Just how relevant are bathrooms?

In my post on Saturday, one of the things that was cited as an example of bad worldbuilding was the lack of bathrooms:

"You give me in excruciating detail the pyramids, palaces and every other prominent place within a thirty-mile radius, but there are no bathrooms or toilets anywhere."

Well, I do have something to say about that. The reason why bathrooms or toilets are not present is that no one feels they are relevant. And guess what? Most of the time, they are not. It would be easy for an author to consider them unpleasant and skip over them for that reason. There are people out there who really want to create "gritty" worlds and will make sure to include toilet details for that reason, but not everyone falls into this group.

However.

When you're writing a story, you can count on your reader to use inductive reasoning rather than deductive reasoning. Why is this important? Because with inductive reasoning, a lack of evidence for something can in fact imply that that thing doesn't occur, or doesn't exist.

Extrapolating from this, you can imagine that we don't want anyone to conclude erroneously that there are no toilets in this world. How do we fix this without spending undue time on it?
The easiest thing to do is to use small instances of cleanliness issues. I'm thinking of Nya in Janice Hardy's The Healing Wars series, who at a certain point dips a sock in the lake to clean her face. Immediate implication: she has no bathroom. Janice also mentions bathrooms in the case of Nya's friend Aylin, who lets Nya use a communal bathroom down the hall where she lives. The result is that the mention of cleanliness and the bathroom will imply attendant issues of toilets without the author actually having to go there. Of course, there will be places in your story where the lack of a toilet may actually be relevant (as in a long ride, etc.) and an oblique reference to stopping behind a tree might not go amiss.

In my current novel in progress, For Love, For Power, an unusual amount of time is spent in bathrooms. No, it's not particularly gritty or dirty! For this story, the bathroom focus is on bathing, and it serves a specific purpose: it is often an ideal setting for me to explore concepts of privacy, safety, and intimacy that differ greatly between social groups, and are highly relevant to the story. In fact, my characters head to the bathroom in the two opening chapters.

In chapter 1 my main protagonist, Tagret, gets caught in a mob panic when a concert crowd witnesses a death and concludes that the virus Kinders fever might be "loose" in the room. It's perfectly reasonable for him to hurry home and get straight into the bath... and having his brother pick the lock on his bathroom door and interrupt him is the perfect introduction to the nature of their relationship.

In chapter 2 my second protagonist, Aloran, is about to interview for a job as manservant to Tagret's mother. The nature of the position of manservant is highly relevant to the kind of delicate issues he'll be facing with the family, and to many of his personal struggles in the book, since the Lady won't have an easy time accepting his service - so during the chapter I try to show the range of his duties. The business end of it gets covered in the job interview, where he's tested for his bodyguarding skills and his ability to judge social situations. However, he's also expected to wash his mistress without becoming emotionally involved, and that's the sort of thing that benefits from a bit of show-don't-tell. So before he heads off for his interview I have a young classmate of his ask him to help with practice for the bathing exam. The students at the Academy are required to demonstrate that they can bathe the person they find most attractive without showing signs of emotional involvement - so off they go to the showers where Aloran coaches his friend through the process that he has mastered, but his friend is still struggling with.

The juxtaposition of these two situations, each of which is only a tiny section of the chapter in question, provides a useful and highly relevant contrast between the characters and the social groups they belong to. Each one also sets up expectations for where the different characters will feel discomfort in the story as it continues.

So in your story, particularly if you're writing a novel which will cover a lot of ground (because story-relevance has to be a lot stricter in short stories!), I urge you at least to consider the question of bathrooms. To mention them often might be gratuitous, but to omit them entirely can appear ridiculous. And as you can see, in some cases they can be a great ally in helping you explore questions of intimacy!

It's something to think about.

Description, Relevance, and Genre

I had some very interesting comments on Monday on my post about description - in particular, people commenting about the descriptive requirements of different genres. J. Kathleen Cheney took that aspect of the topic and ran with it on her blog, here.

I was particularly intrigued by the following from her post:

... I did add this stipulation [to my rule of relevance]: There are instances where description is expected rather than required for the sake of the story, so a lot more gets put than is strictly necessary...

For example: If you're writing a GBHF (Great Big Honking Fantasy) you're probably going to describe everything, twice. At least. Down to what manner of stains mark the hems of the priests' robes in January. This seems to be expected in the GBHF. (Yes, I'm making a generalization, but that's what the internet is for, isn't it?) If you're writing Hard SF, you're going to have to describe all your gizmos and then explain how they work. (Also, if you can find any excuse to include the description of field-stripping a weapon, you must include that. It's a right of passage, I think.) If you're writing Romance, you must decribe the women's clothing. (Men's you can skip sometimes, as they always dress alike anyway.) You must also describe the upholstery and drapery in any room the female POV enters...

All right, I admit I'm sounding a bit sarcastic, but the truth is that there are some expectations tied to the target market of the story, which are probably based more on what the reader wants to know.

In fact, when I wrote my first post, I was thinking about my own writing rather than considering genre distinctions - but Ms. Cheney makes an excellent point! Genres like mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction and fantasy each come with reader expectations, which translate into editorial expectations, for certain types of description.

On the other hand, that need not be the last word on the subject (need there ever be a last word on anything?). I think Ms. Cheney and I would agree that, while it's true that genre readers expect certain kinds of description, it's still a good idea to try to maximize the relevance of any description. Yes, describe if it seems appropriate, but don't cut corners and figure that all readers will be interested in extensive description without a lot of relevance support.

Try to push for more relevance support regardless of what you're describing, in whatever genre. Yes, there are expectations - but you'll hear people talking about how in really great writing, every sentence is doing more than one thing at a time. Not only is it worldbuilding, not only is it character building, it's also pushing the main conflict forward - oh and by the way, it's also serving the theme, etc.

Each of those things is a form of relevance support, and it just goes to show that in the end, it's worth pushing hard to create as much relevance as possible for descriptions.