TalkToYoUniverse

Guest Post: Myke Cole on "Military Culture"

2012-01-26T05:30:00.000-08:00

When people talk about "military culture," it evokes a lot of tired stereotypes. It's rigid, it's conservative, it's macho. I'll never forget when I first became enamored with the military as a kid. My parents laughed off the idea of my ever joining. I was too creative, too free-thinking, too aesthetic. I had a problem with authority. I was too smart. I asked too many questions. I'd never last.

What could I do? I was a kid. They were grownups. I believed them.

And that's a shame. Because they didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

The US military is perhaps one of the most misunderstood institutions in the world. This is owed partially to a relentless portrayal of it in Hollywood and the gaming industry (who have a storyteller's interest in polarity and stereotype) and partially to the growing divide between the civilian and military populations in this country, now arguably worse than it has ever been in our history. I did a guest post on this topic at the Qwillery. You can see it here - http://qwillery.blogspot.com/2011/12/guest-blog-by-myke-cole-why-are-we-so.html.

Here's the truth. The military is (and arguably always has been) a *gigantic* organization. It draws liberally from all sections of society. Rich and poor of all races and creeds join up for reasons ranging from ideology to hope-for-advancement to sheer love of the work. The military isn't, and never has been a monoculture. It has proclivities and does draw more heavily from certain segments of society, but that doesn't change my overwhelming experience, which is this: I have met every different type of person in the military. There are artists and free-thinkers. There are anti-authoritarians and anarchists. There are mavericks and dreamers. Many countries have military castes that are kept socially distinct from the rest of society. In America, we have citizen-soldiers, who take off their uniforms at the end of the working day and integrate back into their civilian communities. We have reserve forces (like the one I serve in) that only soldier part-time. When they're off work, they're right alongside everyone else in the malls and parks and churches, recognizable only by accidental use of jargon or a distinct haircut.

It is our military's greatest strength. It is the thing that keeps the military from ever dictating policy (instead, it is an instrument of it). We are CITIZENS as much as warriors, and we are deeply connected to the fabric of the country around us.

When people ask me "what is the military's culture?" I respond "what's your culture?" We are you, and you are us.

And that's why I never look for, or seek to write "military" characters in science-fiction and fantasy. I honestly don't believe they exist. There are only characters, each reacting to and being shaped by their military experiences in their own unique way. PEOPLE remain the heart of great stories, and the military is a broad section of all the people in the society it serves.

Which is one of the biggest reasons I love it so very much.

Myke Cole
SHADOW OPS #1: CONTROL POINT coming from Ace (Penguin) in February, 2012!
www.mykecole.com
www.facebook.com/mykecole
www.twitter.com/MykeCole

Checklist for creating alternate social and cultural norms in a fictional world

2012-01-25T05:55:00.000-08:00

You've created a world. The "people" there, human or not, don't live like we do. How do you go about writing their lives - their manners, their rules, etc. - without sounding either pedantic or overblown? It's not as easy as it looks, but I hope this checklist will help you to get a good start.

[Note to my hangout folk: this post is a second follow-up to the worldbuilding hangout I reported on last week, during which we discussed how to set up alternate social norms in a fictional world.]

1. Identify social and cultural parameters
   Some of you may already have done this, i.e. listed out the social rules by which the people of your world live. If you have not, it's worth doing. This single step in itself can be a long process, as there are a lot of areas in which cultural parameters operate. I'll list some of the areas, just to give you some inspiration. Greetings and manners, architecture, food culture (preparation and consumption), economic roles (work), taboo behaviors (verbal, physical), education, elites (economic, educational, etc), religion, folklore, etc., etc.

There's a lot out there, and if your world is comprehensive enough, it will be enough for your story to get lost in. To make sure that doesn't happen, make sure to...

2. Organize and prioritize your parameters
   Of all the possible cultural parameters you might have come up with, not every one is going to be equally important to your story when you write it. Is there a particular cultural artifact, or set of assumptions, behaviors, or practices that are going to be central to your main conflict? Are any assumptions going to take a back seat, but still be important to themes of the work? It's a good idea to have a list, or at least a clear sense in your head as you start, what these parameters are going to be. Culture is so huge and complex that focus is really important.

3. Identify "problematic" parameters
   The extreme version of a problematic social or cultural parameter is one that will be difficult for readers to accept. Perhaps they'd say something like, "I just can't believe that people would not want privacy here." Problematic parameters are the ones that don't fall easily into a set of existing real-world expectations. Either something is normal that shouldn't be, or something that we consider normal is abnormal.

4. Develop a multi-pronged strategy for how you as author will disseminate cultural knowledge
There are several ways to "get social and cultural information across." Use them all. If you use just one, I guarantee it will come off as weird, so try to balance the ways you get things across. Ask yourself:

a. which information will be evident in the setting?
For example, architecture says a lot about the history of a people. The presence of both classical stone buildings and apartment blocks of ultralight concrete implies a long history of technological development as well as respect for the legacy of the past.

b. which information will be integral to character behavior and judgment?
Manners and politeness will show up in dialogue and character judgments. It will show up in where the person goes, and how (where do they access transportation, for example?). It will show up in whether they notice "that person isn't where they should be," or "that person's clothes really mean he's showing off," etc.

c. which information will be taught?
Teaching should not be done by the author to the reader (unless you have an explicitly storytelling/teaching narrator). If something needs to be taught, it should show up in a natural teaching context within the society: teacher to student, adult to child, or insider to outsider, etc. There may be fixed methods (curriculum) by which such teaching is accomplished. I have a caste whose members, when in doubt, recite lessons to themselves. I don't do this with everyone, but it fits with the educational style of this particular caste group.

In each of these cases, the question of normal and abnormal is absolutely critical - normal and abnormal as defined by the point-of-view character(s). Any cultural detail that you explicitly describe will come across as "marked," or not entirely normal. If it's stuff that your people actually consider to be unusual, then fine. If it's stuff they consider normal, then you have a problem.

5. Make sure that the normal is defined by lack of attention, rather than attention.
To define something by lack of attention, you have to deliberately redirect attention onto something else. That something else can be a conflict between characters that causes them to say things to one another that they already know. It can be a "secondary detail," or some related characteristic within the normal parameter that has particular meaning - such as a hairstyle on a dark-haired head, if everyone has dark hair. It can be avoidance behaviors - say, when people of a lower class deliberately avoid particular types of interaction with members of a higher class in order to avoid unpleasantness.

Note: I constantly - and I mean constantly - see abuse and discrimination of oppressed groups indicated by direct insults or by direct conflict between the groups. Try to avoid this unless the presence of this conflict is the inciting event of your story for some reason. Oppressed people go very, very far out of their way to avoid conflict of this nature. You will be doing yourself a huge favor if you show the possibility of this conflict in avoidance behaviors and the characters' internal fears, and only show direct conflict in emergency situations. Because this stuff only happens when the people concerned are unable to avoid it.

6. Remember to defeat real-world expectations deliberately.
We have all kinds of "sets" that naturally go together in our expectations. "If there's a TV, there must be a phone" is one example. "If people are having intimate relations outside of an existing monogamous relationship, that must be bad," is another. The one I run into is, "If there are nobles living in a caste system, it has to be medieval." As author, you have to defuse these contexts deliberately. Show the different path technology took in your world. Or have characters casually discussing what would be taboo behavior for us. Or make sure to put electric lights on the first page just to say to the reader, "This is not medieval! SEE?" Just leaving it in the background is not enough, because our expectations are very, very strong. Maybe you've seen that internet meme with the message where only the first and last letters of each word are in the correct places, and everything in the middle is mixed up? And you can still read it? That is because the strength of your previous knowledge and expectations will be enough to build the word just on the basis of first and last letter (and maybe a hint of middle content). Believe me, only one or two details will cause an entire set of technologies, or morals, etc. to come into play. If you don't want them in play, you have to slap them down on purpose, as early as possible.

I could go into greater detail, but I hope this gives you a basic framework to work from. Good luck with creating your fictional societies!

Hooray! A new novelette sells to Analog!

2012-01-24T13:13:00.001-08:00

I just learned this morning that the novelette I finished recently, entitled "The Liars," has sold to Analog magazine. This is my fourth sale to them, and I am absolutely thrilled. I'll let you all know more about it when I do!

Tomorrow's Worldbuilding Hangout: Cities

2012-01-24T05:55:00.000-08:00

Please join me tomorrow, Wednesday, January 25th at 11am PST on Google+ to discuss Cities in worldbuilding. I look forward to our chat!

TTYU Retro: Superpowers of the Grammatical Subject

2012-01-24T05:30:00.001-08:00

You know what I mean by the grammatical subject. "The subject of the sentence." Oh, yeah, no problem. It's the agent, the do-er, the entity or person or thing that engages in whatever the verb says. It's always a noun phrase. Examples:

I slept.
He hit me.
Reyes tried to escape.
The white-furred cat jumped over the fence.

If you only consider it from the perspective of its grammatical definition, though, you might miss its most important function. It focuses reader attention and gives special importance to whatever magical noun phrase gets that all-important, first-in-the-sentence spot*. When we choose to make something the subject of a sentence, we're exercising a great power. *(I'll consider exceptions below)

I'm deliberately going to quote Spiderman: "With great power comes great responsibility."

The easiest way to see the power of the subject demonstrated is by looking at what happens when we use it in unfortunate ways.

Teleporting readers into the air
Readers will be looking to ground themselves at the beginning of any story. What you chose to use as the subject of your first sentence thus becomes very important. If you begin, "The apartments at 200 Smith Street," then your readers will find themselves floating over said apartments. If, on the other hand, you begin, "I couldn't believe my eyes," then your readers will find themselves looking through the eyes of a person, "I," about whom they'll be looking to learn more. If you give them a name, like "George found the body at midnight," then they'll instantly be transported to George's location (beside him, or in his head, yet to be determined). An enormous amount about your narrator will be evident very quickly. Because I do very close internal point of view, I'm always tempted to start with internalization in my first sentence (implying the presence of a character rather than showing it). However, I always try to get the name of my protagonist in as the subject of a sentence within the first paragraph - and usually in the first sentence. Since I don't intend my readers to float on air, I don't want to transport them there accidentally.

Losing readers in a trance
The subject of the sentence can be a noun phrase, and it can vary in length, but because we're snagging a reader's close attention with it, if we let it get too long we've got trouble. Check out the difference between these two sentences.

The white-furred cat jumped over the fence.
The white-furred cat which my brother found over Christmas break and nursed back to health with the help of three friends jumped over the fence.

I often try to add extra information into the background of a sentence by using long noun phrases, but there's a limit to how much you can do without having your reader hit the word "jumped" above and go, "What?" They're engaged in trying to figure out precisely whom they'll be watching for the next few sentences (as subjects usually establish referents that get carried forward) and will follow the details... and when the verb finally breaks them out of the trance, they may no longer have any idea where they are or what you were saying! It's good to watch out for that.

Telekinetically striking readers over the head
A grammatical subject is a strong statement. By placing someone in grammatical subject position at the start of a paragraph, you're essentially saying, "Reader, you'll be hearing about this person for the next few sentences." This means you don't need to do it more than once. I talked some time ago about the hierarchy of reference. The hierarchy of reference basically says that you use a name for someone the first time you mention them, and then typically a pronoun thereafter unless you have to disambiguate between several possible pronouns, in which case you can use a brief description (more extensive details are here). A possible sequence of subjects might therefore be: Tagret, he, he, the noble boy. Now, imagine what would happen if you said, "Tagret, Tagret, Tagret, Tagret." By the end of it your reader would be begging for mercy. The same effect can also be achieved (far more easily) with the pronoun I: "I, I, I, I, I, I." Ay-ay-ay! Have mercy on your reader and don't always use the identical subject, but vary your sentences.

Transforming readers into fish
Think about the close attention that the subject demands, and then ask yourself where you're putting it. If your reader is working through the first paragraph of a story, and the first two or three sentences are internalization which implies the character rather than showing him/her, then by the time the reader reaches the end of that paragraph he or she will be looking hard to find the character subject from whom these internalizations are coming. Like this:

Where were the diamonds? This place wouldn't be safe for long, for sure and certain. Garmin's feet crept quietly across the floor.

Your reader might not realize it, but he/she has been looking for Garmin. But you haven't provided him for the reader; you've only provided his feet. Through the power of the grammatical subject, your reader's eyeballs have been transformed so all they can do is give the fish-eye view of what's going on. Not only will it give a strange feeling of an exceedingly close view of disembodied feet, but the reader may experience uncertainty about whether Garmin is really the character he/she is looking for. If Garmin's your protagonist, this is not a good thing.

Casting a glamour on readers
This one is a broader extension of the last power. When a fairy casts a glamour, the victim can't see what's real. When you choose not to put your protagonist as the subject of the sentence, you're deliberately making that person less visible. If you put your subject after a long "when," "before," "as," etc. clause, you're hiding your subject behind a screen. If you provide a body part, or a piece of clothing, or other evidence of the character's movements as subject, it will make the reader feel far from the character as if they're observing them externally (often from the fish-eye view!). If you choose to put your protagonist in the grammatical object position, you're making him/her into a victim and someone or something else into the position of agent/actor/do-er. If beta readers tell you your protagonist isn't ever acting or taking initiative, check to make sure he/she isn't spending too much time outside the subject position. Simply putting the protagonist in subject position isn't going to make him/her into a strong, pro-active character necessarily, but it's a step in the right direction. Furthermore, when people talk about not using passive verb forms, they may actually just mean that objects or thoughts or ideas or body parts are spending too much time in subject position in your story, rather than THE ACTOR, the protagonist, the one who should have primary place there. The flip side of this, of course, is that if you want to make someone invisible - such as when your protagonist discovers some terrible crime has been committed by an unknown (invisible!) agent - in those cases you should use the passive for whoever committed it. If your protagonist did it, but is in denial about having done it, one way of expressing this would be to have that person think about the act without placing him/herself in subject position, using passive instead. This is done deliberately in politics all the time, because by speaking in passives, politicians cast a glamour over their listeners and make invisible the actors behind critical events. It's a great tool for writers, too - but when you're dealing with your own protagonist, perhaps you can see why making the main character invisible (or distorting our vision of him/her) isn't such a good idea.

I'm sure there would be more I could say on this topic, but I think this is as much as I can fit into the extended metaphor this morning! I hope you find it interesting and helpful while you consider drafting and revisions.

When do we need to know what a character looks like?

2012-01-23T06:00:00.000-08:00

I used to think that it was really, really important to know what characters looked like. So important that I wanted to make sure that I described each one as soon as he or she appeared. I would draw pictures of each of my characters so I could understand what I wanted to describe.

Now that I've been writing for a while, I realize the answer to this question is less clear-cut. It has nuances.

Before I hit nuances, though, I will say this: it is not necessary to describe your main character on the first page. Sometimes you can get through an entire short story with only a very minimal sense of what the character looks like. So back away from the mirror scenes, folks, before you make your readers scream, "cliché!"

Right, then. When is it important to know what a character looks like? Here are some factors to consider:

1. In which genre are you writing?
If you are writing romance, the appearance of the main characters particularly is very, very important. Typically, so is the type of clothing they wear. You will also find the trend toward describing clothing and appearance in gothic and steampunk contexts, and sometimes in alternate history. In other genres, whether or not you describe appearance will depend on other factors. Which leads me to...

2. How much of the character's appearance can be supported using existing reader expectations?
If you are writing in mainstream genres or in genres (like historical) that access existing sets of technology, fashion, etc. then you can take advantage of that existing knowledge in your reader and evoke more than you describe. If you are working in science fiction, fantasy or steampunk where the presence of one thing doesn't necessarily imply the presence of another, you may need to put effort into describing more detail in order to defeat incorrect assumptions.

The next set of questions has to do with the nature of the characters in question.

3. Is this an omnisciently observed character, a point of view character or a secondary character?
This is probably the single most important question to answer. If you're using an omniscient narrator, the narrator is the one deciding what visual details of the main character and secondary characters readers need to see. If you're using limited point of view, then what details of secondary characters get described will depend on the mental states, perceptiveness and judgment of the point of view character. And what details of the point of view character get described will depend on how aware that character is of his/her own appearance.

4. If this person is a secondary character, will he/she appear in the story more than once and need to be recognizable?
A character who will need to be recognized later needs to have some characteristic that stands out and is noticed by the point of view character. This feature does not have to be visual, but it often is, and it must be included in the initial description. For example, you might have a character who will be "a guard with a crooked nose" the first time and "the guard with the crooked nose" thereafter.

5. If this person is a point of view character, what aspects of his/her personality lend themselves to a concern with appearance?

The only time you really want a person looking in a mirror is when that person has a habit of looking in mirrors to check his/her appearance. The reasons for checking the appearance will affect how the appearance is described, and they need not occur on the first page where a character appears, but should appear at the point where the concern with appearance is most relevant. A lady might be concerned about whether she looks right for a party and check her makeup in a mirror before walking in, or she might just touch her cheek with one finger unconsciously. I have a character who has to check his appearance constantly so that his boss won't freak out. His self-descriptions are quite detailed but have nothing to do with vanity or the public's opinion.

6. If this person is a point of view character, are there any aspects of his/her appearance which will affect his/her perceptions, judgments, or actions?
When you are using a limited - particularly a deep internal - point of view, and particularly if you're working with a character who doesn't really care about his/her appearance, then this is the question you should be asking. I have a character with very short legs who is taller than the people he's speaking to when he is sitting down, but shorter when he stands up - so I need to be clear about whether he's looking up or down at people at different points. My character Rulii from "Cold Words" is a member of the downy-furred race of the Aurrel, which is enormously important in the story, but not because it's a matter of how he looks. It affects his behavior, his fear of cold, his fear of shame, and his desire for justice (because his race is downtrodden). Those aspects of appearance which affect the way a character perceives things, judges things, or behaves, must be included - but the best way to include them is by demonstrating the effect they have on the character rather than stepping outside the character to observe them.

7. Are there any questions of appearance that readers are likely to get wrong?
This is a funny one. A character in one of my unpublished novels is very pale and has blond hair, but when my writing group first read it, many of them picked him as having dark hair because a) he is a mysterious character and b) I didn't make explicit mention of his hair color early enough. This is one that you might be able to take care of just by including the basics of eye and hair color that Western readers will be looking for, or it may be something that comes up in critique.

Finally, this seems like the perfect place to address Garrett Anderson's recent question:

"What sorts of strategies would you recommend in describing a character to an audience when the adjectives would not exist in your fictitious world? For example, if I have a character whom I want to look Asian, but there is no such place in my fictitious universe, what are some strategies to convey the appearance? Maybe that's not the best example, but basically, if you want a certain look, and you don't want to use real-world references."

I recommend a few steps. First, ask yourself if this particular appearance is absolutely necessary to your portrayal of the character. If it isn't, don't worry about it - just give a few basic characteristics like maybe dark hair and leave the rest up to your reader. If it is, keep reading.

First, create a sense in your mind of what the character looks like physically. Ask yourself what aspects of that appearance would be noticeable to a resident of your world. Those are the ones you will want to include in your description.

Second, and very importantly, think about why it is that residents of your world would notice these physical characteristics of your character. What is it about that person that stands out relative to all the people around? Does he or she resemble a person of a particular nationality local to the world in question? Does the character's appearance give observers a "vibe" like the one that an Asian appearance would give you? Where does that vibe come from? What associations are people going to make with that appearance when they see it? Those associations have to be grounded in the world you have created.

I actually have a character whom I imagine as vaguely Asian-looking. I don't describe him at all until the third page of his opening chapter. You'll notice (and laugh at me no doubt) because this is a mirror moment (not a whole scene, thank goodness). This description comes at the point when he's just finished showering and dressing before a job interview, and gotten into his black silk suit:

"He plucked up his favorite tailed comb and trained his dark hair into its ponytail, which thanks to Kiit's precise trimming, fell just outside his collar. At the mirror he shared with his bunkmate, he painted the small black circle between his eyebrows, cleaned his makeup brush and shut it into the box of implements atop his dresser."

Most of his "vibe" comes from his attitudes and his actions rather than his appearance. If readers don't see him the way I do, that's fine with me.

I hope this helps you all deal with the question of appearances!

Setting up alternate social parameters: a worldbuilding hangout report

2012-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

I met last week with Barbara Webb, Brian Dolton, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Janet Harriet to talk about setting up alternate social parameters. Thanks to all of you for a great discussion!

I decided to jump in by mentioning the perils of "as you know, Bob" dialogue. The biggest peril in setting up alternate social norms is being too instructive as an author. If you must have instruction, then try to fit it into natural instructional contexts in the plot. There are a lot of interesting ways to create a realistic instructional context. One of the classic methods is creating a "stranger in a strange land" scenario. You put a character who doesn't know the social rules into a situation where he or she must be instructed in how to behave, and voilà! Another possibility is to use a very direct storytelling narrator, such as the narrator of Jacqueline Carey's novel Kushiel's Dart, who can explain to you, her alien listener, anything she likes without sounding out of place. Still another possibility is to use young people for your instructional purposes, but beware on this one: young people already know a lot about the rules of the society they live in. They're just more open to being instructed on the fine points. Nobody's going to sit a kid from a caste society down and say, "Now, I'm going to tell you what the castes are, and how they are ranked." They've known that since they were old enough to think.

When you can't instruct, the other approach is to demonstrate, i.e. to put characters inside a situation. There are still things to beware of here. If there's a large list of stuff (such as my seven caste levels in Varin) that people really need to know, don't give it to them. Lists will kill you every time. What you want for a demonstration context is some situation where the presence of some smaller number of the phenomena in question changes how people behave in some way. You can show your main point of view character acting in accordance with the rules (which by the way they will probably not make active note of), judging the situation and thinking through the implications of other characters' actions. You can let the implications of that scene stand for the whole, and then take advantage of another scene later for a view of a different part of the whole picture.

Barbara asked, "What do you do when you're dealing with something that isn't important?" What do you do, for example, if you are working in a society where casual sexual relationships are not unusual, but are the norm?

This was a challenging question. The first thing to keep in mind is that if something is normal, then there is no reason for people to notice it or draw attention to its presence in their lives. Thus, you should avoid drawing attention to it. But if it draws reader attention because it's a taboo activity anyway, are you simply up a creek without a paddle? Not necessarily.

A phenomenon like this is best approached from two directions. First is positive direction, where you set up a constellation of related assumptions (Janet's great suggestion was to look at related assumptions like whether marriage relationships are considered exclusive), and make sure that the "normal" activity occurs a lot, in character actions and mentions. Second is the negative direction, where you deliberately break the assumption that already exists. Set up a scene in which it can be deliberately defused. If you have your princess in bed with her boyfriend on the eve of her wedding to another man, and this is okay, then consider having their pillow talk involve the implication that everyone knows - most importantly that the boyfriend and the fiancé both know - and don't really mind.

Of course, I say implication. Don't have them together and have the boyfriend say, "you know, I don't mind that you're getting married tomorrow. I hope he doesn't mind that we're together." That still puts attention on the phenomenon itself that makes it appear marked, i.e. unusual.

What you want instead is to look for secondary implications. If a behavior or condition is normal, then it's deviation from that, or particular unusual details of it, that become important. If everyone around you has dark hair and brown eyes, then there's no point in observing that "this person has dark hair and brown eyes." A person for whom that condition is normal would notice other details, such as "this person's brown eyes were rounder than most," or "that person's dark hair was styled in the XX fashion." You can include the specification "brown" or "dark" for the reader's sake, but keep the attention on the other details the person would notice. Brian pointed out that in China attention is given to facial hair, face shape, cheekbones and mouth shapes. If the princess and her boyfriend from the situation above are talking in a relaxed manner about what their various partners' favorite styles of intimacy are, that's a very different conversation.

Thanks again to Barbara, Brian, Glenda, and Janet for speaking with me! I missed speaking with you all today (and the rest of the internet, oh boy!). I will keep you posted on the topic of next week's discussion (January 25th) as we get closer to it.

SOPA Blackout Day

2012-01-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

After much deliberation I have decided to go without the internet all day today, Wednesday, January 18th. Apologies to my worldbuilding hangout friends. I will be back on Thursday with a hangout report from our discussion of setting up social parameters that took place last week.

I do not approve of censorship and I encourage you to learn more about the SOPA and PIPA bills currently going through the US Congress. In our attempts to stop piracy, we must not stifle ourselves.

TTYU Retro: Seeking Uniqueness? Make a Twist

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking lately about what makes a story unique. I'm working with young people right now, and I hear a lot of ideas from them, many of which bring in familiar elements from stories that I've read, or archetypal plot elements from the classic fairytales, etc.

Just because we've heard an idea before doesn't mean it can't be done in a novel way. But what can we do to make sure that the story we have is unique, and not like others of its type?

Twist!

A lot of the stories we're familiar with come with a set of underlying assumptions about their execution. Settings in which they're expected to take place. Characteristics that their characters are supposed to have. Ways their cultures are supposed to work. Technologies that are supposed to go together.

But why?

There's no real reason why these things have to be maintained as they are. Pick one and change it - not a little, but in a way that will make your story utterly different, so you'll really have to sit back and THINK: wow, how far do the consequences of that change really go? Here are some ways to try.

Set the fantasy story in a technological setting. Steampunk did this, and look what happened!
Take an expected technology away. I rarely see this done, but I'm doing it myself: Varin has no visual tech, for cultural reasons (no movies, computer monitors, etc. and a sense that even photography is inappropriate). And what if you did something really radical? Took away fire? Or the wheel? What would happen then?
Change gender roles. Reverse them, okay sure, but what if you altered them? Ursula K. LeGuin did that by taking away gender in her own way, and bang! You could even have gender roles look one way in one part of your society, and totally different in another part, so long as there are solid cultural reasons behind it.
Change diet. And don't stop with what's on the table, but contemplate the consequences for agriculture, for lifestyle organization, for food culture and values.
Change character. I usually do this by changing culture, because that then changes the fundamental way that a character thinks - changing the metaphors they use to describe the world, and changing the rationale behind the decisions they make. You want readers not to be able to predict what your character will do? Alter their cultural morality and see what happens!

What I'm advocating here is not easy to do. A change as fundamental as the ones I'm describing has lots of far-reaching consequences for your world, for your characters and for your story.

But that's the whole point.

If you can make a twist, and explore its consequences on a larger scale while maintaining the internal consistency of your world and its cultures, believe me, you'll have something different.

It's well worth thinking about.

Don't underestimate the power of nonfiction

2012-01-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

I'm guessing that most of you writers out there - at least the ones reading this blog - are writing fiction. Putting a lot of energy into writing our fiction, and developing our craft, is absolutely vital if we are to get anywhere with this fiction-writing thing. On the other hand, the first publication I ever had in the field of science fiction and fantasy was nonfiction.

This was 2006, and it was the first time my name ever got "out there" to the sf/f community, as opposed to being seen only by the editors who at that time were considering, and uniformly rejecting, my work. The article was called "Point of View: Reading beyond the I's" and appeared in the Internet Review of Science Fiction.

When I wrote this piece, I was lucky to be able to write it based on my knowledge of discourse analysis, a topic I studied in graduate school, as well as my lifetime's experience with reading and the time I had spent writing and honing my craft to that point. If you do have a special area of expertise, this is a great way to take advantage of it as you move into fiction writing. I use my linguistics, anthropology, and language acquisition knowledge both in writing nonfiction and in writing fiction. If you have experience with riding horses, with psychoanalysis, or physical therapy, or medicine, or physics - any and all of these can become rich resources for fiction writers. And if you can also write nonfiction to share your expertise with research-thirsty writers out there, so much the better, both for you and for all of us who want to learn.

The Internet Review of Science Fiction, unfortunately, is no more. However, there are other places that invite nonfiction, including Strange Horizons and SFSignal. And then there is always blogging. The only trick with blogging, of course, is that you should ideally have a lot to say about the topic you choose to focus on (or it will be hard to come up with enough entries on the blog to keep an audience coming back).

Yes, it takes time to write nonfiction. This is time that you could potentially be writing fiction. On the other hand, writing nonfiction can also help you hone your ease with words, and your professional persona on the web. It can even help you organize your thoughts and enhance your fiction along the way.

It's something to think about.

Link: Gendered Cover Poses

2012-01-13T06:48:00.000-08:00

I was fascinated by the following two posts, dealing with what it would be like to attempt the poses that are given to male and female characters on book covers. Summary: men's poses are natural, and women's poses are bizarre and will make your body hurt. But it's so much more interesting when you see these two people actually attempting the poses and talking about their experience. So go check these out: Jim C. Hines and genrereviews...

A sf/f writer experiments in literary thinking

2012-01-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

I never thought of myself as a literary writer. Sure, I've done a bit of reading (ok, quite a bit) of literature that's considered classic, but that was never my thing. I always knew I was a writer of science fiction and fantasy. However, the further I go into this the more I can see value in some of the features of literary writing that I learned about in school (in fact, I learned more in university level discourse analysis than I did in high school English).

My goal has never been to get high-falutin'. I've seen, and laughed at, plenty of those jokes and stories about how the literary reader sees someone next to a blue curtain and draws all kinds of extra conclusions about mood etc. when all the writer meant to do was make the curtain blue. But I'm lucky enough to work with someone who views literary interpretation in quite a new way (new enough that she's doing research on her teaching techniques). And I'm realizing that while we may not intend to give things extra meaning, a lot of times those meanings sneak in anyway.

