Entries tagged with society

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Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/08/14-49-customs-and-mores/

Key Points: Truth is stranger than fiction, consider child widows on the banks of the river Ganges, Thimithi firewalking, vulgar rhythms in Mexico, gourds for clothing, and open containers and paper bags for alcohol. In stories, how y'all use y'all can get you in trouble. Don't overdo it, one or two wonky details are enough to make a society feel alien. Give us the norm, then show us how it is broken. Showing characters breaking customs and reactions of other characters is good. What we do is normal, but others do is weird. Why do we shake hands? For most characters, why is just that's the way we do it. Use obviously different things to make readers think about it. Using a different point of view allows you to explore or showcase the culture, and use it for conflict and fun. Consider a cat and you walking through your house in the dark. Flavoring a war story that takes decades with cultural details makes it interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 49.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Customs and Mores.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] Customs and mores.

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] Dan. You were an anthropology major in college.

[Dan] I was.

[Brandon] Tell us what I… What the word mores means.

[Dan] A mores is essentially… It's a manner of interacting in a culture. It is a specific thing that a… The way a culture does something. So one of the ones that Brandon mentioned before we started was shaking hands. There are some cultures that greet each other by shaking hands, and there are some cultures that don't. That's just the way in which we, as a society, have decided to say hello to each other, and often goodbye. It's different from society to society. That can apply to essentially every form of interaction that we have, there's some kind of mores that governs how we do it.

[Brandon] Let's start with some of our favorite kind of real-world mores or customs that seems stranger…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Than fiction. Just to kind of put ourselves on the right foot here.

[Dan] Okay. Go for it.

[Mahtab] I can start. I do not have to look further than India…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] For some of the most weirdest stuff I've seen.

[Howard] That's really far for us, but go on.

[Mahtab] Okay. Well, let me share it with you. One of them. This one I do not like, but it's the way things are done. Widows, no matter what age, they are… First of all, there used to be a lot of child marriage. If for… And the kids used to be married to older men. If the men died, the child was a widow. There was no remarriage. There is a beautiful movie called Water, which was made… Produced by Deepa Mehta, which just talks about a child widow who has to live on the banks of the river Ganges. Love is forbidden. Any kind of comfortable amenities… They just have to live a really harsh life. So that, I found, is really weird, to kind of give up your life. Whereas here, I mean, if a spouse passes on, you are allowed to find happiness. That is not allowed in our customs. The other thing which I just recently found out. It's called Thimithi, which… It's actually Timothy, which is a firewalking festival, which happens just before the Hindi New Year of Deepavali. It has its origins in the Mahabharata, which was the war which was fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. But basically, one of the groups insulted the wife of the other group, and to prove her innocence, she walked on coals. She emerged unscathed. Men, not women… Men, in a little village in India, walk on coals to prove their purity. They have to walk really, really slowly. I found that really strange. It still happens.

[That's great]

[Mahtab] That's just two. There are a lot more, but I will…

[Dan] So here's one of my very favorite ones. In Mexico, there is… Every culture has their curse words, and their swearwords. In Mexico, there is a rhythm that is considered incredibly vulgar. It's the rhythm of shave and a haircut. I know, now that I've said this, people are going to come up to me at events and signings and whatever, and knockout shave and a haircut on the table. It's incredibly offensive. Just the rhythm by itself. I've never encountered that anywhere else before. It's fascinating to me.

[Brandon] My favorite one, since we're going on these, is penis gourds.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] If you're not aware of this, in some South American indigenous tribes, men will wear a gourd on the tip of their penis to be clothed. To us, they just look naked. But to them, that is fully clothed. If the gourd is off, then they are naked and it is taboo. But if the gourd is on, then they are not considered naked. That… I love this one, because what it really says is a lot of our taboos in cultures, which are related to mores, are really social constructs. Right? What we consider vulgar, obscene, or honorable or pure or whatever is a social construct. Playing with these things in fantasy and science fiction books is one of my favorite things to do.

[Howard] We have the same gourd here. It's in a different place. It's the open container law for drunk driving.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah.

[Howard] Is the top on the bottle? The top's not on the bottle, you're going to get a ticket. Because the bottle's naked.

