Lisa Batya Feld's Blog, page 2

Deserving of Merit

It doesn’t surprise me that the man whining that doctorates only count if they are in medicine has only an honorary degree himself. The people who rush to act as gatekeepers are often the ones who are most insecure about whether they themselves belong: the act of kicking someone else out of the clubhouse is meant to cement their own right to be there. The same man whines that honorary degrees don’t mean what they used to back in his day—again, feeling his own standing threatened, his impulse is to see who he can kick out to prove not only that he belongs, but that he is empowered to decide who is in and who is out.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about academia, the literary scene, the Jewish community, or politics—gatekeeping is a symptom of a poisoned system where people do not feel valued. A healthy system needs people with a variety of specialties in order to thrive. Therefore, there can’t be one single measure of success or belonging for everyone. In a toxic system, members feel their position, power, or identity is threatened, and that the only way to gain or regain security is to throw someone else out. The problem is that once you’ve thrown someone out, you’ve proven people CAN be thrown out, so ironically, you’re now even less secure.

Absolutely, Dr Biden should be addressed by her title. Absolutely, we need to have more conversations about how often we question the credentials of women and other people from marginalized groups. But I’d love it if we could also have conversations about how toxic systems encourage us to attack others when we feel squeezed out, because we need to fix those systems and stop letting the conversation be defined by the insecurities of people who see their privilege and status evaporating.

Milestone

I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel I started writing twenty years ago, when I took off a year after college to write. Shortly after writing the first three scenes, I realized I didn’t know enough about life to write the book these characters deserved, and I put it aside to focus on other projects. Many years later, I picked it up again, got halfway through, and then got completely derailed by the intensity of applying to and studying in rabbinical school. This summer I tore it down to its component parts, took the pieces that were essential to its heart, and started over from scratch. And now, finally, I have something with a beginning, middle, and end.

Some elements have remained essential. It’s always been a story of a young person grappling with responsibility for the first time. It’s always been a disgruntled postal worker and a teen mom saving the universe. But when I started writing, I had no concept of privilege, or institutional racism. Understanding how much those concepts were baked into the universe I’d created, and having my character realize they’re in the wrong, has been essential to the story this time around. Which means it’s going to take a few drafts to make sure I’m not doing something awful or exploitative at someone else’s expense.

Definitely not done yet. But the milestone still feels good.

Progress is not a straight line

Professor: Let’s hear it for progress! 100 years ago, it would have been unimaginable for women to be rabbis!

Me: Regina Jonas submitted her thesis arguing for women’s ordination in 1930, 90 years ago, and was ordained in 1937.

One more time for the people in the back: because women and marginalized people are repeatedly erased from history, it is often the case that someone has fought to become the first, had to prove their right to even attempt to enter certain spaces or take on certain roles, had to figure out what that would look like or what accommodations might need to be made, when in fact there have been numerous other “firsts” before them who fought the same battles and were erased after their deaths (sometimes even during their own lifetimes).

Decades before Sally Priesand became the first woman rabbi ordained in America, Regina Jonas was ordained in wartime Berlin and continued her ministry in a concentration camp until her death. None of her male colleagues who survived spoke about her publicly or made it any easier for the next woman to follow in her footsteps. And 40 years before Jonas, Ray Frank was giving High Holiday sermons (as long as she was careful not to seek ordination or support women’s suffrage). A couple of decades before that, Hannah Rachel Verbermacher, the Maid of Ludomir, taught a community of students for decades and brought them from Europe to the Holy Land, acting as their rabbi, whether or not she was officially ordained. And there are probably dozens more cases whose records are lost to us, at least for now.

Which is all to say that I’m wary of calling anyone the first X, both because they’re probably not the first, and because it’s often a way of making them the only: “We have one now, we don’t need two.” We need to be sharing (and recovering!) more of their stories, but those stories can be — must be — interesting regardless of whether someone was THE first, one of the first, or simply one of many.

Further adventures in writing

When last we left our heroes, I had decided to keep working on my book using Nanowrimo’s interface for accountability, but not beat myself up for not being able to work at their breakneck pace for a month on a novel that’s already taken me more than 20 years. I decided a more sane and sustainable pace would be 60,000 words in 60 days.

