I just learned about this new "followers" function on blogspot, thanks to my friend Ann Wilkes. So for those of you who visit here a lot, you can sign up to follow if you like, and your name will appear here on the page. Now I'll have to go looking around and find my own favorite blogspot blogs to follow!
Makes me think of that song about the greenwood tree...
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
Considering Deafness
I've been thinking about deafness a good deal recently because I have a deaf character in a story I'm working on. Deafness fascinates me because it is, in one sense, a medical problem - caused by nerve defect, for example, or accident, or abuse of the ears over a long period of time - but in another sense it is a badge of membership in a language community.
The difference between auditory languages and visual languages is sometimes called a "channel" difference. Channel effectively means which sensory pathway is chosen for the language conduit, and in past entries I've discussed this a little; I know I've mentioned chemical scent languages a couple of times.
In a sense, by being born without hearing or becoming deaf, a person loses one channel. They then have two choices: attempt to "cure" the deafness medically, or use another language channel. In school I saw a fascinating video about cochlear implants, which can cause some deaf people to begin to hear. In that video was one woman who lost hearing as an adult, and she definitely felt rescued by the implant which restored her hearing. Then there were the children, and therein lay the conflict.
A pair of hearing parents with a deaf child had no hesitation about "restoring" the child's hearing.
A pair of deaf parents with a deaf child did not want to take away the deafness which was part of what defined her, didn't want in a sense to evict her from the cultural community to which they belonged.
Part of what entered into their decision was having someone assess the speech of other children who had had cochlear implants, and tell them whether they "sounded deaf" or not. They made their decision to forego the implant because they felt that giving her hearing would oust her from true membership in the deaf community, and they weren't convinced that it would give her true membership in the hearing community.
This last one is an issue of brain plasticity, or the ability of the brain to learn new language information. A rule of thumb on child language states effectively that the brain loses the ability to acquire nativelike phonological ability (i.e. pronunciation) at about age 6; grammar not until about age 13. Thus the later a child receives a cochlear implant, the more difficulty that child will have in processing the sound and turning that into natural-sounding auditory language.
Personally I thought it a shame that the child in question should miss out on hearing all the wonderful sounds of the world - but on the other hand, I understood the parents' cultural point of view.
I want to talk also about sign language a little, but I'm going to have to save that for another post.
The difference between auditory languages and visual languages is sometimes called a "channel" difference. Channel effectively means which sensory pathway is chosen for the language conduit, and in past entries I've discussed this a little; I know I've mentioned chemical scent languages a couple of times.
In a sense, by being born without hearing or becoming deaf, a person loses one channel. They then have two choices: attempt to "cure" the deafness medically, or use another language channel. In school I saw a fascinating video about cochlear implants, which can cause some deaf people to begin to hear. In that video was one woman who lost hearing as an adult, and she definitely felt rescued by the implant which restored her hearing. Then there were the children, and therein lay the conflict.
A pair of hearing parents with a deaf child had no hesitation about "restoring" the child's hearing.
A pair of deaf parents with a deaf child did not want to take away the deafness which was part of what defined her, didn't want in a sense to evict her from the cultural community to which they belonged.
Part of what entered into their decision was having someone assess the speech of other children who had had cochlear implants, and tell them whether they "sounded deaf" or not. They made their decision to forego the implant because they felt that giving her hearing would oust her from true membership in the deaf community, and they weren't convinced that it would give her true membership in the hearing community.
This last one is an issue of brain plasticity, or the ability of the brain to learn new language information. A rule of thumb on child language states effectively that the brain loses the ability to acquire nativelike phonological ability (i.e. pronunciation) at about age 6; grammar not until about age 13. Thus the later a child receives a cochlear implant, the more difficulty that child will have in processing the sound and turning that into natural-sounding auditory language.
Personally I thought it a shame that the child in question should miss out on hearing all the wonderful sounds of the world - but on the other hand, I understood the parents' cultural point of view.
I want to talk also about sign language a little, but I'm going to have to save that for another post.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Character judgment and psychology
I had lunch today with a friend who wears rings on her toes - one on each foot. She told me that someone recently asked her if she was Indian (she's not), because apparently there is a tradition involving wearing one toe ring on each foot if you are a married woman. This isn't a tradition I'm familiar with myself, but I do have a necklace my mother brought back from India, which my mother told me is a "married woman's necklace."
This kind of thing provides terrific evidence of the fact that even the smallest things can be judged significant in people's lives. A man's earring worn on the right ear versus the left used to have significance in the gay community. The closing of a kimono left-side first or right-side first can be significant, or the way you pick up a teacup.
