S.B. Stewart-Laing's Blog, page 4

Cultural Appropriation: Some Thoughts

I've covered cultural appropriation on this blog a number of times before. But it's one of those complex and frustrating issues that calls for repeated examination. What adds to the confusion and defensiveness, I think, is the way in which the internet outrage machine reacts to highly-publicised cultural appropriation incidents. The outrage machine tends to assume everyone has the same information, and don't actually explain what's going on or why anyone should care. A quick scan of the comments section on any such article will show you a bunch of puzzled readers going 'but...humans trade, that's our thing. And I'm Afro-American and I like sushi, are you telling me I can't like sushi? But you're wearing jeans and speaking English, WTF? You mean I can't like jewellery because a Navajo made it?...'

Covering all of cultural appropriation in a blog post isn't really feasible. Plus, as I said, it's something that deserves regular discussion. However, I can give you a few bullet points to guide you through.

Cultural appropriation isn't:

Displaying a piece of art or using a tool for its intended purpose. A lot of food falls into this category as well. If you're appreciating art or putting a mundane item (like cookware) to use, then the object is fulfilling it's purpose. Totally respectful. Adopting the customs of a colonising culture. This is a survival mechanism for holding a job, going to school, etc. in the coloniser's world. Adopting the customs of a culture while you're visiting. This is polite. And honestly, you'll probably enjoy your visit a lot more. Researching a culture for a project. In-depth research about experiences outside of our own is awesome! The more in-depth the better. Trade and exchange between two cultures on equal footing.

Cultural appropriation includes:

A power differential. The appropriator has more cultural capital, usually from belonging to the dominant culture, and is appropriating from a marginalised group.Misusing a religious or culturally significant object. Self-explanatory. Exploitation without understanding or advocacy. This means using some piece of the culture to further your own ends without giving anything back.  Fetishising. Turning 'exotic' aspects of the culture into something titilating or into a gimmick, instead of recognising that the non-theme-park version is someone else's normal existence. 

Again, not an exhaustive list, but hopefully some guidelines for thinking about cultural appropriation in fiction and in real life.

Those Meddling Authors

One of the primary markers of a Mary Sue is that the fictional universe bends over backwards to the breaking point to accommodate the character. Even if the character isn't a full-on Sue, a lucky escape that defies probability, causality, or physics can torpedo audience suspension of disbelief. A common cause, particularly in the latter case, is that the author is attached to their characters, and feels a need to rescue them from their scrape. Alternately, the author has essentially gotten 'painted into a corner' as far as their plot, and genuinely needs a deus ex machina to rescue their protagonists.

Luckily, this is fairly easy to fix, at least in principle. First of all, you have to be willing to let your characters get themselves into major trouble. Second, you have to keep an eye on the 'big picture' of your plot and be willing to revise to make things work.

Your characters, if they're well-developed, have any number of flaws. They're also in a challenging environment, or there would be no story. Combine these factors, and you have a recipe for characters getting in over their heads. It's actually vital to suspense that the problem be something the characters are likely unable to cope with at all. So don't worry about characters being out of their depth as long as there is a plausible mechanism for them to save themselves.

That brings us to point two-- sweeping in and scooping the characters out of danger via a contrived outside force will just annoy your audience. However, it's pretty easy to get your characters stuck at an impasse, especially if you've been making big changes to your plot outline (or not doing a plot outline and winging it). The solution is to figure out what your characters need in order to plausibly escape their situation. Then backtrack and revise the preceding events accordingly. You may have to do quite a bit of plot unraveling and reworking to get to those plot elements integrated smoothly, but it's worth it to have your characters do some satisfying problem-solving rather than be rescued by a meddling author.

Author Knowledge, Character Knowledge

Any of you who are familiar with roleplaying games have probably been scolded about the difference between 'player knowledge' and 'character knowledge'. For the uninitiated, 'character knowledge' consists of things your character is aware of at that particular point in the game, whereas 'player knowledge' is meta-awareness you probably have about the world of the story, the other players, and the like.