[Dan] Well, a lot of states still have the paper bag law with alcohol as well. That if you are walking down the street with a bottle of alcohol that everyone can see, then you get arrested. But if it's in a paper bag, even if we can see you drinking it and we know what's happening, it doesn't count.

[Brandon] So, how do we go about creating these in our stories? How do we use them? Truth is stranger than fiction, how do you convince people that these things are real? One of the most difficult places I've gotten myself in the most trouble with social mores was use of the word y'all in one of my books.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because I found that there is regional variation in how y'all is used. I used it a way that is the less widely used method. I have heard many, many times about how I got that wrong. It kicks people out of the story, even though it was right for that character. How do you use these?

[Dan] I don't know.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The hardest thing to do is to, in your own life, distinguish between the things that you have to do and the things that you don't have to do. The… Finding serial killers, finding patterns and what they do. What are the things that that they did that didn't have to be done? Why did they do those things? Well, those are incredibly significant. Does the killer think about it? Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. What are the things in my life that I do that I don't have to but I'm going to do it anyway? I hadn't asked myself that question before right now, so I don't have an answer.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But it's a great question.

[Dan] I would say, for the most part, unless you are writing a story that is very specifically sociological or anthropological, don't overdo this. Pick one or two things. For example, in the Stormlight Archives, the women have the safe hand that they always keep covered, and the women aren't… They don't eat spicy foods. That's… Those are the only two I can remember. I'm sure there might be a couple others. But you throw those in, and then the rest of the society is surprisingly familiar. But it feels very alien, because the setting is different, and because there's those two details that stand out as wonky.

[Mahtab] The way I like to see it is customs are important because it shows you how that particular race or culture behaves. It's but a great way to use this is give us the norm and then show us how it is broken. This… The example I want to share is not really a fantasy example, but it's done really well, which is Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Which is where a group of boys crashland on an island. All customs, social mores, just basically breaks down, where the boys just forget about all laws of how to behave. They're all kids. There is complete lawlessness. There are two leaders that kind of try and draw the boys to each other, so there are two groups. Their weapon of power on that island is one of the boy's glasses, because that's the only way they can create a fire. It completely breaks down, where one of the boys is killed, and everyone comes to their senses when a patrol ship comes looking for them and they're rescued. Everyone kind of comes back down to earth. But it's a fabulous example of when there is no… When social customs and mores breaks down, you could have a fabulous story. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. He's expressed it really well. So, the point I was trying to make is find one or two customs. Show us what the norm is. Then break it completely. That'll give you so much of your story.

[Dan] Showing characters break it, and then the reactions of other characters, can lend it a lot of gravity. So, like, we don't necessarily understand why they have to do this one particular thing in their society. But as soon as we see the horror in everyone else's eyes… Oh. Now I don't necessarily feel that that's important, but I can tell that it is.

[Brandon] You bring up the safe hand in the Stormlight books. One of the more common questions I get asked is what's the deal with that safe hand? Why do they have that safe hand? Which, as a writer and having studied anthropology myself and things, that question always seems really weird to me. As a writer. Because it is expressed by the outsider looking at a culture, saying, "Why are they so weird?" It displays a shocking lack of self-awareness about the way that human beings work. Now, I understand why they do it. Obviously. I'm not saying that the readers are weird. But this is how we are as human beings. What other people do is strange, and what we do is normal. We don't ask ourselves, "Why do we shake hands?" Maybe someone does. Maybe somebody… I'm sure someone has traced back where it came from.

[Dan] I can tell you.

[Brandon] Yeah?

[Laughter]

[Dan] Look. We shake hands because it is a way of signifying whether we do manual labor or not.

[Brandon] Oh.

[Dan] So it is a direct enforcement of the caste system. That's subconscious, but that's kind of what we're doing is "Hey, look how smooth my hand is. I'm rich."

[Brandon] Yeah. Um... That's awesome.

[Dan] But it's not important.

[Howard] I'm not even going to let you touch my hand. I draw with it.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It is, but it isn't. Right? Because I do want to talk about creating these things and having purpose behind them, but one of the things to understand is, to the characters in your stories, to the vast majority of them, there's not a why.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] The why is because it's the way it should be done. This is what's appropriate. Why do you wear this and someone else wears this? Well, in most cases, it's just this is what's familiar. This is what we wear. This is what's right to wear.

