Writing Excuses 13.37: What Writers Get Wrong, with JY Yang

Sep. 19th, 2018 02:15 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.37: What Writers Get Wrong, with JY Yang
 
 
Key points: "There's no one way to be non-binary or gender nonconforming." Don't just drop non-binary pronouns into a story without thinking about how gender plays out in those societies. This relates to your self, your core identity. To do justice to gender it should permeate every aspect of the book. We have been socialized to put people in boxes, but maybe it is a spectrum. Although these are all artificial distinctions. Beware of equating gender to specific markers. It's not just presentation. Gender is identity. You may know internally that you are not one of these, but not actually say it in public. How does the character relate to the world? Part of the challenge is that our language does not offer good ways to describe yourself beyond "I don't fit in the boxes you've created" to pronouns and adjectives and whatever.
 
( Out of the boxes... )
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Aliette] I'm Aliette.
[Howard] And I'm going to get it wrong again.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That's okay, we rely on you for that service. We have with us special guest, JY Yang. JY, tell us about yourself.
[JY] Hello. My name is JY Yang, and I am a writer of short fiction and slightly not so short fiction. So I have two novellas from tor.com publishing that are out in September, The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven, which are secondary world science fantasy. I tend to write a lot of epic fantasy now, but I actually really love science fiction. I used to write a lot of like cyberpunky-ish stuff.
 
[Dan] Awesome. Well, that's cool. Okay, so this is one of our what do writers get wrong episodes, which we love to do. Mary? Tell us about this. What are we doing?
[Mary] So, with these episodes, again, what we're trying to do is present you with people who have different life experiences than the core podcasters do, as a way of helping you begin to think about different characters that you can start to incorporate. So instead of telling you stuff and showing you stuff, we're getting an expert in to kind of talk about their life experience. But we want to be clear that these people that we bring on are not speaking for the entire culture. They're not… culture is not a monolith, and everybody has multiple facets. For instance, JY has multiple facets. What are some of yours?
[JY] Okay, I have… I'm going to say that I love learning languages. But the only language I've kind of successfully managed to get like a [garbled] level of reading language is Swedish. I like whales. And I am a non-binary queer person.
[Mary] So, with all of these facets, which one are we going to focus on?
[JY] I'm going to talk about, I think, being non-binary and generally some [what] gender nonconforming.
[Mary] Okay. So that means what do people get wrong about non-binary and gender nonconforming?
[JY] Okay. I have to start off with a caveat emptor in that I have not actually identified or even thought of myself as non-binary for a very long time. I'm 34, I think. Yes. I am 34 years old, and until I was 33, I basically thought I was a cis woman. Interestingly enough, I think it was the process of writing my novellas in which I kind of realized that these non-binary characters that I'm creating, they're kind of actually me, in the sense that that's the way I sort of relate or don't relate to gender. So, that's my caveat. That… Don't take my words for gospel. Particularly because I hang out with a lot of like non-binary friends, and we all have very different pathways to discovering that we're non-binary. A lot of us are still questioning. We don't have one way to sort of relate to our gender. So I think that you can't really say, "Oh, no, this is exactly what people get wrong about things." Because there's no one way to be non-binary or gender nonconforming. One thing that I think that I can say that actually bothers me when I read about non-binary characters is that people who write characters who use non-binary pronouns, like they/them, em, and… It's kind of just dropped into the story, and people are like, "Oh, look, I have a non-binary character and they use they/them pronouns." But I don't really get a sense of how El's gender plays out in those societies. It just feels like, oh, the only thing about being non-binary is that you use different pronouns, which… It's a lot more than that. It's something that goes to… Well, the way I feel is that it's something that relates very strongly to… Your self, like core identity. I think gender is something that is very, very cultural. It's pretty much embedded very deeply in every culture there is. No matter how this is expressed, you don't have a culture in which gender doesn't matter at all. Not on this planet. Likely, if you have halfway humanoid characters, it's not… It's going to be a thing. So. Yeah, I think that the sense… What bothers me about these characters is that they're sort of dropped into a world, but I don't see… I don't get a sense from the world that gender is something that the author kind of thought about in great depth.
 
