The Shape of Families

I've been thinking about families for a lot of reasons. One is the ongoing U.S. debate over gay marriage; another is that I've been reading The Tale of Genji which features a very different family structure from the Imperial court of Japan in the Heian period; another is that my latest alien species, the Cochee-coco, have very different concepts of family. So I'll come back to each of these below.

What do we think of when we hear the word "family"? Well, I think of mother-father-sister-brother. This is most likely because that was the shape of the family that I grew up in. Of course, that's not the only shape a family can take. At this point I start thinking of all the permutations I know of, and really it would be both tedious and exhausting just to list them all. I'll refer you though to a wonderful Sesame Street song called "Doing the Family Thing," which shows lots and lots of different kinds of families.

What I'd like to do is start by taking a look at some of the underlying principles behind family structure, and then looking at their consequences.

The prototypical family is based on the concept of matehood - physical matehood, by which I mean two individuals who can mate with one another and produce children (not that they necessarily do). Although gay marriages don't fall into this category, the criterion is not as restrictive as you might think. Monogamy is only one example of a family type based on the matehood concept; step-families also fall into this group with the simple addition of divorce or some other form of detachability. Families born of arranged marriages fall into this group, and so do polygynous and polyandrous family types (collectively known as polygamous).

The Imperial family of Heian Japan was quite complex because it was polygamous. Here's a quote from the introduction to Royall Tyler's translation of The Tale of Genji: "...the Emperor normally had a range of recognized relationships with women, less because of sexual acquisitiveness on his part than because he was required to make his prestige relatively widely accessible to the members of the upper aristocracy."(Penguin Classics 2001, p. xiii) So in addition to the single Empress there were Consorts and Intimates who had different status, and following from this, their many children had different importance within the society.

Other families might not have followed this same pattern. While the character Genji, who is officially a commoner, ends up having four or five wives, that was probably not so much the case outside the aristocracy. Which is to say that a single society doesn't always follow the identical family pattern throughout - something to think about if you're designing a society of your own.

Another way of organizing a family is based on the concept of soul-matehood. The change between the criterion of physical matehood and the criterion of soul-matehood is both inclusive and exclusive: it excludes families born of arranged marriage, and includes same-sex couples and their families. It also easily accommodates a happy family I know with two lesbian moms and two gay dads and their children (this one could very well be seen as lying on the border between the physical and soul matehood types).

A variant of the soul-matehood criterion appears among the otterlike aliens I created for my most recent alien linguistics story, "At Cross Purposes." The Cochee-coco are born as twins, and the twin relationship is the major organizing relationship of their society - but it is flexible, so twins who don't feel compatible can separate and go look for someone else to serve as their "twin." In fact it is a type of soul-matehood that is far closer than that of human societies, but it is primarily non-sexual. Cochee-coco can choose physical mates to be their de facto twins, but they don't always.

So, I thought to myself as I designed them, what would that mean for their family structure? Well, you could have a physically and soul-mated pair who lived with their children, and that would look like a typical family of humans. Then you could have a pair of unrelated male or female soul-mates who would live with their children, which might in some ways resemble a gay family. You could also have a pair of twins - male and female siblings, brothers, or sisters, who would live with their children. These might look to humans at first glance like incestuous families, but in fact the children would not be conceived with the siblings, but with physical mates outside the pair. You could also have very large family groups where twin pairs would want to live with their physical mates and their twins...

At a certain point I realized that this was far too interesting to include in my first story about the Cochee-coco, so I kept things simple and I'm thinking about how to include it in a story later on. I have no doubt that there are ripe opportunities for humans to misunderstand the nature of Cochee-coco families and for strife to arise from it.

One useful thing to think of when working with families of different types in your writing is to consider kinship terminology. What do people call each other? In some societies, the maternal uncle and paternal uncle are called by different terms because they are seen to have different social functions. Keep in mind also that some societies allow kin terms to be applied outside the family, and some don't. In America typically a person outside the family must be very close to merit a kinship term like Aunt or Uncle, while in Japan it's pretty standard to call people you don't know by kinship terms. In Japan the term you apply generally depends on the gender and the perceived age of the person you're talking to - a young boy would be "big brother" and an older man "uncle" and an even older man "grandfather." Mike Flynn does a great job of creating a society which applies kinship terms to everyone in his latest story in Analog, entitled "Cargo" (June 2010).

Another thing to consider when working with families is child-rearing. Who does it? Mom or dad? Or older siblings? Or the entire village? Do people keep track of paternity or not, and why? Do adults talk with children at all, or do they leave that to the older children?