[Brandon] Let's stop and do a book of the week.

[Mahtab] I'd like to recommend The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge. She is a British writer. This particular novel actually won the Costa book award in 2015. The premise is very intriguing. It's… In her… In… So the protagonist is a female. Her name is Faith Sunderly. She's a 14-year-old girl. What… The premise of the novel is that in trying to discover who murdered her father, she discovers that he was trying to shield a fossil. A tree that feeds off lies. Then the fruit that it bears actually gives the person the truth. So she… So it's basically [fertilizes], those laws are spread throughout a certain community, and the tree bears certain fruit. The language of this story… Her language is just absolutely exquisite. So, it's kind of a part horror, part detective, part historical novel. You should all go read it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] I like the conceit, and I want one.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, going back to this idea of customs and mores. Stormlight Archive. Why do I do what I do? As a writer, I can say why I do what I do. Why did I come up with the safe hand? I wanted to indicate this is a stratified society, a deeply sexist society, and I wanted to have social constraints that readers from our world reading it would be like, "Wow, that is too constraining." The flipside of that is men aren't allowed to read. Right? Men don't read. There are these… Like, these restrictions that I knew my readers would read and just bash their heads against. The purpose of that is to indicate it's a different culture. It's also a very constrained culture in a lot of ways. I wanted the reader to feel those things.

[Dan] Well, one of the values of doing that in a weird way is that it forces readers who live in patriarchal or sexist societies to confront it, without it just… Without being comfortable with it. There's a lot of the sexist things that we do in our society that get carried over accidentally into fantasy, and a lot of people don't think about them when they read them. So, a custom like the safe hand is weird and it is shocking. It forces us to go, "Oh. Okay. That's different. Now I see what I wasn't seeing otherwise."

[Brandon] Why else do you use these in your stories? What purposes do you have for them? How do they enhance your stories?

[Howard] The piece I'm working on now, the protagonist is an AI who desperately wants to be able to understand everything that's going on around her. She manifests as female. There are aliens everywhere. When she is talking with aliens, when she is communicating with them, she is observing everything, the body language, she's listening to what they're saying. Some of it she can interpret and some of it she can't. Some of it she will get wrong. There's a fight scene that I've written and somebody comes down and breaks up the fight. The fight started because she didn't want the bird with the long tongue to lick her. The person who breaks up the fight says, "If you want the licky birds to not lick you, ask them. Don't touch their tongue." I loved that moment because it inverts our idea of personal space. Well, of course, you're not going to lick me, and if you're going to lick me, I'm going to slap your tongue out of… No. You have to ask in order to not be licked by the licky birds. Also, the word licky bird is just inherently funny.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Having it delivered in that way told a nice joke. But it allowed me to explore the inverse of this concept of personal space in a culture that has lots of aliens in it who are struggling to figure out each other's cultures in order to live together comfortably.

[Brandon] Mahtab, you wrote an entire book about the cultural differences between India and America. Why were you doing it the way you did? What did you gain from it in the story you were telling?

[Mahtab] Well. For one, I wanted to showcase India, but from a totally different point of view. So the point of view for this particular book, Mission Mumbai, is from the American's point of view. For him, it is a huge cultural shock, because he's never been there before. Now had I made that point of view from the Indian boy, half the jokes would not have worked, half the plot points would not have worked. Just basically showcasing it from someone else's point of view who's never been exposed to it, it helped me set up a lot of, as I said, humor, a lot of plot points, a lot of… Showcasing the Indian culture as well, and an appreciation by a person who was non-Indian. Because there's also a lot of stereotyping as far as a certain place is concerned. That's perpetuated by movies. You see certain movies on India and you just think, "Okay, there's a lot of poverty. People don't speak English out there." When I first came to Canada, often I was asked the question, "How is it that you speak so… English so well?" I just wanted to give them the Matrix answer. When I came in, at Immigration, they asked me, "English or French?" I responded with "English."

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] So… But, so one of the reasons of using this as a setting and having a totally different viewpoint talk about the culture was to not only showcase it, show the weirdness of it, but also use it as a good place of conflict and fun.