Let me get specific. I'd been working for years on the idea of aligning metaphors with features of the story. After all, to me a metaphor that doesn't link up with anything else is merely showing that the writer wants to be cool and use a metaphor (which is limited in its usefulness). In my worlds, metaphors have to be consistent with the worldview of a character. The girl who compares fields of grass to bedsheets because she's never seen the former, and seen plenty of the latter. The alien who compares working toward major life goals with chasing down quarry. Our metaphors come out of what is familiar to us, and having a metaphor from our world happen in a world that is unlike our own can be at best slightly clunky, at worst, something that throws a reader out of the story completely.

Then I wrote a story (out on submission now) where a metaphor got a little out of hand - in a cool way. I had a Japanese character who was suffering enormous grief and rage, interacting with a nature spirit who had been recently hit by a bolt of lightning. It seemed natural to set the story during typhoon season. But as I wrote it, the typhoon metaphor grew. There were typhoons happening during the story - a character waiting for rain - a character trying to contain a typhoon inside herself - someone trying to create a raincoat... So, naturally, I went to my literary friend and said, "Yikes, can you look at this?" And she grinned at me as though I'd just discovered something she knew about all along. I suppose you could think about it like a piece of art that has the same color in multiple places across the composition. It's almost like hiding a beautiful pattern in the story for the reader to find if they'd like - not letting it be the whole point, or letting it take away from the main conflict, but picking something that will play into the main conflict and allow the different parts of the story to link together. Even if a reader isn't consciously aware of it, their subconscious probably will be on some level, allowing it to contribute to the "feel" of the story.

In fact, I'd been struggling with a literary-symbol task for a while before the typhoon story started lining up. Why? Well, because in my Varin world, there is an unusual phenomenon that the local people don't really understand, characterized by two things:

1. Small, bead-sized (1/4 in diameter?) will-o'-the-wisp type energy creatures, called wysps, that float around the underground cities and the surface, drifting through walls and generally being a sort of background phenomenon;
2. Incredibly tall "trees" called shinca whose trunks grow up from the rock underneath the city and continue on without branching all the way to the surface, where they branch and grow "fruit." The shinca give off heat and a bright silvery glow. They are also invulnerable, so buildings must be built around them.

Now, there is plenty of room for me in later stories to make the shinca and wysps be a topic of mystery and questioning, and to allow characters to try to figure out their nature. But not in this one, which means that I have to write an entire novel in which both shinca and wysps are simply a part of the background and normal day to day life in Varin. But I knew that if I just left it at that, I'd end up with some people going, "what's the point of having these things?" So I'd been looking around for ways to help them fit in with what's happening in the story in some way. I decided as an experiment to have wysps show up when people were taking risks, and to have shinca appear when people were getting insights.

As plans go, it sounded clunky, but I was game to give it a try, because the last thing I wanted was for people to say "If you take these out, the story won't suffer." I can't take them out. So they can't seem extraneous.

As I've been writing, however, I've sometimes put them in in places where I didn't expect to, and sometimes omitted them in places where they might have appeared. And then yesterday I realized my subconscious had been up to something. I was putting wysps in places where people were taking, not just any sort of risks, but risks related to social boundaries that were associated with highly charged emotional states. At the same time, the shinca were appearing not with all insights, but in scenes where protagonist characters got specific kinds of insights - and appearing to interfere with the antagonist's insights. Something tells me the human brain loves patterns so much it schemes them constantly without conscious help. I can feel a pattern coming together that fits with a lot of the fantastical qualities I had given to shinca and wysps already, and so far it's not feeling clunky. I'm sure that revision will help me make it work more effectively, but I'm excited to realize that not only will I have a good reason to keep shinca in wysps in the current book, but that their thematic meanings will actually be able to carry forward into the later stories where they become more of a central issue.

I'm not sure what kind of suggestions I can make for other people's writing. What I can say is that no metaphor or simile should be considered to stand alone. If you find you're writing a descriptive phrase just because you've always wanted to use that phrase somewhere, make sure to check it - see if it fits into the mentality of this character, into the values of the society and the world. If you're describing a particular phenomenon a great deal, you might want to ask yourself if it has any ulterior significance to the culture, the characters, the story problem, the themes you're trying to evoke.

One more thing. I tend to focus a lot on doors. It's not something I ever consciously planned, but there are lots of occasions when people can go through a door in one way or another, or hang in a door, or not want to stand in the door, etc. Now, believe me when I say that for the most part in my work, a door is a door (aside perhaps from the fact that I've made sure the architecture fits the culture of the groups I'm working with). I'm not planning to drop everything about pushing my story forward and run off to look at every instance of doors in my story. However, in Varin at least, a lot of the story issues have to do with what kinds of behaviors are closed off, what kinds of people are supposed to have barriers between them, etc. - and so maybe a focus on doors makes sense. Maybe if and when I get Varin published, someone will pick up the book and go, "you know, she was up to something with those doors." It's possible I am, without even thinking.

It's something to think about.

Link: Twelve things you were not taught about Creative Thinking

2012-01-12T06:22:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed this article. For anyone who is interested in questions of psychology as they relate to writing and creative thinking, it's terrific. I can actually recognize some of what it is talking about in my own life... and maybe you will, too.

Boy meets girl - how?

2012-01-11T07:13:00.000-08:00

You know all about "boy meets girl" - it's one of the most common things we see in stories, even ones that don't have romance as their primary reason for being. But if you're working in a world with alternate social rules, one thing you should probably consider is how boys and girls meet each other. After all, if they aren't meeting each other at all, then that makes it hard for them to fall in love. And if they are meeting each other in very restricted circumstances, that may have a deep influence on what the society considers relevant to choosing a match.

Imagine the situation where boys and girls aren't allowed to meet. The sexes are totally separated as much as possible, so love between a potential husband and wife is probably not considered that important. This is the kind of place where you'd expect to see arranged matches based on criteria that can be assessed within the isolated context.

Imagine the situation where boys and girls play together all the time, but boys and girls tend to be separated for things like team activities, and gender roles are seen to be relatively distinct. Relationships form, and some boys understand girls better because they have sisters or cousins who force the gender-divided expectations to be broken down, and vice versa for girls understanding boys. But there are also going to be large groups of boys who haven't had much contact with girls and know their ways mostly by hearsay and culturally based report. This is sort of the situation my children are currently working in.

Every parameter you change is going to have a huge influence on how relationships form.

In this vein, I was thinking about Disney princesses. We watched Mulan a couple of days ago. I remarked to my daughter how this was my favorite of the Disney princess movies, and she said, "but she's not a princess." It was a good observation. Mulan is obviously a member of a noble family, but really, she's not a princess. And I think the reason why I always enjoyed her relationship with the Captain was that in spite of the deception involved in her pretending to be male, she actually got to know him. They went through rough things together. Compare that with the typical love-at-first-sight scenario that we see basically everywhere else in the Disney princess canon.

If you think about it, the idea of love at first sight in itself isn't a horrible thing - instant attractions happen. But when you look structurally at the positions the princesses are put in, they aren't ever in positions where meeting a boy will happen naturally and allow them to get to know each other. Historical princesses had some of this difficulty as well (though I imagine they were more realistic in their personalities), because the ways in which they were allowed to interact with potential matches were very circumscribed. If you're only ever going to be meeting any member of the opposite sex for an hour at a time, on a dance floor, then NOT believing in love at first sight is going to be a problem, because it will simply mean you have to resign yourself to not loving the person you're going to marry. Which of course does happen, but we like to think of these matches in an idealized way (because thinking of them any other way might be depressing! Just witness the Disney princess annotated portrait that has been floating around the internet lately).

Now, an example from my Varin world. The social parameters in Varin are twisted by the fact that the noble caste is in decline and in desperate need of healthy children (which it finds difficult to procure). As a result of this, women in the noble caste (but not the ones below) are very oppressed, and rushed into babymaking as soon as possible (age 17, which in the global scheme of things is not horrible, but still very early from my own point of view). Because their health and safety is considered a priority, the Grobal women are given bodyguard-nurses at birth, and these companions safeguard them until they are grown. This means that it is extremely difficult for boys to interact with girls. Boys are expected to approach the girl's servant before they approach the girl herself, to the extent that they must speak with the servant first until they get permission to speak to the girl. This means that boys without sisters have very little idea how to interact with girls at all. It also means that arranged marriages are the norm. Arranged marriages are also the norm because of the need for alliances between the Great Families, and they are typically arranged by men in power, so you end up with lots of couples where the man is 20 years older than the woman - because the man is powerful enough to make the arrangement successfully, and the woman is being rushed into childbearing. This has consequences all through the society because love is not generally the currency on which these things are based, and because young people are not able to satisfy their sexual appetites without braving bodyguards and serious trouble (which means they look for various other ways to satisfy them that I won't go into here).

What parameters for interaction have you set up in your world? How do boys and girls meet? What are the expectations for love and marriage? How does that change expectations and behavior?

It's something to think about.

Thank You! And, our next worldbuilding hangout announcement

2012-01-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

I turned on my computer this morning to discover that I now have reached 250 followers on this blog. Let me just say to all of you: Thank You! I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming and reading, sharing my thoughts, commenting, and passing on links that you like. I just wrote yesterday about how to keep the internet under control, but if you were paying attention, I also mentioned just what it is about blogging that I find wonderful - it gives me a community with whom I can spend time every day, talking about things that I find fascinating, without having to travel to all of the disparate locations in which all of you find yourselves (Brazil to Norway, Canada, and just about every state in the US). I'm very lucky to have you and I'm very grateful.

This week I am resuming my weekly Worldbuilding hangouts. Tomorrow's hangout will take place on Google+ at 11am PST, and we'll be discussing Establishing Social Norms in worldbuilding. I'd love to see you there!

Note: in order to minimize the unwanted distraction of people popping in to show us slogan signs (yes, this has happened), I am obliged to limit the hangout invitation to members of my (quite large) writing community circle. If you would like to attend and are not sure whether you are a member of my writing community circle, please comment below with your Google+ username and I will make sure to add you to the circle. My goal here is not to exclude anyone who is genuinely interested in discussing worldbuilding with us! I hope to see you tomorrow.

TTYU Retro: Your dialogue can do more

2012-01-10T06:01:00.000-08:00

I decided to revisit this post because it's related to the question of nuance in dialogue that I picked up in my post, "What your character doesn't know can hurt him/her (in dialogue and internalization)." It's nice to see that I've progressed as far as I have on this novel in the last year! And certainly, the importance of conversations in my work is just as great now as it was then. I hope you find it interesting.

I've just spent a week working on one conversation.

This is not because I had no time (not that I had a lot, but I did write consistently). It's because for me, conversations are very important. Particularly if the conversation features a character who hasn't had much "screen time" previously, and particularly if that character is one who influences the course of the main story as it goes forward, it's worth giving people a good look - and listen - to her. So each time I came back to work, I started by reading through the conversation so far. Each time, I found places where the dialogue I'd written could accomplish more.

I know many of you write in layers. By this I mean writing one type of thing to get started and then going back to flesh out other elements later. Often, that first thing is dialogue - but just because it's the thing you feel comfortable enough with to write your dialogue first, you shouldn't necessarily leave it. It may be able to do more.

When people speak, we don't ever really say one thing at a time. Think about the conversations you participate in. Everything you say gives extra hints about social context, your intentions, etc., but because in reality you're engulfed in that context, and you hold those intentions, what you notice about what you say is the language that imparts new information. That is to say, the social and other contextual information is evident when we speak in person, so we typically don't notice it unless we are actively trying to determine where another person is "coming from."

In writing, this process can be reversed. Certainly in most cases, dialogue isn't enough to carry a narrative all on its own (plays are different, of course) - I usually add internalizations, actions, body language, and other kinds of cues to any kind of dialogue situation, even if it's just a conversation. However, if you think about it, when you write the subconscious cues that would ordinarily reflect the social context can actually imply the social context. They can imply the character's motives. This is particularly useful if you have a non-point-of-view character on your hands.

Since this may sound vague, and since a lot of it is subconscious anyway, I'll give some before-and-after examples of how I went about adding an extra layer to dialogue.

Tamelera, Version 1
"Maybe I should try to speak with her [Selemei], but since she joined the Cabinet, I'm not sure I can trust her."

This isn't bad. Captures Tamelera's emotional reaction to Selemei, the reason for it, and the proper chronology. Also shows a glimpse of the political structure (Cabinet).

Tamelera, Version2
"Maybe I should try to speak with her [Selemei], but when she took a Cabinet seat she joined the men's side. I'm not sure I can trust her now."

Better. Why? It keeps the earlier details, but also makes clear that Tamelera is aware the Cabinet is dominated by men (which has been pointed out earlier; Selemei is the only woman on the Cabinet). Furthermore, it shows that she thinks of the world as divided into men's and women's sides, which are opposed to one another. This is a major characteristic of hers that I can build on later.

Here's another example.

Recited message, Version 1
"I extend my invitation to you to attend an informal tea and concert at the Club Diamond [...] I expect to see you there."

Recited message, Version 2
"I extend my invitation to you to attend an informal tea and concert at the Club Diamond [...] See you there!"

Here the difference is very small, but important. You may notice that neither one says "please let me know if you're able to come." The message sender wants the recipient to show up at this tea, and in fact has information that could potentially be used to blackmail the recipient into coming. I tried to reflect the attitude of "I could blackmail you" when I first wrote the invitation, but it seemed too dark. It also seemed a bit heavy-handed for the message sender, who is a bit more subtle and refined than that. Thus I decided to change it to "see you there!" which conveys a certain charming excitement, but also relies on the underlying assumption that the recipient will be attending the event.

The next example I think shows how a slight change can give a clearer idea of a character's assumptions and social expectations. It comes from a section where Tamelera's son has told her he's met a girl, but he hasn't told her under what kind of circumstances they met. Here is her comment:

Comment, Version 1
"I'm sure any girl would feel lucky to meet you."

This is certainly true, as her son is quite handsome and a pretty nice kid, too.

Comment, Version 2
"I'm sure any girl would feel lucky to be approached by someone like you."

I decided to use "be approached" to show that Tamelera assumes her son decided to approach the girl - when in fact she was the one who approached him. I decided to use "someone like you" because Tamelera doesn't want to engage emotionally with the idea of her son meeting a girl. Thus she speaks of him as a member of a group of people (people like him). Given that people in this society are primarily defined on the basis of their social standing, it means that girls like to meet boys who are in a good social position, and implies that Tamelera is trying not to imagine the actual people involved.

Here's another example:

Household Keeper, Version 1
"Yes, sir. She will join you as soon as I have your breakfast ready."

Household Keeper, Version 2
"Oh, yes, sir. Join you she will indeed, as soon as I've your breakfast ready."

In this case, the Household Keeper's voice was turning out to be too similar to that of another servant, also in the room at the time. Since he's a recurring character who will be seen more closely in other chapters, I decided to give him a different speech rhythm. This differentiates his speech from that of the other servant, and it also helps me give a sense of the scope of my world, because he sounds like he has a dialect (and later when it's relevant I'll mention that he's from a provincial city).

And one final example:

Surface, Version 1
"Let me tell you about the surface."

Surface, Version 2
"Do you remember what I told you about the surface?"

This sentence is one character bringing up a topic that she's about to discuss with someone else. As you can see, the dialogue will turn out differently depending on whether the characters have met before, and whether they have spoken previously about a particular topic. I realized that the way I phrased this topic opener needed to reflect these characters' shared history - and that it could thereby help me handle backstory. Anyone who sees version two will immediately know that these two people have discussed the surface before, which gives me the opportunity to say a few words about what the content of that communication was. The advantage for me in my revision was that if I hadn't placed their previous conversation as backstory, then their current conversation would have had a lot of ground to cover before I could get to what they really needed to discuss. So not only did the dialogue sound more natural, but this segment of the conversation become significantly shorter and less clunky.

To summarize, dialogue can help you reveal:

character attitudes (Tamelera example)
character intent (Recited message example)
character assumptions and social expectations (Comment example)
character differentiation, background and world characteristics (Keeper example)
character backstory and personal history (Surface example)

These aren't the only things that dialogue can help you do, but they're the examples that I was working with this week. Your choice of words in dialogue can leave other kinds of clues, like indicating what kind of information is known and which is new, or whether your character feels comfortable or uncomfortable with the situation. It can also help you strengthen the theme of your story. When handled well, it can often help you take some of the information burden off the main portions of the narrative.

It's something to think about.

Why the internet is a trap - and how this writer deals with it

2012-01-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

If you're a writer, I imagine you are familiar with the problem of the internet trap. You turn on the computer to start writing, and an hour later you're still on the internet. You think of the pages you have still to write and you want to scream, Why is this happening? How can I stop it?

So I thought I'd begin this week by talking about why the internet is such a trap, at least for me. And also, thinking about how to manage the whole thing. I hope that my thoughts may help those of you out there who experience something of the same thing.

Internet Trap #1. Small flashes of wonderful in a torrent of irrelevant

I've heard partaking of the internet compared to drinking from a fire hose. I don't quite agree with this, because it suggests that if you could manage to take a sip, it would be good water that you were getting. To me it's more like a baseball game: you'd better have good friends with you and be doing something in the stands, because most of what's going on is stuff you don't care about anyway (in this I reveal my bias against baseball - sorry baseball fans!). Each critical play is buried in a ton of waiting around. On the internet, sometimes I'll have a day where I find tons of links I want to pass on to my blog readers. Then I'll go for weeks without encountering anything to care about at all.

Internet Trap #2. News

Yes, this is where I get the vast majority of my news about the world. And though I spend a lot of time in worlds of my own, I do care about what's going on. So I find myself clicking through to read about current events when I should probably be writing, or at least not reading my sixth article in a row about a particular issue. Even one I really care deeply about.

Internet Trap #3. Small tasks

This is a big one for me. Going through emails, making sure to check up on social networks, etc. It feels quick - each email takes very little time to process, either to file or look at or throw away. Each part of the stream goes by quickly. But the tasks pile up, and you can easily lose a half-hour or more in increments of two seconds.

Internet Trap #4. Reminders and notifications

By this I don't mean going to one site or another and checking news streams etc. This is about when your computer beeps to tell you someone is inviting you to chat, when you hear the tone or see the flicker that indicates a new email has come in, etc., etc. It's like when the phone rings. Your first instinct is to stop whatever you're doing and check it. When I'm really concentrating, I don't notice this stuff half the time. But when I'm not super-absorbed, I can get pulled right back out of whatever it is.

Internet Trap #5. The desire for distraction/the risk of missing something/the desire to have "something happen."

Who among us does not procrastinate? Even when I'm not being beeped at I feel the temptation to go on the internet. I might see a cat photo, or a picture of a cool cake, or the face of a friend. Related to this is the sense that something important might be happening (either in the world or with a friend) and I might be missing it. The worst thing I find myself doing is rifling through the internet hoping that I'll run across something that will change my life for the better (like discover that I've sold a story or find out that someone has said something nice about me).

Internet Trap #6. Sense of community, the importance of internet presence

These are actually good things about putting in time on the internet! But they contribute to the draw of it. The internet helps us feel like we're not just alone in a room writing, and for many of us (like me) this is a very good thing. Besides which, we would like to increase our visibility by maintaining an internet presence, and have been told this will help us to succeed. Surely being active in blogging and social networks will make this happen. But how much will it really contribute to the bottom line? And how much will it take away from the critical time we need to spend actually writing? Those are hard questions to answer.

Internet Trap #7. New networking opportunities

How many times have you been invited to a new networking site? There are so many out there, and being a part of one has both good aspects and bad. I have found that if I start participating in a new networking site, it reaps benefits because I get better chances of quality interaction with the frontline participants. On the other hand, it takes on far more importance than it deserves, and thereafter one of two things will happen. Either it will not retain my interest and I'll have to drop out because I just don't have that much time in the day, or it will be worth participating in and I'll have to spend a bunch of time balancing it against my other networking commitments.

Whew! So at this point I'll talk about how I deal with managing these problems. Believe me when I say that my solutions are not perfect. If you have good ideas in this arena, feel free to make suggestions in the comments!

Solution A: Give yourself meta-time, and manage actively.

This is a pretty simple thing, but I can't recommend it enough (that's why it's solution A!). You know you're on the internet. You know it's sucking your time. Take a step back and look at what you're doing, and when. That will allow you to evaluate it and make decisions about changing it. This is what I do to deal with the problem of new social networks - I step back after experimenting with them and ask how I want them to fit into my whole internet picture.

Solution B: Schedule yourself.

This is my way of dealing with many of the issues above, including the fire hose/baseball game problem, the news problem, the small tasks problem, the sense of community/internet presence problem, and the networking opportunities problem. I try to fix, and to limit, the times when I'll be using the internet. Blogging time is limited to during the weekend, or before I get my kids up for school. Networking I often do while the kids are home, since it requires less concentration. Small tasks time I limit by fixing the amount of time I'll spend on it - and this includes networking and news stories time. To keep myself from losing track I'm going to try setting myself a timer with an alarm. This is also going to help me remember to give my eyes a rest every so often.

Solution C: Disable the evidence of notifications

Now, I don't mean that you should dig into preferences to disable all notifications. However, your computer has a mute button for a reason. If you must have your email and internet browser open while you're writing, make sure to take the word processing file you're using and expand it to fill the screen so you don't see those little telltale flashes and such. You just don't need those little sensory distractions.

Solution D: Cultivate a detached attitude

This is, I suppose, the trickiest. It took me quite a while to realize that I didn't need to read every notification of everything on every social network, but just to dip in and sample each time I was there. News stories will wait for you. Every service or game that you are involved with is designed to convince you that you must never leave it alone or you'll miss something absolutely critical, but this is not generally the case. If you do happen to be involved in a game (Farmville leaps to mind) that requires attention at particular intervals, consider stopping for a while when you have a project to complete. Be aware that you need to be the one running your use of the internet, rather than letting it run you. Muses are fickle enough, and we're already trying to fit them into the compartments that other parts of our lives offer us - we shouldn't ask them to bow to internet "needs" that are being cultivated in us by online marketers.

Solution E: Realize that you get out of the Internet what you put into it

This is what I say to myself whenever I find myself searching for something meaningful, or searching to make "something happen". When I put effort into my online presence (mostly by blogging), then I can feel the rewards. When I write a story and get it out there, that also has an effect on the internet - and I like that effect better. So there's no point just surfing around looking for something good, I tell myself. Go create something, and that will make something good happen. If it's time to get my blogging done, then I'll do that. But if it's time to write, I'll either hide the internet or turn it off completely and try to create something fantastic. Because that gives me something even better to talk about.

Am I perfect in my execution of this? Well, of course not. I began this post saying that I do have trouble with the internet taking more time than it deserves. However, this post is going to help me put into words what I'd like to be doing going forward, and I hope it will help me take the strategies I already use, and make them more effective.

So what do you do to keep the internet from taking time it doesn't deserve? Feel free to comment because I'm sure everyone would be interested to hear.

Culture Share: Tanzania - A Scandinavian visits the Masai

2012-01-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Therese Lindberg discusses a short visit with the Masai of Tanzania (at the border of Kenya), which she made while studying language and culture in Africa.

A Scandinavian visits the Masai
by
Therese Lindberg

Some years ago, while studying religion, I was offered the chance to go to Africa for a couple of months to observe religion and culture first hand. I jumped on the opportunity, and started saving, and reading about cultural and religious practices in Africa.

By way of Amsterdam, I landed in Nairobi, Kenya, and from there I traveled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

When I stepped out from the airplane the air hit me like a wall. I've never felt warmth and humidity in that way before. Even though I was dressed for the climate, I couldn't wait until I got my luggage, so I cut off the sleeves on my t shirt and rolled up the legs on my shorts even further.

I bought two bottles of water, slipped on my sunglasses and stood there waiting. Even though the workers and people on the airport of Dar es Salaam were used to white people, they still stared quite a bit. I suppose I stood out, a Scandinavian wearing brand clothes and sparkly sunglasses.

I stayed the first night at a missionary outpost, and they were very friendly. The staff, all locals, insisted on washing my clothes even though I'd just arrived. And when I tried to politely decline, they just as politely, explained it would be taken as an offense if I did. So I handed over my luggage and the next day everything had been washed, pressed and folded neatly.

Through my travels and time there, a lot of things happened. Too much in fact, for one single article. Which is why I will focus on some key events.

I'd decided to learn as much of the language as possible. I have knack for picking them up, and with an extended dictionary I did my best. After roughly three weeks I no longer needed my interpreter and could manage by way of Swahili and substituting certain words in French and English.

In fact I was headed towards the border between Tanzania and Kenya to spend some time with the Masai, and got the chance to sleep outside under the stars in a nature preserve. I was told it was fenced in, but the area was so big you would have to drive for weeks if you wanted to get from one end to another. We made camp in what seemed the middle of no where, and we were met by large Masai men who were sent to guard us. I asked from what, imagining the answer would be lions. Surprisingly the answer was elephants and baboons, mostly the latter.

When the sun set, it was something taken out from a movie. I've never seen such strong brilliant colors before, radiating across the sky in purple, blue, yellow, pink, red and even green. Once the sun was gone, darkness came quickly. I lay still when it was completely dark, listening to the wild life around me. There were lions, although they wouldn't approach. There were baboons and other animals one would expect to hear. I opened my eyes when a baboon screamed, and what I saw I'll never forget. It was the stars. Being Norwegian, I'm used to seeing them. The winters get cold and dark and so we always see them sparkling, but this was different. It was as if someone had copy-pasted a particularly star crowded part of the sky, multiplying it a thousand times. They lit up everything, and it was no longer pitch black. There were constellations I'd never seen before. I remember seeing the outlines of giraffes in the background, and the odd looking trees far away.

The next morning I woke up after barely having slept, but I was still very excited. I'd met a few Masai throughout the weeks, but mostly they were selling jewelry. We left the preserve and drove through a jungle for some hours, but most of the ride was through red desert. The bus-ride took nearly twelve hours and when I got to their village I was covered in red dust. The Masai women greeted me by smiling and nodding their heads. The Masai men jumped. And they jumped really high up in the air. They didn't bend their knees, they simply bounced up and down. I didn't have a measuring-tape but saying they neared almost a meter jumping up and down is not exaggerating. When the women deemed me “okay” the children started swarming. They all wanted to be picked up and they touched my hair and skin and I had tiny hands all over me. They were a group who lived far out in the desert, and being half-nomadic they didn't see outsiders that often, and for most of the children I was the first white person they had ever seen. While they were dissecting my every move and trying to figure me out, I did the same with them. Most of the girls there had their front teeth on their lower jaw pulled out. They also had black dots tattooed into their cheeks and a lot of jewelry. It was a special kind, it looked like tiny orange, white, blue, and black beads threaded onto thin wire. It was made up of different patterns, and wires crossed and formed into various shapes. One of the women caught me staring and gracefully unhooked her necklace and placed it around my neck. I was at a loss for what to do, and then a man came over to me and spat me in the face.

My jaw unhinged and I stood staring at him. My interpreter came over to me and explained that they had been told to show me and the others their native ways. And in their native ways, spitting in someone's face meant a sign of great friendship and respect. He told me I should spit back, but being brought up the way I am, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I explained awkwardly in Swahili that I accepted his token of respect, and shook his hand, explaining that this is how I showed great respect. He accepted this and smiled broadly. His earlobes had been stretched and were fitted with round jewelry too, in such a manner one could look through his earlobes.

We were all shown to our cottages where we were staying for the week and night came quickly. We slept on straw beds, but they'd laid thick blankets on top for us. The next few days they explained how the men who were warriors went out hunting, and were not allowed to drink alcohol, smoke, marry or be involved with women. Their sole task was to protect the tribe, and they took turns during the night protecting everyone from elephants, lions and baboons. They spent their lives like this from the age of eighteen when they were circumcised. The immediate three to six months after this they spent alone in the bush, proving themselves. According to Masai tradition they would become a true warrior when they killed a lion at the end of this period. After which they would remain a warrior for the next twelve to fifteen years.

The women had their own society. They taught the girls how to make food, how to respect the men and how to act. They were also in charge of herding the goats and milking them. While the boys playfully fought amongst each other and learned to be men.

On our last night they had a big party. With a huge bonfire in the middle and we all sat together. Oddly enough, for a moment it reminded me of Ace Ventura – Nature calls, when they sit in front of the bonfire and everyone dances. It had similar aspects to this, but the men didn't interact as much. They mostly kept to themselves, and stood jumping up and down while talking. The women braided my hair, and talked too fast for me to grasp everything but my interpreter explained it to me as quickly as he could. They offered to tattoo my cheeks as a sign of welcoming me to their tribe, which I respectfully declined together with having my own teeth drawn. I also declined adopting a little girl who had lost her mother. Apparently, my hips indicated I would be an excellent mother. They meant it as a big compliment, but I was raised in a place where having broad hips is frowned upon and only means finding jeans to fit is difficult! But I smiled and thanked them for the compliment, and figured I liked their way of seeing it much better.

At the end of the night they slaughtered a goat. They cut its neck and the way the goat shrieked is forever burned into my mind. They placed a cup underneath its neck and filled it with blood. Prior to slaughtering it they had milked it. They mixed the milk with the blood and handed it to me. They told me that by drinking this I would be cleansing my body spiritually and it would give me strength. It smelled quite rancid and the color was slightly pink and chunky. I nodded my head respectfully, forced myself not to gag, and finished the cup of blood and goat milk. I handed the cup made of tree back to the Masai man and bowed my head deeply again. Once I did this the men broke out in a sound I've tried to replicate thousands of times. Their tongues moved from side to side really quickly and the sound coming out was very loud. While doing this the men jumped up and down and the women once again hurdled around me. They placed jewelry around my neck, arms, ankles, waist and in my ears. I was completely covered when they were done.