[Dan] So, is there a counterexample that you could give of maybe an author who did their research, who does portray it accurately? What are those differences? What are the signs that, "Oh, yeah, this person knows what they're talking about?"
[JY] Okay. So I'm going to… I think that… In a way I think… The best thing I think can probably do is to sort of read sort of like non-binary writers who write like non-binary characters with sort of like different gender things. Okay. I think like, for example, Ann Leckie, who is not non-binary, and who, as far as I know, is a woman, but she… Like, her Ancillary Justice novels. I'm pretty sure that was the name for the series, which I'm completely forgetting right now, but you know what I'm talking about.
[Laughter]
[JY] I think it's interesting because she basically embedded gender very deeply in her books, in her system. That's something that sort of like permeates every aspect of the book if you know what I'm talking about. That is, I think, that is the kind of depth of thought, I think, that if you really sort of like wanted to do justice to gender. That sounds really strange when I say it out loud.
[Chuckles]
[JY] But, like, it's not just something that's sort of a gloss put on top of a world.
 
[Mary] One of the things about being people is that we have socialized to put people into boxes. There's a very interesting study that… I'm going to circle back to gender, I promise… About color. That shows that the words that we have for color come into the language at the point when we can create that color. They come in a very predictable pattern, except for Egypt, which gets the word blue way before everybody else does because of lapis lazuli. So this is why in Homer's The Odyssey, there is no… The ocean is the wine-dark sea. The word blue never occurs. So this study shows that if you do not have the word for a color, you actually lumped the color into a different color category. They did… They showed this video of some people in a society that… A tribal society that… Here on earth, this is not secondary world, this is real world stuff. That has a very simplified color structure, compared to what we think of as a color structure. So things are all in the kind of greens and browns and reds and blacks. They show them a wheel, and they don't have the word for blue, specifically. They show them a wheel of swatches, and they're all green except for one that is blue. They're like, "Which one is different?" They look at the wheel and they guess and they point at different ones. To me, it's very obvious which one is blue. Then they show them a wheel of this gray green thing and like, "Which one is different?" They all, unerringly, without hesitating, point to the same square. To me it looks completely the same. It's because they're using different boxes. So I think, and this is where we circle back to gender, so I think that one of the things that has happened to us is that we have been trained in 2017 to put people into only one of two boxes. So we're at this generational shift where we are learning that there are other boxes, and that really, we shouldn't actually be looking up boxes, because, just like color, there is a spectrum. But that these are all artificial distinctions that we are making.
 
[Dan] I'm… Okay. I'm going to… Before we carry on, we need to pause for our book of the week. So, tell us about the book of the week.
[JY] Okay, the book of the week is actually… I'm going to cheat, because it's actually two books. But they're short books. So, like, if you combined them, they're kind of like one book.
[No no no no no]
[Howard] Our readers, our listeners, have never complained when we've given them more than one thing to read.
[Laughter]
[JY] Okay. So… The books of the week are my Tensorate novellas, the first two of the series, which comes out from Tor.com publishing in September. They're called The Red… Oh, God, I always get the… The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune. They're basically set in a secondary world setting, which is sort of heavily influenced by Asian culture. I have like them swearing in like [Hokien] which is kind of my parents language. It is a world where there is magic that is based on stuff like the five elements which I've kind of like sneakily used as five different sorts of like energy in terms of physics. But everyone has the potential to use magic, but learning how to use it is very difficult and it is very much restricted to people in power, people with privilege. So the two novellas are each centered on one of a pair of twins who are born to the supreme ruler of the dominant empire. Their names are Mokoya and Akeha, and the two novellas kind of like sort of tell the story of how they rebel against their mother, and break away from their family and sort of join the resistance to their mother's terrible rule.
[Dan] Awesome. That is The Black Tides…
[Garbled]
[Dan] Oh. Sorry, go ahead.
[Aliette] I want it this week.
[Laughter]
[Aliette] I read them and they're really, really excellent books, and like, they've got this really, really awesome world building. And like the gender and the whole coming to your own gender… Like, oh my God.
[Garbled]
[Howard] JY said these are coming out in September, and you're using the future tense. But, by the time this episode is aired, fair listener, they are already available to you. If… they're going to be up on Tor.com, is that?
[JY] Yeah. You can… Tor.com publishing. You can probably get them on Amazon and Barnes & Noble…
[Howard] We will provide links to them, so you can just go get'em.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Howard] No waiting.
[Dan] The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune.
[JY] Yes. Yes yes yes.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Awesome. By JY Yang.
[JY] I wrote these. I should know… But sometimes, I'm like, "Mmmm…"
 
