S.B. Stewart-Laing's Blog, page 30
September 30, 2012
Banned Books Week!
For all of you who care about reading, writing and free speech, the first seven days of October is Banned Book Week.The fact that people censor books tells us something important about the power of fiction in society. Books get banned because fiction spreads ideas. Fiction is a uniquely human way of transmitting emotions and thoughts and values and knowledge and making people think-- asking us to contemplate the big-T Truths that are greater than mere fact. Fiction allows us to experience other lives, and see through others' eyes. That sort of understanding and empathy, that way of engaging deeply with experiences outside of our own, is a powerful thing. And for anyone who doesn't want the boat rocked, it's a dangerous thing.
That fiction can strike enough fear to prompt people to try smothering it is confirmation that fiction matters. The ideas contained in fiction matter. Fiction is where we tell each other what is important, learn new perspectives, reflect on the past, dream about the future. And none of those things can be quashed without damaging our ability to think and feel as a society.
September 28, 2012
Traveling
Most of us grew up in the age of globalisation, and take it for granted that an airplane (or train, or car) can get us anywhere in the world within hours. It's also easy to forget travel time in your story for a more obvious reason-- you want to get on with the plot. However, you can use travel itself as a plot complication (heck, Tolkien's work is nothing but this!), as well as using a careful understanding of transportation to lend a sense of realism to your world and preserve the reader's precious suspension of disbelief.
Travel will also affect other aspects of world-building. Information, trade goods, and people will travel at different speeds and in different numbers depending on the mode of transport, changing current events consciousness, economics, and cultural diversity.
It's good to look at what modes of transport are availible in your society. Then assess their characteristics:
How fast (realistically) can you travel?What are the limitations of this form of transport?What are the hazards associated with this?How much does it cost?Once you have this in mind, you can figure out how to use these issues to mess with your characters. It's great fun. I promise.
Travel will also affect other aspects of world-building. Information, trade goods, and people will travel at different speeds and in different numbers depending on the mode of transport, changing current events consciousness, economics, and cultural diversity.
It's good to look at what modes of transport are availible in your society. Then assess their characteristics:
How fast (realistically) can you travel?What are the limitations of this form of transport?What are the hazards associated with this?How much does it cost?Once you have this in mind, you can figure out how to use these issues to mess with your characters. It's great fun. I promise.
September 27, 2012
Viewing Recommendation: Human Planet
For those of you writing about a pre-industrial or non-urban fantasy setting, I highly recommend watching BBC's Human Planet (you can get it online). It features stories of humans surviving and interacting with their environment, and is a great way to gain perspective if you live in an industrialised area. Furthermore, you can see up-close how people live in a variety of environments-- being nomadic seafarers is very different from being a traveler in the desert.
Even if you have a good sense of living, it's an amazing look at the human condition, the diversity and the universal experiences.
Even if you have a good sense of living, it's an amazing look at the human condition, the diversity and the universal experiences.
September 24, 2012
Writing Bisexual Characters
Since it was Bisexual Pride Day yesterday, I thought I'd keep on theme by posting a bit about writing bi characters. You'd think it wouldn't be that difficult-- or at least not any more difficult than writing a gay or straight or asexual character. But not only are bisexual characters seriously underrepresented in fiction (fanfic doesn't count!), but the ones who do turn up tend to land straight into the Unfortunate Implications zone. There are some common and obnoxious manifestations of this:
Bisexuals with no standards. Just because someone's dating pool includes more than one gender doesn't mean they find anyone with a pulse attractive, any more than straight people find any and all random people of the opposite gender attractive. Bisexual creepers. Although the Evil League of Evil does believe in diversity, I'm speaking about characters who are bad people because of their orientation, and use their sexuality to make life miserable for everyone else. This trope really kicked off in the 50's, but it's still going strong and has been used by high-profile authors such as Diana Gabaldon. Bisexuals as fakers. This is probably the most common and annoying trope. The idea being that bisexuals are either straight people angling for attention, or gay people peering cautiously out of the closet. Even Glee has been a major offender. Now, this isn't to say you shouldn't write a bi character who has poor taste in partners, or is a dodgy character, or is an attention-grubber or uncomfortable with their orientation. All of these traits are fairly equal-opportunity. However, it's something to write with care, to make sure to write a fully-developed character with a number of traits which include both sexual orientation and bad behaviour, but whose behaviour is not a pathological and inevitable outgrowth of their sexual orientation. [image error]