I felt warm from appreciation and acceptance and came to realize that the Masai are some of the friendliest and interesting people I have ever met.

Therese Lindberg lives in Fredrikstad, Norway, except when she is on the road.

What your character doesn't know can hurt him/her (in dialogue and internalization)

2012-01-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

To get this topic started, I'm going to start with an example. The following exchange is one I revised yesterday morning:

Initial Draft:
"Young master," said the First Houseman's quiet voice. "The Arbiter of the First Family Council..."
"Oh, thank you, Serjer," said Tagret. "Has he sent a reply?"
"He has come to see you, sir."

Revised Draft:
"Young master," said the First Houseman's quiet voice. "The Arbiter of the First Family Council..."
"Oh, thank you, Serjer," said Tagret. "What does he say?"
"He has come to see you, sir."

The difference isn't huge, but it is important. I changed Tagret's question from "Has he sent a reply?" to "What does he say?" The reason I changed it is because in writing the first question, I had lost sight of what Tagret knows and expects - specifically, that Tagret would automatically interpret his servant's mention of the Arbiter to mean that a message had been received. He would not ask whether there was a message. He would ask what the message was. That still leaves plenty of room for him to be surprised that the Arbiter has come to see him, and it keeps him from seeming dazed or appearing to point out the obvious. Here's my point:

What your character says and thinks will change completely based on previous knowledge and expectations.

Possibly the mystery/police procedural writers know this best. Entire plots can hinge on a slip of the perpetrator's tongue, something to indicate the person knows more than he/she claims. "No, I haven't seen Grizelda's goldfish." "Aha, but I never told you what Grizelda had lost!"

This is also an excellent way to reveal a character's bias. Here's another example from yesterday: Tagret wants to reveal to the Arbiter that his brother has a congenital mental problem, but first he asks the Arbiter to promise not to blame his mother - a promise that the Arbiter readily agrees to because he's a nice person. The way he talks about it afterward, though, reveals his position on the underlying matter.

"You've already said you wish to protect your mother for her involvement..."

The Arbiter, helpful as he is, does believe that the mother is responsible for the problem with her son. If he did not feel that way, he would say something like,

"You've already said you wish to protect your mother from any accusation..."

When I'm critiquing, there are two types of problems I typically see which arise from the writer not keeping the character's knowledge and expectations in mind. The first one is when a character seems not to know basic parameters of interaction in his/her society. This is pretty common in early drafts where all the details of a world haven't yet been worked out, so it's not necessarily a huge problem, but it's still one that needs to be addressed before the final draft. If the character is speaking or internalizing on the basis of a relatively blank slate, in the worst case he or she may appear shallow or stupid. Watch out particularly for the less extreme case, when a character may appear younger than the age the writer specifies. This is very often due to insufficient evidence of social knowledge in the character's actions, speech and thought.

The second type of issue I run into is what I'll call over-instruction. The character doesn't naturally demonstrate bias or social knowledge through phrasing in dialogue and thought, so the writer realizes that the reader may forget that this person is biased and society works in the way it does... and has the character make overt statements of bias or explanations of social structure. This isn't always quite as obvious as "as-you-know-Bob" dialogue, but it's worth watching out for.

Avoiding over-instruction is not the same as avoiding instruction altogether. There are plenty of contexts when people (particularly young people, but also adults) get instructed about how the world is supposed to work. However, it's important if you're going to include instruction to make sure that you're not solely acting as an author instructing your reader, but that the context of instruction is also one that would occur naturally in your society. In my book, the Arbiter's job is something like that of a high school guidance counselor, so he's full of advice, even in the same conversation:

"Tagret, you need a manservant, and you need one now. Do you want to remain helpless until the end of Selection?"

"You'll need to write your own inquiry letter, but you may use this one as an example."

"You realize any manservant would have [saved your life]... You can't afford to let fondness influence your treatment of servants. Given your brother's current position, we need you to be as strong as possible, politically."

Notice that Erex is ready to tell Tagret that he's showing too much fondness for a particular servant - but he doesn't bother saying anything about where servants rank, or whether they have value, because he considers that evident (his own servant is standing right behind him at the time). He makes the instructional point in order to get to what he considers more important and central to the conversation, namely Tagret's reputation as a potentially strong political force.

This makes me think that I need to come up with another checklist post, for setting up social parameters. In any case, it's something to think about.

For those of you who have been anticipating my return to worldbuilding hangouts, I'll officially be resuming those next Wednesday, January 11th. I'm looking forward to chatting with you all again!

TTYU Retro: The Experience of Pregnancy

2012-01-02T22:41:00.000-08:00

How many of you out there have ever been pregnant? The number of you answering "yes" is going to be limited by certain factors, such as being female, being of a certain age, etc.

Okay, then, how many of you have ever considered writing about a pregnant person in a story? Probably far more - the limiting factors aren't so limiting in fiction!

So many times when I see pregnancy in a fictional context, it tends to fall into the tired old throwing up - food cravings - fat tummy combination. But there's so much more to pregnancy than that! So for those who might want to know for their research, I thought I'd start this entry. I encourage any of you who have experienced pregnancy and would like to contribute any of your own experiences to comment at the end of this post. I'm trying not to be gross here, so please keep the comments informative and not too detailed. Please do also see the comments on the first version of this post, here.

Let me start with some refuting/refinement of the traditional basics, and then I'll add some different kinds of pregnancy stuff.

1. Throwing up.
Not everyone does this - I felt nauseated at times, but never actually threw up in either of my pregnancies. Morning sickness can hit people in the morning, but sometimes people feel it more strongly in the afternoon (I did). For some, it can last all day. My own experience was that I would feel nausea if my stomach was ever totally empty. Therefore, I had to make sure not ever to let my stomach be empty. I took food with me everywhere (more on this below). Morning sickness for most people lasts through the first trimester (12 weeks); for me it lasted 15 weeks. I have known people for whom it lasted through the entire pregnancy, but this is more rare. So if you have a character experiencing morning sickness in their 8th month of pregnancy, this is a really unusual thing (and in addition, they've probably had it all along until then).

2. Food cravings.
Yes, these happen. But pickles and ice cream would be something I'd expect to hear about from one woman in a hundred (or maybe more). My experience was more that I wanted to eat in a particular pattern. This pattern was different for different pregnancies. With my son, I wanted to eat meat. Lots of meat, in lots of forms (though I remember feeling revulsion for tangerine beef; go figure). With my daughter, it was vegetables and fruit. Meat didn't gross me out, but neither was I excited about it. I definitely did want to keep supplies of my favorite foods available. Note for the curious: this is not a boy/girl thing. It's all about the individual pregnancy and the individual child. I have heard lots of stories about indicators that you're carrying a boy or a girl, but none that actually have consistent patterns across groups of people. The thing I experienced the most was hunger, and hunger like I'd never known it. A moment would come, and I would need to eat. NOW. Even once the nausea effect was gone, the hunger effect would remain, and I'd get so ravenous that I'd feel dizzy and angry. This again was why I carried food with me all the time. I wasn't able to wait five minutes for a table.

3. Fat tummy.
The weight that a woman gains in pregnancy is significantly more than the weight of the baby, but she may or may not put on fat. This weight comes from amniotic fluid, placenta, and other things - not the least of which would be the extra blood the woman needs during a pregnancy (up to 50% more than usual). Early in the pregnancy you'll see the tummy bulge but it will feel soft because the uterus will still be too small and too far down in the pelvis to feel. The hard round tummy of later pregnancy is the feel of the uterus which has pushed other things (intestines, etc.) out of the way. In a second or subsequent pregnancy, the abdomen will expand more quickly than in the first pregnancy, because the body has already "learned" how to stretch out to accommodate a growing baby. In addition, the tummy does not expand gradually and consistently, but will remain at one size for a period of time, and then expand rapidly over a day or two before staying at that size for another longer period.

Some other elements of pregnancy that aren't usually accurate in fiction include:

a pregnant woman may experience slower digestion (even constipation), but she'll have to go to the bathroom more often because she'll be eliminating the baby's wastes as well as her own, and the uterus often presses down on the bladder.
a pregnant woman will have changes in balance, and may stumble or fall, or have difficulty navigating stairs or narrow aisleways (such as passing people in a theater or stadium). The irregular expansions of the belly have a lot to do with this, as they change your center of gravity constantly.
a pregnant woman will very often experience an increase in the sense of smell. I could smell cigarette smoke practically half a mile away; a friend of mine was able to smell pizza before it even came out of the kitchen. My brother referred to this as "Spidey-senses." Perhaps included in this is an increased awareness of surroundings, and increased anxiety about dangers.
starting around the third trimester the woman will probably start to feel Braxton-Hicks contractions, which are uterine contractions not associated with actual labor. (It feels for a few moments like you're holding a basketball inside your stomach!) For most women I know, it has been difficult to distinguish between strong Braxton-Hicks contractions and the early onset of actual labor. Cries of "The baby's coming!" and "It's time!" occur often in fiction, but seldom in real life.
one very common symptom of pregnancy is extreme fatigue. My own experience with this was having sudden waves of fatigue hit and knowing I had about ten seconds to lie down (bed, couch, wherever) before I'd fall asleep, whether I wanted to or not. During my first pregnancy, I'd sleep for two hours each time. During my second, the baby would wake me up after a much shorter time. On one of those occasions, I discovered he had learned to use the CD player while I was sleeping! I'm very lucky he wasn't a destructive baby.
the "water" doesn't always break. Some women experience their water breaking at home, and some in public places. It's not always dramatic, though our pregnancy counselor joked that if it happened at the grocery store you should just break a pickle jar on the floor and shout "clean-up on aisle 3!" However, once the water breaks the baby needs to come out within 48 hours or be at risk of infection.

A few last thoughts - I include these because they stand out to me, though childbirth and its aftermath aren't really official topics of this post:

women don't always scream in childbirth.
women experience continued contractions after the birth (even when everything is out), because these serve to bring the uterus back down to its normal size and to stop the bleeding.
breastfeeding is both instinctive and learned, and it isn't easy at first; it's also very individual. There's no one way to do it.

I hope this post expands your thinking about pregnancy if you haven't experienced it. It's worth doing research about it if you want to include it in a story. The web has lots of sites where you can find medical information about pregnancy and its physiological changes, including this one. You can also interview friends or try to find personal accounts of pregnancy experiences. It's worth doing, so that your story doesn't fall into a pregnancy cliché by accident.

When do you trunk a story?

2011-12-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

I ran across this question on the SFWA website recently. It's an interesting question, and not at all easy to answer.

Let's start with the more basic question: what does "trunk a story" mean?
Well, to trunk a story in its simplest definition means not to send it out, or to keep it in your "trunk" at home (at this point, this is a virtual trunk for most of us, rather than a literal one). So, once you have stopped actively writing a story, and have revised it to the point where you consider it "ready", then if you don't send it out, it might be considered "trunked."

Of course, if you're simply not sure you're through with revisions, you may just be letting it rest to give yourself a fresh perspective on it. This is not the same as trunking, and it is highly recommended practice. Distance makes for more effective revisions.

The question of trunking becomes much more relevant after you've sent a story out and it has come back rejected. Many writers will cite Heinlein's rule, that you should not revise a story except to editorial order. I don't actually agree with this. If you've sent a story out, and it comes back rejected without comment, and you look at it again and see some major way to improve it, then go ahead and rewrite. It's just like taking a rest from your editing to get distance. Even better is when the rejection actually contains advice - then you can decide if the advice seems solid, and if it is, revise as necessary. But once you've revised, you need to send it out again. And again. And again.

So when do you stop?

Well, getting demoralized is not a good reason to stop. There are a lot of markets out there, and markets come and go. A story that gets rejected at all the current pro markets might not be good enough yet (and it behooves you to try to figure out if that's indeed the problem with it), but it might just not have matched the tastes of a particular editor. Thus, you should keep going. There are a lot of great semi-pro venues out there (some of which may become pro in the future), and if exposure is what you're looking for, there are also venues such as small anthologies which can be terrific (though they pay less well). You can choose to trunk your story temporarily because you don't want to submit below a certain pay level... just don't lose it in your files! In the future, other markets will surely open up at the pay level you're interested in, and you will be able to submit to them at that point.

Deciding that a story just isn't good enough... may or may not be a good reason. Maybe you just haven't found the right editor yet. But if you're feeling pretty sure it's not good enough, or you're getting pretty uniform feedback from critique partners but you don't feel capable of doing the revisions required, then maybe it's worth setting the story aside and taking a look at it later. If you leave it aside for a few months, or even a few years, then you might be able to come back to it later. At that point you may decide it should be blown to smithereens, or you could have much better vision and better tools as a writer and really be able to make it work. This has happened to me.

Deciding that a story isn't your first priority right now... is a good enough reason. I have a story that I'm keen to revise, but I don't have time. Add to that the fact that it takes place in my Varin world, which not many people know, but in which I'm currently writing a novel, and I arrive at the following decision: I should probably be writing my novel and not rewriting that story right now. It can sit until I have the time and wherewithal to deal with it.

Deciding that you don't want a story to represent you... is a good enough reason. I had a story that I wrote on the basis of a story seed given to me by somebody else. It was fun to write. It was really different from what I usually write, and as such I found it refreshing. But when I started to send it out, the main complaint I got from editors was that the premise was not believable - and the premise was the part that I had been given as a seed. I couldn't change it without gutting the story. I looked at what I had written, and asked myself, "If an editor says he/she likes this, will I feel happy about having this in the public domain with my name on it?" In the end, I decided I really wouldn't. So I retired the story. I have only ever done this once.

I'm sure that my own personal experiences don't cover all the possibilities here. Have any of you decided to "trunk" stories? Why? I'd be interested to hear your thinking on this subject.

Illness and Medicine: A Google+ worldbuilding hangout report

2011-12-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

First, let me note that there will not be any worldbuilding hangout today, for any of you who might have been thinking to drop in. I'm going to be resuming my worldbuilding hangouts in January. And some secret plans are afoot... I'll let you know more when we get more tied down.

This past Wednesday I spoke with Janet Harriet, Harry Markov, and Glenda Pfeiffer. Our topic was Illness and medicine. As with many of our topics, it's hard to know where to start with this one, so I started by mentioning one of the fundamental underpinnings of any culture of illness and medicine, namely the idea of cause and effect. The way that we treat people, and the types of medicine we pursue, are based on our understanding of the causes of illness. Thus, when a people believes that illness is caused by evil spirits, the medical approach will typically address this problem directly by providing exorcisms and other spiritual approaches. When a people possesses the idea of germ theory, that fundamentally changes the approach to one of finding medicines to deal with the germs in question. There is also the possibility that medicine may be an empirical/experimental practice, which is to say that a people may have found out through fortuitous circumstance that eating a certain plant will cure headaches, or stop a certain kind of illness. In this case the cause of illness may not be considered particularly relevant. Janet felt that (at least historically) midwives have had an expertise that grows out of this kind of learn-by-experience approach. And Harry mentioned that if you have a magical healing system, the sense of cause might not even be necessary.

On the other hand, a logic of magical healing is necessary. This logic can grow out of the general logic of a magic system, or out of some kind of medically based model, but it needs to feel grounded. I mentioned how I'd worked with Janice Hardy when she was setting up some of the cultural underpinnings of the magical healing system she used in The Healing Wars. In this system, healers are able magically to perceive injury and hurt, and to heal it, but must take the pain of it into their own bodies. Then they have to push the pain out into a magical metal which stores it (and is in short supply). This metal is in turn forged into pain-shooting weapons, creating a pain-based economy. Believe me, this is a fascinating trilogy - but at the start we were looking for answers to questions like these:

Who are physicians?
Why are they chosen as doctors?
What is the role of doctors in the culture?
What are the limitations on doctors?
Is there any alternative to the magical healing system?

In fact, people who use plants and other substances to heal are considered dirty in Janice's world, and dangerously unreliable...but the system would have seemed incomplete without them.

I believe it was Harry who mentioned that in the Anime series "Bleach" there is a character who can do what looks like healing, but is actually a localized reversal of time that reverts the damage to its previous condition. Harry shared a logistical issue he's been dealing with in his work in progress, where magic can be used to heal, but at the same time, using magic is a drain on life force. So what happens if you try to heal yourself? It could be complex...

Glenda asked, "How do the magical healers conceptualize healing and illness?" This is an excellent question. Very often we use metaphors to describe illness; this can influence our treatment of it in addition to our general concept of its cause. Magical healers who are aware of physiology will treat people very differently from those who are not. Harry's system has complex rituals - like recipes - for tissue repair. Thus the healer need not know too much about physiology, only how to follow the rituals, and of course he/she must have the magic ability to activate the process.

It is worth doing research when you're dealing with illness and medicine in your writing. Don't just gesture at what is possible. I've gone and looked up how to treat bruises, and I've looked up the different types of recognized mental illnesses, and a lot of other things as well. It's also worth considering the scope of what doctors are called on to treat. As Harry noted, homosexuality has sometimes been considered a mental condition that requires "treatment."

What can you alter in your world? There are lots of underlying parameters that are open to change. For example, who is more important, the doctor or the patient? Who has the power, and why? Can you ask questions about the recommended treatments, such as why and how they are to be delivered? Can you refuse treatment?

It's important to keep in mind also that doctors are knowledge elites, much like priests. They undergo special training, and have knowledge that must be protected and treated with respect. Often they can engage the services of gatekeepers to help them accomplish this. In the case of a system based on evil spirit possession, the roles of doctor and priest can overlap. Even today, Harry told us, people worry about the "evil eye" in Bulgaria: if people look at you and think you're pretty they will jinx you and make you feel ill; grandmothers will recommend washing your eyes three times at the door and washing the door handle and then you should be fine. Exorcisms still happen, and mental illness can sometimes be labeled as possession.

The metaphors we use to describe our bodies and our health are very resistant to change over time, and they can deeply affect our behavior. If you're worldbuilding, this is a wonderful area to spend time developing because tiny phrases will speak volumes about the way your people think. Here are some expressions that the discussion participants shared:

"The hamster that runs my brain fell off."
"One of your boards is loose."
"Losing your marbles"
"Not playing with a full deck"
"You've let go like liver" (in Bulgaria describes lounging around lazily)
"A seagull has eaten your brain"

I wrote a post some time ago called Body Models and Metaphors, which was about how one decides when to seek medical treatment. Some people base their decision on the amount of time one has been sick, while others base their decision on specific types of changes in the health condition.

Some final things we mentioned were terminal illness and palliative care, medical insurance, and issues of public health and vaccination.

In Japan, very often the person who has a terminal illness will not be told, because it is believed that the knowledge would trouble them unnecessarily. Instead, the family will be told, and the patient simply expected to follow doctor's orders without any knowledge of the reason. In the last session I linked to the article called "How Doctors Die" which is also relevant here, about the cultural conditions that lead us to expend so much money on torturous last-ditch treatments when people are near death. The question of medical insurance comes along with the role of government in public health in the society you're designing. Does this society have a concept of spreading the risk across the population? How might a government respond to issues of public health when it is responsible for safeguarding public health and sponsoring treatment? In Australia, the government puts out pretty stiff advertising against unhealthful behavior that brings significant expense upon the public health system. One would expect vaccinations to be heavily supported in an environment like that, whereas in the US a lot of people have been convinced by fraudulent argumentation that vaccinations cause autism or other disorders... leading directly to public health problems such as the resurgence of diseases like measles and whooping cough. There can also be questions of whether one group in society is disproportionately affected by one health condition or another - such as Tay-Sachs disease affecting Jewish people, or royal families having a tendency to carry hemophilia. In my Varin world the noble caste is heavily inbred and so everybody has some kind of health difficulties (or if they don't have them currently, they still might have had difficulties at birth).

Obviously there's far more than can be covered in one hour, but I hope these thoughts have given you some inspiration. Our next hangout will be in January, and I have a special plan in the works, so I want to ask you: are any of you working on creating languages for your stories right now? If so, would you be interested in a special invitation-only hangout with experts (not just me) on language design for fantasy and science fiction? If you are, tell me about it in the comments below.

TTYU Retro: Using the social tools you have (or, why the women of the past weren't powerless)

2011-12-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Must every scene must be different?

2011-12-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

This is, of course, a trick question. The answer itself isn't the important part - the important part is that your readers will notice sameness when they encounter it, and expect it to mean something. Which in turn means that if you don't want the sameness to mean something, you have to work towards making every scene different.

Let's get a bit more concrete about when sameness means something.

Let's say you're starting your story with your main character walking into a confrontation with a parent, and the main point of the story is a change in the relationship of that character with the parent. Then it makes sense to put in a scene at the end where there's another confrontation between the character and the parent, and it comes out differently. The repetition is noticeable, and it means something: it means the character has changed, allowing a different outcome from a very similar situation.

In The Princess Bride, we see repetition between the scene when Buttercup first gets introduced to her people as a princess, coming out on the red carpet, and the scene where she walks out with the queen's crown on ("at noon she met her subjects again, this time as their queen...") and gets booed. In the first instance, she's detached but accepting of the situation. In the second, she has her detachment and her acceptance called into question. It creates a terrific contrast, and that second scene had me going "No, no, no!" the first time I saw it. (And it has the boy doing the same thing.)

In The Lord of the Rings there is a repetition of the scene inside Mount Doom - between Elrond and Isildur in the first instance, and between Sam and Frodo in the second instance. Part of the power of the repetition comes in our desire for all the adventures to have changed things and made the situation different, so that Frodo won't fall into the same trap - and yet he does.

In a situation where two scenes are noticeably the same, readers will conclude that any differences they can find will be seriously significant to the story.

Now let's talk about when it's important to make every scene different.

Take my novel in progress as an example. I have a society going where the nobles get messages via servants, and in which the sending of messages is quite common and sometimes quite important. Naturally, this means I have a lot of scenes where servants are delivering messages. The danger here is that there would be too much similarity between the scenes of message delivery - causing people to invest significance in differences between the scenes that really have no particular import. Then of course as we go on and there are more instances of message delivery, it could get extremely repetitive.

In this kind of situation I pay very close attention to which aspects of the scene are important. Is the location where the message is received important? Is the method of delivery (paper or recitation) important? Is the content of the message important? Is the character's reaction to receiving the message important? When I write the scene, the important elements need to stay, but those of less importance can just be skipped. So when Tagret gets a message too sensitive to be written down, he gets it in his own room via recitation - and I make sure to show that. When another message comes and the deliverer wants to be anonymous, Tagret gets a piece of paper slipped under his door. When the message is too urgent to let the family enter the house and relax before receiving it, I have the First Houseman meet them in the entry vestibule to deliver the message. But when Tagret gets the message that a close friend has survived the threat of death, it's not the method of delivery that's important, but Tagret's reaction - so I skip the message delivery entirely and go straight to Tagret's post-message emotions and actions.

Watch out for small details that can become repetitive when you're not paying attention, such as the way you have people respond to danger, or the way they approach doors. If you're always describing these the same way, you're giving your character a habit - which may be charming and work great, or which could be entirely distracting from the conflicts of the story.

The other place where sameness can cause trouble is in larger, more important events. Maybe you're writing a book where a politician is trying to get something done and has to give a number of important speeches. It could turn out to be really awful if everything surrounding those speeches is the same, especially if your politician is giving the speeches about the same topic, just to different people. In that case, it's worth working hard to create different contexts for the similar events.

In my novel in progress, there is a point when the story events start being organized around a political process called Heir Selection. In my Varin world, twelve candidates compete in several rounds of voting so that one can be selected as heir to the throne. The votes are all cast by the members of the Eminence's cabinet. We start with the Round of Twelve, then three days later is the Round of Eight, three days after that the Round of Four, and three days after that the final round. I think you can see the trap. If these events are not to become very repetitive and boring, they must be very different from one another. They must take place in different locations, the type of test put to the candidates must be different, etc. - but even that is not quite enough. I've also found that I have to make sure that I use different points of view, and even take focus off the content of the event. The Round of Twelve is handled in the point of view of one of the candidates on the stage in the Hall of the Eminence; the Round of Eight is outside in the Plaza of Varin, and the questioning that the candidates have been subjected to is not even part of the event. While the Eminence announces the results of the question session and introduces the four candidates who will be moving on, I stay in the point of view of an audience member who doesn't care at all about what the Eminence says because he's busy trying to stop one of the candidates from being assassinated. My sense is that for the Round of Four I'll be back in my candidate's viewpoint, because this is a spot where his actions during the competition are absolutely critical - but for the final round I suspect the question of the results will be far more important than any character's actions during the ceremonial portion, so the ceremonial part will most likely be omitted.

As I go through this I'm noticing a pattern, which is to say that any time you have repetition it's important to keep the primary focus different. Try to identify what's most important about what is happening, and stick to that. Look around for ways to change setting, character, etc. so you are not simply falling into a reader's comfortable expectations. When their comfortable expectations are being met, readers are far more likely to skim or skip. It's the focus on difference that will keep their attention riveted to the page.

It's something to think about.

Series: Worldbuilding Hangouts on Google+

2011-12-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

This is an index of all of my Worldbuilding hangout reports. I'm listing them alphabetically by topic.

Link: Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits

2011-12-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

Here's a good article by a modern armorer concerning the question of reasonable armor for women, and how to balance style with functionality. My favorite part is when he says that if Sauron ever raised his arms too high, he'd poke his own eyes out!

Unfortunately, the link to the article has gone dead. Darn... and thanks to Sean for letting me know.

Guest Post by Jane Kindred: The Language of Fallen Angels: Russian on the angelic tongue

2011-12-15T05:30:00.000-08:00

When I first decided I was going to create a celestial world that echoed the world of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, I didn’t actually intend for the story to have anything to do with Russia. I was just working from the “what if” of an angelic grand duchess being the only survivor of her family’s execution and having to go into hiding with demons. Stumbling across the name of the city of Arkhangel’sk while searching for Russian angelic names was the beginning of my Russophilia. I just loved the way the name sounded and looked. Alongside the history of angels, I was soon researching the history of Arkhangel’sk, and the story began to be increasingly rooted in the real world.

Meanwhile, thinking it would be a fun way to do some research for the book, I signed up at the local community college for a class on Russian Culture and Civilization. That whim would turn into a full-on obsession within a matter of days. As soon as I began studying Russia, I fell in love with it. We watched Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev in class and I ran home to put it on Netflix so I could watch it repeatedly (all three and a half hours of it), fascinated by the images of the icons painted in the early Orthodox cathedrals by devoted monks—and equally fascinated by the depiction of pagan rituals celebrated on the summer solstice before being subsumed by the Church. We read Gogol and Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova, and I couldn’t get enough, moved to tears by the sound of words I didn’t even understand.

When my instructor mentioned she was hosting a summer Russian-language trip to St. Petersburg, there was no way I could pass it up, though I had to turn my entire world upside down to do it. (I think it was around this time that friends began to be less amused by my obsession and a little more concerned.) I didn’t know a word of Russian, so I bought a Russian language dictionary and a beginning Russian textbook and taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet and the rudiments of the language. By the time we arrived in St. Petersburg, I could spell my name in Cyrillic script, identify signs for the metro and the bathroom, count to 20, and say “I don’t know,” “I don’t understand,” and “I don’t speak Russian.” (And “How much is that bulochka?”)

I fumbled my way through conversations over evening tea (and bulochki) with my hostess every night, managed to buy things at the corner markets—even if I later learned I was asking for the equivalent of being a bottle of water rather than purchasing one—and counted my money in rubles and kopeks. I was hesitant to speak in broken Russian in social situations, but the longer I listened to the flow of the sounds of the people around me, the more I seemed to be following what others were saying. One of the highlights of my trip was listening to a friend’s uncle who didn’t speak a word of English reciting long stanzas of Yevgeniy Onegin as we walked to the Ekaterine Palace in Pushkin.

By the time I returned to the States, I knew my demons weren’t just going to happen to land in Russia when they fell. There would be an indelible tie between Heaven and Russia, and my demons would be Russian. I wanted the language to be an authentic part of that characterization, woven in among the English words as unobtrusively as possible. Like Joss Whedon’s characters do with the odd Chinese phrase in Firefly and Serenity, my demons often slip into Russian for more course expressions, and I also made it a kind of secret language used by the demon peasants still living among angels in my celestial St. Petersburg.

There’s a scene set in modern St. Petersburg in which a human negotiator between the demons and the Seraphim brute squad chides my demon Belphagor after he expresses ignorance about a post-Stalinist statue commemorating suffering in the gulags: “It’s your country, yet I seem to know it better than you do.” Belphagor shakes his head and replies, “Not my country,” and his friend says, “Of course it is. Why else do you come here?”

Just as it did for me, Russia took hold of my demon from the first time he fell into it. It’s beautiful and tragic, heartbreaking and triumphant at once, plunged into the harshest winter nights and soaring into the most magical, brief summer days in a way that’s almost a metaphor for its entire history, and its people are its soul. It’s no surprise, then, that Russian is also Belphagor’s language of intimacy.

There was no way I could do the place or the language justice after a five-week trip and with a very limited vocabulary, but by letting my angelic grand duchess experience it as I did, as a foreigner dependent upon the people around her who embody the place, I hoped to convey both its lyrical magic and its darkness to the reader. While my Russian phrases may be imperfect, so are my demons, after all, having picked up their Russian on the streets of Heaven’s slums. Hopefully, we’ll both be forgiven for our mistakes.