In each case, the significance of the object or act is in the head of the character doing the judging.
This relates to my post of yesterday, inasmuch as characters can be differentiated by the way they judge situations. I find it fascinating to write a conversation between two people from two different cultural groups, and to switch point of view halfway through, so that readers can share the difference between what the two people notice in the interaction, how they judge the significance of one another's clothing, posture, etc. The most fun for me is when the two don't understand each other because they can't entirely back off their own cultural categories and judgments.
Individuals can also have different ways of judging. Imagine the way that a detective looks at a room, compared to the way that a child looks at it. Each will be looking for different things, putting importance on very particular and personally relevant details.
And then there are the characters with extreme, or impaired, judgment. This is where psychology comes into play. When I write a character as simply mean-spirited I find I don't know where to go; I'm grasping at mean things for that person to do. When I go into their psychology to identify a traumatic event that has changed their judgment, or even to identify a mental illness that alters their perception and judgment of events, it has a wonderful effect: it ties down the driving forces behind their behavior. Suddenly their behavior is no longer random, but principled, and I can take their strangeness much further without straining credibility.
I'd like to add one last observation that comes from the "show don't tell" arena. Having a character with a complex cultural background, or a mental illness, doesn't mean that everything about their culture or judgment has to be explained. They can demonstrate it in the kinds of things they treat as unremarkable, or where they suddenly take offense. Even an offhand descriptive adjective can be turned toward illuminating their point of view. I've even gone so far as to try to build the mental characteristics of a character into the prose style I use to write their voice. I'm thinking in particular of an obsessive-compulsive Machiavellian character I'm working on, who has a tendency to fixate on a topic and return to it over and over in his thoughts, always judging things instantly and never questioning himself in any way.
I'll admit here that I have trouble writing non-chronologically. The trick is, I really like the feeling that each chapter will be different because of subtle changes in character viewpoint that grow out of the character's experience.
In any case, character judgment and psychology are productive avenues to explore, if you haven't already.
This kind of thing provides terrific evidence of the fact that even the smallest things can be judged significant in people's lives. A man's earring worn on the right ear versus the left used to have significance in the gay community. The closing of a kimono left-side first or right-side first can be significant, or the way you pick up a teacup.
In each case, the significance of the object or act is in the head of the character doing the judging.
This relates to my post of yesterday, inasmuch as characters can be differentiated by the way they judge situations. I find it fascinating to write a conversation between two people from two different cultural groups, and to switch point of view halfway through, so that readers can share the difference between what the two people notice in the interaction, how they judge the significance of one another's clothing, posture, etc. The most fun for me is when the two don't understand each other because they can't entirely back off their own cultural categories and judgments.
Individuals can also have different ways of judging. Imagine the way that a detective looks at a room, compared to the way that a child looks at it. Each will be looking for different things, putting importance on very particular and personally relevant details.
And then there are the characters with extreme, or impaired, judgment. This is where psychology comes into play. When I write a character as simply mean-spirited I find I don't know where to go; I'm grasping at mean things for that person to do. When I go into their psychology to identify a traumatic event that has changed their judgment, or even to identify a mental illness that alters their perception and judgment of events, it has a wonderful effect: it ties down the driving forces behind their behavior. Suddenly their behavior is no longer random, but principled, and I can take their strangeness much further without straining credibility.
I'd like to add one last observation that comes from the "show don't tell" arena. Having a character with a complex cultural background, or a mental illness, doesn't mean that everything about their culture or judgment has to be explained. They can demonstrate it in the kinds of things they treat as unremarkable, or where they suddenly take offense. Even an offhand descriptive adjective can be turned toward illuminating their point of view. I've even gone so far as to try to build the mental characteristics of a character into the prose style I use to write their voice. I'm thinking in particular of an obsessive-compulsive Machiavellian character I'm working on, who has a tendency to fixate on a topic and return to it over and over in his thoughts, always judging things instantly and never questioning himself in any way.
I'll admit here that I have trouble writing non-chronologically. The trick is, I really like the feeling that each chapter will be different because of subtle changes in character viewpoint that grow out of the character's experience.
In any case, character judgment and psychology are productive avenues to explore, if you haven't already.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Don't make them all the same
Keeping characters different from each other can be hard. I've noticed this especially when I read a large number of books from the same author; at a certain point, some of the characters will start to blend together across contexts. As a reader I never appreciate this. As a writer I'm always on my guard.
My attempted solution - not that I can swear it won't happen eventually, but I'll do my best - is to make my own characters as grounded culturally and linguistically as I can. To think about them in terms of their genetic background, physiology, upbringing, and personal experience.