[Howard] If you look at the difference between you walking through the house in the dark and your cat walking through the house in the dark. The cat knows where everything is. A lot of things are taller than the cat. The cat has a completely different perspective of that room. Your experience with that room is going to be banging your shins, and tripping over the cat. Both examples… Both points of view can tell you about the room. The one that involves pain is often the more interesting one. It's also, to my mind, more quickly going to tell me where all the furniture is.

[Dan] My very favorite book series is the Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. I talk about it all the time. One of the things he's doing in there is he's telling essentially a war story that takes place over decades and decades. The middle Saxon period. This portion is generational warfare. But by setting it up… I mean, it's historical, but setting it up so that it is Saxons versus the Danes, we get a distinct sense of who the cultures are. So the way the two armies fight is defined by their background and their culture. The way that they maintain the territory that they win changes from culture to culture. So you get… Bringing out all those cultural details add so much flavor to what is otherwise just a war story that takes a really long time.

[Brandon] Mahtab, we have loved having you on the podcast. This is your last week with us. So, thank you so much.

[Mahtab] Thank you so much for having me. I've always loved Writing Excuses, so it's a pleasure to have shared this.

[Howard] Wait, you've listened to us before? Ordinarily we don't let fans into the room.

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] I have not taken anything. But anyways, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[Brandon] We are going to end with some homework from Howard.

[Howard] Yes. Um. That pause was me remembering what the homework is. Take a culture… Take a cultural quirk, a mores… Something that is weird and preferably really annoying to you. Take that thing and extrapolate upon it. Build a whole set of culturalisms, of mores, of behaviors that just bug you. But that are logically connected in a way that this culture makes sense. Your goal is to create a culture that is very different from anything you'd want to live in, without creating a strawman.

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

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/18/14-33-writing-imperfect-worlds/

Key points: Writing a setting where underlying ideas aren't what you believe? Imperfect, flawed worlds, with cultural ideas or norms that you don't agree with? We write these to help understand the imperfections of our world and how to solve them. Popular genre, with a flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair as the big bad guy. Take an imperfection in our world and push it. If you are writing historicals, beware of telling the reader that "this is okay." You might try to lampshade it, to have the protagonist stand against the prevailing attitudes. But they need to have spots where they are ignorant or unaware, which they confront. Fiction about imperfect worlds can give us a script, a lens, that we can use in the real world. When writing stories in a historical period or fantasy world, don't just pretend that problems weren't there, don't rewrite history by ignoring the issues. Instead, be aware of the unjust imbalances, the ramifications, the external costs. To write a character who is a realistic product of a society with biases we would consider reprehensible, make sure to include someone who can call them on their bullshit. Give the reprehensible traits real consequences. Think through why they have these beliefs or opinions. Don't give the protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they are the protagonist.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 33.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Imperfect Worlds.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] I'm going to ask you, how do you write a setting in which the pervasive ideas, cultural ideas or cultural norms, are not ones that you think should be?

[Mary Robinette] That's basically my entire existence with every piece of fiction I write because I am a woman in modern-day America.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You said imperfect. Any piece of nonfiction is inherently going to be the writing of an imperfect world. I would say that the question you're asking is more along the lines of writing deeply flawed worlds.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] In order to help us… And I guess this isn't part of your question, it'd be part of my answer… You write these in order to help us better understand the imperfections of our own world and how we might go about solving them.

[Margaret] Well, I think we've seen a lot of popularity of this genre in recent world… In recent years. I mean, what else is something like The Hunger Games? They've created this deeply flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair. It exists to give Katniss something that's worth fighting against. It's… There's that… You're setting up a big bad guy and there's no bigger bad guy than society.

[Mary Robinette] Handmaid's Tale is another good example. A lot of times what you're looking at here is taking an imperfection in our world and pushing it, when you're creating a science fictional society. I write a lot of historical stuff, which is going into areas where… Like the 1950s, Jim Crow is still very much a thing. The Glamorous Histories. Regency England, which we all love, is built on a base of slavery. So these are things that… One of the challenges is writing it in such a way that it doesn't tell the reader this is okay and valorizes it.

[Brandon] Right.