If you're an author working alone, with no one to call you out on it, it's easy to let 'author knowledge' inform your character's actions when the character in question shouldn't really have this information. A big part of this, I think, is that as an author you are immersed in the world of the story, and forget that the characters don't share your omniscient perspective (unless you are writing God, as played by Morgan Freeman-- in which case, ignore this post). This is particularly true if you're writing multiple characters who have radically different takes on the situation, and if you're taking up an omniscient or limited-omniscient authorial voice. (Another part is probably the urge to keep our characters out of too much trouble, which is probably worth a separate discussion.)

Personally, I like to keep tabs on what each character knows or doesn't know in any given chapter via a spreadsheet (Michael likes to keep his notes in a more organic format). You can use index cards, an outlining tool, or simply character sheets, as long as the method helps you remember. This will keep your characters from mysteriously acquiring knowledge about the plot that they simply shouldn't have.

Likeability vs Competency

If you've watched How I Met Your Mother, you presumably have familiarity with the Hot-Crazy Scale. For those of you who haven't, Barney, the show's resident cad, ascribes to a theory that a woman the hotter a woman is, the more crazy she can be and still be dateable.

Although I don't think this is an ideal metric for dating, there is some nugget of wisdom that writers can take away from this. Specifically, that the more competent a character is, the more unlikeable they can get away with being. Competent in this scenario can mean 'really good at evil', I definitely apply it to villains. Conversely, the less competent a character is, the more likeable they must be in order to maintain audience interest or sympathy.

While comedy can support bumbling villains, the rule still applies for the most part. After all, good comedy requires conflict to work. Furthermore, goofy villains require some charm so that they are in fact funny instead of simply annoying. Similarly, a dark anti-hero must be good at what they do, or else they're just obnoxious and mean. So without further ado, I present the 'Likeable-Comepetent' scale.

Depending On How You Look At It...

'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so'
--Hamlet, Act II, Scene II 

'The sinking of the Titanic must have been a miracle for the lobsters in the kitchen'
--Reddit user ElBretto

When I was an undergrad, I had a professor who was fond of pointing out that there's no free lunch in ecology. A tasty meal for a lynx means the end of a hare.

This same principle can be applied to thinking about plot outcomes. While the triumph of an individual hero and the punishment of an individual villain can be generally viewed a positive outcome, the 'good'/'bad' dichotomy gets a bit messier if you expand the conflict. This is even more true if the two sides are morally ambiguous, and victory for one does not represent a sweeping win for the forces of good.

It bothers me intensely that many stories-- with high fantasy being a particularly bad offender-- act as though the triumph of the protagonist means a guaranteed happily-ever-after wrap-up for all the characters in the world of the story. When you have a story with a reasonably small scale, such as a conflict between just a few individuals, a clear 'happily-ever-after' or 'tragically-ever-after' ending might be feasible. In these instances, the 'world' of the story is compressed to encompass just the focal characters.

In narratives set on a national scale (following a ragtag band of rebels as they take on the Dark Lord), it's harder to ignore the other perspectives on the story's outcome. First and most obviously, there are the bad guy's minions who got slaughtered in the course of the battles between good and evil. How do their families feel about that? That's assuming the minions actually volunteered their services and weren't just innocent victims of the Evil Usurper. Second, there's the ones who got away, as well as all the passive supporters of the Dark Lord. These people are not necessarily cackling Evil Overlord wannabes, and may have thrown in their lot with the Dark Lord for entirely prosaic reasons. But they're probably pretty displeased with how things turned out, especially if the new 'Good Guys' government is going to hunt them down and punish them.

Finally, there's the 'collateral damage'. Bluntly, all the neutral characters who got caught in the crossfire. These are the people whose cornfields got trampled in the Final Battle, the people whose sheep got stolen for army rations, whose houses got taken over and used as barracks, who got conscripted, who got buried in rubble when their city was indiscriminately shelled by drones. No matter what side they might have been sympathetic to, or if they even cared about the conflict beyond praying that people would stop sowing land mines in their orchards, they're not going to be instantly happy when the heroes emerge triumphant. And that assumes that when the Good Guys win, they are going to send in emergency rations and a team of mine-sweeping rats to help clean up.