***

Bio:

Jane Kindred began writing romantic fantasy at the age of 12 in the wayback of a Plymouth Fury—which, as far as she recalls, never killed anyone…who didn’t have it coming. She spent her formative years ruining her eyes reading romance novels in the Tucson sun and watching Star Trek marathons in the dark. She now writes to the sound of San Francisco foghorns while two cats slowly but surely edge her off the side of the bed. Jane is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Carina Press/June 2011) and The Fallen Queen (Entangled Publishing/December 2011), Book One of The House of Arkhangel’sk trilogy.

You can find Jane on Twitter: @JaneKindred
on Facebook: www.facebook.com/somewherebetweenheavenandhell
or on her website: www.janekindred.com

The Culture of Death: A Google+ worldbuilding hangout report

2011-12-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I was joined by Leigh Dragoon, Dale Emery, Janet Harriet and Glenda Pfeiffer for a discussion of the Culture of Death. Considering how dark the discussion could have been, I felt it was actually wonderful - more intellectually engaged, and at the same time more personal, than I had feared.

We began with the idea that despite the uniformity of the phenomenon of death across the world, it is responded to with an incredible diversity of practices. These practices vary across countries, but they have also varied across history, in part because of the way science has changed the way we interact with death.

We started in with some examples of death practices. In Japan, Buddhism is often seen as the religion that handles death the best (in comparison with Shintoism and Christianity). It is said that people are born Shinto, get married Christian (or Shinto), but die Buddhist. The Buddhist ceremonies in response to death occur at regular intervals after the death has occurred, which we felt fit well with the way that people endure grief. Leigh also noted (somewhat later in the discussion) that Islam provides for different funerals at intervals. Sometimes death is celebrated, as in the Irish wake (involving drinking and music). Janet mentioned the New Orleans funeral in this context - a procession that begins somberly but ends with a huge party. In 2010 when my own family went to Europe, we encountered a funeral procession in the city of Aosta, Italy. The coffin was being carried by about eight pallbearers and accompanied by a four or five piece brass band - a combination which we found quite unusual. One of the participants asked me if they hired dirge singers (answer: I don't know, but I didn't hear any), and mentioned that the book Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay involves hired mourners. I brought everyone's attention to this terrific post that Joyce Chng (Twitter @jolantru) contributed to my Culture Share, entitled "Qing Ming and Seventh Month - no, they are not Halloween." In it, she describes Singaporean funeral practices and the "ghost month."

Out of Joyce's post I remarked on the presence of different colors in the funeral ceremony and we moved to discussing colors associated with death - like brown sack-cloth and red threads. In the US and in many other countries, black is the color associated with death. In China and some other countries, white is the color associated with death. This is something I've taken advantage of in my own worldbuilding: in Varin, the goddess who cares for the spirits of the virtuous dead is Elinda, the moon, so the color of death is moon yellow, and people going to a funeral bind yellow scarves around their arms just below the elbow, with the ends hanging down toward their feet.

Religion is very closely associated with death, I think because one of its functions is to provide explanation, social support and comfort. We don't always attend to questions of death or cosmology in our day to day lives, but an event like a death causes us to reach out for this kind of support. Dale insightfully described celebrating the dead through ceremony as a spiritual act.

Indeed, there is a strong sense of community built up among people who attend a funeral, and I believe part of the function of death celebrations is to bring a community together after a catastrophic event of this nature that might otherwise cause people to drift apart. Janet described it as figuring out a new social order without the presence of that individual, and mentioned cases like the death of a president, and the symbolism in the way the airplane flight formation comes back together.

These kinds of elements can form a wonderful part of any world you are building, and give a great glimpse into the cosmology, expectations and thinking processes of a people. Anything that is a cultural affirmation can take different forms in different cultural contexts. In our own world, a funeral can be a very personal affair, or it can be exceedingly public, symbolic of maintaining the current social order (as a state funeral), or it can even be an event which foments violence and revolution - everything depends on the meaning lent to it by the people involved. Extreme examples of this would be the protests of the Westboro Baptist Church and the events surrounding political martyrdom.

I brought up the idea of the death of Steve Jobs, because it seemed to have taken so many people by surprise. In this culture, there is something of the expectation that death doesn't happen, or that it only happens to "old people" - but of course, who is considered old is another thing that changes with time, medicine and culture.

We also talked about euphemisms. As with any kind of phenomenon considered frightening or distasteful, euphemisms swarm around the way we talk about death. Dale mentioned the death of his dog, which he had described in a letter as having the dog "put down," and told us of his shock when a Swedish friend described it as him having had his dog "killed." Janet told us that in her family, the primary euphemism was to describe someone as "being called home." Another common phrase is to say "passed" or "passed on." This area is an incredibly rich one for worldbuilding. Just by creating a single euphemism you can express an enormous amount about how the people in your world conceptualize the universe - death, an afterlife, etc. Dale mentioned a story by Joe Haldeman called "A Tangled Web" (Analog, Sept. 1981) in which people expressed embarrassment by saying, "I die, and my death creates trouble for the community."

Because of the way demographics work, and the way we travel through periods of our lives where certain things are expected to happen, there can be times when death seems to be coming in a wave all at once. This is mostly a product of our internal point of view on the stage of life we are in, because people are being born all the time, but we tend to know more people who are roughly of the same age we are. (Though it would be interesting to consider what life would be like if people weren't being born all the time.) Janet mentioned how this can be seen as bringing about the end of an era, the way that we tend to track when veterans of a particular war, or witnesses of an event, become fewer and finally disappear. Quite recently I saw a news story about the death of the last veteran of World War I. Leigh mentioned that many recordings of Holocaust survivors' stories were made in the 1990's, because people became aware that many of them were dying and didn't want their stories to be lost with them.

Dale asked, "How do we decide what we want to record about people's lives?" It's a fascinating question for worldbuilding. Certain types of information get recorded for posterity, and certain types do not - and the method of recording influences this hugely. Just compare a person's diary with his/her YouTube channel!

Perhaps inevitably, the question of Zombies came up. Robots too - I guess because we were looking for dramatically different models and a little bit of humor on the side. We asked, "Is death inevitable?" What if you could back yourself up into a robot? In this context we discussed Brad Torgerson's 2010 story, "Outbound," involving a boy who at a certain point was transformed into digital form. We also mentioned the ghosts of Harry Potter, and the "Deathday party" that Nearly Headless Nick celebrated in Chamber of Secrets. Would there be circumstances (as with zombies or ghosts or backups) where death would constitute the beginning of life? Dale gave me a great link to a humorous piece by Monty Python, Funeral Arrangements. Because it is so emotionally fraught, death is actually the subject of a lot of humor - Juzo Itami's film The Funeral comes to mind.

Our last major topic was the processing of dead bodies. There are lots of ways of doing this - burial, cremation, burial at sea, etc. Many may have arisen from the desire to keep the dead body from infecting the living (though there is a notable exception to this in the case of cannibalism). Some traditions put the body on display, seeing it as a necessary piece of evidence that the spirit of the person is gone, and thus providing a sense of closure for the survivors. On the other hand, there are plenty of issues surrounding this. What if the person died in a car accident? Do you cover up the damage done to the body? We talked about the idea of the "death picture" and how some mortuaries will try to make the body "perfect." (This creeped a few of us out.) Janet mentioned how sometimes children (and others) are encouraged not to see a person who is dying so that they maintain the image of that person's health in their mind. Leigh mentioned reading that the Greeks viewed becoming dead as a process that followed the initial death event, where preparations had to be made for the afterlife. She saw this as a more integrated view of death and life. In ancient Egypt the royals were mummified and provided with statues of servants, animals, and goods for the next life. In the Asian market near my house you can buy "death money" which you are supposed to burn to send to the dead.

Dale suggested (and I agree) that while one should ask, "What is hidden about death? What is displayed? Should stoicism be valued?" This question of appropriate behaviors for the survivors of a death (extreme wailing and tearing of hair versus stoicism etc) was one we barely touched on, but which provides rich opportunities for worldbuilders.

Here are a last couple of interesting links that came out of the discussion:
How Doctors Die (a discussion of cultural phenomena surrounding death and modern medicine)
The Greek Way of Death (the book mentioned by Leigh above)

Thanks to Leigh, Dale, Janet and Glenda for a wonderful and deep discussion. Today's topic will be illness and medicine. I hope to see you there!

Upcoming excitement...

2011-12-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to say that on Thursday I'll be having a wonderful guest post from Jane Kindred, author of The Fallen Queen - just out from Entangled Publishing. She'll be telling us about how she started learning Russian and how she ended up integrating it into her novel. When you read her story, I'm sure you'll be inspired to go out and start learning a foreign language too!

As for this week's Google+ hangout, I'll be holding it on Wednesday at 11am PST and we'll be discussing illness and medicine in worldbuilding. Please join us... and feel free to ask me in the comments if you need help finding us.

TTYU Retro: Character Motivations versus Plot Motivations

2011-12-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

One of the most critical ingredients of close point of view, from my perspective, is a strong basis in character motivation. I'm sure you've seen instances where characters are acting because the plot requires it, rather than because they have their own reasons to act. Places like this always give me the impression that the narrative has gone from deep to shallow, even when the close point of view is otherwise well-executed.

When I am planning a story, I always have a pretty good idea of how my characters will be feeling in any particular scene. However, I never feel 100% certain until I'm "on the ground" in a scene. This is one of the reasons why I tend to write in linear chronological order - but even if you don't, it's worth taking the time to go through the story in linear fashion to make sure all the motivations connect up to one another.

For me, plotting a character's reaction to something is not a simple matter of stimulus-response. I'd write out my way of thinking through the process like this:

initial mental state
stimulus
judgment
initial mental state + emotion inspired by judgment
motivation
response

Each one of these steps has to connect to the next for me to feel like the scene is seamless. To put it in prose:

Characters perceive plot events, judge them and react emotionally, which then causes them to feel a motivation to act in response.

Sometimes, especially in action, this occurs very quickly. I don't have to write out a separate sentence for each step in the process! But before I have a character enter an interaction, I go through in my head how he/she is feeling and why. Emotions concatenate. If we're already feeling tense, our reactions to a particular event will likely be magnified. If we're feeling rattled because of previous events, we may not be able to slow down enough to notice things, or to think through our response to what happens next.

As I write, I find myself thinking through the nature of emotions and motivations. What kind of emotional state might makes a person get so angry they might start throwing things? If a person often reacts in one particular way without thinking, what might be different about their reaction if they decided to do it on purpose? What does a character want to accomplish by their actions? Are they fully in control or on the edge? What behaviors do they engage in to counteract the feeling of being out of control? What could push them so far they might make a decision that hurts them in the long run? Why would they hurt a friend?

A character's actions, and particularly a point of view character's actions, must grow naturally out of his/her reaction to story events. If they don't, the sense of deep connection and plausibility will be lost. If you have a story that alternates point of view, make sure to ask yourself what happened in Character A's story while you were visiting Character B's head. It's important, because when you go back to Character A, that person's reactions won't necessarily have much to do with what was going on with Character B (unless they were in the same scene together). The state of mind with which they enter their next point of view scene will depend on what they were up to "offstage." So it's very good to have figured out what happened offstage! In fact, if I don't know what happened and what state of mind my character is in, I can't start a new scene at all.

By going through all this, I aim to create a sense of mental continuity with each character that runs from one end of a story to the other. If I find the plot requirements are dragging me off that continuity, then I either go back and change the character motivation so it will end up in the right place... or I change the plot.

It's something to think about.

Writing male point of view

2011-12-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

I ran across an interesting article at Fiction Groupie some time ago about writing male point of view. It provided a checklist of some things that men do and think about...fully admitting that many of these things were stereotypes, but pointing out that the list does have some basis in fact (most stereotypes do, on some level). My first reaction on reading it was that I felt it really didn't apply to most of the male points of view that I write. Was it just that I was avoiding stereotypes? Was it - horrors - that my male characters weren't male enough?

Fortunately, I have male readers who have assured me my male characters are working - but it got me thinking about how I write male points of view. I do this quite a lot, in fact - two of my three published stories have male protagonists, and my novel in progress, For Love, For Power, has three points of view, all of whom are male, for structural reasons.

First I think it's important to think about stereotypical characteristics from the point of view of core vs. peripheral characteristics rather than stereotypes. Core characteristics are those that tend to be possessed by most men we know. Peripheral characteristics are those that can be considered male, but are typically possessed by smaller subgroups of men. One of the things that will cause you to fall into a stereotype is if you give too many of your male characters too many of these characteristics all at once. To go with Roni Loren's list, if they're all action oriented, impatient, visually oriented guys who like to be in charge, project confidence but repress their emotions, say what they mean in order to solve all problems, converse only to exchange information and think about sex all the time... you have a problem. On the other hand, these are all really valuable trends in male behavior in our society that are useful to consider when designing male characters (especially for category romance, which has its own idiosyncratic demands!).

One thing I'd encourage you to remember is that a lot of the characteristics that we consider typically male are based in our society's cultural values - which means that if you're working outside our society and its rules (as I am most of the time) the characteristics of male characters are going to be heavily influenced by the differences in the society around them. Dress varies widely (think Japan versus US men, for example). So does the expression of emotions (think European or Slavic men vs. Englishmen for an alternate example of expressive style). When you're designing your world and the society that operates within it, make sure to think through some of these core gender-role variables and figure out what your society values.

So for the sake of making this more concrete, I'm going to give some examples from my own male characters. I'd say that typically each one has one or two defining characteristics that are "male," but they vary widely on a lot of the other variables.

The most current-society-normative of my characters are the humans from my Allied Systems stories. The young man David Linden doesn't have women to interact with, so sex isn't on his mind at all. He's primarily defined by his need to prove himself to his father as a worthy scientist - which can be done for either gender, but won't seem out of place for a male character. The main character of my story in progress, The Liars, is Adrian Preston. He's married and spends a lot of time thinking about, and negotiating with his wife, but the story doesn't allow a lot of extra time to explore the intimate side of their relationship. He's a man who lives for his work as a linguist and loves it so much that his idea of having fun is working on language.

The idea of the importance of work is one that I didn't see in Roni Loren's piece, but one that I think is common to a great many men. When designing a society you should definitely consider identifying what activities are considered worth dedicating one's life to (work), and which are considered legitimate outlets for emotion and conversation (sports, for example). Even Rulii, my wolflike alien, is very much centered on how his work as Councilor will allow him to achieve his life's goal, which he thinks of in terms of "landing the quarry of my life's hunt."

A more nuanced example from my stories is the character of Imbati Xinta. He lives for his work to the point of fanaticism, and he certainly represses his emotions, but not for the reasons that men in our society would do so. Because he works as manservant to the Eminence of Varin, his job is to stand by and remember everything he hears, and to reveal nothing through his face or movements that would jeopardize his master's secrets. He is a trained bodyguard and martial artist, but in appearance is quite effeminate, and emotionally he is very vulnerable. There are a couple of things going on with this, one of which is that I've known any number of men who go about covering up significant emotional vulnerabilities - and the other of which is that Xinta is expected to repress his own ethics and human feeling, and to be entirely "selfless," since that is considered the ideal state for a member of the servant caste. Xinta self-represses to such an extent that he's not able to connect with anyone emotionally beyond normal politeness, and sex is the last thing on his mind. Which is to say I suppose that I'm using the work focus tendency and the emotional repression tendency to negate the tendency to think about sex in his case. As to his appearance, I'm having him look the way he does - paying close attention to his looks, dressing in bright colors, wearing jewelry, etc. - in part to please the man he works for, and in part to echo that real-world tendency for a "civilized" man to take on more elaborate habits that might be laughed off as effeminate by a member of the lower classes.

I suppose you could say that close observation of the people around you can only go so far, because that will only allow you to see the parameters being used by the people around you. I have found my anthropological studies extremely valuable, because they've given me an eye for paying attention to and interpreting the possible variables behind different styles of social interaction. Particularly if you're worldbuilding, you should try to see foreign movies or read books about people in other times from the point of view of looking at societal models of gendered and romantic behavior (Emma, for example, can be quite an eye-opener for someone used to the permissive ways of modern romance).

When you're writing a male character, you won't want him to be without any male characteristics (those recognizable to the readers). That can be considered a given. But you don't have to cling just to the stereotypes you know. If you cultivate a sense within your world and your reader of what gendered behavior is like, then you can have your male character follow that trend and see it as masculine. Furthermore, female characters can possess Earthly "male" characteristics and still be considered feminine depending on the views of the society you're working in. The most important thing, I think, is to make sure that you've thought through why your character behaves the way he does, why you think he's masculine, and precisely how and why he deviates from the stereotypes that everyone will be looking for, yet fearing to find.

It's something to think about.

Some thoughts on publishing, "teaching to the test," and artistic vision

2011-12-08T08:30:00.000-08:00

I see a lot of discussion of the publishing industry these days. We're clearly in a period of overwhelming change, and I don't find it useful, personally, to take sides in the traditional-publishing-versus-self-publishing conflict. I continue to write; I observe from the sidelines, and I continue to hope for a result that will benefit authors and keep readers reading high-quality work. I think an upheaval like this one will end, not in any complete supplanting of old models with new, but with a new equilibrium whose parameters are as yet uncertain.

Publishing is a very old business. When I first started learning about it with a view to getting published, I was surprised at how little penetration of modern technology (simple stuff like email and websites) there actually was. At this point, these have become the norm. Word processing and email have made it very easy for authors to submit, but the bottleneck they must face is the same as it always was: someone has to read the work all the way through in order to evaluate it. This takes time, and it takes people. The deluge of incoming work has put far more strain on these people than they had to face in the past.

The role of the gatekeeper is a problematic one, and double-edged. The gatekeeper, because of her/his role, has power that can be resented by petitioners. But at the same time, the gatekeeper is protecting the publisher, and the readers, from work of low quality. I'm sure you will say that a lot of poor quality work gets published, and I have indeed felt the same way myself, but the evaluation of fiction is nothing if not subjective. Getting published is not just about being "good enough," it's about reaching someone.

If there is anything I would choose to decry about the current situation, it's the way that the concerns of marketing have pulled us away from that core question of reaching someone. I compare it to standardized testing. Standardized tests were created to evaluate a person's total education, but they never bore much direct relation to it; they just happened to be a good indirect measure of the results. The problem arises when getting a good result on the test becomes so overweeningly important that we decide we must instruct people directly how to take that test. Performance on the test goes up, but the total education that the test once reflected is gone, and students end up with meaningless test-taking skills that leave them woefully unprepared for the demands of life that the original full education once addressed (or at least tried to). In publishing, teaching to the test is the equivalent, in my view, to buying for the marketers. Letting the numbers dictate the content of our fiction will lead us toward fiction written by the numbers, and everyone will suffer as a result.

Fortunately, I don't know many authors who spend much time compromising their vision to a business model. The core of what makes fiction and storytelling wonderful - what makes it visceral, and has made it a vital part of human societies since prehistoric time - remains intact. And I believe that this kind of vision is something that need not be lost at the level of the publishers. Just because we work within a market doesn't mean we need to lose that spark. The example of the late Steve Jobs should be instructive in this regard. Apple stands out as a company because he understood that computers weren't just a business - they could be a vision. I would like to see publishers recapture that feeling of vision, because this business all about inspiration. As authors, we are constantly working to take the voice of the Muse, to convey it to our readers, to deliver it to our agents and our publishers. In the new equilibrium, I can only imagine the most successful publishers will be there to pick it up and let it shine.

Colonialism and Imperialism: A worldbuilding hangout report

2011-12-07T06:56:00.001-08:00

It was great to get back to the Google+ worldbuilding hangouts after a two-week break for Thanksgiving. I was joined by Kyle Aisteach, Janet Harriet, Harry Markov, and Glenda Pfeiffer for this one, and we had a really great chat.

The topic of colonialism and imperialism is one that I've studied a bit - and found daunting - academically, but one that I engage with in all of my published work involving the Allied Systems universe. The first time I really realized that this was a critical issue for me was in the early drafts of my first story, "Let the Word Take Me" (Analog 2008), when my friend Keyan told me she was worried that the resolution of the story was going to lead to a future "with alcoholic geckos lying around." That really wasn't where I wanted it to go either, so I did some serious revising and kept the issues of colonialism and imperialism at the forefront of my mind thereafter.

In Star Trek, we encounter the concept of the Prime Directive, which demands that the crew of the Enterprise and other ships not interfere in the culture of another people. We all agreed that the pure Star Trek form of this directive is very limiting. It was a concept that came up multiple times in our discussion.

One of the questions that underlies whether Federation folk will attempt to engage with a culture or not, and on what terms, is that of technology level. The idea of a technology "level" is one defined by our own culture and our own world, where we have given names (bronze age, iron age, etc.) to periods of our own history and thus consider them iconic. However, it is a more complex question than this, and we would certainly expect that in dealing with alien societies (either in the science fictional or simply "foreign" sense) technologies would not necessarily conform to our expectations. Certain kinds of materials and innovations are necessary for the technology to develop in a particular direction, but a people will view both materials and technologies through its own lens of value, and that can create significant divergence.

Thus it's difficult, and extremely problematic, to define who has the "more advanced" society. Harry mentioned our current level of technology as being associated with the desire for instant gratification. High levels of technology in one area don't necessarily entail cultural refinement or sophistication. In Alan Smale's alternate history novella, "A Clash of Eagles" (Panverse) the Roman legions are sure they are the superior culture at least militarily, but they are soundly defeated by unexpected military technologies possessed by the residents of North America. My own story "At Cross Purposes" (Analog 2011) involved spacefaring otter aliens with technologies that humans couldn't understand, but they felt that art was more important than technology, and thus had no prime directive at all (they were happy to give tech to artists of any stripe...I can't wait to write a story about that kind of havoc).

Very often we encounter situations where one society feels superior to the other. But how is that enforced? Kyle asked whether it is ethical for a group with higher medical technology to withhold that technology from another group in desperate need, just for Prime Directive reasons. Indeed, this is an area where ethics come into play quite seriously, and Star Trek has driven plenty of episodes with the question of which one will win out (Prime Directive or ethics/compassion).

Janet remarked that in a colonizing situation, one group has something that the other one wants - this can actually play both ways, as sometimes the colonized want the higher tech or whatever it is that the colonizers possess, and sometimes the colonizers are there because the people of this area possess something they are planning to take. An excellent book about the topic of the colonizing of the Americas is Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I recently read a great article online that recommends several books. The article can be found here. You might also be interested in Orientalism by Edward Said.

When writing and worldbuilding, it is very important to avoid stereotypes. The "holy noble simple native folk" will drive people mad, especially since they've seen it so often in movies like Pocahontas and Avatar. Avatar also has the "one white/human guy who shows up out of nowhere and becomes better at native stuff than the natives and saves them all" stereotype, about which I have heard many people scream.

Colonization has happened all over the world, and can take different forms. Harry mentioned that Bulgaria had been colonized by the Turkish. The British colonization in the Americas would have been less dramatically, but still distinctly, different from the British colonization of India, for example.

Colonization also has an enormous influence on language, up to and including language death. Languages disappear when all their speakers are killed, or also when the language ceases to have any functional utility in the surrounding culture. Colonizers also use the standardization of language for writing and commercial purposes to exert control over the colonized. We diverted momentarily into a discussion of how standard language differs from language used on the ground, and Harry definitely saw this as a possible form of power maintenance. As an example of language variation away from a "standard," he gave us the word "pepper," which near the Black Sea means "bell pepper" but 600 km away on the other side of Bulgaria means "chili pepper." Kyle said that we have a "war over 'Next Tuesday.'" [I think the question of the scope of "next" is a discussion for another time, however.] In a colonizer situation, the group in power maintains the standard language and uses it as a gatekeeping device.

Language can also be used as a form of rebellion by the colonized. Kyle told us that during the Holocaust, Jews used "amchu" as a secret way to ask, "Are you one of us?" The Hebrew language was revived from a purely literary and liturgical language to a spoken one for the purposes of unifying the Jewish population. Harry told us that there was a linguistic underground in Bulgaria during the Turkish occupation, when everyone was politically bound to speak Turkish, and bound in religious circumstances to use Greek. Bulgarian was still maintained as a language throughout this time period. Similarly, in World War II the Japanese outlawed the speaking of Korean and Chinese in the areas they controlled, but those languages continued to be spoken in the home and surged back again once the Japanese occupation came to an end. This switch was not peaceful but came to an end as violently as it was initially imposed.

One of the things that can happen in a colonization situation is what I called the aggressive use of stereotyping. Colonizers will create a stereotypical image of the colonized group to associate them with weakness or lack of quality, and those stereotypes will take on a pernicious power both among the colonizers and among the colonized. Harry (I think it was) remarked that sometimes the more oppressed the people are, the more they conform to the stereotype against their own best interests.

Though we spoke mostly in terms of science fiction, all of these principles can also be applied to fantasy. Only the nature of the technology and resources will be different. Even "low technology" is still technology, and a group with iron swords will prevail over a group with stone tools or bronze weapons. Wands can play the same role as guns - so please feel free to apply all of this over whatever colonization scheme you're working with, fantasy or science fiction.

At the end Harry proposed our topic for the next session (today, December 7, 11am PST): the culture of death. I hope to see you there!

Tightening your plot by layering

2011-12-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

There is something to be said for having everything happen at once.

Often we think of the climax of a book as the place where everything comes together and starts happening at the same time. However, we shouldn't necessarily restrict ourselves to the climax; layering can be beneficial at other points in a story as well.

I mention this because of my own experience. I had a sequence of events in my WIP as follows: the protagonist had to go to a political event; thereafter my bodyguard character had to follow a nefarious character to prevent an assassination; thereafter my bodyguard had to come home and find a conflict going on between the master and mistress. It wasn't bad, but when it came to dramatizing the whole thing, I found it was dragging. I was struggling to get the protagonist out of previous plot points and over to the political event. I was daunted when I tried to imagine all the details of the political event. Then I couldn't figure out how to make the opening of the prevent-an-assassination sequence different from all the previous interactions between servants that I'd been working with (I try to make every interaction unique - something I'll be writing about soon in another post).

Over this weekend I realized what the problem was. Everything was strung out, all the events coming one after another like beads on a chain. That simultaneously put too much importance on each individual event, and made me work too hard to keep them connected.

I therefore decided that as many things as possible needed to happen at the same time.

I can get away with this in my novel, because it's supposed to be complex. It is certainly possible to overload a scene with too much stuff. However, if you can find a way to concatenate instead of stringing, the result can be amazing. In the case of the sequence I describe above, I decided that the political event and the assassination attempt had to happen at the same time. This accomplished several useful things for me.

1. Because the assassination attempt had to occur in a specified location, I suddenly had a place to put my political event that was more effective than the white-room-ish space I'd been fighting against previously.

2. Because the new sequence placed both my protagonist and my bodyguard in the same location, it allowed me to do a direct point-of-view handoff (I love those).

3. Because I could do the point-of-view handoff, I could shift to the bodyguard's perspective early in the political event, thereby making it unnecessary for me to elaborate on all the details of the event. In fact, the ceremonial details of what's going on are much less important than the bodyguard's attempt to foil the assassination. Layering allows me to place focus on the more important element and stick the less important element in the background.

4. Suspense went through the roof. Instead of having the bodyguard out attempting to stop an assassination on his own terms, he's right in the middle of a public event trying to figure out how to save the target from the assassin without having any means to reach the assassin (who is hundreds of feet away) or the target (who is at least fifteen feet away).

5. Consequences also became much more dire. The bodyguard won't be able to take action without hundreds of people seeing him, and this will result in entanglements that delay his return home, providing a perfect reason for him not to be where he needs to be when the conflict between master and mistress begins.

It's worth keeping an eye out for opportunities to do this. Especially if you are being told by critiquers that your story is wandering, that the pace is slow, or that it's one thing after another after another, consider whether layering might be the right answer.

You might also want to look out for this if you're trying to figure out how to shorten a work. What if you feel like you've taken out as many words as you can and the book is still "too long"? Maybe you're aiming for 90-100K words but you're stuck at 127K. Usually at that point it's the structure of the story which has to change - and if you can take a step back from your outline and create clusters of events that can either closely follow one another, or happen concurrently, then the layering effect will save you a lot of words that can't be "pulled out" any other way.

It's something to think about.

An Excerpt from "Cold Words" in honor of Analog's first e-anthology

2011-12-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

If you follow me on Twitter or are a connection of mine on Facebook or Google+, you may have seen my announcement that I had a story anthology come out today. My story, "Cold Words" (Analog Oct. 2009) is now appearing in Analog's first e-anthology now available on Amazon. I was incredibly honored to be included in an amazing Table of Contents with authors like Mike Flynn, Harry Turtledove, Marianne Dyson, Brad Torgerson, Robert J. Sawyer, and many others.

Amazon allows you to look inside the ebook, but doesn't actually give excerpts from all the stories, so for those who are interested I thought I'd put up a teaser excerpt of the story.

Rulii is a wolf-like native of the planet Aurru and the only member of the downy-furred Lowland race on the Majesty's Cold Council. He is brokering a deal with the Allied Systems to bring a human spaceport to his region, hoping this may bring the riches his oppressed Lowland people need to improve their lot. Problem is, the new negotiator Hada must speak the Cold words dialect well enough not to insult Majesty - her language sounds wrong and he can't figure out why. The human linguist Parker is trying to help him, but Parker's friendship may put Rulii in an entirely different sort of danger...

Click here to start reading!

Two excellent links on how far to take links between grammatical and actual gender

2011-12-03T23:03:00.001-08:00

My two friends, Keyan Bowes and Aliette de Bodard, contributed some very interesting thoughts to the online discussion of grammatical gender and its links (if any) to actual genders and actual gender attributes. I found their position particularly interesting because of the implication that Americans tend to anthropomorphize more than other cultures (not something I can recall seeing any studies about, but it may indeed be the case), and that that influences us to give a greater significance to grammatical gender than it in fact merits.

