Wonderful Article

I thought I should share this link to a really terrific article by Nisi Shawl about portraying minorities in your work if you aren't a member of a minority (or of a particular minority) yourself. It's on the SFWA website, here.

Darmok and Me

I have a couple of serious posts brewing, but I thought today I'd keep it light and whimsical... partly because I exercised this morning and do want to get some writing done before my kids-at-school window closes, and partially because I discovered that someone had googled "Darmok" and found me.

If you've read my first published story, you already know why I find this delightful.

Even those who know me well - but from recent times - may not know that I was a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan in college. Not a Trekker, and never a "dress-up-and-go-to-cons" type, but someone who would watch Star Trek TNG every single week. This actually lasted all the way through getting married, and I watched Voyager and Deep Space Nine too, and even Enterprise. My first favorite was TNG, and DS9 was second. Something about the aliens... you all know how I love to think about the alien experience.

I remember very well when I first saw "Darmok." I was fascinated. I kept hoping I'd catch it on reruns. There was something about the language premise of a people who would speak only indirectly, in allusions to a set of stories they shared, that really fascinated me. I think it was the fact that someone had at last found a way to stump the universal translator! I was glued to the screen, and afterwards I kept thinking about the episode, thinking and thinking.

I was struggling with it.

I mean, what a brilliant concept! But things about it kept bugging me. I guess I'd already come into my obsession with cultural depth in science fiction and fantasy, even though I hadn't yet discovered writing. How, I wondered, had these folks become a spacefaring people if they didn't ever speak in productive sentences? Were there stories in their canon concerning circuits and how they went together? More than that - how was this language learned?

I'm actually pretty flexible when it comes to my expectations about how languages are learned. Kids are amazing, and they can learn a lot from the data that they're presented with. But grammar, as a force, is pretty irresistible. Witness the creole languages that grow out of pidgin languages: the first generation cobbles something choppy together so they can get things done even though they don't have a common language, but the second generation takes that and gives it grammar. It's pretty amazing.

So I struggled with the idea that a guy like the alien captain, when facing death, would still be speaking in choppy sentences. I figured the language concept would work, but that the language would have to have a grammar and it would have to be spoken productively somewhere, sometime - the same place where the language would be learned by children. Then the people would just have to have some vastly compelling reason why they'd speak in the oblique manner.

The idea sat in my head for a very long time. The vastly compelling reason was easy to come up with: religion. Religions are intimately linked to patterns of language use, and they're very good at setting up rules and taboos, so it fit perfectly. Then I realized that the stories they told were considered religious, and were told in a holy place. That led to the idea that the holy place was a community building where people could spend hours on a regular basis, particularly as children, and where behaviors would be learned.

Then I left it alone for a long time, and finally after a number of years I wrote "Let the Word Take Me." So if you've read it, and you were ever curious, yes, there's a reason it reminds you of "Darmok." In the first draft the language concept was my "punch line" and the story didn't work, exactly because I was using the Star Trek idea as the surprise - and after Darmok, it's not a surprise any more. When the story really started to take off was when I combined the Darmok language concept with some of my own experiences in Japan - an additional social aspect - and with some concepts from anthropology about coming of age.

So in the end, this post has turned not only into the story of Darmok and me, but a little description of the process of writing, and how my ideas came together for that initial story, which appeared in Analog in July/August 2008.

At this point, my stories are made up of language concepts and ideas that are all mine, but I'm very grateful for that initial inspiration, or I wouldn't be where I am today.

A different value: choice

Would you rather have a choice? Or would you rather not?

I'm going to guess that when the question is asked that way, a lot of people will answer, "yes." In America, we tend to like to have choices. We have tons of them - just walk into the supermarket and try to buy breakfast cereal, or laundry detergent, and you'll discover how many options go into just a single choice around here.

Or how about a restaurant, when you order? Would you like soup or salad with that? Salad? Great. What kind of dressing? You have six options to choose from.

This is the kind of thing that many Americans relish. It's also the kind of thing that shuts a lot of people's brains down. My Australian and British friends tend to wonder at the diversity of options over here, and at the same time say, "Isn't it ridiculous?"

The availability of choice has also changed over time. When I was a kid, I never remember choosing what I had for breakfast, except when I chose my breakfast cereal at the store. I chose the cereal then, and then ate it day after day. But I find myself asking my kids what they'd like on almost a daily basis. This becomes a problem, because it opens me up to complaints about having given them the wrong thing. I never gave the choice problem a single thought when I began this routine, but I probably should have. Now I have to try to train my kids out of being finicky. Sad to say, I was the one who inadvertently trained them into it, at least where breakfast was concerned.

And then there are life choices. We talk about these with our kids regularly. If someone at school is constantly bugging you, what do you do? Often enough, you feel like you have no options - so talking it out and making sure you consider different possibilities can have great value. Tell the teacher is one option. Call the kid's bluff is another option. Bluff or tease back is another, and yet another is to get violent. Some of these options are socially acceptable, and others are not - and don't even get me started about questions like drugs and alcohol. I've already mentioned those issues to my kids, even though they're just 4 and 6. I figure the orientation had better start early.

My friend Janice Hardy has a great little quote in her book, The Shifter: "She who has a choice has trouble."

Now, when it comes to writing and worldbuilding advice, I'll start with the obvious: make sure that your setting has a level of choice consistent with that present in any historical analog you're using for background. Don't have your medieval character walk into the equivalent of a Y2K grocery store, or even a 1950's grocery store! If you're working from the ground up in a science fictional or fantasy economy, think through how goods are supplied and transported, and that will help you arrive at how they might be presented. Different social groups can have different ways of accessing goods depending on their level of affluence, as well.

Second, keep your eye out for places where people are likely to be asked to make choices, either between objects or between life options. You can really give your world a lot of depth if you can think through what kind of reasoning might go into your character's choices in each situation.

Third - and I think this is the sneaky one - keep your eye out for a character's tacit expectation of choice. A character without the means to access the choices available to others will not react easily to being presented with the kind choice a rich or powerful person is accustomed to dealing with. The options that spring up in the character's mind will be limited by their culture and upbringing. They'll probably struggle. They'll probably also wonder why they have to choose at all, and whether there's any potential for punishment involved in the choice. Furthermore, they'll be far more likely simply to accept what they're given without question or objection. So watch out for situations where your poor or undercaste character acts as if he/she feels entitled to the privileges of the rich. Even as this character objects to his/her status, even as he/she plots revolution, there's going to be a subconscious level on which they fear the ability to make a choice.

It's something to think about.