If you want to go for an clean 'happy' ending in a story like this, I would recommend the following. First, don't sweep the 'collateral damage' characters under the rug. Address the challenges they'll be facing, and how the good guys plan to help them. Second, and just as importantly, show that the struggle was worth it. This means establishing both the problems of the starting status quo--make the Evil Overlord actually evil-- and establishing how much better the good guys are (not just because they've got the right genes!) in a very concrete way.

Night of the Living Easter Bunny: On Cultural Reference Points

Back when I was an undergrad, I used to teach English to Japanese immigrants. One day, near Easter, one of my students blurted out in Japanese:
'Easter is a really creepy holiday.'
I was a bit confused. 'What? Why?'
Student: Because of the zombies.
Me: WHAT?
As it turned out, my student's 3rd grade teacher had taught her class a unit on American culture. Unfortunately, her sources were vague memories of the post-WWII occupation and some textbooks whose contents didn't quite survive the translation process. She had then told her students that Americans were Christians, which meant they worshiped Jesus, a man who had been killed and returned some days later as a brain-eating zombie. Add to this a giant bunny that crept into people's houses a la Frank from Donnie Darko, and you had a whole batch of elementary schoolers convinced that Easter was an absolutely terrifying holiday.

The point of this little example is that we judge the world based on a set of cultural assumptions so ingrained that we don't even notice them. It's probably one of the biggest barriers to understanding people who aren't like us-- we judge people's actions through the lens of our own assumptions, and oftentimes those actions or beliefs seem irrational when in fact they make sense in context. If you understand how and why someone came to a particular belief system, you can convincingly write a character with whom you don't agree or share a lot of experiences.

The other trap for writers is that it's easy to impose our cultural assumptions on other times and places where those assumptions have no business appearing. Thus we have what Mittlemark and Newman call 'The Vegan Viking'-- a character whose views would be completely normal on the author's home turf, but jarringly out of context in the time and place about which the author is writing. This immediately breaks the suspension of disbelief. These assumptions can be all kinds of small things-- for example, I once read a story in which a female character was showing off her 'spunky' nature by wearing trousers. Never mind that she was supposed to be living in a culture in which trousers were not a typical clothing item for any gender!

It's incredibly easy to fall into this pattern, because by their nature our cultural assumptions are essentially invisible to us. Our brains like lump people who behave like us into the 'normal' category, and everything else into 'other weirdos'. Although we can't erase our brain's penchant for slotting everything into categories-- after all, organisational ability is a great part of our intelligence-- we can make ourselves more aware of it. In planning our books, Michael and I like to write out Q and A for seemingly basic questions about our characters. When I say 'basic', I mean questions about their morning routines, how they acquire food, what sources they rely on for information, and how their family is organised. A lot of these questions force us to acknowledge our ingrained beliefs and remind us to write about the world as it is for that character, not how we implicitly assume the world works.

You're Not the Boss of Me!

In fiction, as in real life, there are often good reasons to defy authority. After all, a good deal of human progress is owed to people who stood up to unjust laws and corrupt governments and oppressive social systems. And many a good fictional story echoes these struggles, pitting the characters against powerful antagonists.
Then there's the characters who seem determined to annoy and inconvenience whoever's in charge for no good reason whatsoever. Teenage characters are particularly common offenders, but there's also a subset of characters (particularly angsty urban fantasy detectives) who do this as well. While this can sometimes work when it's presented as a fundamental character flaw, but all too often, we're supposed to admire the character not in spite of their borderline case of oppositional defiant disorder, but because of it.

On some level, this is understandable. All of us, at some point, have harboured fantasies about talking back or otherwise defying an authority figure we didn't like or starting a public protest against some stupid rule. It's a pretty basic human urge. Since fiction often contains a degree of wish-fulfillment, it's not surprising that fictional characters defy authority more frequently than people do in real life. At the same time, this regularly moves well beyond the bounds of credulity. When writing a character who's bent on sticking it to the man, ask yourself the following questions:

Are your character's views congruent with their cultural worldview? For example, if a character comes from a culture with a high power differential where the higher-ranking person is always right, it's going to take a lot more for them to rebel than if they come from a culture where people regularly challenge their leaders. Also, their motives for rebelling will be different depending on what their culture expects of leaders. If not, how did that character come to their particular viewpoint? If a character's ideas about authority run counter to the cultural norms around them, you'll need to explain why. What is the character's motivation? Someone who is fighting back against an intolerable abuse of authority needs to be treated very differently by the narrative than someone who is basically a troll (ie, enjoys getting a rise out of people), which is different still than someone who simply ignores rules because they like their way better.How do other characters respond? Characters do need to have realistic, contextually appropriate reactions to the character who is stirring things up. These reactions may be nuanced-- for example, someone could be both grateful that that the character is standing up to a bad leader, but also fearful of retribution if it all goes wrong. 

The Anatomy of a Mary Sue

I failed another Mary Sue test. Apparently, I 'should probably think of ways to tone down this character a little to make him or her more realistic'.

Now, since I have yet to actually vanish in a puff of logic, I'd hazard to say that Sue-ness is more complex than a checklist of character traits. Blogger Jennifer Koch (aka novadestin) has written one critique of Mary Sue litmus tests, and I'm inclined to agree with many of her points.
First of all, a lot of 'Sue' traits can be completely justified within the setting or within a particular story. This is particularly true of sci-fi and fantasy, where characters' unique status is often a major plot point, and of escapist genres where we want everyone to be above average. In these cases, a character can be a bit over the top--or even a lot over the top-- and fit right in with world of the story.

Second, a heap of stereotypical Mary Sue traits do not preclude character development. For example, a number of characters in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle have all kinds of 'Sue' traits, but still manage to be likeable. Part of this is that their human sides are developed, and part of this is that they don't cruise through the plot unimpeded-- their extraordinary abilities are matched by extraordinary challenges.
Finally, I firmly believe that what makes a character a Mary Sue is not their specific traits, but their effect on the story around them.

Fundamentally, Mary Sue tests fall short because they focus disproportionately on superficial character traits (unusual names, etc) and authorial identification with the character rather than how the character interacts with the plot and setting. A story can be derailed just as thoroughly by a character with no extraordinary features who breaks the rules of the setting with impunity and is the moral centre of the fictional universe as it can by an escapee from House Sparklypoo. It's up to you to evaluate whether or not any one character is being treated as awesome by the narrative in the absence of any evidence, or if a character is getting away with undue rule-bending.

Dear J.K. Rowling...

 

Knowing the Unknown Unknowns

'...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.'
--Donald Rumsfeld
A lot of the world had a bit of a laugh at the then-US Secretary of State when he made his assertion about completely unforeseeable events. But whatever you think of the Bush administration's foreign policy, I'd argue that Rumsfeld had a point. No matter how carefully we plan, a single random and essentially unpredictable event can derail it all. But however frustrating these events are in real life, they are an unparalleled source of plot twists and complications when skillfully deployed in fiction. 
As statistician Nassim Taleb argues in his books, humans tend to underestimate the enormous influence of random events on the world around us. Part of this stems from our innate tendency to look for logical patterns even where none exist. Another part comes from our inability to catalog all possible random  and improbable events; as a result, we underestimate the likelyhood of such an event happening to us. 
Fiction, of course, demands that we be somewhat less random than real life. Because fiction follows a distinct narrative arc, we expect a certain unrealistic level of continuity, otherwise we the audience feel cheated. So introducing a 'random' event in your fictional world takes a bit more finesse than just spinning a 'choose your own disaster' wheel. Here are my suggestions for using random events in your story for plot twists and profit:
The event should be predictable (or highly plausible) to the reader, even if the characters know nothing about it. This means that if you're going to use an unlikely or complex random event, the reader should know enough to predict that this might happen and effect the main characters, even if the main characters don't have the means to anticipate it. For example, if the kingdom next door is going to have a civil war that spills refugees and general chaos into your main character's hometown midway through the book, there should have been some hint of brewing civil unrest over in the neighbouring state or the reader will see the plot development as contrived. However, some random events, such as a huge snowstorm in early winter, are plausible enough to need little foreshadowing. 
With enough subtle foreshadowing, an 'unknown unknown' event can be a great way to worldbuild and to introduce a whole set of complications to your plot.