I encourage you to go and read their arguments, here (Aliette de Bodard) and here (Keyan's response).

While the link between language and thought is undeniable, it is also subtle. Thus it can be easy, when saying something like, grammatical gender influences the way we think about objects, to overstate the case. Much of our language use is subconscious, and in particular it would be a mistake to assume that the presence of a grammatical feature in a language means that a speaker of that language will think about reality in a particular way all the time, or with intent, or on a conscious level. As Keyan notes, in Hindi there can be one masculine and one feminine word used for the same object - so clearly there can be no underlying assumption of gender being literally possessed by that object. Furthermore, as Aliette remarks, the characteristics that we assign to one gender or another vary widely across cultures.

If it were so simple, then it would have been a matter of much less debate, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about the links between language and culture would not have been so heavily disputed. It's important to remember that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis had a "strong version" and a "weak version." As Wikipedia would have it:

"(i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior."

In the end my best suggestion if you are curious about the links between language and thought is to go to the actual studies. One of the current leaders in the field is Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of cognitive psychology at Stanford University. In looking directly at the psycholinguistic articles, you will be able to see how studies were conducted and upon whom, and get into the real subtleties involved. It's a fascinating field to delve into.

Link on how manners continue to change

2011-12-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

How digital assistants are affecting the way people talk in public. What is polite?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/technology/virtual-assistants-raise-new-issues-of-phone-etiquette.html?_r=1

Fun link on Japanese Ghosts and Monsters

2011-12-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

I ran across this one on Facebook this week. It's quite a long and interesting list, and though I'd quibble with some of the pictures, a lot of them are great. Plenty of ideas here!

http://www.tofugu.com/2011/10/29/super-ghouls-n-ghosts-from-japan/

Culture and language in The Fallen Queen by Jane Kindred

2011-12-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

I met up with agent Sara Megibow (I almost typed "angel," and while she's lovely, you'll see why that's funny in a second) at World Fantasy Convention a few weeks ago, and while she and I were talking about my interest in language and culture in fantasy, she handed me an ARC. "You might like this," she said. She was right.

The book in question is Jane Kindred's newly released novel, The Fallen Queen. While I won't attempt to review the whole book, I'll tell you what I thought was fun and fascinating about it. Kindred has taken Heaven and turned it into a mirror of Tsarist Russia - and she also taken the main character, an angel, on a trip into Earthly Russia, complete with Russian language and tapochki slippers.

Very careful attention is paid to creating parallel levels of reality in this book. Not only is the geography of Heaven carefully analogized to the geography of Russia (the river Neva in Russia=the river Neba in Heaven), but Heaven isn't just a bin full of angels. It's carefully divided into layers of angels characterized by different elements (fire, water, earth, air), who don't necessarily understand each other. Those who appear human are the Host of the Fourth Choir, while the Ophanim and Seraphim each have supernatural behaviors and qualities that make them distinct. What's even more fun is that the powers of the angels and demons are relative to where one stands in the layers, and which layer one happens to be occupying at the time. Demons are those of mixed blood and "impure" behaviors, keeping the spirit of angel versus demon and also setting up a rather deft allegory related to race and to purity of blood.

I got a special kick out of the way the Russian was used. I don't speak any Russian, but I sure want to now that I've read it! The language never interfered with story comprehension, but the author used it with finesse. For one thing, the angel doesn't speak Russian when she first arrives in Russia, and she has no Heavenly power that grants her language skill. For this, Kindred gets a cheer from me! I'm willing to grant that the angel Anazakia will have some ability to pick it up quickly, and this is used to advantage. It's great, because when she first arrives, the things she doesn't understand are related in Russian, so if you really don't understand Russian, you understand precisely the same things she does, i.e. not much. If you do understand Russian, no doubt you'll get a lovely little sense of confidentiality with the author. The use of Russian goes down as the book progresses and Anazakia understands more, but it is still retained for flavor in a lot of contexts.

One last issue I'd like to mention is that this book engages with questions of virtue, vice, and sexual taboo behavior in a really interesting way, by juxtaposing the behavior of humans, demons and angels, and setting Anazakia's fall - and the attendant changes in her own choices - against that. While there were a few places where I felt the author's views intruding, the overall treatment of the topic I felt was very good, and readers may find it tittillating in some places, appalling in others, and overall quite thought-provoking.

I'd like to thank Sara Megibow again for handing me the ARC. It's really fun when I can discover a book that is both enjoyable and engaging on multiple different levels.

Gender in Language: A Worldbuilding Hangout Report

2011-11-30T06:15:00.000-08:00

This is a report on the Worldbuilding Hangout that I held two weeks ago, on November 16th. I was joined by a large (wonderful!) group including Cheryl Barnett, Dale Emery, Glenda Pfeiffer, Harry Markov, Janet Harriet, Kay Holt, and Kyle Aisteach. Our topic was Gender in Language, and boy, did we have fun with this discussion!

We started out brainstorming examples of language that stood out to us for their portrayal of gender. I mentioned the phrasing in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness that has tickled me ever since I first read it: "my landlady, a voluble man..." What do you do when you're trying, as LeGuin did, to portray someone with no gender? Well, sometimes she alternates as above, to confound our expectations. When she wants it not to stick out, however, she picks one.

Kyle talked about using "zee" for non-gendered pronouns. One of the hazards of trying to find a new pronoun is to retain the sense of specificity while gaining a sense of neutrality. The pronoun system is notoriously resistant to change (that is, when it comes to keeping readers with you). Cheryl mentioned Melissa Scott's "Shadow Man" which uses five genders - now there's a challenge, but clearly it can be done well!

Of course, the most common solution to the problem of gender neutrality is to use the plural pronoun "they." This has become extremely common, though I wouldn't say it's become part of accepted grammar. Kay and I both remarked that language doesn't tend to create a lot of "new stuff" - it has accepted regions and methods of creating new words, but doesn't do much to change the core elements (like pronouns). Kyle and Harry mentioned how German concatenates nouns to create new vocabulary, and in fact languages do a lot of borrowing words back and forth to create new concepts. As you may know, German has masculine, feminine, and neuter articles associated with nouns of each category.

I mentioned that the lack of gendered nouns in English (English is unusual in this regard compared to most of its direct relatives). Apparently there was an early confluence between English and Old Norse, which didn't have gendered nouns, and it was at that historical point that English lost its own use of gendered nouns. Finnish uses no gendered pronouns at all, but languages that do assign gender are extremely common. We speculated that this might have originated (back in the mists of time) from the human tendency to anthropomorphize things. However, there have been salient examples of flexibility, or at least unusual usage. When women came to power in the age of the Pharaohs, they were referred to as kings, not queens.

Though we've worked very hard to start using words that are gender neutral (congresswoman -> representative, steward/stewardess -> flight attendant), gender still has enormous influence on language and thought. I once read a study where young French- and Spanish-speaking children were asked to create cartoon characters out of objects. Without fail, they chose to assign genders to the characters that corresponded to the genders of the nouns in their language. I once also linked here to a great NPR article which talked about the influence of gender on language - it turns out that people tend to associate adjectives to nouns according to their gender. For example, people speaking languages in which the word "bridge" is masculine will talk about bridges as heavy, tall or strong while people speaking languages in which "bridge" is feminine will talk about bridges as light and graceful. The gender of the noun influences the perception of the genderless object.

Kay mentioned that colonialism can force a language on people - such as Spanish in the Phillippines, and that this can change the use/perception of gender. Cheryl mentioned the French invasion of England, which brought in a lot of new words, but didn't re-gender-ize the nouns (excuse my creative grammar, Cheryl!). It is very hard to eradicate a language, unless you eradicate all the people who are using it (which can be done, sadly). Kyle mentioned that after the French invasion of England, French was used as the language of the court - and the courts! - so that it wasn't until the reign of Edward II that English was reinstated in the courts so the accused could understand what was going on. Latin was maintained as the language of the Church for hundreds of years. Other languages have gone underground, such as Gaelic, Korean during WWII under Japanese occupation, or Bulgarian during the Ottoman invasion (thanks for adding that one, Harry!).

Some languages have different dialects in which gender is assigned differently. Kyle mentioned different dialects of ancient Greek. Dialects emerge over time as language use is isolated in an area, and all kinds of changes can potentially emerge.

We returned to the question of gender by talking about Japanese women's language. Though women in Japan don't use "their own language," the style in which they speak is very distinct from the style in which men typically speak. My husband, who learned for years from female teachers, was once told by a friend that he had to "stop talking like a girl." Women tend to speak more formally using honorifics, verb endings, choices of more formal vocabulary, and using different emotive particles on the ends of sentences (these indicate if you're exclaiming, questioning, etc.).

There are also gendered variations of English usage, as Kyle mentioned (this isn't just for languages in faraway lands!). Generally in English the use of qualifiers and indirect approaches is considered more female, and the use of more direct approaches is considered male. There is also a female style many of you may recognize in which statements are delivered with the intonation of questions (i.e. going up at the end). There are internet metrics available now which claim to be able to tell whether a writer is male or female, but Cheryl told us those tend to pick her academic writing as 90% male, and her fiction as 90% female, so there's obviously something else going on besides gender!

Finally we attacked the question of what this all means for worldbuilding. Gender has a deep influence on any people's unconscious view of the world and on the way they speak - so it should do the same for the worlds you create. Harry suggested people could use a special Bulgarian style of insult, where someone will use the wrong gender for a person, and then when they get called on it, deflect by claiming that they were talking about a gendered object nearby. (I'd never heard of that one, and we all loved it!) If you're working with aliens, you can consider animal gender behaviors and assign language use based on them. Avian aliens might have variations in plumage and singing style based on gender. It's always fun to challenge or change gender expectations. A seahorse alien would probably assign male gender to a pregnant human (and misunderstanding and/or hijinks might ensue!).

It's important also to keep in mind that gender is not simple or exclusively bimodal, even in our own world. Some harrier hawks are born with female plumage and engage in female behaviors. Gender is all over our DNA, and resides as much in our brains as it does in our bodies, physically. It is also surrounded by elaborate patterns of cultural behavior, and the two intertwine.

I mentioned that I have a friend in the Netherlands who does speech therapy, and during one of our visits she told us she had a transgendered client who was getting her help to learn how to speak in a feminine way. That if nothing else should tell us that gender has an enormous influence on language use, and that this influence is cultural rather than physical. Cheryl recommended an interesting link about how to speak androgynously.

This is a never-ending topic, but that was where our discussion closed. Today at 11am we'll be talking about colonialism and imperialism, so I hope you'll join us!

Cultural views of "attractiveness" change

2011-11-29T09:00:00.002-08:00

I ran across a couple of cool links today I thought I'd share. One is this link, which shows old weight gain ads - I mean, after all, you wouldn't want to be too skinny or you wouldn't get any dates! Another great one is this one, from Jamie Todd Rubin, discussing the ads that appear in the 1940's Astounding magazines. Not only weight but tobacco and many other things were seen differently, and it's very evident in the advertisements he shares. Check it out!

Back to Worldbuilding Hangouts!

2011-11-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm back from my trip and I'm going to be resuming worldbuilding hangouts this week. This Wednesday we'll be talking about Imperialism and Colonialism. The hangout will take place at 11am PDT on Google Plus. I hope to see you there!

TTYU Retro: How and where to begin a story

2011-11-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

How and where to begin a story is always - always - a hard question. I have gone back and changed the beginning for nearly every story I've written. In some cases, I have changed the beginning multiple times over the course of revision. It's enough to make one go batty!

The fact is, while there is no absolute rule, a story generally should begin with:

the main conflict, or some event that is a direct tributary of the main conflict
the main character

This may sound simple, but there's more to it than that.

I put the main conflict first because the main conflict is what drives the story forward, and sometimes the main conflict does not start in the same place that the main character does. Often in works where a murder mystery occurs and where the antagonist is mysterious, the book will start with a segment from the antagonist's point of view. This establishes the stakes, i.e. why exactly it is that a reader should care about what the main character is going to try to accomplish. Thus, when we get to the point where we're seeing the main character - likely doing something far more innocuous - we already get a sense of danger, anticipation, and most importantly, curiosity about what happens next. When, as in Janice Hardy's The Shifter, the character has a secret and her safety depends on nobody finding out about it, it makes perfect sense for the story to begin with a scene that results in this secret being discovered. That's what I would call a tributary scene, where the scene has its own natural stakes and drive, but delivers us into a place where the main conflict has clearly begun. For my current work in progress, the opening scene is one that shows the main character in a situation where it is important for him to pay attention to how he and his reputation are perceived by others, and then shows him being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns into a place of extreme danger, not because of the antagonist, but because of a contagious disease and the fear that the disease causes in people around him. The disease then becomes a driver that leads to a second major change, the death of the Eminence, that propels the story toward its conclusion.

I'll return in a second to the issue of "being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns," but before I do that I want to address the question of backstory.

I often feel like choosing an opening scene for a story is like trying to create a see-saw. You have a big piece of story (it might even be your protagonist's whole life!) and you have to balance it on that opening scene. The part that chronologically precedes the opening scene is the backstory; the part that follows is the story. My rule of thumb is this:

Any piece of backstory that contributes directly to the identity of the protagonist, his/her culture, his/her self-awareness, and his/her basis for decision making can be portrayed indirectly through the protagonist's actions, and thus need not be included in the main story.

You may have noticed that I've arrived at "the main character" here.

Point of view is my ultimate ally in this. I think about it in the following terms: we judge our experiences and choose our actions on the basis of our personality and experience; thus, aspects of personality and experience can be included at points where our protagonist judges events, and chooses to act.

Here's an example from For Love, For Power of me doing the backstory thing with character judgment. Tagret (my main character) is going to a concert in the ballroom and one of his friends tells him that a new Cabinet member will be announced at the event, and that it might be Tagret's father. Here's how Tagret responds:

"It wouldn't matter," Tagret said. "My father wouldn't risk coming all the way back across the continent just for a Cabinet seat. He's too happy ruling Selimna where nobody can reach him." No Father meant none of Father's nasty surprises, and it would be preferable to keep him there, except that his last and worst surprise had been taking Mother with him.

The fact that Tagret's parents have been gone in a place so far that they can't come back to visit, that he hates his father and loves his mother, and that his father is important enough to consider a Cabinet seat not worth his while - all of these are important pieces of information for understanding the story as it continues. They are relevant here not because Tagret stops out of his ordinary concerns to muse on them, but because he's using them as a basis for his evaluation of the ongoing talk, and his response.

The fact is that an opening scene is strongest when it's a point of convergence. It shows conflict, it shows character, and it shows world (you didn't think I'd forget world, did you?) all at once in an active and engaged way. At the beginning of the story, a reader needs to be grounded in all three.

Grounding is absolutely critical in an opening scene. This is the word I give to basic reader orientation. The reader needs to be oriented - in some way - to the who, what, and where of the story. These elements can be presented in different sorts of balance, as when our protagonist is feeling disoriented and not knowing where he/she is, but they are very important. Imagine the main character as a runner, and you're about to be tied to that runner with a rope so you can follow along at (possibly breakneck) speed for the entire story. If you are going to be able to do this, you have to have your feet on the ground. Otherwise the runner will end up dragging you, spinning and yelling, until you manage to untie yourself and get away.

This is why starting in the middle of extreme action is not a good idea. Everett Maroon had a good post on this issue, here. In your opening scene, your main character should be doing something that requires him/her to indicate to readers who he/she is and what his/her normal concerns are. Until "normal" is established, the abnormal will have no meaning. Even if your character is disoriented, he/she can still try to make sense of what is going on around him/her in terms of what would be normal under ordinary circumstances.

Similarly, starting with simple introspection or gazing out at views is not a good idea either. It's not just that you've omitted the conflict. It's also that you've shackled yourself in terms of backstory and world. It's not only that people don't sit down and contemplate the basic normal conditions of their lives for no reason. It's that backstory and world belong in the background, and if there is nothing going on, they will necessarily take the front seat. By starting with your main character in a situation of conflict that leads directly to the main conflict of the story, you do several things:

You give your main character an opportunity to introduce him/herself through action and judgment
You give your main character the opportunity to introduce his/her world through action and judgment
You orient readers and establish where the story will be going next
You place the drive (the hook!) of the story front and center so readers can catch hold

As you consider where to place your opening scene, think of the two basic criteria of main conflict and main character - but if it's not obvious where that scene needs to happen, think through the more detailed questions. Ask yourself:

in what context could the main character best demonstrate his/her core motivations, possibly through indirect reference to backstory?
in what location the main character could best portray the conditions of his/her world that have the greatest bearing on the story as it goes forward?
in what situation would the significance of the main conflict to this character become most evident?

Once you've arrived at an answer, don't figure it's the answer. Be aware that it's perfectly okay to start in the wrong place - if I didn't realize that, I would never finish anything. In the first draft, the most important thing is to find a point of entry where the story starts telling itself to you. Then you can go back later and refine the placement of that scene so it does the most for the story as a whole. After all, sometimes you don't know where the story is going until you've finished it. And since a major point of an opening scene is to show, or foreshadow, where the story is going, you'll be able to place it a lot better if you actually know where the story is going!

Dive in and go for it. These are just a few things for you to think about as you prepare to do so.

Secondary characters can add dimension and tension

2011-11-28T09:49:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I come into a scene that I've really been looking forward to, and then I discover that it's not really popping the way I want it to. This happened to me the other day with a scene where my protagonist, Tagret, is reunited with his best friend Reyn after they've both been deathly ill. Honestly, I really had been looking forward to the scene - in part because I wondered what would come out of it, whether they would be closer as a result of their ordeal, or further apart. But when I got there and started writing it, it started feeling like some generic scene of reunion.

Generic is not allowed in my book.

It was at that point that I realized I hadn't been thinking through the surrounding context enough. By that I mean that it's always valuable to consider not only the situation at hand (in this case the reunion), but what surrounds it. It can sometimes be easy to think only about our point-of-view protagonist, and not so much of the others he or she interacts with. In my case, I hadn't really thought through how Reyn would be feeling, and what role would be played by the fact that a mutual friend of theirs contracted the same illness and died of it.

So I came up with two ideas that completely change the feel of the conversation:

1. Reyn lives without either of his parents (he's held back by law from accompanying them where they are working now), and has realized that he doesn't want to die without seeing them again. He has decided that as soon as the law allows, he will move to their city to live with them. This changes the conversation significantly, because instead of "wow, we're together again and we're both alive" all of a sudden it was "wow, we're both alive but you should know I'm going to skip town as soon as I can." The tension level is going to go way up as a result of this, and tension is generally good for story drive.

2. Reyn isn't just going to be thinking he needs to leave town, but he's going to be telling Tagret (as opposed to thinking it but not telling him) in part because he's feeling survivor guilt. He feels terrible that their mutual friend has died and isn't sure that he deserves to be alive and part of this friendship when their friend cannot be. This gives him an added layer of motivation, and gives the conversation somewhere far more interesting to go when Tagret gets upset about Reyn's declarations that he wants to leave.

Lucky for me, this also fits beautifully with the next piece of the chapter where they'll be interacting with the one friend of theirs who was untouched by the disease - I now have a lot of great ideas about both Reyn and Tagret, their psychological states and how they'll feel about seeing their friend who got lucky and didn't have to suffer.

What does this mean for you?

Well, it means that if you find yourself entering a piece of interaction between characters, and it doesn't seem to have as much punch as it could, try reversing your point of view for a while. See if the non-POV character doesn't have something really interesting on his or her mind that could take the whole interaction in a different, more fruitful direction. Not only will it help to raise tension locally, but if you take it seriously (i.e. don't just stick it in for one scene and then forget about it later), it can make your secondary character much more three-dimensional and interesting. It will also combat that feeling that readers sometimes get, that they are listening to a conversation that is "getting stuff done" for the author but not really progressing with natural realism.

This change that I am making is not going to change any major plot points, but it will change the whole feel of the story going forward, and make Tagret's motivations far more interesting and subtle as he heads into the rest of the "stuff he has to do." So as you work, don't just make the conversation go the way it has to to get the plot from point A to point B. Think of the hidden context, and do more.

It's something to think about.

A blind man sees

2011-11-28T07:44:00.001-08:00

This is an amazing link. A man who was always blind describes what it is like to see for the first time.

On Anne McCaffrey and Genre Borderlines

2011-11-22T19:34:00.001-08:00

I was deeply saddened today to hear of the passing of Anne McCaffrey. I first discovered her work because, as a child, I had a propensity to pick up from the library or bookstore any book I found featuring the keyword "dragon" in the title. ("Magic" was also a strong indicator that I would like a book.) The first one I ever read was actually Dragonsinger, and I think it was the combination of the word "dragon" and the enticing illustration of a girl surrounded by miniature dragons that first drew me in.

Perhaps because I had dragons and fantasy on my mind, for many years I figured that McCaffrey's world was one of fantasy. It bore some key similarities - low technology living and societal structure being two examples - to prototypical fantasy worlds. However, because I loved the books so much, I continued to read on and on, and as those of you who have done the same will know, I eventually discovered that Pern was not a fantasy world after all. It was a science fictional world. In fact, it wasn't until this year that I realized Dragonflight had first been published in Analog!

Over the years I've spent getting to know the science fiction and fantasy-writing community as an author, I've realized that the borderlines between genres are both highly contested and relatively fluid. They follow the pattern of most categories that we identify: that is, there are some works that are considered prototypically one or the other, but in fact each genre is characterized by a number of features. The number of features possessed by any given work can vary, but only a very few are strong "genre-breakers," and even these - like dragons - can be fit into a different scheme if we pay close attention to the features that surround them.

When we read, we draw conclusions based on either the presence of a thing, or its absence (like, say, electricity). The easiest world models to grasp are the ones that fit with our existing expectations of the world, where the presence of one aspect of our technological life, or our social life, will automatically imply the rest. Those world models are the prototypes, that fall smack in the center of what we imagine fantasy or science fiction to be. The ones I've always admired most, however, are the ones where our expectations are defeated in one way or another. Books where every aspect of the world fits seamlessly with the rest, but in a configuration that does not conform to our expectations.

This was the kind of world I imagined when I first set out to create Varin. And while I take Ursula LeGuin's worlds as models I want to emulate, I think that the stamp of Anne McCaffrey on my fundamental concepts is unmistakable. Both Pern and Varin are worlds where technology has gone into decline (though Varin's technology level hasn't fallen nearly as far as Pern's). Both are worlds where certain phenomena appear to be magical, since though they are central to the people's lives, they aren't deeply understood. Both are worlds where societal structure has taken on an archaic feel for locally important reasons. And both, as a result, have one foot in fantasy and the other in science fiction.

I am grateful to Anne McCaffrey for what her books have taught me - personally as well as in my writing. I can only hope that what I create will live up to the example she has shown. And I hope also that all of us will take inspiration from her vision, which crossed over genre borderlines and created an enduring world that felt alive, and at the same time was constantly surprising.

Hard Choices Require Consequences

2011-11-21T07:02:00.000-08:00

One of the most compelling things you can encounter in a story (either short or long) is a hard choice. The character gets to a certain point in the story and has to decide whether to take this path or that one, whether to hurt someone by doing one thing or hurt another person by doing something else. I don't know about you, but when I sense a hard choice coming it engages me wonderfully. Oh, my goodness, look at the conflict that is going to come out of that!

This is good. However, the big risk with setting up a hard choice is that you have to follow through.

I've read a number of books recently that involved hard choices, and at least two of them have let me down. The author has gotten me deeply engaged in the question of what choice will be made, and what the consequences of that choice might be... and then suddenly changed the game. Either the choice became unnecessary, suddenly, or the protagonist decided she was going to have her cake and eat it too, and for some reason that was okay with everybody.

I found this very disappointing, but when I think about it now, I wonder to myself why it is that I feel so disappointed. Why shouldn't I be happy that this horror for the protagonist isn't going to take place? Why shouldn't I be pleased that in the end, everything is going to work out?

In part it may be because this feels to me like what Janice Hardy calls "nice writer syndrome," where an author isn't hard enough on his/her characters and the story has less impact as a result. It's important to remember that one of the reasons we care about a character is because that character might have something bad happen to him or her. If there are no consequences, it's easy to think that the character's choices simply don't matter. As you can imagine, Janice herself doesn't suffer from this! (Just read The Shifter and all will become clear...)

The other part of it, I think, is the sneaking suspicion that the author might be playing with us as readers. That we're being led to anticipate an enormous consequence, getting worked up with excitement at the prospect, and then told that it really wasn't important anyway. The only way I think one could get away with this as an author would be by leaving so much evidence through the story that there was another way out of the situation, that when readers finally got there the whole thing would click together and we'd say "why didn't I see that option before?"

I realized just recently that I'd set up a big choice in For Love, For Power. Unlike in the last novel I wrote, the choice isn't central to the climax of the book (does she go into the magical world or not?); in this case it has to do with the relationships that happen between the characters. I hadn't really thought through it until recently, but I'm realizing that readers will think Tagret has to choose between his relationship with Reyn and his relationship with Della. If I defuse that question too early, say by having Reyn lose interest, or (God forbid) die, then I'm not taking advantage of all the potential conflicts that my book offers. I think of it as an opportunity that I'm happy not to have lost through lack of attention. Once I started thinking about it as a hard choice, then I realized some changes that could happen in later chapters of the book that would really make things fraught with tension, conflict, and doubt. Since tension, conflict, and doubt all increase the amplitude of the story's impact, I'm definitely going to head in the direction of facing the choice rather than defusing it. There have to be potentially bad consequences either way the choice goes, because a choice that is too obviously good on one side and bad on the other really isn't a choice at all.

What choices do your characters have to make? What kind of consequences do they entail?

It's something to think about.

Aligning characters ambiguously (remember The Princess Bride?)

2011-11-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'm a sucker for ambiguously aligned characters. Good guys who turn into bad guys, bad guys who turn out to be good guys, those folks are just plain fun. I write stories with this kind of character all the time, but I was reminded of them recently when my kids and I watched The Princess Bride.

I'm sure most of you are dearly familiar with Inigo and Fezzik. During our first viewing I became fascinated by the fact that these two characters are immediately likeable despite the fact that they've just kidnapped the princess along with Vizzini. So during our second and third viewings (since people, especially children, like to see fabulous things more than once) I took a look at our introduction to these two characters.

Basically, after our first view of them which involves them knocking out Buttercup, we immediately shift, not to her point of view of them on the ship, but to their own internal squabbles. Inigo demonstrates curiosity about what exactly they are doing ("what is that you are ripping?"), showing that he's not entirely aware of their mission. Then when Vizzini describes the basics of of his plan to frame Guilder by killing Buttercup and leaving her on the frontier, Fezzik reveals that he wasn't totally in on the plan either, and that he has morals well-aligned with our own ("I just don't think it's right, killing an innocent girl."). We then get an opportunity to witness Vizzini's cruelty applied to his own accomplices as he dresses them down.

This is a good start, but on its own, I don't think it would be enough to convince me that Inigo and Fezzik were anything more than weak bad guys, or at a stretch, decent guys forced into nefarious deeds by circumstance. The point where I really start liking them is when I see Fezzik clearly have hurt feelings as a result of Vizzini's tirade, and then Inigo comes over to him and starts deliberately consoling him by starting the rhyming game. At this point, these two characters are no longer simply henchmen who do their boss' bidding. They are actual people, friends in fact, who care about each other and also have a sense of humor... a sense of humor which they are entirely willing to use at Vizzini's expense ("Anybody want a peanut?"). This pattern is then confirmed as we go forward into Vizzini's mercilessness and Fezzik's inability to use his considerable power (the fact that he's literally dangling Vizzini over a cliff) to win an argument. It continues into Inigo and Fezzik's interactions with the Man in Black, where we are also given glimpses into the backstory of each character. In fact I don't think that it would be nearly as difficult to guess the identity of the Man in Black if we immediately concluded he had to be a "good guy" because Fezzik and Inigo were "bad guys."

I think there are some good lessons to be learned here about what it is that makes a character likeable. Readers and viewers collect evidence in a character's interactions which they use to establish that character's qualities and alignments. Clearly even criminal behavior (kidnapping) can be quickly outweighed by evidence of reluctance and human caring. It's good to remember this if you're creating ambiguously aligned characters, and even if you have a protagonist who has to do bad things. We don't blame Janice Hardy's Nya for stealing, because she's stealing eggs when she could potentially choose to steal something much worse, and then only because she's starving. Her human qualities come to the fore much more quickly.

What do your characters do to show us that they are human? Does it make them seem more complex? Does it make them likeable?

It's something to think about.

Gender: A Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report

2011-11-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

So finally here I am to report on the Gender hangout, which took place on November 2. Cheryl Morgan, Dale Emery, and Kyle Aisteach came to talk with me and we had a terrific discussion; Harry Markov joined in for a few minutes at the end.

We started out by taking about one of the classic SF/F tales about gender, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. I've heard people characterize this book as too preachy, but I've never found it so. It's always seemed to me more of a thorough thought experiment, and my fellow discussants felt that it reflected some of the social issues at the time that it was written (1969, and I agree). Briefly, the people of LeGuin's planet Gethen have no gender unless they are in their four-day-a-month sexually receptive phase, when they may take one gender or the other depending on the circumstances. LeGuin approaches this in a very interesting way, too, both giving the outsider's scientific (and thus explanatory) viewpoint and local tales of human interaction that introduce us to the social rules of Gethenian societies from an insider's viewpoint.