[Dan] Okay. Cool. So. This is a question we've asked a lot of our what do people get wrong guests that I would love to ask. What are some of the clichés of an incorrectly expressed nonconforming gender identity that you see? When people do it wrong, what stands out is obviously wrong?
[JY] Okay, so this is not, I think, specific to just non-binary, but a gender nonconforming, in which I do see every now and then, like cis authors kind of equating gender to sort of very specific markers of desire like sexuality or like liking skirts makes you more feminine and liking pants like makes you more masculine. I think it's a lot more complicated than that. As… I think I have my non-binary friends who are very, very feminine, they present themselves very femininely, but they don't identify as being a woman. A woman. Wow. [Laughter] And… Yeah, I think that's one of the things where I think you really have to sort of consider like gender is a social construct. And feeling that you're of a certain gender may not necessarily correlate to how you break out of the boxes that society wants to put you in. Like, you're a particular gender, you have to present yourself in this, this, this, and this way. I think gender is a lot more than likes surface gloss that says… Presentation in a sense is very much superficial. I think… I feel like gender is an… It's an identity. It's something that you can't really define, you can't really put into words why you feel this way, but… You just know that it's right for you. I think that's a reason also why a lot of likely non-binary people I know are still trying to sort of like figure themselves out and how they relate to society in terms of their gender presentation, and they have some days in which they want to present more femininely and some days in which they want to present more non-femininely… Masculinely [chuckles] I'm a writer, I'm good at words. I'm sure.
 
[Mary] Let me ask a… Use myself as a useful representative example, and ask a really specific question. So, I have a book that set in 1952, and I have a character in it that my intention is that they are non-binary. But it's 1952, and that language doesn't exist yet. What markers would you put in that book that would make you recognize the character as representing you?
[JY] Hum. That's a very good question. I think that there has to be a certain, I think… Well, it depends on whether… Okay, I think it depends on a number of things, because you can be sort of like internally I know that I'm not one of these, but you don't actually ever say it in public. So I don't know if they're closeted non-binary or it's actually addressed in the book, because I haven't read it, I'm sorry.
[Mary] That's okay, the book isn't out yet, you couldn't have read it.
[JY] Oh, that's good. I didn't know that. But… So in a sense that I think you have to be very clear on what the character themselves, how they relate to the world. I think like specifically because like I think in the 1950s, like gender was a very… I think that the strictures of gender were… Especially in America, were a lot more constricted than they are now. So in order to sort of like say, "Hey, I don't fit into these boxes," you have to have an active sort of rebelling against that. It's like, well, I know that these boxes are here, but I think that these boxes suck. Even if they can't sort of articulate that, it's because I don't belong to either gender. The boxes that exist right now… They have to be like, "No, these boxes make me feel uncomfortable." And even if they don't understand why, it's just like, "I don't like them. And I refuse… Or don't refuse." But, yeah, that sort of discomfort with the binary has to be there.
[Howard] The challenge that Mary has is merely a slightly exacerbated version of the one that English writers have in general, which is that our language does not offer you good ways to describe yourself in a way that is clear to everyone else. It's one thing to say, "I don't fit in the boxes you've created." It's another thing entirely to say, "This is how I represent," and to be able to do that with one set of pronouns and one set of adjectives and whatever. We just don't have those tools.
[Aliette] I mean, we do have languages that have… Finnish, right, for instance…
[Garbled]
[Aliette] Has no pronouns. At the opposite end of the spectrum, French genders everything, so, like, the non-binary community in France is like, "We need to do like all the word endings," and like it's how do we do this? We need to create this third like nonspecific non-masculine non-feminine gender for everything.
[JY] Yeah. I think in Swedish, they actually sort of… They actively did that. They introduced a third gender-neutral pronoun that some people I know… I don't want this in our language, but I like that they actively… The people who are… More or less in charge of the language are actively saying, "Yes, we are going to do this." Which I wish like there was something similar in English, because, yeah, I still get blowback on like using they/them pronouns in English. They're like, "No, it's not grammatical." I'm like, "Mrrr…"
[Mary] Well, actually…
[Laughter]
[Mary] Yeah, I was going to say.
[JY] It's been going on for like four or five centuries at the very least. Right?
[Mary] Jane Austen could do this. You can too.
 