[Margaret] I know one time when Madman was coming out, I think it was like season one or season two, and I watched a couple of episodes. I'm like, "Hey, mom, have you ever watched Madman?" Her response was, "No, thank you. I lived it." I had… It's not necessarily the imperfect world. Eh, it is not relevant. I need not cite this example.

[Brandon] Right. Okay. So, I would say the first thing that I have tried when I did this is kind of lampshade it. It can be difficult because I think your first instinct is to have your protagonist be the person who is not as sexist or racist or ist as the culture around them. Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm okay with picking up a story and then reading it and being like, "Oh." Because there were people, even back in Regency times, who were like, "This is not okay."

[Mary Robinette] The anti-… The whole abolitionist movement there.

[Brandon] That is certainly one approach to it, and I actually kind of appreciate, like, Mary, that you walk that line. I would say a lot of times your protagonists are several steps further along than the average person, but they are… They still have blind spots that they end up usually getting confronted by in the story. So it's not this perfect character who has no problems, but at the same time, it makes me sympathetic towards the character because at least they have the blinders a little bit further open. It kind of makes me think, "You know, I probably still have my blinders on to an extent."

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you're doing that right now, with blinder and blind as a pejorative term.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of those things that I have worked very hard to train out of my own vocabulary, and talk about spots where I'm ignorant. Spots where I have lack of knowledge or lack of awareness. But it is… It's very easy when you're writing these to trip up on stuff that society has imprinted you with. So one of the fun things about doing this, one of the reasons to do that, is to interrogate these things and to look at them and sort of hold them up to the lens and use science fiction and fantasy to tip them to the side.

[Margaret] For me, where I hit the line is where I'm reading a book… Because sometimes it's fun to read books that take place in worlds that are not like ours. That's why we read fantasy and science fiction. Sometimes it's even fun to read stories in a pseudo-medieval setting where gender equity is stepped back from where it is today, shall we say? For me, where I reach the line is where I start to feel as if I've started to read a Prussian porn. It's like this was just written to talk about oh, how terrible it was to be X in X time, or in this scenario. I love Bujold's The Curse of Chalion books. It's like there is a lot of sexism and allusion to sexual violence in those. It's not explicit, but there is this kind of threat of your main character being a woman, there's stuff that she is worried about. For me, that doesn't cross the line. Everyone places their lines in different places where there comfortable reading, but it's not a story that's about like, "Oh, no, I'm going out into the world. What's going to happen to me now?"

[Howard] In the… Around 2015, the Schlock Mercenary installments, our cast finds a giant, abandoned station if you will, world-sized, that makes them incredibly wealthy. In the 2018-2019 installments, the original inhabitants turn out to never have left and they want their stuff back. Yes, you can take a step back and look at this and say, "Oh, my gosh, this is exactly like what would happen if the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Australia or wherever rose up and demanded all of their land back. What would we do?" Well, it's not exactly like that. But having the protagonist deal with it in a way that says, "You know what, they're right. This isn't my stuff. It's their stuff. Not a whole lot I can do about that." We now have an enormous debt, which is part of our plot problem. The story is not about returning things to indigenous peoples. The story is about we made an enormous budgeting mistake and now we have problems to solve. It's fun to write and having a protagonist who recognizes, "Oh. Somebody lives here. Actually still does live here." And immediately said, "Well, okay. That's…"

[Mary Robinette] A lot of times what I think fiction is doing, and especially when we're dealing with imperfect worlds, is it's giving us a script that we can use and take into the real world. One of the things that I do that is actually the opposite of writing imperfect world is that I tend to write happily committed married couples. I do that because I so rarely see it in fiction. I see a lot of people who have taken their social cues from these narratives about men who are stalkers and men who are abusive. It's like that's not the relationship that you should be aiming for. So when you deal with an imperfect world and you have a character who is coming to grips with their own imperfections, it gives the reader a script and a lens with which to interrogate their own stuff. I know that I… That's certainly one of the things, the side effects, that happens when I read. It is one of the things that I think fiction and science fiction and fantasy particularly do very well.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is actually Mary's book.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I've been talking a lot, but I'll talk some more. So, The Fated Sky is the second book in my Lady Astronaut series. The reason I suggested this book for the book of the week is because it is set in the 1950s. It is set in the heart of the civil rights era. It is dealing with a lot of the problems that are inherent in the world at that time. My main character, Elma, is not actually a completely reliable narrator. It's first person narration. There's another character who has been her antagonist for the entire book. As this book unfolds, we find that as she is interrogating her assumptions, that… And he is interrogating his, that there is… There's actually more common ground than either of them thought. But the big thing for me with this is the idea of the narratives that we bring into relationships. That when we are describing our relationships to someone else, it's like, "Oh. I hate him, he hates me." That's the narrative. That's part of what happens with an imperfect world is that it's built by people who come with their own narratives that they're applying to just stuff that happens.