The question of gender in stories isn't just about stories that focus on gender questions, however. There are tons of gender issues in all kinds of stories which are ostensibly "about" other things. I had a fascinating discussion with author Myke Cole about his upcoming novel, and he was thinking deeply about his portrayal of women, so that the context of a military plot wouldn't make them come out as men with women's names (I'm very curious to see his book; it's about the modern military with magic-users, and sounds fascinating). Kyle mentioned the question of female characters in video games. One game he mentioned portrays women as pilots "without much character," and he said he'd heard divided opinions on this portrayal - one friend who said the characters weren't feminine enough, and another who was happy to see them "not turned into the typical woman." Cheryl noted that in video games you also get the issue of gender change. Some games, like Mass Effect, allow particular characters to be either male or female, which changes the nature of the social interactions they engage in (including romantic liaisons that then can be either hetero- or homosexual depending on the gender chosen for the characters in question).

We talked a little about stories in which people change genders. Cheryl mentioned Steel Beach by John Varley, in which gender reassignment is very easy. Dale mentioned the film Orlando; there was also My Brother's Keeper, in which a monk receives a visitation from an angel, and apparently later changes gender. There are also stories where genderless characters are interpreted to have different genders by different people (or the reader). Kelley Eskridge's Dangerous Space was mentioned, as was John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, and apparently Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series takes gender as a prominent secondary theme.

One thing that is very interesting to do as a writer (which many authors are already doing to great effect) is to engage with the question of gender from the angle of deliberately altering the social contracts that surround gender. That is, taking our current expectations of behavior that is masculine or feminine, and turning those expectations on their heads. Another is to engage in a world where many of the same gender issues occur that currently occur in our world, and then bring attention to them so that our subconscious acceptance of behaviors can be questioned.

It is very difficult to tease apart which aspects of gender are societal, and which are genetic.

Kyle told us of a friend who had written a story and then went through and switched the genders of all the characters. This is a very interesting experiment to try, because you will discover that changing the gender of a character has an enormous effect on a reader's (and our own) expectations for them. If you do this, you may decide that you would prefer to change a character's actions in one scene so they become less stereotypical. I myself recently changed the gender of a minor character in the story I'm writing because I felt that putting a woman in that position was too stereotypical: the woman was complaining about being asked not to take a dress fastened by magnets onto the planet (where there is a magnet prohibition), and declared she wasn't going to undress in front of a thousand people. When I changed the character to a man and the dress into a bodysuit, the entire interaction felt much fresher and less clichéd.

Whenever you are working with oppressed characters, it's important to realize that these characters aren't necessarily weak. They may have few areas in which they can exercise power, but they will most likely have a finely tuned sense of how to use that power to their own advantage. If a woman's only power is to choose a husband, she'll choose very carefully!

Kyle made the interesting observation that comedy about women with power used to be far more common than it is now. He gave the examples of Vaudeville and the television show "Bewitched." Cheryl mentioned a show with advertising men and dumb women in charge. Kyle also pointed out that "Mr. Mom" was a comedy, but that men who care for children at home are so much more common now that making a whole comedy about it would seem strange. (Comedy generally flirts with borderlines of unacceptability in one way or another; things that make people uncomfortable. If women with power ever become entirely normal, the impetus for comedy will have to shift somewhere else.)

Society is not uniform in its expectations of gender behavior. Different cultures see the role of women and men differently, and even see the divide between them differently. If we start looking into the behavior of other animal species, the expectations differ even more widely. Lions have specific gender-related roles related to hunting, dominance, etc. Spiders have even more dramatically different gender behaviors (human women are not likely to bite their husbands' head off literally!). Raccoons follow a pattern where the females with young drive the males off, and the males live in group homes separately from the mothers. Pronghorn antelopes tend to divide into herds of all males and all females, but some males run with the females. Every animal species which has been studied for gender relations exhibits some homosexual behaviors, and some pairs form stable families, as for example pairs of female albatrosses.

When we write portrayals of gender orientation behavior, it's important to think through how readers will see what we portray. By this I mean that we should pay close attention to whether we are giving value judgment messages. When I was first designing For Love, For Power, I knew that my antagonist, who is a sociopath, was going to have a homosexual relationship during the story, and so I realized that I needed to be careful to have my protagonist's side of the story portray homosexual relationships between non-sociopaths, or I'd accidentally be seen as delivering the message that all homosexuals are sociopaths. When I spoke about it as having a "grid," Kyle immediately picked up on this and explained to us that people who write for TV shows literally have grids they fill out so that they can make sure to have characters with different racial, gender-related, and behavioral characteristics. The danger of this, of course, is that viewers or readers may be able to detect the grid you were working with (ex. "We have the homosexual crazy guy, so we need a heterosexual crazy guy, and then a homosexual sane guy, and a heterosexual sane guy, oh, and there should be women too, which boxes do we need to fill in for them?"). It's worth taking the time to make sure you're developing the details of each character and making each person "fill in his/her box" in a way that is subtly grounded in character and backstory, rather than just setting up cardboard box-fillers.

Stereotypes exist for a reason. First of all, it's vitally important for human survival that we be able to create categories out of things that may only vaguely resemble one another - if we couldn't recognize an apple because it was the wrong color or shape, we'd go hungry, and if we couldn't recognize a lion because it was a bit too small, we'd get eaten. Second of all, behavioral trends exist, and gender characteristics tend to pattern in predictable ways. For each category we create, there is the stereotype at the dead center, and a range of core/prototypical group members around it (which vary to some degree), and then further out there is a wide variety of less typical group members and individuals whose group membership is ambiguous. It's good to keep this in mind whenever we work with categories in our worldbuilding.

Dale mentioned that he has been working with a small breakaway community where gender roles differ because of the need to increase the population. Demographic pressures can have varying effects on the social roles expected of different genders. In his world, these pressures lead to a greater degree of gender equality, while in my own, similar pressures result in extreme oppression of women. What is happening in the worlds you are designing?

In amidst our discussion, Dale perceptively pointed out a pattern he's observed in some classic works of science fiction, including Asimov's Foundation and Empire and Robot stories: Men were referred to by last name, while women and robots were referred to by first names. The simplest explanation for this is that there is a subconscious perception of both women and robots as those who serve men - at very least, the pattern suggests that robots and women pattern together in social estimation, while men pattern differently.

At the end of the discussion Dale asked me if there was anything I had to say about gender in language. I nearly burst out laughing, because I have nearly an endless amount of stuff to say about gender in language... so we decided on that as the topic for the next hangout. That hangout took place last week, November 9, and I'll be writing that one up as soon as I can.

Thanks again to Cheryl, Kyle, Dale, and Harry for coming to speak with me. It was a wonderful chat. Since I'm writing this up late, please do feel free to comment with anything I may have forgotten!

Worldbuilding hangout postponed to Nov. 30

2011-11-15T14:48:00.001-08:00

Life has attacked! I think it must be the lead-in to the holidays.

The blog will continue as usual...

And I'm still planning to hold a hangout where we discuss Colonialism/Imperialism...

but the hangout can't be this week, or the week of Thanksgiving. So I'm moving the Colonialism/ Imperialism discussion to Wednesday November 30th (sorry everyone). In the meantime I'll try to catch up on the reports of the last two discussions, and get on top of my writing, which means getting a story out the door to submission, and getting stuck into a new chapter.

A checklist for deep POV (in 1st or 3rd person!)

2011-11-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what "deep point of view" is, or thought you might like to try to achieve it? Essentially, deep point of view means feeling "close" to the narrator in a story. It's a question of narrative distance: instead of being a distant storyteller aware of the story being told, the deep narrator feels as close to the protagonist and her/his instinct and gut reactions as possible. Since I've always loved feeling like I am experiencing the story in a visceral way alongside my protagonists, I've spent a number of years developing techniques for deep POV, trying to push closer and closer. The first article I ever wrote on point of view appeared in 2006 for the Internet Review of Science Fiction: "Point of View: Reading Beyond the I's." Since I've seen people discussing the question of deep POV again lately, I thought I'd put together a checklist of things you can do in order to create it.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind as you enter the task of creating deep POV is this: deep point of view is not created by personal pronouns. It has almost nothing to do with whether you are using first person or third person - you can make third person feel close or first person feel distant if you really try. Any text contains lots and lots of different opportunities to get closer or further away from your narrating character, and the more "close" opportunities you take, the closer your narrator will feel. The list below will give you a sense of where to look for these opportunities. Please do keep in mind that none of these are "rules," and you do not have to do all of them.

I'm going to go through each point of the checklist in detail first, and then repeat it at the end as a summary so you can run through it more easily. (So if you want to get the overview first, you can skip down to the end now and then come back.)

Here we go:

1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
Personal pronouns are the ones people always ask about first when they talk about point of view. Usually they're either "I" (first person) or "he" or "she" (third person) but sometimes can be "you" (second person). Just because you've chosen one or the other of them does not mean that every sentence, or even every other sentence, should start with one. As a guideline for where you should use these pronouns and where you should not use them, think about dividing your character's narrative into action, perception, and judgment. Action sentences are the ones where your character is doing something, and those are the ones which will use personal pronouns. Perception sentences are the ones where your character is remarking on something that he/she perceives (sees, hears, smells, feels, etc.), and those should not use personal pronouns. Judgment sentences are the ones where your character is expressing an opinion about something that's happening, and those shouldn't usually use personal pronouns either. Chances are, if you're using personal pronouns for perception or judgment, then you're filtering.

2. avoid filtering
Filtering means putting extra words into your sentence that remove the reader from the experience of the character. When you go through your life you probably don't think distantly about what you're perceiving. You hear a car horn and you don't think, "I'm hearing a car horn." You think, "Hey, that's a car horn!" The filtering words in this case are "I'm hearing." Anything that describes the narrator's thought or mode of perception "I heard," "I saw," "I felt," etc. should be considered a filter between the reader and the character's experience. Expressing opinions is similar. You don't think to yourself, "I think that slime is disgusting." You think, "Eww, that's disgusting!" In a way, by writing down "I thought," or other filter words, you're reminding readers of the character's presence, drawing attention to the fact that he/she is a character in a book they're reading. If you do this as little as possible, your point of view will feel deeper.

3. use internalization
I'm going to pick up here on what I said in #2 above about what one thinks to oneself. Your character is going through the story, acting on the basis of what happens to him or her. In deep point of view you're trying to create the sensation that your reader is deep in the character's head, and that means listening directly to the character's thoughts - most often, right as they are having them. If you try to think of everything in deep point of view as internal in some way, then all description becomes perception. I'll come back to this below, because I'll be looking at a lot of tools to make description feel internal. My point here is that only what the character perceives should be described. Then, once something has been perceived (the character sees a rose; the character gets stabbed, etc.), then the character will have an emotional reaction, possibly one which evokes memories of backstory. After that, the character will form a motivation to respond and then he/she will respond.

Now I'm going to move into some more detailed techniques that involve specific grammar, and will contribute to the success of the first three above.

4. use deixis, or pointing words
When you move through life, you spend a lot of time pointing, both physically and verbally. Which one do you want? That one. Whose is that? Mine. Your character should be doing this, too. The trick to remember as a writer is that all pointing words indicate a "center" where the speaker is standing. Remember when the teacher called your name in class? You answered, "Here!" The word "here" points to the center; it points to yourself. In your narrative, the pointing words should all indicate your point of view character as the center. It's not actually very hard to make pointing words point to the character as the center in the case of dialogue, but it's much harder to remember to pay attention to the pointing words in general narrative. Every time you write "the night before" instead of "last night," you're taking a step away from your character's deep perspective. It's very easy to make pointing words in narrative point to you, as author, without even thinking about it. But in deep point of view, you don't want anything pointing outside the character. That character isn't aware that he/she is in a story, and thus you don't want author-centered pointing to remind readers that the author is still there. Here's a list of some kinds of pointing words that you can look out for (it's not an exhaustive list, so make sure to keep your eye out!).

demonstratives this and that (especially this)

Example: "This was what he'd been looking for."

adverbs here and there (especially here)

Example: "He walked into the lab. Here was where it had all happened."

adverbs now, soon, today, tomorrow, last night

Example: "Last night it had seemed only a memory, but now it loomed ahead of him."

verbs come, go

Example: "The thing was coming closer."

5. use syntax
This one is directly related to the question of the character's action as I mentioned above. A character's action is anything from "He held perfectly still" to "She grabbed the knife and dived over the edge of the platform." I like to think of it as things the point of view character does which involve intent. Even things like "She looked at him" and "He didn't move" can be deliberate actions on the part of the protagonist. Mind you, they could be external too - they are open to either interpretation - but if everything around them is indicating an internal point of view, then these will be read as internal as well. The guidelines below basically are saying that you want to indicate that your deep point of view character is in charge of her/his own action by placing her/him in the subject position of the main clause of the sentence as much as possible.

place the protagonist (or the protagonist's group) in subject position

Example: "She reached for him." "They walked together into her room."

avoid placing the protagonist in object or other syntactic position

Example: "He reached for her." (if used too much, can sound like "he" is the protagonist)

avoid placing the protagonist in a subordinate clause for action

Example: "As she walked in, the door swung shut." (puts emphasis on the door's action)

use empty subject constructions to convey judgment

Example: "It was ridiculous to think anyone would actually follow him."
I'm going to explain this one a little bit. Notice that my protagonist, "she" is not present in this sentence. That's because we're not looking at an action sentence. This is a judgment sentence, and thus, if I said "She thought it was ridiculous..." then putting her as the subject would create filtering, not a sense of action. We often use the empty "It is"/"It was" with judgmental adjectives to think about situations in our experience, so I encourage you to do this for deep POV.

use bare verb+preposition combinations

Example: "He walked up."
This one is related to my point above about not putting the protagonist in object position. If I wrote out the whole situation, "He walked up to her," then she would appear in a non-subject position. If I leave "to her" off, then I find it seems more like what someone would think internally.

One last note of caution on syntax: when I say to avoid something, I'm not telling you you can't put your protagonist in these syntactic positions. I'm only trying to say that the effect will be different if you do: the emphasis will seem to rest somewhere other than on the protagonist's intent to act. Sometimes this is what people are actually referring to when they say to avoid "passive" constructions. However, if that different effect is what you want (for example, if you want the protagonist to be perceived as victimized) then no problem.

6. use adjectives, adverbs, and similes with judgmental connotations
In deep point of view, what you're describing isn't what you're describing. It's what your character is perceiving, noticing, and judging. Anything your character doesn't perceive shouldn't even make it into the description (I'll come back to this in a second). Whenever you describe a scene or an object, think through how your character perceives it. Describing something as "red" feels very different from describing it as "dirty red" or "sparkling red." Saying someone moves "reluctantly" is a judgment by the person perceiving it. Maybe that person is only moving slowly for some other reason. A character will compare something he/she sees to familiar things - so what is familiar? If you say her hair is like silk, presumably you know what silk is like. If your character compares something to silk but is too poor ever to have encountered it, you're looking at author point of view, not character point of view. I have a longer article about this, here.

7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
Whenever you can, it's important to create a sense of internal judgment - even in contexts where you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find it. Modal verbs and evidential adverbs can help you do this. I have a longer article about this, here, but here are some examples of how to use these.

can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, have to

These are the modal verbs, and each of them says something about the speaker's evaluation of the situation - likelihood, possibility, probability, will to accomplish something, etc. All of these are very subjective, and thus add a sense of internal evaluation to what is being said. For example, instead of writing "The ninja kicked him, but he quickly recovered from the blow," you could say, "The guy might be a ninja, but he couldn't kick hard enough to keep him down for long." And that brings me to...

apparently, evidently, of course, clearly, surely, no doubt, naturally, likely, etc.

These adverbs indicate the protagonist's judgment of the sentence or proposition that follows, how likely or expected it is, and what they think of the source of the information. In fact, you'll hear a lot out there about how you should be avoiding adverbs altogether, but they can be extremely useful. In this article alone I've mentioned them now three times! Adverbs expressing time, adverbs expressing judgment of actions in description, and adverbs expressing the protagonist's judgment of information are all extremely helpful to creating deep point of view.

8. use articles "a" and "the"
I just wrote an article about this one last week, but I'm going to add to it here. "The" indicates known information. It is especially useful in indicating places or things that your protagonist is already familiar with. As such it's really useful when you want to create a sense of internal point of view, because you can use it to reflect your character's internal knowledge. Be careful not to use it to reflect your own (the author's) knowledge rather than the character's. "A" indicates new information. As such it's a really critical tool because "a" is the primary indicator of noticing. If your character uses "a" with something, that means he/she has noticed that thing. Watch out for this, especially if you're trying to get a message to your reader without having your character get the same message. For example, your character can walk into a room where there's a really important key (a clue, or something needed to advance the plot), and just see it as "a room full of junk" (in which case the reader won't know the key is there) or "a room full of junk like old books, keys, and stationery" (here the reader might be able to pick up that the key is there, especially if some other hint has caused them to look for it). Here's the trick: the minute the character says she sees a key, that means she's noticed it. It's then up to the author to decide whether to show how the character responds - whether she looks by without thinking it's important, or whether she goes, "hey, that's the key I was looking for!"

9. use voice
Voice is a topic about which whole reams of information can be (and have been) written. What I'll say here is that if you're striving for a deep point of view that directly relates the inner thoughts of your protagonist, then those thoughts should reflect the way that character actually expresses him/herself. If this is a person who speaks a dialect, then the dialect should influence the internalization as well as the character's dialogue (though the internalization doesn't have to be quite as extreme as the dialogue). If this is a non-native speaker of English, find a way for the narrative and internalization to reflect that (as well as the person's level of proficiency in English, and level of education, so they don't sound needlessly stupid). If this is a person who swears, then that should show up in internalization. Whenever you can, consider whether your character's reaction would be worth expressing with direct thought exclamations. These are things like taking "He wondered if he could..." and turning it into "Could he...?", or taking "He wished..." and turning it into "If only...", or taking "She didn't want to..." and turning it into "No way would she..." or even "Damned if she was going to..." These can of course be overused, but they certainly will deepen the reader's sense of your point of view.

So, now that we've discussed everything in detail, here is the summary checklist:

1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns

Personal pronouns are for action with intent.
Try to avoid them for perception and judgment.

2. avoid filtering

3. use internalization

all description becomes perception.

4. use deixis, or pointing words

demonstratives this and that (especially this)
adverbs here and there (especially here)
adverbs now, soon, today, tomorrow, last night
verbs come, go

5. use syntax

place the protagonist (or the protagonist's group) in subject position
avoid placing the protagonist in object or other syntactic position
avoid placing the protagonist in a subordinate clause for action
use empty subject constructions to convey judgment
use bare verb+preposition combinations

6. use adjectives, adverbs, and similes with judgmental connotations

7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs

can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, have to
apparently, evidently, of course, clearly, surely, no doubt, naturally, likely, etc.

8. use articles "a" and "the"

"The" indicates known information.
"a" is the primary indicator of noticing.

9. use voice

dialect
profanity/swearing style
"direct thought" exclamations (if only, no way, damned if)

I hope you find it helpful in your own writing and editing.

Designing a dialect without changing spelling

2011-11-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'm sure most of you have read books where the author changed the spelling of words in order to express the pronunciation of a particular dialect. It used to be done all the time (Huckleberry Finn, A Little Princess etc.). Even now it can be done well, and even brilliantly (I think immediately of the dialects invented by Mike Flynn for The January Dancer and Up Jim River). However, if it isn't done right, it can be embarrassing, inconsistent or even incomprehensible.

This is why I don't do it. I still do dialects, though, so this article is about how to make dialects sound different without actually changing spelling to reflect pronunciation.

Fortunately, there is a lot more to dialect variation than pronunciation alone. There are also variations in pronoun usage, variations in syntax, variations in prosody (intonation and meter), variations in the use of the verb "be," and variations in vocabulary. Because I'm talking about writing in English, I'm going to stick to these - but it's good to be aware that in other languages, you can also have variation in other parameters (in Japanese, verb endings also vary by dialect!).

So let's do these one at a time, with some concrete examples. Pronouns (I/you/he/she/they/etc.) are a wonderful tool. Any change you make in the way you use them will be highly visible, because they resist change rather wonderfully (it's extremely difficult to get a reader's mind to accept a new made-up pronoun unless it resembles an existing pronoun very closely).

A great science fictional example of pronoun change comes from the work of Aliette de Bodard, who works with the Xuya Empire, a wonderful far-future version of the Chinese empire. In this universe, the Emperor is always referred to as "The Emperor ytself." I'm not sure about you, but the moment I see this I know that I'm looking at a genderless pronoun. There are two things working for me when I interpret this. One is that the pronoun would be pronounced just like the pronoun "itself." The second is that it has a very simple spelling change that tells my brain "look out!" This spelling change also leads me not to expect the default interpretation of "itself," i.e. that there is some kind of genderless object running the empire. There's a lot of mystery surrounding the person of the emperor here, but I don't immediately guess that the place is being run by some sort of machine.

I decided to change pronouns when I was designing the undercaste dialect of Varin, but in a more extensive way. These people start using plural pronouns for each other as soon as they reach adulthood. Now, surely most of you are familiar with the pronoun "y'all" from the American south. When I first learned it I thought it was used as a plural form of "you." Interestingly, though, at least in some regions it is a singular.

y'all = you (singular)
all y'all = all of you (plural)

This was a good thing, because I knew that the idea of pluralizing a pronoun wouldn't push people too far outside their comfort zones. However, I pluralized more than just the second person.

I => we
we => all-we
you => ye
you => all-ye
he/she => they
they => all-they

The result is extreme, but comprehensible once you get the hang of it. I was trying to make sure I introduced it in a very comprehensible context, so the first line that contains one of these pronouns is this:

"Give it to us, then."

Perhaps you notice the similarity to existing English dialects from the UK? This was fortuitous, but I'm ready to use it to the hilt, and you should be too, so remember this: the dialect you create may well evoke existing Earth dialects, and if it resembles one that bears some social similarities (casualness, lower-class) to the group you are working with in your world, this will really help your readers to get the picture.

Variations in syntax are cases when you change the order of words. For most of you, I'm guessing Yoda will leap to mind. He's weird (and possibly annoying) but he is comprehensible. One of his main strategies is to take the object of the sentence and promote it up to the front of the sentence, so that instead of Subject-verb-object, you get Object-subject-verb:

Your father he is.

Now, if you go in and start doing an analysis of everything Yoda says, you'll find he's not particularly systematic. However, when you're altering syntax for your dialect, I encourage you to be so. If you can stick to a particular pattern, then the learning and comprehension burden is reduced for your readers.

I did my own syntactic alterations when I was designing the alien voice for "Cold Words" (Analog, Oct. 2009), and I've analyzed it here on the blog, so I'll direct you to that article if you want lots of details about how it was done. That was a case of rendering an alien language in English, so it had a lot of different feature changes! [An Introduction to Aurrel]

Variations in prosody can be huge. This is intonation and stress, and all you have to do is choose words carefully and put them in a particular order to get it done. You don't have to change spellings, and you don't have to use special words. I have at least a couple of characters whose dialects are distinguished only by word and rhythmic patterning. Here is one example:

Pelismara (standard) dialect:
"You're all right now. How do you feel?"

Safe Harbor sea level dialect:
"Oh, young Master, sir, please tell us now you've not gone deaf or blind, and ease us all our worry?"

I shouldn't forget to mention "be." This is a verb that does a lot of helping but isn't very heavy on content, so perhaps that's why it ends up changing so much. Some dialects of English don't conjugate it at all. "I be going..." "They be good people..." etc. Change your default language on Facebook to "Pirate" and see what happens! This means that not only are people accustomed to seeing the word "be" used in variable ways (and thus will tolerate your alterations more easily) but that using the unconjugated "be" gives a very particular flavor to the dialect you're creating. This can definitely work to your advantage.

The next one to look at is changing vocabulary. In fact, if you're writing in another world, you're probably doing this already. Science fictional neologisms like viewport, commlink, etc. all would fall into this category, and so would created words for objects in fantasy worlds like "laran" psychic power in the Darkover world of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross. The thing to watch out for here is not to create so much new vocabulary that you're interfering with comprehension. SF neologisms have the advantage that very often they're pieces of existing words, like "mods" for modifications. However, if the context is not clear, they can also become confusing. One great thing you can do with vocabulary is create a sense of judgment and perspective. I've mentioned before that any object in a world will tend to be called different things by different people. A weapon used specifically by one group of people will tend to have the name of that group associated with it (in Varin, Arissen weapon or Imbati shot) - but only when being referred to by an outsider group. Arissen would never refer to their energy weapons as "Arissen weapons," because that wouldn't make any sense. They would have intimate knowledge of the variations in these weapons, and so would categorize them based on their function, as bolt shooters vs. arc zappers. Their familiarity with the types would show in the casualness of the terminology. We see similar things in our own world when we're looking at how laypeople versus clergy refer to objects having to do with the church, or how laypeople vs. medical practitioners refer to health issues.

As you can see, changes in vocabulary can hint about attitudes and culture within the group that uses those words. The terms we choose will have flavor, so as you make these alterations, think through which flavor it is you want to impart to the dialogue. If you want to go even further, you can think about how the usage of a particular dialect reflects historical developments, or cultural developments, in the community you're working with (the undercaste plural pronouns have a cultural and historical motivator, for example).

All this is just to say that if you restrict yourself from using spelling as a major tool in creating a dialect, you're really not "restricting" yourself much at all.

Now, go forth and have fun creating dialects!

This week's Worldbuilding Hangout

2011-11-08T06:21:00.000-08:00

This week's worldbuilding hangout will be tomorrow, Wednesday November 9 at 11am PST. We will be talking about Gender in Language. Please come and join us on Google+! Basic prerequisite is a Google+ account, but with no microphone/no camera we can manage workarounds. I hope you will join us.

Tying the pieces of a chapter together

2011-11-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

Over this weekend I was struggling with a chapter of my novel - struggling in part because I haven't worked on it for several months, but also because it was one of those chapters that has two main sections. The point-of-view character interacts with a bunch of people in one location, and then for the second half of the chapter, goes to a different location and interacts with a totally different group of people. It's really hard to make a chapter like that seem like it's not just "one thing and then the other." It can be even harder when the sequence gets longer.

You have to tie them all together.

There is, of course, one really good way to have a sequence of events make sense. If one event causes the next, you're not likely to have trouble. I had Nekantor picking out a bodyguard with the help of his brother and his cousin in the first half of the scene, which allowed him to go safely to the next location in the chapter. But the bodyguard doesn't have anything to do with the fact that he's interviewing with the Eminence. She can't - she's irrelevant except as the means for him to get there. So he was coming out of his interview having accomplished the things he needed to accomplish, but the chapter was feeling like two floating scenes instead of a chapter.

I found the link somewhere else.

One of the things that comes up in the bodyguard interview is the question of betting. Members of the soldier/officer caste enjoy risk and the sense of courage, and betting lets them engage in that in addition to their natural duties. So while the three noble boys are interviewing bodyguard candidates, there's a (seemingly) random thread about betting running through the whole scene. In the end, Nekantor realizes that betting is one of the caste's weaknesses, and decides to use that to help make his decision of which bodyguard to pick. Then, later, I'd gotten to the end of the interview and he and his father were arguing with one another on the way home... and it hit me. Nekantor has just learned something about betting, so he can make a betting comment to his father [roughly, No matter what you say, I bet X amount he's going to vote for me.]. It might seem frivolous, but it works for a couple of reasons - one, because I'm picking up something at the end of the chapter that I was working with at the beginning, and two, because it demonstrates that the events at the beginning of the chapter have changed the way Nekantor thinks about things. He's not just "doing two things" in this chapter, but he's learned something that he can now carry forward (and with this offhand comment he's just demonstrated that he will do so).

All of a sudden I had a smile on my face. I also knew that I had a better title for the chapter. I have written before about the usefulness of chapter titles (here). I find they help me express what I think the thematic content of the chapter is - and they also help readers see which elements are important in the chapter. Before I had managed to find this linking element between the two halves of the chapter, I'd named it after the person with whom Nekantor has his interview in the second half (making the first half seem peripheral or less relevant). Once I'd figured out that the betting was the linking factor, I decided to call it "A Better Bet."

It's not always this hard to tie the pieces of a chapter or story sequence together. I've had plenty of chapters that title themselves, like "Master and Lady" where my servant character got closer and closer to seeing the true nature of the conflict between his mistress and her husband (over several different scenes). But there are times when you won't find the link between the smaller pieces of your chapter in the main driving content of each of the scenes. My primary point here is to say that you can look out for smaller repeating elements - for in my case, it was soldiers betting on a competition between the young noble boys in one section, and a young noble boy betting on that same competition in the second section. You'd be surprised what a difference it makes to the sense of cohesion and continuity within the story.

It's something to think about.

Magic Systems: a Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report

2011-11-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

Last week's hangout was a discussion of magic systems. I was joined by Glenda Pfeiffer, Jaleh Dragich, and Harry Markov. Not all the computer cameras were working, but we had a great audio chat.

Since Harry was the one who had initially proposed the topic of Magic Systems, he got us started with the terrific point that the core of any magic system is the source of the magic in question. Knowing where magic comes from is critical to understanding its properties. The most common model is to treat magic like a (somewhat unusual) resource, almost a material in and of itself, that comes in finite quantities and can be manipulated in various ways. If a deity is the source of magic in your world, then the use of magic will very likely be faith-related. If magic use is hereditary, then bloodlines and social structure will very likely be critical to its use.