Bisexuals with no standards. Just because someone's dating pool includes more than one gender doesn't mean they find anyone with a pulse attractive, any more than straight people find any and all random people of the opposite gender attractive. Bisexual creepers. Although the Evil League of Evil does believe in diversity, I'm speaking about characters who are bad people because of their orientation, and use their sexuality to make life miserable for everyone else. This trope really kicked off in the 50's, but it's still going strong and has been used by high-profile authors such as Diana Gabaldon. Bisexuals as fakers. This is probably the most common and annoying trope. The idea being that bisexuals are either straight people angling for attention, or gay people peering cautiously out of the closet. Even Glee has been a major offender. Now, this isn't to say you shouldn't write a bi character who has poor taste in partners, or is a dodgy character, or is an attention-grubber or uncomfortable with their orientation. All of these traits are fairly equal-opportunity. However, it's something to write with care, to make sure to write a fully-developed character with a number of traits which include both sexual orientation and bad behaviour, but whose behaviour is not a pathological and inevitable outgrowth of their sexual orientation. [image error]
September 21, 2012
Location, In Perspective
About five years ago, I lived in Mystic, Connecticut (population 4,000). It’s an adorable New England fishing town, with an excellent maritime history museum. It’s also the place where I witnessed the tail end of a bank robbery by some crooks who didn’t think things through. The reason for the bank robbery (a surprisingly regular event, as one unfazed bank clerk told me while we were standing around waiting for the FBI) is that Mystic is a short drive away from New London, a crime-heavy urban centre, and the seemingly easy target for criminals. The ‘seemingly’ part kicked in for our robbers a few miles down the road. The aforementioned Mystic bank sits on a peninsula bisected by the local motorway. On one side is a drawbridge, on the other, a regular bridge which is very easily cordoned off, and no other ways to leave town (except by water). It took the police about fifteen minutes to make the arrest. Actually, there are two lessons to be learned from the shortsighted criminals* which can be applied to fictional settings. First, no matter what your main setting is—an Inuit hunting settlement, a London dive bar, a cargo ship in the Pacific—it has connections with a larger world which are important. It makes a big difference if your idyllic farming village is a twenty minute drive from a high-crime industrial centre, or if it is surrounded by thousands of acres of sheep pasture. It will have a bearing on who shows up, who lives there, and why.Second, think about how people come and go in this setting. A village which is only accessible by foot travellers or pack llamas will have a very different level of connection with the outside world than a settlement of the same size which is next to a busy canal. A port town attracts a different crowd than a scenic city built around the tourist trade, which is different than a manufacturing city. Think about how the larger world interacts with the immediate setting of your story, and you can open up new possibilities for conflict, all while enhancing the story's realism. [image error]
September 19, 2012
Somebody Else's Problem: On Apathy as Antagonist
In fictionland, apathy is a severely underused pattern of human behaviour. In part, this is a product of the fact that characters taking initiative is exciting. However, I think the ability of apathetic behaviour to cause havoc is seriously underestimated.
Humans have a shocking ability to ignore 'somebody else's problem'. Relatively small-scale examples involve ignoring an immediate, limited problem-- for example, leaving an injured person lying in the middle of a motorway. The effect is more pronounced when other people are around. Psychologists call this phenomenon the 'diffusion of responsibility', whereby everyone watching an emergency assumes someone else will call for an ambulance, leaving them free to pop some popcorn and watch the show. In a story, this can be a big problem for your heroes if they get into a jam, and you don't have to invoke intervention by the bad guy, or have the world mysteriously turn against your protagonist. Some good old indifference will cause them just as much trouble.
On a broader scale, people have a hard time not being apathetic about things like political movements or the Evil Overlord taking over the government or an impending global ice age. Part of this is simply a defence mechanism which all of us have to keep from having a nervous breakdown every other minute. Even people who are activists tend to be passionate about only a few causes, because there are just so many hours in a day, and just so far one's empathy can be stretched before numbness kicks in. Part of it is our inability to 'scale up' our experience to understand things like sea levels rising or a trillion-dollar deficit or thousands of people being 'relocated'. The numbers are just too big, and it doesn't seem real, because it's overloaded the circuits of a brain which evolved to cope with things on a much smaller scale. Finally, unfortunately, there is a selfishness factor. If the Evil Overlord isn't coming to relocate your ethnic group to the middle of the wilderness, why bother making a fuss? There's nothing in it for you.
Once again, this is an excellent way to explain how the Evil Overlord came to power without the residents of the country being actually evil. Or how some other seemingly preventable problem got out of hand by the time your story starts.