[Brandon] I haven't read the second one yet, but I've read the first one. The first one deals with the same sort of thing, and I loved it.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Brandon] It is one of those… It was just really, really interesting and fun to read, and eye-opening at the same time.

[Mary Robinette] I suppose I should mention that this is a book about going to Mars in the 1950s when women are the computers because we don't… Haven't miniaturized computers yet.

[Margaret] But with punchcards.

[Mary Robinette] With punchcards.

[Brandon] It's an alternate history.

[Mary Robinette] An alternate history. And imperfect… There is an entire chapter that is nothing but clean… Zero G toilet repair.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Selling point.

[Howard] Do you use the word milk dud?

[Mary Robinette] No, but we do talk about satellites in orbit.

[Howard] Okay.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So. Veering back…

[Laughter]

[Margaret] I'm just remembering all of the rocketry euphemisms in the first book. I'm like, what euphemism?

[Brandon] What do you guys… Do you have an opinion on stories that are set in a historical period or in a fantasy world that just tries to pretend the problem was never there? Meaning people who want to write a steampunk story and just say, "You know what, we're going to write an alternate history version where this isn't an issue." Or people who write a fantasy novel, where they say, "You know what, in my world, racism just isn't an issue. We're not going to deal with it."

[Mary Robinette] The thing is… There are parts of me that love these optimistic visions of the world. I think when you're doing steampunk and doing that, you actually have to move it to a different world. You can't just erase history. That is deeply problematic. It's taking a lot of people's pain and going, "Ah, I just don't want to deal with your pain, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to acknowledge that you've been hurt. I'm just going to… Goggles, dresses, and overalls! Whee!"

[Brandon] Right. Can I… I don't want to… But this is… This is something that is very natural to start doing, and is a place where you might end up having to confront some of your biases because natural human instinct is, "Oh, I'll make it better. Isn't it just better…"

[Margaret] If that never happened?

[Brandon] If that never happened?

[Mary Robinette] While, yes, that would be… It did happen. The other thing that I would say has just slipped out of my head, so, Margaret, you talk, since you had a thing you wanted to say.

[Margaret] I was saying that I don't want to say that you can… It's like, "Oh." I think a trap that one can fall into in, say, steampunk or historical period, and you know that racism was a problem or sexism was a problem, but you don't want to deal with that. The way to not deal with not dealing with that is to not have, say, any characters of color in your book, so that lets you ignore racism.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] That's a bad way of dealing with that.

[Mary Robinette] Don't do that.

[Margaret] I mean, clearly, if you're doing steampunk, you're creating an alternate history. There were not giant rail lines of flying zeppelins. I don't even know why you'd have a rail line if you were flying, but…

[Mary Robinette] But still…

[Margaret] Whatever, it wasn't there. But if that's the only thing you've changed, and everybody is also still white and upper-class and… Who is shoveling coal and how are we thinking about this?

[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is the thing that… Unfortunately, as a species, we tend to just always other people. If we're not going to do it along race lines or gender lines, we're going to find something else. There is always, unfortunately, going to be oppression. I wish that that were not the case, but I find it difficult to believe that there wouldn't be some form of oppression. So when you decide that it's like, "You know what, I'm not going to have racism." But there will still be some other… It's like there's something, unfortunately, is going to fill that gap. There's going to be…

[Howard] There needs to be an unjust imbalance somewhere.

[Mary Robinette] There's going to be ramifications of that choice.

[Margaret] It's ignoring the fact that this lifestyle was made possible because of an oppressed underclass.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Honestly, folks, and this is uncomfortable truth to hear, it's still the case.