In the end, I wrote about 55,000 words in two months. I was ahead of the curve when the semester started, then classes took over my brain. I had a brief return to glory when my school gave us a week off, but when I had to go back to school, I had to shut down my writing brain. I stopped a tantalizing scene and a half from the finish line: it’s RIGHT THERE, and I simply can’t work on it anymore until we go on break.

Writing out the plot beats for each character turned out to be the secret weapon for this book, particularly because this has always been a book about a self-centered young person who learns to love and communicate with people vastly different from themselves. I needed to think through what those other characters wanted in those early scenes where the main character is oblivious to them, and it means those characters are much more compelling all the way through.

I’m hoping that once I get my feet under me, I can finish off the first draft, use November to go back over what I’ve written and clean it up (for one thing, there’s a lot of timeline/continuity issues I need to settle), and then start showing it to my beta readers this winter.

Here’s hoping I have the strength to take this over the finish line.

(Mis)Adventures in writing

[image error]We’re coming up on the end of the month, so it’s time for an honest check-in about NaNoWriMo, the good, the bad, and the ugly, in reverse order:

The ugly: I spent a lot of this month realizing what wasn’t working, setting aside what I’d written, and starting over, which means I’ve gone through five complete revisions of chapter one and written what probably amounts to 15,000 words in total without making a ton of “real” progress. Some highlights from this process include making an excel spreadsheet of every plot and character element in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” comparing it to my story, realizing several of my characters have no motivation for their actions in key scenes, and revising accordingly, gender-swapping my main character, fleshing out that character’s backstory, and realizing her story needs to start totally differently than her brother’s did, which also allows me to introduce the villain and the main plot threads in the first scene, and realizing that I had the wrong stakes for the story’s climax. That’s kind of a lot, and figuring it out was even messier and more piecemeal than it appears here. Not to mention, I’m probably not done figuring everything out yet.

The bad: I got sidetracked by helping other people with urgent projects. When my own creative work isn’t going well, it’s hard for me to take it seriously. It’s easier to help someone else and feel competent, even essential, rather than sit and stew in my own frustrated creativity, to respect my writing time and demand others respect it as well.

The good: I figured out some important storytelling techniques that will help me in the long run. I took a story I’ve been holding on to since I was 19 and figured out what bits are really essential to the story I need to tell and which are not. I haven’t written every day, I’ve maybe written a third of the days, but the writing days have often meant ten hours or more working on my story, and even the days that I wouldn’t count as writing days were days when my last thought before I went to bed and my first thought when I woke up were about how to make my story better.

So. NaNoWriMo was both a success and a failure: I got back to the page, I did a ton of work on my story, and I have almost no usable writing to show for it. Essentially I’m starting over from scratch and I’m going to try to write this as a full-length novel through August and September, recognizing that school and the High Holidays are probably going to complicate that timetable. I’m probably going to use Nanowrimo’s interface to keep track of my writing. Onward…

Where are we going in this handbasket?

My friend Betsy said something yesterday that blew my mind. (Content warning for people who really can’t handle depressing Covid scenarios right now.)

We know that the virus mutates quickly, and we’re already seeing regional strains. However, we don’t yet know whether previous exposure or vaccines to one type will protect against other types. This could mean that Covid pushes people to become more insular: we would interact with people in our local bubble but avoid outsiders. My writerly brain went instantly to the world-building implications: Communities would become more self-sufficient and inter-generational, with a resurgence of regional food, accents, arts, some people telecommuting, but a lot of needs taken care of within the local community. (Perhaps akin to the world of Marge Piercy’s “He, She and It.”) Cities would go back to their medieval roots: the place where people go to escape limitations and succeed beyond the possibilities of their home communities, but with a far higher death rate than the countryside.