[Dan] Okay. So this has been a great conversation, but we are out of time. JY, do you have some homework you can give us?
[JY] Okay. Yes, I do have some homework. That homework is to read two non-binary writers who I love a lot. Their names are A. Merc Rustad and Rose Lemberg. So Merc has a collection that's just out called… I think he… Do You Want to Be a Robot and 21 Stories… Something like that. I'll give you the name of the thing and then you can put it up. [So You Want to Be a Robot and Other Stories]
[Dan] We'll put that up on the website.
[JY] They are an amazing short story writer. Then there's Rose Lemberg. They write the Bird books, which is a series of short stories, and there's a novella that's just out this year with Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Both Rose and Merc right beautiful, evocative, poetic stories that are so full of imagination. The great thing is that they kind of worked very nuanced gender systems into them. But… These are… That's not actually like the point of the story. The point of the story is not to talk about gender, it's about characters falling in love, having wants, having desires, having needs. So, if you want to see how people do it, those are great examples.
[Dan] That is perfect.
[JY] It's neat stories. You will love them.
[Dan] That's exactly what we need. So, thank you very much. Thank you, JY, for being on the show.
[JY] Thank you for having me.
[Dan] This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.36: Confronting the Default

Sep. 12th, 2018 11:12 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.36: Confronting the Default

 
 

Key Points: What do you think is normal, what are the ways that you think things should be? Seasons in LA, or Australia? Matters of faith? Gender, race, and all that? What about writing a strong female protagonist, except she's the only female in the book? Be aware of your biases! Think about where they came from, why do you have them? Fail better the next time.
 
( Mirror, mirror, on the wall... )
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
 
[Brandon] We are confronting the default. What does this even mean? Mary, you titled this podcast. What do you mean by that?
[Chuckles]
[Mary] So, this is all the things that you think are normal, that you just don't even see in your real life, the ways that you have been programmed to think things should be. So one of the examples that Amal used when we were getting ready to start was that you might think that seasons are normal. But if you live in LA, seasons are…
[Amal] Something that happens to other people.
[Mary] Yes. You have the mudslide season, and you have the California is on fire season.
[Brandon] I've had so much trouble with this recently, just because my books do very well worldwide, and I always post, "This fall, my book is coming out."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] And someone will say, "Your fall or my fall?"
[Ha! Ha, ha, ha!]
[Brandon] They live in Australia. I'm like, "Oh, right." The word fall is a default term for me that means a certain thing. It's really crazy.
[Amal] No one even calls it fall in the UK. It's always autumn. But I had an experience with that where I used to… I still do, but it's on hiatus… Edit this poetry journal called Goblin Fruit. Our art director, Oliver Hunter, for a while was living in Australia. We were very seasonally focused, very four seasons. Like literally, the seasons got woven into the themes of the poetry, and we'd always be asking Ollie to illustrate it accordingly. Which we didn't realize until literally three years into the project…
[Laughter]
[Amal] That this meant that he was always drawing the autumn stuff in his spring and so on. At some point, he pointed that out, kind of bemusedly, and we felt terrible. I mean, just never thought about it.
 