I've seen a couple of "character sheets" floating around the forums this week, where people have been asking if they have to know all these different things about all their characters, or if they need to write journals from the character's point of view. I think these things can help, but they can also be hard to do when you're sitting down to start a book. I'd say start with a general sense of the person, their motivations and goals and why these things are important to them. Then, as you go forward, just keep awareness of the different kinds of questions you might like to answer on the more subtle levels. The more you write about a character, the better you get to know them and the more nuance you can add. In my experience, for getting to know a character and how they operate, there's no substitute for writing a story from their point of view - even just starting and attempting one that will never get published. It makes you dig in more than you need to if you're just using a character sheet and looking at them from the outside.
The other thing is, don't make every character from a particular alien or racial group exactly the same. This is what I've earlier referred to as "running true to type." It's fun to have a group of people from different races, whether that be elves, dwarves and humans, Braxana and Azeans (thanks to C.S. Friedman) or the people of Sendaria, Arendia, Nyissa etc. (thanks to David Eddings). But if the belief systems of these people are entirely uncontested, uniform across the race or alien group, the story won't have all the dimension it could.
There are two ways to approach this. One is from the character direction, making sure that your characters are three-dimensional and have motives and inner conflicts and all those important things. That's certainly true of the characters from the authors I've mentioned. The other is to think directly about the character's relationship to the social group they belong to. I couldn't say whether other authors have thought about this; they may well have.
Take a social group that has a particular vocation, belief, or ideology that they are meant to follow. You end up with a situation where children of that group are being told "this is what you are like"; "this is how you are supposed to act." How do the kids then react to that? Do they embrace it? Are they resentful of it? Resigned? Subversive? Do they reject it directly? And if they reject it, do they keep some of the beliefs subconsciously without realizing it? All these are available options.
Ask yourself another question, too: what does it mean to be fortunate among these people? What about unfortunate? Even a group of poor or undercaste will have a difference between the fortunate and unfortunate among them, and so will a group of nobles. And groups like these will always have inner conflicts over things of value, which coexist with conflicts between groups.
Once you've thought through a few things like this, making characters different can be a bit easier. And fun, too!
My attempted solution - not that I can swear it won't happen eventually, but I'll do my best - is to make my own characters as grounded culturally and linguistically as I can. To think about them in terms of their genetic background, physiology, upbringing, and personal experience.
I've seen a couple of "character sheets" floating around the forums this week, where people have been asking if they have to know all these different things about all their characters, or if they need to write journals from the character's point of view. I think these things can help, but they can also be hard to do when you're sitting down to start a book. I'd say start with a general sense of the person, their motivations and goals and why these things are important to them. Then, as you go forward, just keep awareness of the different kinds of questions you might like to answer on the more subtle levels. The more you write about a character, the better you get to know them and the more nuance you can add. In my experience, for getting to know a character and how they operate, there's no substitute for writing a story from their point of view - even just starting and attempting one that will never get published. It makes you dig in more than you need to if you're just using a character sheet and looking at them from the outside.
The other thing is, don't make every character from a particular alien or racial group exactly the same. This is what I've earlier referred to as "running true to type." It's fun to have a group of people from different races, whether that be elves, dwarves and humans, Braxana and Azeans (thanks to C.S. Friedman) or the people of Sendaria, Arendia, Nyissa etc. (thanks to David Eddings). But if the belief systems of these people are entirely uncontested, uniform across the race or alien group, the story won't have all the dimension it could.
There are two ways to approach this. One is from the character direction, making sure that your characters are three-dimensional and have motives and inner conflicts and all those important things. That's certainly true of the characters from the authors I've mentioned. The other is to think directly about the character's relationship to the social group they belong to. I couldn't say whether other authors have thought about this; they may well have.
Take a social group that has a particular vocation, belief, or ideology that they are meant to follow. You end up with a situation where children of that group are being told "this is what you are like"; "this is how you are supposed to act." How do the kids then react to that? Do they embrace it? Are they resentful of it? Resigned? Subversive? Do they reject it directly? And if they reject it, do they keep some of the beliefs subconsciously without realizing it? All these are available options.
Ask yourself another question, too: what does it mean to be fortunate among these people? What about unfortunate? Even a group of poor or undercaste will have a difference between the fortunate and unfortunate among them, and so will a group of nobles. And groups like these will always have inner conflicts over things of value, which coexist with conflicts between groups.
Once you've thought through a few things like this, making characters different can be a bit easier. And fun, too!
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