Think about problems in your story which could be explained by apathy instead of malice. Or about unique problems apathy could create, and you'll have some potentially interesting plot twists. [image error]
Humans have a shocking ability to ignore 'somebody else's problem'. Relatively small-scale examples involve ignoring an immediate, limited problem-- for example, leaving an injured person lying in the middle of a motorway. The effect is more pronounced when other people are around. Psychologists call this phenomenon the 'diffusion of responsibility', whereby everyone watching an emergency assumes someone else will call for an ambulance, leaving them free to pop some popcorn and watch the show. In a story, this can be a big problem for your heroes if they get into a jam, and you don't have to invoke intervention by the bad guy, or have the world mysteriously turn against your protagonist. Some good old indifference will cause them just as much trouble.
On a broader scale, people have a hard time not being apathetic about things like political movements or the Evil Overlord taking over the government or an impending global ice age. Part of this is simply a defence mechanism which all of us have to keep from having a nervous breakdown every other minute. Even people who are activists tend to be passionate about only a few causes, because there are just so many hours in a day, and just so far one's empathy can be stretched before numbness kicks in. Part of it is our inability to 'scale up' our experience to understand things like sea levels rising or a trillion-dollar deficit or thousands of people being 'relocated'. The numbers are just too big, and it doesn't seem real, because it's overloaded the circuits of a brain which evolved to cope with things on a much smaller scale. Finally, unfortunately, there is a selfishness factor. If the Evil Overlord isn't coming to relocate your ethnic group to the middle of the wilderness, why bother making a fuss? There's nothing in it for you.
Once again, this is an excellent way to explain how the Evil Overlord came to power without the residents of the country being actually evil. Or how some other seemingly preventable problem got out of hand by the time your story starts.
Think about problems in your story which could be explained by apathy instead of malice. Or about unique problems apathy could create, and you'll have some potentially interesting plot twists. [image error]
September 17, 2012
A Limited Perspective
All characters are unreliable narrators.
No, scratch that.
All people are unreliable narrators.
The 'unreliable narrator' concept is usually applied to characters whose worldview is prominently askew, but this is somewhat misleading, as it implies that any character not explicitly written as seeing the world through a noticeably warped filter is a reliable narrator of their own experience. But unless your character is God-- presumably played by Morgan Freeman-- this is impossible. All of us see the world through the lens of our senses, experiences, and beliefs. Without us even consciously seeking meaning, our brains work frantically to make sense of the world around us, fitting explanations based on what we already believe or know to be true. We even manage to respond to stimuli without being explicitly aware of it, and this contributes a good deal to the things we 'just know'.
This means that no character (except the aforementioned Morgan Freeman, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster) should have views which are 100% in line with the objective reality of the story. This is a surefire way to create an impossibly annoying Mary Sue-- a character who knows everything and can't screw up, because they are one with their universe's reality.
The complaint I've heard about this approach is that if a character believes something, their understanding of the world should seem real and sincere. There is actually no barrier to a detail-conscious writer doing both. Because we sieve through our experiences and-- sometimes unconsciously-- seek evidence for our world views, and have a wide variety of mental gymnastics which keep our view intact, it's entirely possible to show a character dealing with information that objectively proves they're not totally right about how the world works. Alternately, there can be subtle hints in the environment, or the use of another PoV character, to show there is more to the picture. [image error]
No, scratch that.
All people are unreliable narrators.
The 'unreliable narrator' concept is usually applied to characters whose worldview is prominently askew, but this is somewhat misleading, as it implies that any character not explicitly written as seeing the world through a noticeably warped filter is a reliable narrator of their own experience. But unless your character is God-- presumably played by Morgan Freeman-- this is impossible. All of us see the world through the lens of our senses, experiences, and beliefs. Without us even consciously seeking meaning, our brains work frantically to make sense of the world around us, fitting explanations based on what we already believe or know to be true. We even manage to respond to stimuli without being explicitly aware of it, and this contributes a good deal to the things we 'just know'.
This means that no character (except the aforementioned Morgan Freeman, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster) should have views which are 100% in line with the objective reality of the story. This is a surefire way to create an impossibly annoying Mary Sue-- a character who knows everything and can't screw up, because they are one with their universe's reality.
The complaint I've heard about this approach is that if a character believes something, their understanding of the world should seem real and sincere. There is actually no barrier to a detail-conscious writer doing both. Because we sieve through our experiences and-- sometimes unconsciously-- seek evidence for our world views, and have a wide variety of mental gymnastics which keep our view intact, it's entirely possible to show a character dealing with information that objectively proves they're not totally right about how the world works. Alternately, there can be subtle hints in the environment, or the use of another PoV character, to show there is more to the picture. [image error]
September 12, 2012
Message and Madness: Why Complexity is Your Friend
All fiction is a window into the author’s worldview. But when I write about ‘message fiction’, I am referring to pieces which seek to explicitly explore a topic, usually with the intent of conveying a particular position. Now, we message fiction folks have been given a bad rap by people who feel the need to bludgeon readers with their views, usually in the form of a squeaky-clean set of heroes pitted against a sinister army of stawmen. (Michael Chriton’s State of Fear springs to mind). The author tries to clean up the grey areas, to force a dichotomy of good vs. evil. Ironically, it often ruins the real-world applicability. Ecoterrorists with weather-control technology have little to do with the arguments over things like the logistics of abandoning a fossil-fuel economy or developing renewable energy or the reliability of long-term climate models, all of which are huge parts of the debates over global warming and what to do about it.