Harry explained the example of one of his own works, in which blood sorcerers had powers that came from splintered pieces of the soul of a single magical creature who had come to Earth. Which piece you were in possession of (heart, eye, etc.) completely dictated what kinds of magic you were able to work, such as when the person with the eye soul-piece was able to do seeing magic. In his system, objects were able to be affected magically if they had a particular "frequency" of magical vibration.

It's a good idea to avoid all-powerful characters. They may be tempting, but they're far less interesting. Magic use generally has a cost, whether that be in blood, in simple fatigue, in loss of soul or sanity, etc. Readers find it helpful to be able to anticipate what might be possible in the magic system, but if anything is potentially possible, then it's hard to tell why the conflict would even occur without someone waving a hand and ending it all "by magic."

A successful magic system typically has a method of control or limitation. Harry Potter's magic system flirts along the border of being out of control, at least as I see it, because it's hard to anticipate when some new power or potion will come along and completely change what's possible. This has some advantages because few things in the world are totally uniform in their character, and it does keep us on our toes. It's also consistent with the real-world history of magical practice and the various methods that have been used for it. Needless to say, it works.

We talked about various different types of systems that we were familiar with. Jaleh talked about her work, where there is a transformed person and a mage - and how she'd thought about who had what kind of magic and how the two interacted with one another. I mentioned that there are many location-based magic systems that use specific places or lay-lines in order to govern the use of magic. Janice Hardy's The Healing Wars trilogy uses a bit of a different system: tired of seeing magicians always being weakling scholars, Janice came up with a system where enchanters have to work magical metal, and therefore are basically huge intelligent blacksmiths. Parallel to that is the natural genetic ability to heal (and move pain) by touch. Laura Anne Gilman apparently has a system where magic comes from the growing of grapes and the making of wine, where mages grow their own grapes, and drinking different wines will allow you to work different magics. My Varin world is an example of a case where I was so dissatisfied with the uncontrolled qualities of magic that I decided not to make it magic at all - the characters think it's magic because they don't understand it, but actually there are natural (if highly unusual) creatures involved in the phenomena that appear to be magical. Jaleh mentioned a system where magic came from shapes and colors around you in the environment, and each magic user had a specific shape that was their favorite - octagons, for example.

Objects and creatures can be magical, or may not be. Often the magic of objects and creatures is distinct from the magic used by people, and does not operate in the same way.

Harry remarked that magic is a vehicle to propel the story, and should be about more than just battles between wizards. He mentioned telekinesis, which can be used for all kinds of purposes. He also brought up the great point that the presence of magic in a society would have enormous cultural implications.

All the distinctions we recognize between haves and have-nots would exist in a world where magic is used. If magic is a resource, then of course some people will have more of it than others. People often portray magic as an elite power possessed by only a few. Glenda pointed out that there are some authors (like Piers Anthony in the Xanth books) who create a situation where everyone does magic but with varying levels of ability. Most people in such situations will have a tiny bit of power, and a few will have a lot. People entirely without power will be outcasts or seen as strange. Harry compared magic to nuclear power, in that it provides power, has practical applications, but can be highly dangerous and toxic.

The idea of a non-magic-using society where magic exists but is hidden in a secret world, a neighbor-world where magic users only really have dealings with other magic users, is pretty common. We see it in Harry Potter certainly, but in a lot of other contexts as well. That's actually a convenient way to minimize the effect of magic on the larger society.

If you have a society where magic is common, the effects will be much more widespread. Ask yourself what inventions we have that might have been replaced by the use of magic. Any single innovation that did not occur in your world as a result of magic would have large ongoing effects on the development of technology and society as a whole. When I was helping Janice think through some of the effects of the magic system she'd designed, we had to figure out why people wouldn't use normal medicines as an alternative to going to the magical healers - and we realized that people who used herbs and powders etc. would be seen as dangerously unreliable, possibly dirty, and definitely undesirable. On the other hand, these people do exist, and if they didn't, it would really feel like some major world piece was missing.

We talked about a few more models of magic that have been used in different contexts. Blake Charleton's Spellwright uses words in different languages for magical purposes, and confines particular magical effects to the use of any specific language. My own novel, Through This Gate, uses writing as a force of creation and each character's magic is influenced by the cultural imagination of the era from which he/she came (one character teleports like blinking, one like stepping through a curtain, one by appearing in a cloud of smoke, and another like falling through a circus trapdoor and being vaulted up into the new location). Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books put a lot of significance on the knowledge of true names as a means of working magic. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books rely on the magic of the Greek gods and the intervention or non-intervention of the deities themselves (it's interesting to note that the gods have sworn a non-intervention pact; this is a form of magic control and makes the stories much more interesting!). While Percy's powers are heredity-based, some miracle-working can be based on belief (where a crisis of faith can lead to a loss of powers); either way, the identity of the sponsor god or goddess is critical in determining what kind of magic can be accomplished.

Thanks so much to Harry, Glenda, and Jaleh for coming. I had a great time chatting with you. Today's hangout will be discussing Gender in Worldbuilding, so I hope to see you at 11am today!

This week's Worldbuilding Hangout

2011-11-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Just a quick announcement/reminder: this week on Wednesday (tomorrow) at 11am PDT I'll be holding a worldbuilding hangout on Google+. We'll be talking about gender in worldbuilding. I hope you can make it!

Why Articles Matter - the Known and the New

2011-11-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

On Sunday at the World Fantasy banquet I mentioned to my neighbor that I was going to write this article.

"I'm going to write about the importance of articles," I said. He replied, "Why articles? You could write an entire story without them."

He's right, of course. You could - but there would be problems. Not just that the story would sound funny, either. Articles tell you whether something is known information, or new information - and this can be incredibly important to your management of information. Here's the ultra-simple example I used with my WFC neighbor:

1. I walked into the room. There was a man!

2. I walked into a room. There was the man!

In sequence 1, we assume we know the room being talked about. It's been mentioned before in the story, maybe even in the previous sentence. At very least, there's only one room in question, and the narrator is familiar with it. When the narrator then walks into the room, he/she makes a discovery. There is a man there. This is new information. The narrator does not recognize this man at first glance. It might be someone he/she has never seen before, or simply a failure to recognize the man that will then later be corrected. The point is, at least for the moment, the article tells us that we have not encountered this man before.

In sequence 2, the only thing that has changed is the articles. It's a little clunky, but I think you can see the difference. In this case, the room is what is new information. The narrator has either just discovered that a room is there, and informed us by walking into it, or there is a collection of rooms available to potentially walk into, and the article tells us that the narrator has just picked one. At that point, the narrator discovers a man that he/she has encountered before. It may be a man that the narrator has previously mentioned to readers, or it can be a man who has never been previously mentioned in the text, but who is known to the narrator somehow. Indeed, if we haven't seen him mentioned in the text before, our very next question will be, "What is his significance to the narrator?" Because the article will cause us automatically to assume he has one.

Back when I was writing my article about proper nouns, I quoted Wikipedia as saying that proper nouns don't get used with articles. Ahm, sorry, Wikipedia, but they do - in special contexts, of course.

If in my story the narrator calls a person George, rather than "a man," it suggests certain things. At very least it suggests that the narrator recognizes him and has heard of him before. More likely, they have met before and know each other. There's a lot of known-vs-knew information taken care of right there. So you're only going to find the article added in unusual contexts where there is extra information, or an unusual situation, to be imparted.

Surely you can imagine the waiter approaching you at the dinner table and saying, "A Mr. Jones is here to see you." If the waiter simply said "Mr. Jones," then it would suggest that the waiter knew him in some capacity. In fact, it wouldn't be ungrammatical if the waiter simply said "Mr. Jones," but in that case the waiter would be taking a sort of insider stance, behaving as if he/she and the diner shared this acquaintance in some way.

We also are all familiar with the expression "the John Smith." It's most typically used with emphasis on the "the" to tell us that among all the possible John Smiths in the world, this one happens to be a specific individual that the speaker and listener can identify as known to both of them in a very obvious way. That's why you will usually find this type of article appearing in front of the name of a famous person who has something of a common name, or occurring in a context where the name of a famous person is familiar, but the context is unexpected. Nobody would be surprised to hear me say, "I saw Neil Gaiman this weekend." But if next week I were to say, "I saw Neil Gaiman at my sports club," listeners would likely say, "Surely not the Neil Gaiman?" Because it would be next to impossible for this illustrious author to appear at my sports club, and far more likely for whoever-it-was to be someone who just happened to have the same name.

Tracking articles in a story is not usually going to be something you handle consciously. It's a niggly little job when you do. However, it's a good thing to watch out for because it can really throw readers off. If people are giving you comments like, "Who is this guy again?" or "I'm confused - has he been here before?" you might have an article problem.

Articles are also extremely important when it comes to creating the sensation of insider point of view. We sometimes can unconsciously use the articles that reflect our own knowledge rather than that of the narrator, or another character's knowledge rather than this one's. Make sure as you're going through your revisions to take a look at what your characters are treating as known, as familiar, as belonging to them (a very common implication of using "the" to suggest something is known). Look also at what they consider unfamiliar, and what they are discovering (a common implication of "a").

It's something to think about.

Chapter transitions and story drive

2011-10-31T06:04:00.000-07:00

What is it that creates the sensation of story drive?

There is no one single thing that does, of course (no surprise). A character with goals, a sense of danger, making sure not to include any irrelevant description (or any description that doesn't fit with the mental state of a protagonist in a dangerous hurry). But that generally is what happens within the narrative, as you're reading along through a chapter.

How do you sustain story drive over a chapter break?

Point 1: A cliffhanger ending alone is not sufficient.
Cliffhangers come in different forms. Someone can be literally hanging from a cliff, can make a dangerous discovery, etc. Anything that makes a reader go "Aigh, what happens next?" Just make sure not to keep the answer hidden. Pick it up in the very next sentence if possible. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be left demanding the answer to something and then either have the answer appear in backstory to the next chapter so you never see it, or have the next chapter not address the question at all. It doesn't have to answer the question directly, necessarily, but please don't make me ask that question and then hide the answer outside the narrative. "Aigh" quickly turns into "Argh!"

Point 2: A continuous timeline is helpful for drive, but not necessary.
I really really like switching chapters inside of a critical moment. One chapter ends one second, and the very next second, the next one starts. For example, I have one direct handoff (this is my nickname for them) where Tagret's father takes him into a room and Tagret discovers that his father has been interviewing the servant Aloran. This is a real shock for Tagret because it's a move that will really upset his mother, and he's been fearing that his father is hiding something from his mother. The instant he makes the discovery, I switch chapters and begin with Aloran going, "Oh, no, it's Tagret!" We already know what the stakes are for Tagret, and it's less obvious how Tagret walking in is bad news for Aloran...but it is, and switching to his point of view allows me to show that, and then have Aloran take the narrative in a different direction immediately thereafter.

When you are using a continuous timeline, even if you aren't using a direct handoff, your readers don't have to do the work of re-orienting themselves every time they start a new chapter. This is work that will pull them off the drive of the story conflict, so if you want high drive, try to reduce the amount of orientation work they have to do at the beginning of any chapter.

Point 3: Even without a cliffhanger, and even without a continuous timeline, you can create a sense of direct continuity between chapters.

The way I recommend doing this is to look for cohesion elements. These are things that readers will recognize because they have seen them in the previous section of narrative, and they then show up in the next. Cohesion elements are very flexible. For example, you could have an object in the first piece and then have it appear in the second piece: I'm imagining a scene where a criminal encounters a hand mirror at a crime scene, and then in the next section you have the detective picking up the mirror to examine it as evidence. (I'm sure you've seen this done on TV also!) It doesn't have to be an object though. It can be a topic of conversation picked up by the protagonists. Or it can be a location. A location can be mentioned in conversation in the previous chapter and then you can show up there in the next one. It can be an activity that appears on either side of the divide (with or without different people engaging in it), or a theme.

Point 4: If you have no obvious cohesion elements, you're placing a big demand on your readers. You're saying to them, "Trust me, this is relevant." And in fact they'll probably go with you up to a certain point... but they will be actively searching for cohesion elements. I've been reading this lovely book - Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox - and he achieves a very dreamy sense of the entire story by not connecting all the pieces directly, but by making sure to drop cohesion elements when you're looking for them (sometimes two or three paragraphs into the scene, and you'll have this "Aha!" moment). It's very effective, but it's also risky and I could imagine some readers feeling confused at different points.

When you're working on a novel, keep your eye out for these cohesion elements. Try to use them consciously to bind the story together and keep up a sense of drive. Be aware that tiny things can make the difference between your readers taking a running step between chapters, taking a slow step, taking a long floating leap, or floating right off the page and out of your book for good.

It's something to think about.

Me, and book reviews

2011-10-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

This weekend at World Fantasy Convention I was asked several times if I do book reviews. The short answer is that I don't. However, I did encounter a couple of people who were interested in getting my opinion about specific aspects of their books...and that I feel is within my purview. TalkToYoUniverse is all about language and culture and writing, and those of you who have been following me for a while know that I get pretty analytical sometimes. So if you're interested in having me look at your book and analyze a small piece of it to look at worldbuilding or point of view or cultural representations etc. I'm willing to consider it. It will be something of a different angle on the book than you'd see in a general review, and more congruent with my theme.

In this vein, then, I'm going to be doing a piece in the next week or two about a new book that's coming out called The Fallen Queen by Jane Kindred. Lucky me, I was given it in Advance Reader Copy by an agent at the convention, and it's a lot of fun! I'm also hoping to see another ARC from someone I met... this could be really cool and interesting.

Wish me well at World Fantasy!

2011-10-27T15:27:00.001-07:00

I'm headed off to World Fantasy Convention tomorrow morning, early. I'm really looking forward to it. For those of you who are less familiar with it, World Fantasy Convention is a wonderful convention that is more focused on industry professionals - authors, editors, and agents - than fans. If you're in a position where you're breaking into writing, it's wonderful. There's a whole lot to learn, a lot of really wonderful people, and a lot of fantastic intelligent conversations going on.

And if it so happens that you're already going, keep an eye out for me!

Magic Systems 11am PDT today on Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout

2011-10-26T08:29:00.000-07:00

Today, Wednesday, October 26 at 11am PDT

I'll be holding a worldbuilding hangout on the topic of Magic Systems! This should be a really wonderful one because I have opinions about magic! Now you will all laugh, because I have opinions on everything. But there are a lot of great magic systems out there, and a lot of not so great ones, and then some that you may be designing yourselves. I think we're going to have a really awesome discussion. Come and join us!

Here's how to get there: go to Google+ (you need an account, but it's not hard to get one). Look up my profile, Juliette Wade. At the time the hangout is going on, that should be the top entry on my stream, so click "join" and there you go.

Manners: a Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report

2011-10-26T05:40:00.000-07:00

My visitors for this hangout were Kyle Aisteach, Dale Emery, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Harry Markov. It was good to see Dale back after not seeing him for a while! Glenda had a few audio difficulties, so she doesn't appear as often as the others in this report - sorry, Glenda!

We talked about manners. What do you think when you think of manners? I asked. Kyle thought of "A comedy of manners," while Dale thought of choices you make about how to moderate interaction, and Glenda talked about greasing interaction. All of them are correct.

When I start into the topic of manners, which is one of my favorites, one of the big issues I face is that many people think just of fancy manners when you say "manners." Manners is a much bigger deal than that, for two reasons:

People don't ever not have manners
Manners are managed subconsciously

You might argue that you're very aware of manners and what you should do, and you'd be right. People are very aware of what they should do. Researchers have found that if you ask someone what they say in a particular social situation, people will tell them what they feel they should say, not what they actually say when bugged with a microphone.

Manners in your story are more than just having one prim and proper character.

We then tackled the topic by discussing two aspects of manners language that I had studied:
phatic talk (the talk whose content and meaning has less importance than the social fact that stuff is being said) and Speech Acts, which are contexts where you are "doing" something by saying it (requests, refusals, marrying two people, etc.)

Any time you perform a speech act, you are potentially insulting someone or "threatening their face." Not literally, of course - you're not likely to damage someone's visage with a refusal. However, if you think of "face" in terms of your social image, like "saving face," you'll see what I mean. There are lots of ways that people use to mitigate this possibility. If I add some nice pretty words it will make the threat softer, and protect me from this person who could potentially be very upset.

Kyle told us a very interesting story about how difficult it was for people to get women's accounts of the Titanic disaster, because it was considered rude to ask a lady about anything upsetting that had happened to her in the past. Apparently some people's stories were lost forever because whenever they were asked about it, they would get all affronted!

We asked, "How can you approach somebody? What is appropriate?" Sometimes there is a socially licensed way to approach a person. Sometimes it's easy, as when you are friends. Sometimes you can't approach that person at all, and have to use elaborate work-arounds.

Dale asked me what I meant by "elaborate work-arounds." The most common everyday example I could think of is when a girl who is not a member of a particular social clique likes a boy who is a clique member, and asks an intermediary to approach him - or even asks an intermediary to approach another clique member, who can then approach him on her behalf.

Kyle mentioned that when you see a celebrity out eating dinner, it's inappropriate to interrupt their dinner and ask for an autograph. This leads to people standing by doors, lying in wait outside the bathroom, etc. hoping that the celebrity will stray across their path in one of these socially autograph-licensed areas.

I gave an example from my current novel in progress of a servant who faces social pitfalls when trying to return to his lady the key to her diary, which has been stolen. The servant can't go to the thief and demand the key back because the thief is a more senior servant than he is. In addition, he can't take the key to his lady himself because he'd risk having her think that he had been trespassing into her private thoughts without permission (and he hasn't yet won her trust). In the end he enlists the help of the lady's son, who as a nobleman is of higher rank than the thieving servant, and who as the lady's son is someone she trusts. In the end she and her son both admire him more for his discretion. And that's one of the critical things that manners can do for you.

In this context, Kyle mentioned N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms as a great example of a story that handles subtle and complex social rules. That's one I'm going to have to seek out!

I mentioned the situation in Japan, where it's uncommon for you to meet anyone as a casual street acquaintance, and much more likely for you to be introduced to someone through correct connections. This situation makes a lot of sense if the language requires you to use different manners depending on the person's relative rank to you. How are you going to guess the rank of a person on the street if you haven't been introduced?

Kyle told the story of Saint Bernadette, who was a peasant in France who met the Virgin Mary. Apparently she knew she was in the presence of a deity because Mary addressed her in the formal "vous" form, and nobody in her life had ever addressed her in the formal!

We briefly discussed the idea of formal and informal pronouns (tu and vous in French), which is common to the Romance languages. Formerly, these pronouns used to be used as reflections of power relationships, where vous referred to someone of high rank and tu to someone of lower. However, this usage has changed over time, and now it's much more common for people to say vous for people they don't know, and tu for people they know, turning it from a power measure into a solidarity measure. According to Kyle, this is at least in part deliberate, as an attempt to move away from old definitions of social class.

At that point I had a chance to introduce another really useful academic concept about politeness: the difference between Positive Politeness and Negative Politeness. The adjectives used here are not the most useful in reflecting how this works, but because it can be really helpful in developing social interactions, I'll explain.

Negative Politeness is the one we most often think of. This is the kind of politeness which involves saying fancy things in order to make sure another person knows we didn't intend to step on them in any way. The core idea here is that the person "doing" negative politeness is emphasizing how willing they are to protect the other person's autonomy, and their right to do things unhindered.

Positive Politeness is the opposite in that it involves getting closer to a person, rather than moving farther away. Autonomy is not the idea here; alignment is. This is the kind of politeness which involves approaching someone and saying something to make sure they know we're on their side. The things we say can seem impolite, especially when looked at from the perspective of negative politeness which relies on autonomy.

Different people, and different subcultures use these two different styles. I have friends who expect negative politeness from me, and others who expect positive politeness. I have helped friends through situations where someone tried to use positive politeness with a person who expected negative, and inadvertently offended them by crossing their personal social boundaries.

At this point, Harry joined us, and we engaged in some greetings and other social smoothing!

As we move through our lives, we are constantly called upon to take social stances - to act like we're members of this social group or that, to approach someone in a humble or a friendly or an authoritative way. I find it really interesting how I have to change my voice and my mode of expression when I go from chit-chatting with my kids and their carpool friend in the car to telling them they've crossed the line and they need to settle down or I won't be able to drive!

Manners are everywhere. They're in your stories, too. Just take an example of an interaction from a story that you're writing and take a closer look. Play it out. Look at what is at stake socially.

Dale mentioned a context in which someone in a position of service, i.e. someone who was socially obliged to carry out another person's orders, was asked to "promise" to do something. Promising is a prime example of a speech act, but unexpected in this context because carrying out an order is something that should be so normal it's unnoticeable here. To ask someone who serves you for a promise, you'd need to be asking them for something that is well outside the boundaries of their normal service.

How many stories do you know about oathbreakers?
Harry mentioned the unbreakable oath taken by Snape in the Harry Potter books.

Dale gave a rather fascinating example of manners in a workplace culture, where if someone suggested you take on a job or a function, you were essentially forbidden to refuse. However, you were not necessarily expected to succeed in carrying out the job or function. You were only obliged to take it on.

I mentioned an example that my husband shared with me: if you receive an invitation from the Queen of England, you can't refuse it. If for some reason (illness or disaster) you can't attend the event she has invited you to, you gratefully accept her invitation, and then say, "unfortunately, I won't be able to make it..."

Manners are everywhere. They are in social restrictions on behavior, approaches, and speech. They are in group membership behaviors. They are in ceremonies and rituals. I encourage you to think about all of these things as you write. It's very easy to fall into a kind of theoretical stance when writing, to think about your world from the standpoint of the author and say, "I have these social groups and this gamepiece is blue, this gamepiece is red, this gamepiece is yellow..." Take it further. Look closely at how the different groups are expected to interact, and what manners they need to follow in different situations.

My Varin world has special greetings that people use to express respect for the people who are of higher caste rank, and the group asked me to explain some details of the world. Essentially, each group has a different job function (officers, public/private servants, laborers, knowledge workers, etc) and each group is proud in its identity and the way in which it keeps life in Varin running. "We've got the real power here, no matter what anyone else thinks; Varin wouldn't survive without us" is the general attitude. The greetings thus reflect the perceived core value held by each caste.
To greet a merchant: "May riches spring from your footsteps."
To greet a laborer: "Fearless labor is the foundation of prosperity."
To greet a knowledge worker: "The focused mind is the sustainer of life."
To greet a knowledge worker who graduated from the University: "May you take your place in the Record of Great Masters."
To greet a public servant: "May your honorable service earn its just reward."
To greet a soldier/officer: "The heart that is valiant triumphs over all."
There are no special greetings for the nobility, to whom caste is more or less invisible, or for the undercaste, because nobody is low enough to owe them a polite greeting. I decided on these greetings very early on in my world design, but they made a great basis for later refinement of the intercaste interactions. If you can start your manners on a basic level, you can move on from there and increase subtlety as you go.

Thank you to everyone who came for the discussion. We decided that today's discussion would be about Magic Systems. We'll be meeting at 11am PDT today on Google+, so I hope to see you there!

TTYU Retro: Similes, Cliché, and Added Information

2011-10-25T06:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a hilarious post from Nicola Morgan about similes. If you aren't sure what a simile is, it's that thing you do where you say something is like something else. "He moved like a cat." "Her eyes were like sapphires." You've seen them before; they're everywhere, and a lot of them are clichéd.

So how do you avoid clichés and keep your similes under control? Nicola Morgan suggests that the simile must add meaning to the writing in order to be worthwhile, and points out that the entire content and connotation of the simile will be added (so be careful).

Question: what does that mean? What kind of meaning does a simile add?
My answer: two kinds.

First, a simile provides a comparison of a story event, character or object, with something else. As it does so, it lends all the qualities of that something else to the object (etc.) it describes. Here's an example, from my story "Smoke and Feathers":

...water reaches out over Ryuuji like a hand of glass.

What's happening here is that a boy, Ryuuji, is having water poured over him from a bucket. However, the effect of the water is far more than him getting wet. (I'll save that for those who read the story.) The simile compares the water to a hand reaching out, which gives the impression that the water could either grip Ryuuji, or maybe even cast a spell on him - things that hands, not water, can do. Thus when strange things start to happen afterward, we've already had a warning of it in the form of this simile.

Depending on the kind of word we choose to compare, the simile can bring along more connotations or evoke a more complete scene to go along with the thing that's being described. This is all included in the first kind of information that a simile imparts, through drawing a comparison.

The second kind of information that a simile can give us is character (and world) information. By this I mean, not comparing a character to something using a simile, but having the comparison itself reflect upon the person making it. If you are using point of view in your narrative, any simile you use will suggest things about the kind of person who would draw such a comparison. Here's an example that Nicola Morgan provided as being a bad example of a simile:

His words paralysed me. I was like a deer that's been transfixed by an arrow, right in its spine, so that it was alive but could not move. [The first sentence says it all. The simile simply adds some wholly unhelpful and, frankly, bizarre, extra images. We learn nothing extra and yet are bombarded with extraneous images of a dying Bambi.]

She says that the first sentence says all it needs to and we don't learn anything extra. I'm not sure about that, though - I personally think the simile suggests something unexpected and (perhaps) unwanted about the character making it. The original writer probably didn't have it in mind to suggest that this POV character was sadistic, or obsessed with death, or anything of that nature. Yet somehow they did. There's added information here, certainly, but information which can only confuse readers about the point of view character.

The information that similes (and metaphors) give us about the point of view character is in fact extremely valuable, and I highly recommend you take advantage in it as you write. Think about what kinds of comparisons your character would make, and why. The comparisons they make will show readers how they judge a situation, and will reflect on their sense of themselves and their own world. Similes give us an enormous opportunity to add dimension and life to our stories.

It's something to think about.

Worldbuilding Hangout on Google+ Tomorrow

2011-10-25T06:04:00.000-07:00

Here's another announcement for tomorrow's worldbuilding hangout on Google+. We're going to meet at 11am PDT to discuss magic systems. All you need to do is go to Google+ and look up my profile (Juliette Wade) and the hangout should come out right at the top. Remember, you don't need to have a working camera or microphone to participate, and you don't need to be exactly on time. We'll fold you in by whatever means, even if it's by IM chat. These discussions are really thought-provoking and inspiring, I find - they're a great opportunity for us to share ideas. I hope to see you there!

The "audacity of writers" - use it to the fullest!

2011-10-24T06:15:00.000-07:00

If you are a writer, you are brave.

Other people may not see you that way, but believe me, it's true. If you're writing, that means you believe you have something worth saying. That world in your head - the one you always seem to be drifting off to - is something you believe in so strongly that you want other people to be able to see it too. Whether you have a moral message or not, you have a vision that cries out to be shared. By writing it, you are being brave. And by insisting on writing it even if others around you don't approve, you are being even braver.

You should be brave this way. Feel the writer's fire inside you and let it burn!

This audacity goes further, too. Every time you challenge yourself to learn more, to push your craft further than you have before, you are using it. Every time you try to write something unlike anything you've written before, and every time you think, "boy, this will be hard to write, but if I can get it right, it will be SO COOL!" you are being brave. Be brave. Push further every time. Write about the things that scare you. Write about the things that make you feel so strongly that you laugh or cry, or want to scream. By writing these things you dare to know yourself.

It also takes bravery to write about those things that other people are afraid to discuss. Painful things. Discrimination. Abuses of power. Even taboos. You don't need to fly them like a flag, but even if you get close enough to look at them straight - or from more than one angle - that takes a bravery worth seeking.

There's a further form of bravery in looking for feedback from others. We write for an audience beyond ourselves, but often we don't meet that audience. Seeking critique is like stepping out onto the stage, waiting for the crowd to cheer or catcall, heckle, or all of the above. Taking criticism and using it to make yourself and your writing stronger takes a special form of bravery.

You should be brave in this way. Be a writer, be confident and proud, and be ready to listen!

If you've ever submitted a story anywhere, you are brave. Congratulations to you, because you went out on that limb. You reached out to an editor. You entered the realm of the publishers, which can (when you're alone in your room, in your own world) seem strange, foreign and daunting. But in fact you've started a conversation, even if you don't at first hear the personal words of the ones you're talking to.

If you've ever been rejected, and then submitted the story again somewhere else - revised or not - then you are brave. You decided that the blow wasn't going to get you down. You kept to your path and continued on.

Every step on this path requires bravery. There are more steps - some might say infinitely more. But I congratulate all writers who read this on their brilliant audacity, and encourage them never to feel like they have no strength of spirit. The more writers I meet, the more I am impressed by their ideas, their determination, and their courage.

Now, go forth and be audacious!

Link: Why computer voices are mostly female

2011-10-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

Here's another interesting story. Why are computer voices mostly female? The reasons are cultural and various, and the article includes very interesting examples. Check it out!

Link: Land bridge theory of American settlement "speared"

2011-10-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

I thought this was a very interesting article. A mastodon bone with a weapon point embedded in it has been dated to a time long before the Clovis hunters came across the Bering strait into north America. So how did people first get here? It's a mystery...

Rediscovering the novel that was my "baby"

2011-10-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

So I have this trilogy I wrote. (Maybe you have one like it, or something similar sitting in your files somewhere.) I always loved it. It was my first "novel," my baby, very close to my heart in that dangerous way that means it will take you forever before you really understand it. Maybe "baby" really is the right word.

It has a lot of growing up to do, but I've never stopped loving it. The world - Varin - was the one part I was sure of, because it came into a mature form on the basis of my studies. That was the one thing I was an expert in at the time that I wrote it. Varin sticks with me. The characters, as problematic as they were in their execution (even after three, four, five drafts!) never stopped sticking with me. I knew that I had their basic roles right, the basic contradictions and flaws in their personalities.

