Using the (Social) Tools You Have

I wonder if you've ever had this experience: you're reading a story set in a far-away world, either far future or far past or far distant in species or dimension, and despite this incredible distance and differences in every detail of their environment, protagonists in this environment seem to be motivated by modern world values. As you can probably guess, the most common version of this that I've run into is the female protagonist who protests the fact that she has no control over her life - easily imagining all the amazing things she could do if only every member of her family and her society and every institution around her weren't there to prevent it.

Call it a pet peeve, but this drives me crazy.

Let me be clear. I am not trying to say that people always accept their lot in life. Any time you have an imbalance of freedoms between one group and another, the group with fewer freedoms will most likely notice the difference, and certain members of that group will feel the need to protest or do something about it. Whether that protestation is quiet, or gets quashed, or turns into revolution depends on social and historical context.

What you'll find, though, is that that same social and historical context - the worldbuilding that so many of you work so hard to achieve - will have deep implications for how the downtrodden think about objecting to their status. Often enough, they won't object at all.

The powerless often have power in certain circumscribed areas. Noble women in the year 1000 AD in Japan led very closeted lives and were entirely protected and directed by their men - but. They learned how to protect themselves by finding powerful protectors among those men. This meant they knew which men to approach, which to allow close, and how to handle them. They knew how to use family alliances on both maternal and paternal sides in order to achieve security or advancement. They also knew how to use their skills with writing to gain prestige, or how to use their skills in memorization of classic poems to get attention. Classic poems may not seem like a big tool for social advancement, but you might be surprised how important they were in the Heian era Imperial court.

People learn to use the social skills they have. They see what works and what doesn't, and they pursue those areas where they can win small victories. Or big ones, as the case may be. Jacqueline Carey's Phèdre (Kushiel's Dart) uses all of her personal skills as a courtesan and a spy to get things done that you might not expect.

In fact, if you think about it, accidentally giving a culturally situated character modern expectations and sensibilities will not help but hurt them. Suddenly they'll appear to believe that they have absolutely no useful skills, and no avenues to escape the oppression they endure - which is not in fact the case. At the same time they'll be able to imagine possibilities that are both implausible and impractical for a person in their situation. So the chances that they'll be able to accomplish anything go down, and since their vision is too unrestrained, they'll be more frustrated than ever. In those circumstances the author may feel tempted to use modern means to give them opportunities for action, but that will only draw the story further away from the world and cultural/social situation that the author intended.

So I encourage you to think through how your characters use the social tools they have to get things accomplished. See if you can find a situated way for your character to work toward his or her own ends. If they can use gossip or information control, use that. If they can stealthily organize masses of people, use that. A character can take the social walls that limit them, turn them into shields and use them for protection.

If you let your characters use the social tools they have, they'll fit far better into their own worlds, and you'd be surprised how much they can accomplish.

Wow! Great article on invented languages

My friend Dave Malinowski put me onto this terrific article, where two experts on invented languages answer questions about the topic. The experts are Paul Frommer, inventor of Avatar's Na'vi language, and Arika Okrent, author of "In the Land of Invented Languages." Check it out!

An interesting article

The online magazine First Things has a thought-provoking article right now about the relationship between sf/f and religion. It's here, if you're curious.

The right narrator

I'm designing a new story. I always enjoy designing because most of it I can do freely in my head any time I want, and not have to worry about whether I can find the time to sit down at my computer. Those who know me well also know that I design by talking out loud - so I do a lot of design while bouncing ideas off various friends (you know who you are - thanks so much!!!).

I've talked before about story design, and the various steps I go through to get a linguistics/alien story going (linguistic problem, aliens, technology level, plot, language, to summarize briefly). This time, though, I'm not dealing with aliens; I'm writing a fantasy story about ancient Japan. This gives me real-time research instead of intensive world and language design, but in fact my attitude about getting close to the thinking process of the people involved remains almost the same. I'm at the last step now, which for the aliens was "language," i.e. deciding what kind of language to use to portray the alien point of view.

For this story I'm calling the step "narrator." I could always generalize and call it narrator for the other type of story too. It's really important to think through:

1. who your narrator is, i.e. how they allow you to get the best point of view on the core conflict of the story, and
2. what their voice is like

I'm not going to spend much time on voice here because I've posted about it several times before. I'm going instead to talk about #1.

Protagonist narrators are the most common in all the works I've read. These come in a number of varieties - I'm not so much talking about 1st versus 3rd person narration here but about whether the narration is delivered in the moment or retrospectively. (I'll talk about non-protagonist narrators below.)

In-the-moment narration works well if you're looking for a sense of visceral closeness to the story. The reader shares sensations, judgments and discoveries with the protagonist as the protagonist has them. This type of narration also allows your reader to experience the protagonist's particular form of myopia, including unreliability (due to insanity, bad judgment, or ignorance). It keeps you as a writer from having to withhold information deliberately and potentially irritate your reader.

Retrospective works well for other purposes. A retrospective narrator has more control over the flow of the story, and can orient the reader on the meta-level to the story as a whole. This allows the writer more freedom to play with chronology because it typically involves less requirement for the end of one section to stick to the beginning of the next. The protagonist can comment on his/her past judgments and orient the reader to a larger moral/general message, like saying what a fool he was when he was a kid. And I'm sure you've often seen retrospective narration used for foreshadowing with phrases like "little did we realize at the time..."

Of course, you can also use more than one narrator. I don't think that switching point of view should be done lightly - it should have a distinct purpose. Crime novels will sometimes dip into the antagonist's viewpoint in order to increase the sense of peril. I personally use point of view switches to show misunderstandings, sometimes within the very same conversation. Part of what I try to do with a switch of narrator is show my readers that no issue is as clear-cut as it seems to any one character in the story, and that even the most reliable characters can still be a little bit wrong. This is definitely the case with my story, The Eminence's Match (forthcoming from Panverse Publishing) - not one of the characters is entirely reliable.

I promised I'd talk about a non-protagonist narrator, and here I am: when you're thinking about who the narrator is, you should think through what the consequences of your choice are for what the story is about. The story I'm designing right now is about a young woman in Heian Japan who goes mad and enters an alternate world (trying to avoid too many spoilers as yet). She's most definitely the protagonist, but there are some difficulties with the idea of using her as a narrator. The biggest one is that she goes mad and becomes unable to tell what is real and what isn't. This makes her a pretty tough vehicle for the reader if I want to keep my reader oriented in the story. I could go for distant narration, but I'd lose some of that sense of closeness that I enjoy so much. So I've just decided to have the story narrated by one of the people who is trying to influence her life (save her vs. cast her down). One of the effects of this is that the story isn't about her "figuring out what is happening" any more - an advantage, since it's going to be tough for her to figure out anything at a certain point. The story shifts when the narrator changes, into a story about three different people trying to influence her in different directions, and which one is going to win. I need to make sure that I keep the focus on her, but this is still a much cleaner model, and I'm very excited about it.

I hope you find these thoughts give you some insight into your own story design process.