 
[Maurice] I'm really just struggling here. I'm just like, "Man, do I have sort of a default that I'm just blind to?" Then I go, "You know what, I… For me, it's actually a matter of faith." Because, and I didn't realize it until recently, I'll always write characters with a certain faith. And they're always questioning their faith perspective. But their faith perspective, for a long time, was always default Christianity. I was just like, I'm going to go out on a limb, and believe that people don't necessarily worship in Christianity.
[Mary] Well, and even within that, there's multiple…
[Maurice] And there's multiple… Right. So I've been very conscious about the faith perspectives that I'm portraying and that I'm examining in the stories, because there are obviously other default… Other faith perspectives. I'm like, "Isn't this great for me to start to explore those in my characters?"
[Amal] I love that example, because it is so useful, especially when talking in genre. Because I think that it's equally possible and happens a lot that geeky nerds who come from science backgrounds will assume a default of atheism for everyone. Because it's what… it's their belief. It's like, "Well, how can you be rational and believe in God?" And stuff… Like, we talked about in the conflicts episode before. But in doing that, they miss out on like, "Well, but wait… But people are religious. People do in fact believe things. How are you going to get at that and represent that and do so specifically in a way that doesn't cater to your biases?" Like, are you going to, if you're an atheist, put religious people in your books who are sympathetic and who aren't just deluded?
[Brandon] Nothing… I've mentioned before, nothing bothers me more as a religious person then reading a book and finding the one religious person is the idiot who needs to be taught the right way of things. One thing I really like about this concept, confronting the default. While we're bring… Why we bring it up is number one, if you do this, you'll become a better writer. You'll become a more excited writer, because you'll find things to explore that you haven't thought about. Plus, you can play in really fun ways with the reader biases. The book is out now, and so I can talk about this, but Stormlight Archive, my big epic fantasy series, a little bit of a spoiler. Humankind is not native to the planet that they're on. So, from the first book, I've been able to really play with this, by, for instance, they referen… The linguistics has shifted, and they call all birds chickens. Because chickens is the word… The loan word that made it through to their language. Seasons to them… They're on a planet with no axial tilt. So a season is just when the weather gets cold for a while, they're like, "It's winter now."
[Huh!]
[Brandon] Readers are like, "Why… They use seasons so weird in this book. They said it's winter last week, and now it feels like summer. What does that even mean? What's going on with the weather?" When they start to put together that all these people have come from another world, brought all of their language for describing the world around them to a planet where a lot of this is different, and have misapplied it, you get really fun things that you can play with in the book.
[Amal] That is awesome. That reminds me of Ursula Vernon's Digger comic. Where the main character is a wombat. It's amazing. Everyone should read this book. The main character is a wombat, and… Like an anthropomorphized wombat. It takes several pages before there are any pronouns applied to this wombat. But this wombat is also from an atheist engineering Society, and something about the fact that they're being portrayed as an engineer, and as someone who's working with a pickax and stuff absolutely cued me to assume that the wombat's male. But no, the wombat is in fact a woman. A woman? A female wombat. It was just like, "What? Oh, I guess those bumps were supposed to be mammary on this character." I totally didn't realize that.
 
 
[Maurice] So, I have an interesting experience about that whole reader expectation thing. So I talked a while back about my novelette that's coming out from Beneath Ceaseless Skies… Or out from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, called El is a Spaceship Melody. It's an Afro future story, and I'd let one of my pre-readers… I gave it to one of my prereaders, and so he's giving me the feedback, and he's like, "Oh, man, I just love how you did the interplay between the two different races on the starship." I'm like, "There is only one race…
[Hah!]
[Maurice] On the starship." He's like, "No, I meant the white characters on your starship." I'm like, "There are no white people in this entire novelette."
[Laughter]
[Maurice] He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like… So I had to explain in this Afro future universe, people are free to define themselves as themselves. They're not defined in terms of an other. There's like no… African-Americans defined just by being African-American. So what you've actually just witnessed is black people talking to each other.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] Right. It just blew his head. It was interesting that he had defaulted, because I don't name the race of some… Of any of the characters really, because it's not like I sit around at a family dinner going, "Hey, by my blackness, pass me the salt."
[Laughter]
[Maurice] It's not something we do.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] So it's just a non-consideration.
[Amal] That's a beautiful turn of phrase, though. I love that.
[Maurice] By my blackness…
[Amal] By my blackness, give me the salt. It's amazing.
 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for the book of the week. We're going to talk about The Murders of Molly Southbourne.
[Maurice] The Murders of Molly Southbourne. So that is a novella from Tade Thompson. It's from Tor… I believe it is from Tor.com, from their novella series. This is an absolutely thrilling book that at first had me completely… I mean, it just caught me completely off guard. Because it's about this woman, Molly, who… I mean, the opening scene is her encountering herself and she has to kill herself. I'm like, "What is going on, right now in this book?" It's a really dark book, but it's also so thrilling. So, Tade has a way of just… And it's really, this really tight POV so you're just really immersed in this one character's head. Which means you really have no clue what's going on. The masterful way he manages to tell the story of this woman encountering versions of herself and having to confront and kill herself, and why she has to do this… It's like this mystery unfolding that he is just… It's elegant. I'm sorry.
[Brandon] That's awesome.
[Amal] That sounds so great.
 