And when I mean they stuck with me, I don't just mean I remembered them. I mean that long after I'd left them alone, realizing that this still wasn't the novel it needed to be, I kept having ideas that refined their character, brought them closer to what they needed to be in order for the story to succeed.

I got a really wonderful opportunity to step back into that world and "get it right" with the short story I had published in Panverse Publishing's Eight Against Reality anthology ("The Eminence's Match," reviewed here by Margaret McGaffey Fisk). It was years since I'd put the novel down, but when I finally got that story right, I knew I had the ability to get the world and the characters to come together. The character in that story, Imbati Xinta, was the first character I'd really grasped with any degree of complexity when I was writing the novel initially, so it made sense that he was the first one I'd be able to "get right." At the same time I was getting glimpses into the character of Akrabitti Meetis, the girl who seems innocent but really is an incredible intellectual subversive.

Last year sometime I started back into Varin writing a novel, For Love, For Power. It was a novel I'd attempted before, after writing the trilogy, initially because I wanted to try to understand the nobility and their situation better (a great reason to start a story, but not sufficient for finishing it, as I learned at the time). It was better-planned than the original trilogy, and when I picked it back up, it started to take off. I'm 2/3 through right now and certain that it will finish in a way that far exceeds what I was ever able to accomplish earlier. It's also doing something fascinating that I didn't expect. By getting me deep into the backstory of some of the trilogy's major players, it's re-focusing my attention on the elements of the original trilogy in a new way. It's forcing me to engage deeply with details of Varin that I hadn't previously considered. How the streets are laid out, for example, and how people who have no power will work around all obstacles in order to accomplish things. What kind of motives are plausible for people to hold. How people earn their money, and what kind of position that puts them in as far as altering the difficulty of their situation.

A few days ago, the question of money-earning opened a door for me into the backstory and mindset of the third character from the trilogy, Akrabitti Corbinan. He was always the hardest, because he was the least like me. I figured out how he was brought up and why he ended up getting involved with gangs, and why his people's undercaste status was so dissatisfying. Hint: it's not because he wants to overthrow the government, which would be implausible for a person in his position. It's because he figures everybody deserves some cash, a place to live, and some respect...and nobody he knows gets all three.

Figuring this out put me in a strange position. Always before I'd known Corbinan was the revolutionary - you know, the one who wants to bring the whole system down and make things right for his people (it's a familiar trope). Suddenly he wasn't that any more. It was refreshing - so refreshing! - for him to be so much more realistic, but I wasn't sure how he was going to get done what he needed to get done any more. I couldn't see how to get him to begin the story I had always imagined. So suddenly everything and everyone was working better than ever before, but the story was implausible!

Today I was talking with the lovely and insightful Janice Hardy, and it came to me. It was like a shock, and I got goosebumps. Corbinan has to discover a hidden library. But he doesn't have to have revolutionary goals, and he doesn't even have to know it's a library in order to get there. Once he's there, he gets arrested and dragged before the Eminence of Varin and his servant, Imbati Xinta. The Eminence falsely accuses him of spying and working for a political rival, has him tortured and thrown in jail. But here's the best part - it is those very accusations that for the first time give Corbinan the idea that he can make a difference. It is the fact that he then gets thrown in prison that gives him time to think it all through, and make plans. An ordinary person with a degree of insight into his own people gets exposed to something unusual, and the results are unusual. That is something I can get behind.

Suddenly I'm starting to realize that none of the previously written text of this story will make it into the new draft. I'm going to have to outline it from scratch, because that new beginning is already starting to show me how entirely different the story will be this time. I don't want to see what I did before. I want its spirit to stay with me, as it always has - but I want to write it the way I now know how to write it.

I'm telling you this because even though I see mountains of work ahead of me, it feels like climbing Mount Everest, in the best possible way. So if you've ever been in this position before, or if you still are guarding a "baby" somewhere, you might have a chance to realize that it still has hope. It might not be a baby, but a caterpillar just waiting for its metamorphosis in order to fly.

I get the feeling mine will fly this time, and I can't wait to get started.

Lovely post about me at Deborah Ross's blog

2011-10-21T11:26:00.001-07:00

My dear friend and awesome writer Deborah J. Ross wrote a thoughtful post about me following my article here called "It's good to be wrong - Or, why my characters use the scientific method." She adds some really interesting thoughts that I hadn't even consciously had when I was writing the article. I encourage you to go check it out, here.

Culture Share: USA (NY) - A Walk to the Subway in Brooklyn, NY, USA

2011-10-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Nicole Lisa discusses her home of Brooklyn, New York.

A Walk to the Subway in Brooklyn, NY, USA

by Nicole Lisa

The New York City of television and movies is cleaned up or dirtied down or filmed somewhere else entirely, and doesn't much look or feel like the city I know and live in. Walking to the subway—something I do almost every day—reminds me of all the things I love about living here.

Brooklyn, one of the boroughs of New York City, is known for its culturally diverse neighborhoods, like Chinatown in Sunset Park, or Italian Bensonhurst. But in some areas, diversity happens on a micro scale—by block, building or even inside each building.

Before I leave my apartment building, I say good bye to my husband in Spanish (actually “ciao,” borrowed from Italian by some South Americans), hear the video game sounds of Russian television programming at full blast and pass brass or plastic mezuzahs on doorframes (small rectangular cases with a Jewish prayer inside).

During the week, on my 15-minute walk to the subway I dodge groups of teenagers chattering loudly in English, get distracted by a mom urging her son to walk faster in Mexican Spanish (“Orále, hijo”) and glance at a group of men sitting on their heels against the stucco wall of a deli, speaking quietly in Tibetan.

On the weekend, on this same walk, when the sidewalks are full of women, I might be one of the few with her head not covered. Hasidic Jews, dressed in black with their elbows and knees covered by long sleeves and long skirts, cover their hair, either with perfectly styled wigs or snoods that gather their hair at the nape of their necks. They tow large families of kids identically clad in home-made clothes. South Asian women, some Muslim, some not, wear bright butterfly-colored salwar kameez (a tunic and loose trousers) that cover most everything, or saris, that may leave arms bare, but cover knees and chests. Their heads are draped casually with a dupatta (a long scarf), more carefully with a pinned hajib, or even more carefully with a black niqab (a head covering with a veil). Fewer children accompany them, maybe only one or two, dressed in a mix of Western and Asian clothing. On summer days, I often wonder what the women think of me, with my uncovered head and knees and tank top.

Off the main commercial street, the buildings change from small free-standing homes mixed with large brick apartment buildings to mansions built at the turn of the Nineteenth Century. They’re really in a motley of styles, from an English cottage covered in roses, to actual Victorian mansions with wide porches and colorful gingerbread moldings...

to a Swiss chalet–Japanese temple hybrid in green and orange.

Flocks of chickens strut in a few driveways and eye passersby suspiciously. Chickens are popular again in Brooklyn, and people raise them in their backyards or in community gardens. Twenty years ago, mostly recent immigrants, or transplants from rural areas, kept chickens. Now many people who’ve never seen a farm keep them (and bees, since the city just reversed the ordinance making beehives illegal).

In other parts of Brooklyn, the row houses seen on TV are the norm: two- or three-story buildings with facades of brown or white stone, connected all down the block by shared walls, with high stoops leading to the entrance on the parlor floor—the main living area of the house if it's a one-family, or one of several apartments if it’s been divided up. Nineteenth Century cast iron fences with pineapple or urn-like finials enclose the front yards and under-stairs entrances to the ground floors—nowadays the coveted garden apartment with access to the backyard. The iron has to be repainted every five years or so to prevent thick orange rust. And there are specialists who replace the stone facades if they’ve become too damaged by pollution or lack of upkeep.

On Sundays, there’s a greenmarket in front of the library on my way to the subway. Farmers from New York State and nearby New Jersey and Pennsylvania set up tents and sell their bread, dairy, produce, sometimes fish, beef or chicken, and local honey directly to customers. On a fall day, you’d see baguettes and pumpkin pies, pears and apples, winter squash, carrots and potatoes, fresh yogurt and milk (sometimes the illegal unpasteurized kind), and hot apple cider and cider doughnuts. The doughnuts come with or without granulated sugar sprinkled on top. Past the greenmarket is the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) pick-up spot. If you join a CSA, you buy a share, or subscription, of produce for the growing season, and each week you pick up a box of whatever the farmer is growing and lug it home on foot.

Finally, I reach the subway. The whole system is old, dug or raised, and cobbled together over more than 100 years and it looks it: metal wheels squeal against metal tracks, the I-beams are exposed and often unpainted, nascent stalactites and stalagmites grow where mineral-heavy water drips through ceilings and walls year after year, and the big brown rats are bold enough to scamper across the platform while you stand there late at night. It’s dirty in a way that surprises Americans from other parts of the country and visitors from all over the world, but it takes us where we need to go (mostly), and makes New York City unique in the US, a place where a car is a liability, not a necessity.

My stop is outside, looking more like a suburban train station than a tourist's idea of the New York City subway. Sub means below or under, and my stop is below street level in a cut out, but it’s not under anything. Once, we had an out-of-town visitor decide he was lost when he got there. He returned to our apartment rather than risk getting on a strange train going who knows where. To make it more confusing, New Yorkers use “subway” and “train” kind of interchangeably. Subway is the system, but train is what you get on. Which isn’t that much of a problem, but we don’t always distinguish in speech between the subway (a purely intra-city system) and the trains on one of the five rail systems that will take you out of the city.

The suburban train feel is accentuated by the station house. In Manhattan, many subway entrances are simply stairs descending to toll stiles. But many, especially in the other boroughs, have actual station houses. This one, built in 1907 for the street-level, then-privately owned Brighton line (named for the beach/neighborhood of the same name at the last stop) hangs suspended above the tracks.

The other subway option in the neighborhood is this one’s opposite in every way; it’s an elevated train that runs three stories above the street on a wooden platform that feels like it’s been there since the original station opened in 1919 (although I don’t know if that’s true) and yet feels temporary too. The whole structure sways when trains pull in or grind away, and the whole world moves—a mini, localized earthquake. If you look down on the tracks, you can see bits of street, vertiginously. And if you drop your cell phone, fuhgeddaboutit (forget about it), as we really do say in Brooklyn. Maybe just not as often as in the movies.

Nicole Lisa is a Brooklynite by adoption. She writes YA and fantasy and is currently struggling with how to conduct research for her work in progress. She loves to geek out on language discussions, eat and travel. She has lived in Mexico, Nicaragua and several different states in the US and speaks Spanish and first generation Spanglish at home with her Chilean-born husband. She can be found at her blog Reading, Writing and the ‘Rhythmatic of Life and on twitter.

Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report: Morals & Values

2011-10-19T21:31:00.000-07:00

We had a smaller group last week for our discussion of morals and values. I was joined by Jaleh Dragich and Glenda Pfeiffer.

Jaleh started our discussion by mentioning a multiplayer role-playing game featuring a team of people trying to stop an invasion of Earth - and hampered by the fact that all team members didn't share the same sense of morality. She specifically mentioned a Victorian English player who would get caught up over how little clothing her more modern character was wearing ("showing a scandalous amount of leg").

I thought this was a very perceptive place to start, because morals and values stand out most when they are put in a context of contrast - either between different members of a group, or between readers and characters. They are also a huge potential source of conflict (as they are in our real lives). Imagine a story where a priest and a pirate had to work together!

It's easier when working with fantasy or science fiction to set up groups with a huge contrast of moral value systems, but also important to remember that there is no such thing as a mono-culture. Even within groups who ostensibly possess the same morality, not everyone will agree. I thought immediately of sectarian disputes within religions, and all of the wars and terrible acts they have inspired - indeed, these have also inspired world-changing acts like the departure of the pilgrims for the Americas.

The second question we discussed was where morals and values come from. A society can have laws, but those are generally a later development that follows on a preexisting set of societal values and traditions, which may or may not be religious (indeed, it's hard to separate societal values and religious values).

So how do you go about creating morals and values in a world you are designing?

Glenda suggested that we consider that there were often practical purposes at the root of certain behavioral prohibitions (or other guidelines), and that these may fossilize while the world around the people continues to change. So in creating a world it's useful to consider what the initial conditions of environment and food production were, for example. "Be fruitful and multiply" is a pretty good admonition for farmers who need more laborers to help them bring in the harvest, and would probably also work well (but for different reasons) for hunter/gatherers in a position where child mortality might be high. Once we hit the post-industrial age, however, having a lot of children becomes less clearly beneficial and more problematic.

Leaders, and elite groups, can also have a large effect on societal values. Jaleh mentioned the influence of charismatic leaders whose beliefs can influence the larger society. There can also be aspirational values established by small groups, which make other people want to emulate them, but may be impractical for people who are not members of the elite themselves (I think here of certain types of conspicuous consumption in our world). Glenda gave a good example of the value of pale skin, which started out as a sign of wealth when people who had to work spent a lot more time outside - but which, now that industrial laborers work indoors, has changed to valuing tanning as a sign of wealth and leisure.

One question you might want to ask yourself is this: how do you define a good person, a good member of society? That definition will change depending on the social subgroup you ask. Each group will have specific ideas of the way a person "should be" in order to contribute in an ideal way.

Glenda mentioned manners here. The question of manners had already come up in passing once before, but they can be seen as critical indicators of whether one is a "good person." Using the wrong set of manners, and being "rude," can easily turn into a serious moral condemnation. We'll talk more about this in today's discussion (so come and visit!).

Outsiders coming in to join a group can give conflicting signals because they are not accustomed to the behavioral rules of the group. Jaleh noted that manners are a way to demonstrate that you have the proper morals.

In fact, two people can have the same basic moral code but their way of expressing it through behavior may differ significantly. People very often have a relationship with their own morality - they may hold a set of beliefs, and have a way that they know they should behave, but they may or may not be able to achieve this, and this can fundamentally influence their own self-value.

One interesting thing to do in a story is to take two people who ostensibly have the same morality system, and put them in a situation of stress. Chances are not bad that under those conditions the two people will diverge significantly in their decisions and behavior in spite of those basic moral similarities. Glenda mentioned a Regency context in which one person was more interested in preserving form and appearances, while another person was more interested in "doing the right thing" regardless of appearances; this meant they dealt with the poor very differently.

Jaleh told us a really interesting story about two monks who encountered a woman beside a river. Neither one was supposed to "mix" with women, but one of the two monks decided to help the woman by carrying her across the river. He carried her across, set her down, and she went on her way, but once the two monks continued walking, the one who had not touched the woman started criticizing the other for helping her. The first monk then said "I carried her across and set her down. So why are you still carrying her [mentally]?"

Not only was this story a good example of divergent behavior based on the same morals, but it also demonstrated that morals are often passed on through stories. It's definitely worth thinking through what the parables and morality tales of your world are, and what kinds of language are associated with morals and values. Is there such a word as "scandalous" or "indecent"? What other judgments might use special words in your world?

Our last major topic was the question of placing value on objects/substances. This phenomenon ranges from assessing whether an object is generally valuable or not, to imbuing certain objects with spirit or with other sacred value (around which there may be considerable ritual).

I mentioned that in Japan's history there was a period where Portuguese traders brought Christianity to Japan, and gained quite a large number of followers, but when the local Daimyo realized that Christianity was becoming imperialist and wasn't simply going to be an additional religion that people could follow (since Shinto and Buddhism were side by side), they decided to stamp it out. This led to a period of terrible violence against both the Portuguese and the Japanese Christians. The relevance of this to sacred objects is that one of the tests for seeing whether a Japanese person was secretly Christian was forcing them to walk over an image of the Crucifixion. If they didn't see the image as possessing sacred value, the idea was, then they would walk over it no problem. Other images and objects have had sacred value throughout history, like the holy grail, relics of the saints, the Shroud of Turin, temples and statues of all sorts. Some places come to be imbued with similar value because of the depth of their sacred history. Glenda mentioned a rebellion in India where Hindu troops refused to use their guns because they had been told that the black paper around their shells (which had to be torn with the teeth) had pork fat on it.

This kind of thing is so potent and so omnipresent in our society that I urge writers to try to include something like it in their stories. The lack of any such significance (regardless of whether it is religious or based on some other belief system) will likely seem strange. Thus, unless that strangeness is a deliberate choice, it's good to think these things through for your world.

The question of pork fat also brought us to the value of foods. Is there a concept of clean vs. unclean in your society? Where does it lie? Did the fact that one food isn't acceptable to your people arise from some condition in their early history where the food could not be prepared properly/safely? Might it have been based on an injunction against over-fishing? Or based on the seasonal algae bloom?

Often, even when the original purpose of a prohibition or of a moral rule has been lost, the practice that arose from it has come to have inherent social value. In fact, it can serve as a marker of membership in the social group that holds this particular set of morals. We thought of both the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition as examples of people outside a religious group using social practices to single people out for persecution.

Would you be willing to break a taboo to save your own life? Would your character?

An example of a very common substance that gets a special value is water. I wrote about this on the blog once before (A different value: water). Is it for drinking? Is it for bathing? Is it, as in the novel Dune, your entire earthly wealth and something to be preserved at all costs (but wasted extravagantly by the people in power)? Is it something that should never be wasted because of frequent droughts? Or something that should be used to purify yourself and the area around your business?

The list of possible things goes on and on. We also mentioned how often people bathe, and whether a person's smell has social value, as in Babylon 5's Mars domes where any kind of strong smell was not approved of.

It was a good discussion, and at the end we decided to move over into the arena of Manners for this week. I hope you will stop by and join us later this morning.

TTYU Retro: Do more research to give the impression of less "research"

2011-10-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

Recently I've read a couple of fiction works, whose names I won't mention, in which I could "feel the research." Perhaps you've run across something like this - a piece of prose with a historical or foreign setting in which you could do a tally of details and everything checked out correct, but somehow it felt effortful. Or though the setting was all present, the characters seemed to float on top of it rather than moving through it.

I could call this a problem of anachronism, but that usually implies something glaring that stands out and doesn't belong in its time period. This isn't something glaring. When I'm in my anthropological mood I'll call a piece like that "not culturally situated."

Very often, it's a problem of attitude. The author's research has given them the architecture, the physical details of rooms and everyday objects - but it hasn't had as big an influence on the way the characters think and speak. Small turns of phrase will stand out as wrong. Or it will be difficult for me to imagine how a person with the upbringing that this protagonist must have had (given the era/location) would reach a state of mind like the one the author wants us to accept. Straining against the status quo - a common phenomenon in a piece like this - is not the problem. It's the assumptions that underlie the WAY this person wants to challenge the status quo that make it successful, or unsuccessful.

Here are a few thoughts on how to avoid having a story that feels full of research, rather than seamlessly melting into the period intended.

1. Don't create an extensive checklist of "stuff." Have a key object or building here or there, and make sure to use of details that aren't obvious or easy - but don't overload the reader.

2. Move beyond Wikipedia. While it can be a wonderful and convenient source, Wikipedia will typically only give you one angle on your location or time period. Look for others, such as...

3. Look to literature or primary sources for inspiration. Literature written in the time period will give you a sense of the language used in your setting, and will also reflect the philosophies and attitudes of the time/location. Primary sources like personal accounts etc. can give you even more of this, if you can find them.

4. Watch your dialogue, judgments and internalization. Check expressions against the Oxford English Dictionary, if necessary, to know when they came into use. Check your characters' moods and the moods of your scenes, and how your characters define them. What words to they use internally to describe their own mental states? Do they reflect how people of that time and location would have described them? Or have any expressions crept in that are inconsistent with the culture or time period?

Even if you can only find one primary source or piece of literature to go on, it will make an enormous difference. In the Heian period in Japan people used to describe the shedding of tears as causing their sleeves to become wet, generally in a very gentle and pensive way. In another period, frantic weeping might have been attributed to hysteria. Nowadays we would describe such things entirely differently.

The setting you choose for your story is far more extensive than just a collection of objects, fashions, and architectural trends. It goes deep into the psyche and language of the people who populate it. When you capture that in your writing, the sense of reality you achieve will be far more powerful, and any departures from it will become far more striking.

It's something to think about.

It's good to be wrong - Or, why my characters use the scientific method

2011-10-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

I was writing along on my latest story (which is almost finished!) and managed to iron out something that really made me happy. I was sitting there grinning and realized this was the sort of thing that I should blog about.

So here I am, to encourage you to let your characters be wrong.

Now, there are lots of good reasons to do this. For one thing, it keeps you from creating a Mary Sue character who can't do anything wrong and really ends up annoying readers. For another thing, it enhances your ability to create conflict between characters. I especially enjoy it when I've got two or three different points of view, and each of them is wrong about something, and nobody really has it right. It creates such great opportunities for conflict and learning and personal growth, and often makes the story that much more worth reading.

But my focus today is on having your characters be wrong in systematic ways. This is something that is particularly useful if you tend to write puzzle stories, or mysteries, or any kind of story where a group of people has to "figure things out."

In a story like this, generally there is a long list of things (like clues, or pieces of the larger puzzle) that your characters will have to put together before they "get it." As the writer of a story like this, you will often be paying attention to whether you are missing a piece, and where it has to go in, and how it can be fit into a scene in the background so that it doesn't appear to be too obvious, etc.

Well, one big problem that can arise in a story like this is confusion. Readers are getting barraged with information as the story goes along and they go, "Whaaa?" They don't feel drive in the story, they feel it's going in all sorts of different directions, and then by the time they get to the point where the main characters are supposed to put it all together (if they ever get to that point) they can't believe the characters would be able to figure it out, because they didn't.

It takes a certain amount of talent, and a lot of imagination, to put the correct constellation together out of a sprinkling of stars.

Here is my suggestion for how to manage this problem: Let your characters be wrong.

I find that my puzzle stories work best when I let my characters use the scientific method as they go. That is, they take what evidence they have at any given point and create a model for what is going on. Because they have a model, their lives seem directed, and their vision seems clear.

In my current story, the main characters arrive on the planet of the Poik and immediately see that there is a problem: the planet is being managed as a tourist destination by the Paradise Company, and as a result its environment has been damaged/altered, and its people are being exploited in a very demeaning way. So they immediately "know" what the problem is, and though they're trying to have a good time, their instinct against exploitation starts them into conflict with the Paradise Company from the start. Everything is clear, and actions are motivated.

BUT.

I suppose you had already guessed that they're not seeing the entire picture at this point in the story. They make friends with one of the Poik, and this changes things. They experience a native ceremony, and that changes things. The further they go, the more they learn. And each time they learn something new, they change their model for what they think is going on. Not only that, but I make sure to have them articulate their current version of the model. Maybe it happens in character internalization, or in a conversation between characters, but there's always a spot where someone has the chance to say, "Because X is what's happening, we should now do Y."

The more complex the real solution is, the more valuable it is for you to break it down into smaller steps. I write pretty complicated puzzles, and I really need to make sure I'm keeping people with me. I need to make sure I'm showing exactly the thought process that leads the characters to the conclusions they draw. That's why this is so valuable for me. That's also why I get so gleeful when I discover a moment where the characters think they have it all put together. Readers will know we're close to the end, and when the characters go, "Aha!" the readers will likely go "Aha!" as well. But there's still something left to learn.

In "Cold Words" I loved it when Parker was trying to explain to Rulii that he felt the downy-furred aliens were being unfairly discriminated against and that he wanted to help them by taking their case directly to the Majesty... whereupon Rulii told him if he did that, they wouldn't have a relationship any more and Rulii would make sure that humans were branded as barbarians. Yeah, you might think you've figured it out, but now I'm going to show you why you really haven't...

This is one critical piece that can make a "twist" at the end really satisfying rather than annoying. The other piece is that you can (and likely should) be subtly telegraphing the larger picture to readers from early on, in pieces whose significance goes unnoticed by the main characters, and which readers are likely to interpret as interesting ancillary detail.

So here are the thoughts to take away as you look at your own stories:
1. Let your characters gather evidence and use it to create models that motivate their behavior.
2. Let your characters change those models in steps as they go through, so as to lead readers along their path of reasoning.
3. Let small pieces of evidence for the biggest picture be available throughout, though their relevance and significance should not be clear, so as to give your climax a better foundation.

It's something to think about.

This week's Worldbuilding Hangout

2011-10-17T09:07:00.001-07:00

Happy Monday, everyone! This is just to let you know that this week I will be having a worldbuilding hangout on Google+, as usual, at 11am PDT. The topic of discussion will be "Manners." This is one of my favorite topics! So please come and see me. Do also feel welcome to comment with any logistical questions you may have about joining the discussion.

Link: Looks like glass is a liquid after all...

2011-10-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

I've been part of arguments about whether glass is a liquid, so I'm mentioning this here. Apparently there's compelling evidence to suggest that it is a liquid after all! Here's the article.

Link: The Language of Interfaces.

2011-10-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed this article. The first piece of it is an article and the second is a slide show, so if you want to see the whole thing, click on the double forward triangle when you get to the slides. It's a funny combination of marketing advice and linguistic anthropology, referencing both the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and products like Google Wave. I enjoyed seeing the whole thing. It will really attune you to the language you see here on the internet and may get you thinking about the language you use in stories as well.

Link: Cave people made paint 100,000 years ago

2011-10-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

This is a really cool article, handed to me by my friend Dario Ciriello, an expert in paint himself. In a cave in South Africa they have found evidence of a paint-making workshop from 100,000 years ago! It appears that pretty advanced humanlike cognition was happening far earlier than science has previously hypothesized. Very cool stuff.

Culture Share: USA - The US through UK Eyes: What's in a Name? And Other Language Differences

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Laura Pepper Wu discusses her culture shock upon arriving in the USA.

The US through UK Eyes: What’s In a Name? And Other Language Differences.

by Laura Pepper Wu

I think the reason that I experienced so much culture shock on my arrival to the US was that I was totally, 100%, unprepared for it. I had lived in Asia for almost 4 years prior, so moving to the US seemed like it was going to be a breeze. I was expecting no language problems, a similar culture, and I felt that since I had seen so many US movies and TV shows that nothing could surprise me. How wrong I was!

The big, obvious differences were the easiest to grasp and get used to. Within a couple of weeks I no longer gasped at the size of the food portions or the oversized cars that rule the road in California. It took me a little longer to grasp the opening hours of the shops, to feel comfortable driving on the right hand side of the road, to remember that I could turn right on a red light, but perhaps only a month or two. It was the small, subtle differences that really got me. The ones that I couldn't even put my finger on until a visiting friend pointed them out, or until they would suddenly dawn on me months into my stay here. This is what I would like to talk about today.

When British people meet for the first time in any situation, be it at the park, at the pub or even at a party, we rarely, if ever, exchange names until it is absolutely necessary. You can talk to someone at the pub for hours until you ask for their name, usually when he or she is about to leave or you have to excuse yourself. Neighbors might say hello to each other every morning for years without ever knowing what to call each other. If you bump into someone on the street and talk for the first time it might be considered rather intrusive to ever ask for their name without having a good reason to know (for example exchanging phone numbers or to find out if you know people in common). And yet here in the US I am asked for my name on a daily basis. It's usually the first thing people ask when we meet; they extend their hand and say "Hi, I'm John" even before we have had a conversation.

The first time I was asked my name in Starbucks I was shocked that they were going to call out my name and everyone in the store would know who I was and what I had ordered. It just seemed so personal!

I also realized early on that it is important for Americans to be called by their full name and that shortening the name might be considered rude or disrespectful. For Brits it's the norm; David is always Dave, Benjamin is always Ben, Thomas is usually Tom. And the abbreviations don't stop there. We will often replace a name with honey, love, babe, chuck, duck, sweetie, mate - anything to avoid using the name which might be construed as aggressive or too direct. In my dealings with American friends I have found it to be quite the opposite. Emails and texts will often begin with Dear Laura, Hi Laura and so on, which I have slowly learned is not aggressive but is instead considered to be respectful. This took me a while to get used to - I have a string of nicknames that I am known by and nobody calls me Laura in England except for my mother (and only when she is angry!)

Moving on from names, but remaining on the topic of the use of language, another subtle culture difference that I notice is the usage of the words sorry and thank you. Observe a transaction with a Brit over the counter and the Brit might say thank you several times; once when handing over the item to the cashier, once when receiving change, once when receiving the item back, and perhaps once again just for good measure. Here in the US I noticed that one thank you is sufficient, if it is said at all. Sorry is again used sparingly compared to the Brits; we are more likely to apologize to others for every small inconvenience that we cause which I have been told appears as passive or weak to an American.

When we talk about the difference between American English and British English, the emphasis is often on vocabulary. We say porridge, you say oatmeal; we say cotton bud, you say q-tip and so on. But the differences extend much further than that, to grammar as well. Brits ask questions differently using a lot more of the present perfect tense: “Have you had a nice day?” versus “Did you have a nice day?”. “Have you been dieting?” versus “Are you on a diet?”. I’ve certainly sub-consciously used the present perfect less since moving to the US; many of my friends and family in California speak English as a second language and would certainly have difficulty understanding what I was saying if I spoke English how I did 5 years ago.

To anyone making the transatlantic move, or to those in business who might deal with clients or colleagues from “across the pond”, I think it’s important for us to realise that just because we speak a similar language, we are two different cultures with two very different ways of thinking and interacting. This is something that has surprised me and continues to surprise me everyday and is worth keeping in mind.

How about you: have you ever had culture shock in a land that you thought you should be familiar with?

Born and raised in England, Laura Pepper Wu set off to Japan for a post-college adventure 5 years ago and hasn't quite made it back yet! She and her husband now live in sunny California where she writes to her heart's content and runs the site http://LadiesWhoCritique.com: a community for writers of all levels to find the perfect critique partner.