[Margaret] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Like, the majority of the wealth in the world is in the United States, and even if you are poor, there are people in the world who are supporting your lifestyle who have it worse than you.

[Howard] There's a concept that super useful for trying to understand the unjust imbalances. Marginalizations. That is the concept of an external cost. If you want to write a flawed society, think about what the external cost is. A good example of external cost is secondhand smoke. I want to smoke. Yes, it cost me something, and it also makes everyone around me uncomfortable, and it changes the smell of the room, and that one's kind of obvious. What if the cigarette smoker couldn't get cancer, and there is no primary cost for them? Suddenly, we have an unjust imbalance that's really unjust. So look at external costs, and as you are creating your society, your secondary world fantasy, your far-flung future, ask yourself who benefits from the external cost and who is paying the external cost unjustly.

[Brandon] So, last question along this topic. You want to write a protagonist who is a product of their society, and therefore has certain biases that we would consider reprehensible. You don't want to… Say you're writing a historical novel. You want to be realistic, although sometimes realism is used as an excuse for things, as we've talked about before. But you want to… You want to be realistic. You don't want this character to be villainous, but you also want them to be a product of their society. Any tips?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I do is to always have someone that can comment or call them on their bullshit.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the ways that you can let the reader know that this character is reprehensible, but that you are not giving approval to that. Because there's a difference between the character being reprehensible and the text saying that that reprehensible trait is a good and positive thing. So having someone who can call them on it, having there be consequences for the reprehensible traits, these are things that I think can help when you're doing that. The other aspect of that is trying to understand why the character has those opinions. Sometimes it's just the way they were raised and imprinted and they have no idea that those things are false or bad or problematic. Sometimes it's… More frequently, when you're dealing with forms of oppression, there is a sense of safety that has been challenged in some way, and that they think, by maintaining this particular status quo, that they will maintain their own security. Or that they will lose something if the status quo shifts. So if you think about the why's of their choices and their opinions, that's going to help you have a character that isn't just "I have this terr… I'm evil." Yeah, evilness is evil.

[Margaret] I'm thinking also if you have a protagonist who is a product of an imperfect society, and being a product, you want to be able to say, "Well, yes, they probably hold some of these imperfect views." What I would be careful of is making sure, since I'll probably have other characters of the society who probably have similar views who are villains, making sure I'm not giving my protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they happen to be the protagonist.

[Brandon] That's a very good point. Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like, "He's a great guy, so it's okay that…" That's where I think it can get really sticky.

[Brandon] Yeah. I'm going to give us our homework today. Your homework's actually to take a character who is either in some media form or someone you have written who is a wish fulfillment character. This is a character for whom things have gone really well. Things might be easy. They're at the top of their power structure. Even though they might be facing very hard external problems in the form of slaying a dragon or rising to the head of their company or something like this, there are certainly obstacles to them, they are in a position where they're able to command a lot of weight of authority and privilege. Take that character, and move them to the bottom of a different power structure or put them in a place where suddenly those things no longer exist for them. See where that story goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Entry tags:

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

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/09/16/13-37-what-writers-get-wrong-with-j-y-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.

Current Mood: wayback

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 7.7: Historical Fantasy

Writing Excuses 7.7: Historical Fantasy

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/02/12/writing-excuses-7-7-historical-fantasy/

Key Points: alternate history changes a historical fact and extrapolates, while historical fantasy adds a magical element to history and goes on from there. Think through how it affects society, but don't push too hard. Mary said, "Jane Austen needs more rotary cannons." Historical fantasy mixes the familiar with the strange. Do your research! Historical fantasy and urban fantasy are the same thing, just in different times. Get familiar with the culture and society. Talk with experts. Beware language, for it doth shift, but you are writing for modern readers.
( Petticoats and parasols? )
[Brandon] You know, let's make that our writing prompt. Just to say, think about a story from the past, or a historical period that you have been particularly interested in at one point in time. Go ahead and try and write a story set in that time. Do a little bit of research. Don't go crazy overboard. Do a little bit. Write a story. Then start to fact check yourself. See if this is a process you enjoy.
[Howard] Figure out if you love it.
[Brandon] Yup. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.