[Brandon] So we're talking about kind of biases, and some of these, that you will have is a listener, are narrative. Because certain types of narrative have been told to use so many times, you have internalized them and you will use them. You will just use them. It will happen. I've got a good example from my books. I'm… Mistborn. My second novel. I love this book. It's a great book. But it has one, now that I've seen it, very glaring flaw. This is that, as a writer, I was trying to… I said, "I'm going to write a really strong female protagonist." That term is loaded, in and of itself, but I'm going to write a female protagonist, teenage girl, and this is a story of her moving in this realm of magic and things like this. I feel like I did a pretty good job. Got a lot of early readers, used my sisters as a model. It really just kind of treated her like a character, right? It works. A lot of people really like it. But, people have also pointed out, she's the only girl in basically the whole book.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Right? This is… Well, this is just a thing that we do. We default to male a lot of times. We default to male when describing characters. When coming up with a team of thieves, I just defaulted to a bunch of guys, and then, and then, kind of the Smurfette principle, right? The one girl. Fortunately, I was good enough not to define her only by her femininity. But at the same time, I still fell into this kind of trap of I defaulted all of my characters to male. Because that's the thieving team that I imagined in my head.
[Mary] I find that I am often guilty of that with characters. That there is a default setting that I'll forget about. In an earlier episode, I offered a worksheet that I use where I have all of the different kinds of axes that people exist on, like ability and age and orientation and all of that. When I filled that out, I will… I look at it, and the default that I kept coming back to is that I tended to have straight characters. Like… And by tended to, I mean that I would look at it and go, "Oh, look, all of my characters are straight. Huh. Interesting. Look at me not even noticing that I did that." The reason that I'll fill the sheet out is because it allows me to spot that. But there's just so many things that even when you think you're thinking about it, because it's programmed in so hard… Like with the Glamorous History books, the first two I was like, "Well, I'm writing Jane Austen with magic. And this is set in Regency England. It's in a small town, the first one, so, of course, there are no people of color there. Then, next is in Brussels, and of course, there are no people of color there. Then I actually researched, and realized that I was completely wrong in both cases. Pieter Bruegel is painting… Etching black peasants in Brussels. So, anyway, point being that in book 3, I addressed that. Set in London, I had this nice diverse cast. Then, book 4, I finished the book and looked at it and was like, "Mary. You have just done another book that is all white people all the time, and it's in Venice.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Which would not be… What have you done?" I had to go back in to correct that. But it's much harder to correct something like that when you are examining your default setting at the end, rather than attempting to examine it before you begin writing.
[Amal] It's a little bit like using the hand that… Using your nondominant hand.
[Mary] Oh, yeah.
[Amal] Like, if you're really focusing on it, you will be able to do something with almost as much dexterity as your right hand, but you're just so used to using… I said right hand, right now, right? That is mine, but that is not the case… Someone's left-handed listening to this podcast, going, "Hang on. But I'm… That's my dominant hand." It is something that…
[Mary] And this is actually assuming that someone has a dominant hand.
[Amal] Has a hand, for that matter. A dominant hand, has a hand. Like, these are all the things that are baked into us because… Especially, when it's your body, using your body to navigate the world. Your body is thoroughly informing all of your thoughts and experiences. I mean, actually, when you're talking about all the straight characters in your books, one thing I love about your writing, and I basically cannot stop talking about this on the Internet, is that I love the fact that you write straight women lusting after men.
[Laughter]
[Amal] Because… Like this is genuinely… I love it. I love it so much for so many reasons. But one of the reasons is that… Besides the fact that I don't see it often and don't see it done in a compelling way. I see… There are so many reasons. One of the reasons is there is this default expectation that women and men are just going to end up together, and you don't actually need to show that desire or that lust, because it's expected. It's just what's going to happen within the parameters of a relationship. But the other reason is, like, I'm bisexual. And I just sort of expect that… I have the opposite sort of bias, where I do just kind of write bisexual characters by default. It's sort of doesn't make sense to me that people don't experience sexual desire for like… For just… That they have the capacity to experience it for everyone. I have to remind myself that that is a thing. But I just… So when you write that, when you write your women who like exclusively want men, I love it. I actually find that like just… It's like it reveals a part of the world for me that I don't experience on a regular basis.
 