Betsy, though, reminded me of the social justice implications: that if people become more suspicious of/distant from those outside their little bubbles, it will be harder to muster empathy for others or be willing to risk ourselves to stand up for those who are not in our own groups. The protests for black lives, the fight for indigenous rights, the need to protect refugees, to mitigate the damage we’ve done to the environment, we’ve seen in recent weeks how urgently needed these things are and how doable they are even in the age of Covid. We can’t let those muscles atrophy even if the new normal looks radically different from what came before.

Nanowrimo check-in

One week in, I’ve realized that I need to completely overhaul my main character and the arcs for the supporting characters as well, which means A, I’ve spent at least 12 hours of intense work on behind-the-scenes stuff which doesn’t actually add to my word count and B, most of what I’ve already written has to be tossed as I start over fresh. It’s incredibly frustrating, particularly during a month when I feel this external pressure to make forward progress at a particular clip. But I also think this will make the story work in ways it wasn’t coming together before. And I want to be honest with you guys about where I am instead of pretending everything’s going swimmingly.

So that’s where I am: working hard, feeling good about where I’m going, way behind on my word count but in it for the long haul, however long it takes. And feeling grateful to my friend Trai Cartwright for reminding me that a good manuscript requires a ton of writing that will never show up in the finished product, because that’s how you get to the good stuff.

Tear Them All Down

I’m regularly amazed at how politics in the science fiction community serve as a bellwether for politics in the larger world. Over the past few years, the SFF community has responded to criticism of awards bearing the names and likenesses of problematic figures in clear parallel to the current debate around taking down not just statues of Confederates but of other problematic figures.


 


Making physical or metaphorical icons of real people is always as much an act of erasure as it is one of commemoration. People are complex. Because no one is perfect, icon culture traps us in a zero-sum game: either the person’s work matters or their victims do. Pick one.


 


When the person is still living, this also means the community becomes complicit in and enabling of the person’s ongoing behavior. But even if the person is now dead, icon culture shuts down honest discussion of how that person’s problematic legacy continues to influence us and the systems within which we live.


 


Ideas and ideals can shift, can be interrogated. Icons are (sometimes literally) set in stone. A narrative of what our ideals are or have been, and how well different people succeeded or failed in furthering those ideals, is much more nuanced and able to weather challenges. It allows us to say that Isaac Asimov and JK Rowling are important writers who have had a huge impact on their genres and on the wider world while also acknowledging the pain they’ve caused. It allows us to say that Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that continue to inspire us towards freedom and equality for all, and also raped slaves, enslaved his own children, and planned the removal of indigenous people and the eradication of their cultures, a complex and contradictory mixture which impacted the systems we grapple with today.


 


We need to stop worrying that once we start tearing down icons, no icon will be safe. Icons aren’t history. Icons aren’t real people. We need to dismantle icon culture entirely so we can talk honestly about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

Blind Spot

This is going to sound like a humblebrag, and I REALLY don’t mean it to be, I’m just super excited to have FINALLY figured out something important for my writing.

The most common feedback I get about my characters is that they’re unlikeable, and I’ve never understood why, because their behavior is within the range of characters I love whom everyone agrees are very likeable and compelling. But this morning, rereading a book by another author, I finally got it. Caring about other people is so natural to me that it’s rarely a matter of conscious thought. When I write, the things I make explicit are the things that are NOT obvious, but I don’t discuss the ways in which the character cares about other people, because it’s a given for me. But not everyone thinks that way, and so my audience, not knowing whether this character is supposed to be good, mean, calculating, etc. doesn’t assume that compassion is there unless I tell them so. To me, being this explicit feels as awkward as announcing aloud, “I’m opening the refrigerator door to get the orange juice, because I want juice this morning,” but at least I FINALLY know what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.

History in the making

It’s fascinating to me that I always assumed the big event I lived through that I’d be asked to recount for younger generations would be 9/11, or the Challenger explosion. I had no idea of the paradigm shift that would mean the experiences I most need to revisit are Anita Hill’s testimony, Rodney King’s beating, OJ’s trial, the savaging of Monica Lewinsky. I certainly didn’t imagine that Columbine would mark a sea change to school shootings as a daily fact of life, making that particular event unremarkable. It makes me wonder whether the events people lived through in centuries past had similar mismatches between what they thought was significant and what future generations focused on.