz, who writes queer Latino boys. And Adam Silvera, who also writes queer Latino boys. But they're completely different from each other. Part of that has to do with one is in the Southwest and one is from the Bronx.

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at ComicCon.

[Whoo! Whistles!]

[Brandon] And I want to thank Zoraida for coming on the podcast with us. Thank you very much.

[Zoraida] Thank you.

[Brandon] Mary? You've got a writing prompt for us.

[Mary] Yeah. What I want you to do is I want you to go and… This echoes something that you've done previously, which is reading outside of the box. I want you to go and find books written by authors in, let's say… See if you can find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Read them. Then… You've got a suggestion?

[Zoraida] No, I was going to say, challenge accepted.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Try and find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Then, make one of your secondary characters… Not your main character. Make one of your secondary characters from Ecuador.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.32: How to Handle Weighty Topics

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/12/13-32-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 12.16: Writing Crime Fiction with Brian Keene

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/04/16/12-16-writing-crime-fiction-with-brian-keene/

Key Points: Crime fiction is hard to classify. Try bad things happening to people. Crime fiction, like any fiction, is for entertainment. The reader empathizes with characters they should not be empathizing with, and wonders why. Good crime fiction makes you feel uncomfortable. Normal human beings in terrible situations, and how they react, and how you as a reader react. How do you get people to empathize with the wrong people? Remember that they are people, too. Put that character in a very bad situation and see how they react. Research -- talk to people! Tell them "I am an author" and then ask questions. Get the reader to empathize with the character, then write the ending that fits. Be aware that readers have their own expectations, too.

( Who shot the sheriff? )

[Howard] We are past out of time.
[Brian] I'm sorry.
[Howard] No, that's okay.
[Dan] We just loved listening to you and your words here. So, you said you had a writing exercise to throw out our audience?
[Brian] Sure. This week, instead of… Regardless of what genre you're writing, write something different. If you're writing romance, sit down and experiment with horror. If you're writing horror, sit down and experiment with a western. You don't even need to complete the story. But just work on it half an hour every day for this week, and focus on the character. When you're done, see if you can take that character and put it into the genre you're working on. It's a character building exercise.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brian] I think what you'll find is that regardless of genre, what matters are the characters you're crafting.
[Dan] I love it.
[Howard] Outstanding. Brian, thank you again for joining us.
[Brian] Thank you guys.
[Howard] Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
[Brian] Go write.

Current Mood: grumble

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Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/27/11-48-elemental-issue-qa-with-DongWon-song/

Q&A Summary
Q: Can only certain people tackle certain issues in their stories?
A: Yes. Imagination and empathy let you project yourself into someone's experience, imagine it, and render it. The farther away, the harder. No. Maybe you can, but should you? Consider the cost.
Q: Science fiction seems to excel in making issue stories engaging by changing the context a little bit. Why does this seem to work better?
A: Science fiction and fantasy, puppetry, anything that lets you look at the issue from one step outside the real world, from an angle, let's the audience look at things in a different way, see connections, and draw their own conclusions. Science fiction and fantasy lets you make a metaphor to attack an issue from a different direction. Without instant triggers, your audience can hear the whole discussion.
Q: Do you have any tools for handling these issues in the context of short fiction?
A: The same tools. Represent multiple points of view, let the character be wrong sometimes. Attach it to a different main driver. Don't answer the questions, let the reader think about them.
Q: How do you make sure you research the issue enough, while not paralyzing yourself with high expectations to do it justice?
A: Break your research into two parts. In part one, learn what you can to tell an honest story. In part two, get readers who know the issue to let you know what you need to fix.
Q: How do you avoid accidentally including an issue that you didn't notice in your writing?
A: You probably will accidentally include issues in your writing. Good alpha and beta readers, and learn to say I was wrong. Recognize that your first reaction is based on the culture you grew up in, while your second reaction is who you want to be. Consider hiring a sensitivity reader.
Q: How do I write a perspective I don't agree with convincingly, without convincing my readers that I'm not on the side of the argument?
A: Empathy and imagination let you embody that position in a person. That's not you, that's the character. Make sure there are people in the text calling them on it, and examples in the text of the problems with it. Hang a lantern on it.
Q: How do you write about an issue deeply personal to you without turning it into a look-at-me sob story? But still retaining accuracy and emotion behind the issue?
A: Show the positive aspects too. Gallows humor can help. Also, metaphor, to transform the situation.
( So many words... )

[Brandon] I think we are going to go ahead and call it there. Dan, you have some homework for us.
[Dan] Yes. So. We've been talking about issue for a month. Next month, we are going to talk about ensemble. So your homework this week is to kind of bridge those. You're going to take an issue and create an ensemble out of it. Take an issue that you haven't dealt with yet in any of the previous homework that we've given you. Gun rights. Or price gouging in pharmacology. Something that you haven't talked about yet. Then examine as many sides of that as you can. Create a cast of characters who each espouse a different viewpoint on that issue. So that you have a large ensemble cast. Next month, we'll talk about ensembles.
[Brandon] All right. Thank you, DongWon.
[DongWon] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] Thank you, Writing Excuses cruise members.
[Applause. Whoo!]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: chilled

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Writing Excuses 11.45: Elemental Issue, with Desiree Burch

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/06/11-45-elemental-issue-with-desiree-burch/

Key points: Issue as an elemental genre is a bit different. The driver is not so much emotion, but curiosity, let me think about that. How do you avoid being preachy? Remember that the first goal of a storytelling is to be entertaining. Issues raise questions, polemics answer them. Have empathy for your audience! The more specific a work gets, the more broadly it relates to people. To let a character deal with a major issue, consider making the main plot about something else (thriller, romance...). Use multiple points of view to show us the issue in the round.

( Behind the curtains... )

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to call this, because we're going to talk about it in two weeks…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Anyway as a subgenre, so… I'm going to let us go there. Mary, I'm going to have you give us some homework.
[Mary] Right. So what I want you to do is, I want you to get a magazine about a topic that you do not normally read. I want you to read the entire thing, cover to cover. Including the ads.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] Was that okay?
[Brandon] You just… That's all you want them to do, just read it?
[Mary] This time, you're just going to read it.
[Brandon] Take notes on the issues that arise, even if they are issues that come from the ads. We'll have you do something with that in a later week. All right. We want to thank our special guest star, Desiree Burch.
[Desiree] Thank you for having me here.
[Brandon] We want to thank our Writing Excuses cruise members.
[Whoo! Applause!]
[Brandon] And we want to thank you guys for listening. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: flammable

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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 24: Random storytelling with James and Julie

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/06/20/writing-excuses-4-24-random-storytelling/

Key points: Worldbuilding, but also characters and conflicts. Change and conflict go together. Empathy for a character comes from something bad that you understand and want to see alleviated. Who will the readers want to root for?
( random tails? )
[Brandon] OK. Well, excellent. We are out of time. I would like to thank our guest stars. Thank you very much.
[James] You're welcome.
[Julie] Any time.
[Brandon] This is been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: blended

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with empathy

Writing Excuses 18.21: The Empathy Gap: How to Understand What Your Publisher is Telling You

Writing Excuses 17.47: The Linguistics of Disability

Writing Excuses 17.46: Monstrous Awakening

Writing Excuses 13.50: What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova

Writing Excuses 13.32: How to Handle Weighty Topics

Writing Excuses 12.16: Writing Crime Fiction with Brian Keene

Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song

Writing Excuses 11.45: Elemental Issue, with Desiree Burch

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 24: Random storytelling with James and Julie

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