[Brandon] Well, one of the things that I think is important, that came out here, that came up again, is being aware of this. Right? Like, where did my biases come from, why do I have them? If we go back to Mistborn again, I'm looking at my models, right? Ocean's 11, the Sting. Sneakers. These are all-male casts. It isn't that I sat down and said, "I want to do a story with an all-male cast." I just did it. There is a separate argument of, "Is it okay to just sometimes write an all-male cast or whatnot?" That's not what we're getting into. We're getting into the things you're doing unconsciously, on accident, that if you examine them, you might say, "Wow I didn't mean to do that. It would be better, it would be more interesting, make a better story, make me more interested in the story if I confronted it and looked at it and tried to do it a different way."
[Mary] Absolutely. That is the thing… Like, as a writer, you want is you want things that you're putting down on the page to be there because you put them with intention. What we're saying is look for the stuff… That it's like, "Whoops!"
[Brandon] Or just Wow.
[Yeah. Yeah.]
[Amal] I'm thinking about this a lot lately with… There are just so many assumptions that… I think it's also good to think about the fact that everyone has these. That having these doesn't make you a bad person. But being aware of them can in fact make you a better person, just because you have become that much more aware of others, and therefore you have like a new channel open for empathy about things. But… Yeah.
[Brandon] I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but one of the very eye-opening moments for me happened way back for a lot of the kind of things that have happened in science fiction recently happened. It was one of the first ones. It was something they called Race Fail. I'm not going to dig into this right now. It's not the appropriate place. But I remember reading a really great essay, and I can't even remember who it was, who looked at this really open eyes, and they were a person of color. They were like, "Look. We need to change the discourse in our society from the word "That was racist" being like the worst thing that you can say to someone. Instead, we need to shifted toward being able to say, "That was racist," and you saying, "Hey, yeah. That was a little racist. Thanks for pointing that out. My eyes are a little bit more open now. I realize something that I' ve internalized." It's… What we would love for you to do as listeners is be able to say it's okay that I have had a bias pointed out to me. It is… I am better now. Not just… We get so defensive. We get so defensive.
[Maurice] That's why I… my credo has always been, "Fail better the next time." Because I'm not going to get everything right the first time. I'm not going to get everything right the second time. But I want to learn, I want to improve. I want these biases pointed out to me so that I can fail better the next time.
 
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do some homework. Amal, you have some homework for us.
[Amal] So, on the subject of biases and norms and defaults, I want you all to think about a bird. Think about what makes a bird a bird. I want you to write down a set of characteristics, say five characteristics that are… That, to you, define what a bird is. I could… I'm not going to give you examples. You can do this on your own. Then, once you have those five things, find real-world examples of birds that in fact don't share those characteristics. Just kind of examine why is it that the bird you came up with is the bird that you came up with, as opposed to some other bird.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J. R. Johansson

May. 2nd, 2017 03:44 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J. R. Johansson

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/04/30/12-18-gendered-dialect-with-j-r-johansson/

Key Points: Men and women have different motivations in communication. Women, in general, seek connections, while men seek status. Women use rapport talk, while men use report talk. Men tend to goal-oriented communications, while women are building bonds. When women join other women, the first comment is likely to be a compliment. With men, the first thing is likely to be a joking insult. Relations versus dominance. Most of this is socialization. Be aware that the exceptions are as interesting as the rules! Broad spectrum of engagement. When a woman says, "This is what happened to me," they are looking for empathy, sympathy, where a man is likely to answer, "Let me fix that for you." Women often apologize, are overly polite. They use equivocating, and self-deprecation. To learn the other side, read work written by and for that gender. Get someone to flag your writing. "Spend more time listening than you spend talking."