If you're creating a society which uses different criteria for the creation of families, think through the possible permutations that the new criteria entail. Ask yourself how the people talk about one another, and how they think about one another. What does it mean to be a brother or sister? To half-brothers and half-sisters in the Japanese Imperial family, it would mean something very different from what I think of when I think of my own brother, and something very different again from the way that my Cochee-coco would think of their siblings. What does it mean to be a husband or wife (if they use those terms at all)?

Don't necessarily content yourself with maximally restrictive assumptions. Think about all your options, and make an informed choice. Your world, and your story, will be all the stronger for it.

Trying a new layout

I'm testing out some new layout possibilities, so the blog may do a few presto change-os in the next couple of hours. Just giving you a heads-up!

Getting ideas is a skill

I had a great idea last night. It was a premise idea, so I'm not going to tell you what it was, but I was really excited about it. I called Janice Hardy this morning to tell her about it, and I told her the idea (which she loved) and said I was psyched because I felt like I was getting ideas more often these days. She agreed. Here's how she put it:

Getting ideas is a skill.

This statement speaks to me - I think she's right. Back before I started writing I thought I had only one idea: it was the core concept behind the first novel I ever wrote, and the one which inspired me to create the world of Varin.

Only after I created Varin in great detail did I realize how many stories a single alternate world could hide inside it. I started writing those stories. Then I wondered if I had any other worlds in me and I created the Realm of Words, which appears in my novel Through This Gate (with my agent now). Of course, that world appeared to have lots of stories in it too.

So at that point it was clear to me that worlds could contain multiple story ideas of different strengths, and I started figuring out which ones would make more successful stand-alone stories than others.

Then I wrote Let the Word Take Me, my first linguistics story. That was one that wasn't really connected to a particular world - but it made me realize I could look for ideas in linguistics and anthropology, a very different kind of source. So I ran with that. I have tried to keep my alien-related stories in a consistent universe, mostly because I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel a lot of times (I reinvent it enough just creating my alien societies).

You might wonder at this point if I think this is the only way to get ideas. I don't. I've used story seeds before, and I always try to pull ideas out of everything around me. I've even posted about how one should look for stories everywhere. But I find there's a difference between picking up story elements from everywhere around me, and having a fully fledged idea leap into my head. One that I know from the start, with that certainty in my gut, will be a good story that's worth writing.

It's that that is happening for me more and more often. I'm having Japanese fantasy and Japanese urban fantasy ideas. Last night's idea was a concept best placed in the current day or very near future.

Janice calls this "exercising the idea muscle."

If I were to make any recommendations for other authors or aspiring authors, it would be not just to exercise the idea muscle by coming up with lots of ideas, but to make sure you follow through and pursue these ideas to a full story draft. Only once you've gotten through the process of drafting, revision and critique will you get a sense of how the initial story idea relates to the final product. And that's what will give you the best sense of which story ideas are really, resonantly successful and which are only just fine.

So that means I have to go off now and think about how to draft this new idea.

This is so good you may already have seen it...

Forget about "lol," this lovely illustrated blog post about "alot" had me giggling loudly enough that I was concerned I'd wake my children. If you need a chuckle in your day, you must read...

The Alot is Better Than You at Everything

Interesting article on social policy by J.K. Rowling

This article may start out at the front by talking about a political party you aren't familiar with (the British Tories), but keep reading, because I thought it was quite a poignant statement on behalf of single-parent families, and shows a lot of principle and backbone on the part of Ms. Rowling. I thought maybe all of you might find it interesting.

Here's the link.

It makes me think I should do a post on family structure... hmm....

Where am I? - Setting versus Grounding

We all know that a good setting for a story is important. I love to build worlds, and I know many people who visit here do, too. Sometimes very extensive ones. Of course, that doesn't mean that mainstream writers don't have to work on their worldbuilding too - they're just building a version of the real world instead of an independent, alternate world.

When we talk about setting, we talk about all kinds of elements that a world has - climate, ecology, flora, fauna, human/sentient communities, demographics, economy, social structure, technology, etc, etc. Everything we think through in our worldbuilding process can be useful to the portrayal of a world in a vibrant way in a story.

Super. But setting on its own isn't enough to make a story take off - every story needs grounding.

This might best be explained with a metaphor.

As a writer, you want to take your reader on a journey. You want to grab them by the hand (or the hair, the shoulder, or the guts, depending on the kind of story) and pull them through the story with you. If you're like me and you want to create a really exciting hook, that means you want to grab them as quickly as possible and start pulling with as much force as you can. Grounding, then, is the difference between having them running alongside you and having them pulled to their deaths behind galloping horses. If you want the reader to come with you - especially at a very quick pace - you want to start by giving them a solid place to jump off from.

On a basic level, grounding is about who/when/where. Who am I (the narrator or protagonist)? Where am I (the physical location)? When am I (the chronological location)? Each of these things can be indicated or elaborated in different ways. The reader isn't looking for every detail of your worldbuilding here - only some basic orientation that can be provided by a personal pronoun (I, he, she) and a sense of voice (who), a description of light or of nearby objects (where/when).