If you want to write message fiction, to make people think in a meaningful way about the problems you are presenting, complexity is your best friend. When we are presented with a situation which is artificially clean-cut, we don’t have to think. And it invites shallow lessons. Furthermore, it kills suspense, because your antagonist must by definition be stupid or insane.
Giving the antagonists a believable, coherent motivation means giving ammunition to the side you disagree with. It means understanding their arguments. In some cases, the train of logic may be predicated on assumptions that the other side disagrees with, or on faulty facts; however, it is still good to dissect how someone would reach that conclusion while still being an intelligent individual. Furthermore, it allows readers to ask important questions, to think critically about the issue, and come to their own conclusions (or not), which is much more powerful than spoon-feeding them your point of view.
Finally, it gives suspense and emotional depth. If your villain has a point or two, or your protagonist is working in a moral grey area, there is much more emotional conflict, because we can glimpse the opposite perspective and sympathise, or may be biting our fingernails as the lead makes a questionable decision. There are more opportunities for schisms among the 'good guys' and deeper, more original plot twists.
So resist the urge to write an artifically clean-cut answer to a complicated social problem. Embrace the intricacies and contradictions. Complexity is your friend. [image error]
September 10, 2012
Meet the Character-- For Real!
Any author who says that their characters are in no way based on real people are lying. At the very least, they base characters of traits they have observed and knit them together to form new characters. For all of you reading The Devil and the Excise-Man, I would like to reveal the real-life inspiration for one of our characters, Ladybird the greyhound.
Lovely readers, meet DeeDee. This former racing greyhound stepped up to the plate to become a full-time service dog when her human became seriously ill, and helps around the house with an astonishing array of tasks. From her intelligence to her stunning all-white, golden-eyed appearance, Ladybird is based on DeeDee. (I do not believe DeeDee has any supernatural ancestry, however).
[image error]
Lovely readers, meet DeeDee. This former racing greyhound stepped up to the plate to become a full-time service dog when her human became seriously ill, and helps around the house with an astonishing array of tasks. From her intelligence to her stunning all-white, golden-eyed appearance, Ladybird is based on DeeDee. (I do not believe DeeDee has any supernatural ancestry, however).
[image error]
September 5, 2012
On Pineapples and Making Assumptions
Until I was 21, I thought pineapples grew on trees. I'd even scoffed at a college classmate from Hawaii who had told me they grow out of the ground on stalks, thinking she was trying to mess with me.
Then I went to the Caribbean for work, and saw a pineapple farm.
As it turns out, they grown on stalks. Out of the ground. Oops.
I tell this fairly trivial story to illustrate a point: we all have a bunch of assumptions and 'facts' we've accidentally made up or deduced or acquired from dubious sources, and sincerely believe are true without fact-checking ourselves. We know pineapples grow on trees (still don't know how I got that so firmly lodged into my brain), so why bother looking it up?
This becomes much more than the stuff of funny stories when these assumptions start to creep into your writing. At best, it's sloppy and will cause readers some unintended giggles; at worst, you're (albeit inadvertently) perpetrating all kinds of damaging misinformation. While some genres do have certain accepted departures from reality built into their conventions, one should still do the research as though you're a total newcomer to the subject. It will pay major dividends. I promise. [image error]
Then I went to the Caribbean for work, and saw a pineapple farm.
As it turns out, they grown on stalks. Out of the ground. Oops.
I tell this fairly trivial story to illustrate a point: we all have a bunch of assumptions and 'facts' we've accidentally made up or deduced or acquired from dubious sources, and sincerely believe are true without fact-checking ourselves. We know pineapples grow on trees (still don't know how I got that so firmly lodged into my brain), so why bother looking it up?
This becomes much more than the stuff of funny stories when these assumptions start to creep into your writing. At best, it's sloppy and will cause readers some unintended giggles; at worst, you're (albeit inadvertently) perpetrating all kinds of damaging misinformation. While some genres do have certain accepted departures from reality built into their conventions, one should still do the research as though you're a total newcomer to the subject. It will pay major dividends. I promise. [image error]