( All the talk, uncut! )
[Howard] Okay. We are out of time. Susan, do you have a writing prompt for us?
[Susan] Um...
[Mary] I actually…
[Howard] No, Jenn has the writing prompt for us.
[J. R.] I do. I have a writing prompt for you.
[I'm so sorry, I don't.] [Laughter] [We got you covered. Go to it.]
[J. R.] Okay. So, I think it's very, frequently when you see a matriarchy represented in fantasy, sci-fi, any of those type situations… It's really just a patriarchy with women in all of the roles. So write a scene with a matriarchy that has them communicating and dealing with each other in a little more of a female fashion. See how that goes.
[Howard] Outstanding. Fair listener, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.22: Examining Unconscious Biases, with Shannon Hale

Jun. 1st, 2016 10:48 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.22: Examining Unconscious Biases, with Shannon Hale

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/29/11-22-examining-unconscious-biases-with-shannon-hale/

Key Points: Everybody has unconscious biases, which will get into your writing. Start looking at them, seeing what you are doing, and examining them to make yourself a better writer. For example, let's look at how we write female characters. Who are the main characters, the named characters? Writing and reading are not gendered topics. Watch out for the one token awesome female -- better than no females at all, but lacking in variety and diversity. Ask yourself "Why?" and "Is there a bias at play?" Start with a person, then decide traits. Try the two rules -- every crowd is full of men and women, and every other speaker is a woman. Then start fleshing it out from there, with interesting characters. Keep trying! You will make mistakes, but learn from them, don't just repeat them.( And for more details, keep reading! )

[Brandon] All right. Shannon, you have some homework for us.
[Shannon] Yes. Take something you've written and gender swap it. Every character that's a male, make him female. Every character that's female, make her male. See how that changes the story. Often what will happen if you have a story with a lot of male characters, not many female characters, suddenly your now newly male characters, you're going to say, "Why aren't they doing anything? Why are they just sitting around and only the female characters are doing everything?" It's going to open your eyes to how you treat the different genders. Then the challenge after that is see if you can actually make your named speaking characters half female and half male, just like they are in the real world.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 6.16: Gender Roles -- Black, White, and Gray

Sep. 28th, 2011 09:09 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.16: Gender Roles -- Black, White, and Gray

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/09/18/writing-excuses-6-16-gender-roles-black-white-and-gray/

Key Points: There's a bigger spectrum of gender than most of us ever imagine. And sexual orientations. Be wary of the big reveal -- that's not the only thing in a person's life. Transformation stories should be more than peep shows. Gender roles and social expectations should be solidly grounded. Gender roles are not just abstractions -- they play out everyday in homes near you! Whatever you do -- think about it.
( coming out of the closet? )
[Brandon] Yeah. All right. I'm going to go ahead... I made the guest do it last time, so I'm going to throw it at Howard.
[Howard] Uh-oh.
[Brandon] Howard, you've got to give us a writing prompt.
[Howard] Okay. Writing prompt. Take something that you do, that you think is unique to you, not only because it's your thing, but because it's maybe gender related to you. Take it, and hand it to somebody, a character in your book who you think is completely unqualified for it, unable to do it. Now define their character around the reasons why they have to accept that task, or that role or whatever. Make that work.
[Brandon] All right. This is been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Applause]
[Brandon] Thank you so much, Keffy. That was great.
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Writing Excuses 5.18: Offending Your Readers

Mar. 1st, 2011 12:58 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.18: Offending Your Readers

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/01/02/writing-excuses-5-18-offending-your-readers/

Key Points: Eschew the egregious offense of over-explaining. Don't talk down to readers. Be careful of racial and gender demographics, BUT don't make your characters stereotypes, either. Be inclusive, but mostly, make your characters people. Burn the strawmen, dynamite Potemkin villages, and don't stack the deck. Don't moralize or preach, trust your readers. Let them read the story, learn who the characters are and what's happening, and draw their own lessons from it. Theme and realizations are one thing, soapbox orations are another. Finally, beware broken promises, especially when it is a shortcut that defaults on what could have been. But we'll come back to broken promises another time. That's a promise.
( The best offenses are good defenses? )
[Brandon] I'm going to break it and say you have to... your writing prompt is to write... what was it, a vampire romance? No, a werewolf romance that does not appear it at first... that does not break any promises.
[Dan] Looks like it's going to be hard science fiction.
[Howard] Start with space opera... er, not space opera. Yeah. Start with hard science fiction, move into werewolf romance... in three paragraphs?
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, and you're stupid.
[Dan] You're out of excuses and nobody likes you.
[Brandon] Sorry, I couldn't help it. Don't be offended.
[Howard] You're out of excuses, and Brandon has no self-control.
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