You'll probably tell me at this point that not every story needs all this. What about stories where the narrator is disoriented, lost, disembodied, or otherwise compromised, and doesn't know where he is? What about the confused time traveler?

Well, you're right. The type of grounding required by a story depends on the story. If you're going to have a physical departure from a location, you need a sense (even a confused, internal guess) of what that location is. A pitch-dark place with a hard floor can be enough if properly conveyed. If you're going to have personal interactions, it's good to have a sense of who the narrator is.

Look at your story. Pay particular attention to the place where the conflict starts - the spot where the hook grabs and pulls in a direction. The nature and direction of that pull will tell you what information might be needed for grounding.

Let me give some examples from my recent experience.

I was reading a draft from one of my many writer friends recently, and felt confused. I thought the protagonist was standing in one place when she was standing in another. I looked back at the descriptions, and the sentence was clear: a different character was standing in the spot where I'd mentally put the protagonist. There was no ambiguity. But when I looked back over the previous paragraphs, they were all internalization - excellent grounding for the mental and moral position of the protagonist, but not of a physical position. Because the different character was located physically, I needed to ask my friend to give the protagonist a physical location as well.

When I was drafting my story, "At Cross Purposes," I discovered that first-round readers were confused at the start. Yes, I was trying for a very quick hook. I was also creating a story where two unexpected things happened one right after the other, and I didn't have enough information to have the two departures make sense as departures. I needed to go back and establish physical location (she's on a shuttle!) and ongoing activity (they're flying around servicing machines) in order for those departures to be more tolerable to the human brain (she discovers something that shocks her, and then it turns out not to be at all what she expected). If you think about it, a departure from expectations means little if you don't have any sense of what expectations are.

I'm currently working on a story with a narrator who is supposed to start as an enigma. Reading about him, you're supposed to wonder, "Who is this guy, precisely?" What you're not supposed to wonder is "What the heck is going on?" I was quite happy with my first sentence, which was, "Of course people write letters; I knew that from watching the monks." The grounding here is that we have a character (I) who watches monks, which implies he's at or near a place where monks live. The next hint as to setting was that the character expresses dislike of letters written in Chinese, because he doesn't care about court business - that at least lets us know we're dealing with Asian monks rather than European ones. Then someone writes the narrator a letter, and the letter is composed in a very particular style that is specific to an era of Japanese history. The problem was, the hints were too sparse and too indirect. I needed better location and time grounding if I wanted readers to accept the style in which the letter was written. So I added the name of the temple, Ninnaji. That gives readers a Japanese language hint, and then optional for those who know about temples and Japanese history, is the fact that Ninnaji is an existing temple in Kyoto which has been around since the Heian era. Then I added that my narrator had stolen the letter in Chinese from "the Emperor's messenger." While that's not specific to the Heian era, it at least is an indication that the time period isn't the present day, and I'm hoping it will get readers looking for further clues - in which case, the letter-writing style can be a clue rather than a mystery.

No matter what the setting, every story needs grounding, and the choice of grounding information is critical to the success of a story opening - so keep your eyes out for it.

Fallow Mind Time

I went camping this weekend. I did not take my computer. The notebook I brought with me was a little 4x6 journal from Japan, and in it I wrote less than a page - all tiny little things to jog my memory.

I packed stuff. Drove windy roads (very windy roads, where I had to be super-careful not to nauseate my poor son). Unpacked stuff. Cooked meals over fire (and on the wood-burning tent cabin stove). Hiked.

And two days in, the answer to a plot problem just bloomed in my head like a flower. So I wrote a couple of notes down, and then left it alone again until I got a chance to talk to a writer friend, whereupon I talked out what I'd figured out, and then left it alone again.

Boy, am I keen to write today.

The funny thing is, for the last week I'd been pushing myself, up against two intractable story problems I couldn't get past. I was coming at them from every angle when what I really needed was to leave myself alone for a bit.

I think every writer should go out and look for a good fallow mind activity, if they don't have one already. A fallow mind activity IS NOT surfing the web or going on Facebook or engaging in normal daily routine. For me, at least, those things fill my mind instead of emptying it. They're a distraction and not a help. A fallow mind activity is something that requires you to concentrate on something different, hard enough that other distracting concerns fall away. These are a few of mine:

hiking
difficult driving
camping
playing piano
rock climbing
dancing to strong music

I wish I could climb rocks more, in fact, because I found the activity so mentally absorbing that I couldn't think about anything else while I was doing it. I find activities like these push away distraction and allow my subconscious to work on my stories by itself - with remarkable results. I encourage other writers to seek out similar activities, because you might really like what happens next.