S.B. Stewart-Laing's Blog, page 8

J is for Just a Flesh Wound

'Anyone who has been shot in the leg and tried to walk immediately afterward was not hired as the technical consultant on this movie.'
—Roger Ebert, reviewing Gunmen

My best friend from high school is an emergency first responder (ie firefighter and paramedic) in a remote area of Texas. Besides the high number of calls to rescue drunks who have been bitten while goading rattlesnakes, she sees a large number of people who call for help pretty late in the game, mostly because they underestimated an injury.

In Fictionland, any injury that is not a direct hit to the heart or brain is deemed 'just a flesh wound'-- this goes double if it's the protagonist getting shot, skewered or bitten. The ubiquity of this trope means that many people who have never seen a serious injury in real life assume that a bullet to the shoulder is not particularly life-threatening. This has a problem on two levels. First, people attempting to incapacitate someone in a fight or dole out a non-serious injury for a stunt overestimate how much damage they can inflict before they need an ambulance. Second, people who have sustained an injury are more likely to 'tough it out' thinking the damage is minor when they really need to be getting themselves to a doctor.

At my friend's behest, my analysis is this: get yourself some first aid training. 
Type 'free first aid class + [your town]' into Google, and you will most likely find courses offered by your local hospital or fire department. Many are outside of workday hours, and will allow you to bring kids (you may even be able to get your kids certified as well). Hopefully you'll never have to use those skills, but at the very least you'll have done some good research for your story and you'll be prepared if it ever isn't just a flesh wound.

I is for Insanely Violent

The human species has a strange relationship with violence. On one level, we glorify it-- we watch others fight for our entertainment, we watch fictional violence with relish, we use violence as a device for solving problems both large and small. On another, we are terrified of being at the receiving end. Perhaps as a result of this split cultural consciousness, we are very quick in both fiction and real life to link violence with mental illness.

Unfortunately, the fictional insistence that all mentally ill people are time bombs waiting to go off has caused serious problems in real life. People with a psychiatric diagnosis are:

10 times more likely to be unemployed in spite of seeking work and holding appropriate qualificationsAre 11 times more likely than the average person to be the victim of a violent crime25% will be harassed or be the target of a hate crimeMore likely to be fatally shot by police even if they don't pose a direct threatCan be legally sterilised against their will in all 50 US states
A lot of these behaviours and policies stem from public perceptions of mental illness which are fueled by media exposure (since many people don't know someone with a psychiatric problem, or don't know they know someone with such an illness, fiction is the only view of mental illness many people get).

So is all this justified to protect everyone else? Let's see:
1) People with serious mental illness commit violent crimes at the same rate as the general population in the area where they live.
2) Only about 5% of violent crimes are committed by people with severe mental illness. (Which is prevalent in about 6% of the population).

I would love to see more protagonists who cope with their mental health problems, but we need a two pronged approach. Yes, good citizens with mental illness need better representation in Fictionland. But authors also need to stop using mental illness as a lazy way to write a violent villain.

H is for Hacking Magic

Although I am an ecologist and statistician by training, my previous and current job fall into the general field of 'working with computers'. Until I started at my last job, I had been blissfully unaware of how deeply Hollywood's assumption that computers are magic has permeated society. However, the surprising number of requests I got for programs that break the laws of spacetime soon got me to revise my thinking.

As a predictive modelling scientist, I use software to return hundreds of thousands of calculations a second, and turn those calculations into predictions, and sometimes into cool graphics. However, the models are not infallible, and do need human input and supervision, and can take awhile to run (a modelling stream is actually running in the background as I type this). There are also limits to what any one computer can do as far as decryption, encryption, network connections, and running various programs.

However, it's not all nonsense. A surprising number of devices with integrated software can indeed be hacked, including:
Cars
Phones
Insulin pumps
Webcams
Cash machines
Pacemakers

So maybe update your software patches while you're updating the plot of your techno-thriller novel.

G is for Geniuses Who Know Everything

I know a lot of overachievers. They're impressive people, but absolutely none of them are at 'TV Genius' level. It's not from any failures on their part-- it's just not possible to be a world-class expert on literally everything, while also speaking five languages fluently and knowing three martial arts.

As a society, we are so fixated on the idea of 'talent' and general innate special-ness that we forget that everything we consciously do-- from feeding ourselves soup to calculating the paths of subatomic particles-- are learned skills. Becoming an expert at a complex skill usually takes between 5,000 and 10,000 hours of focused, deliberate practice. It takes about 14,000 hours of intent practice to become a chess grandmaster. For perspective, there are 8,760 hours in a year, and the typical human being needs to spend about 2,600 of those asleep in order to be healthy. It would take three and a half to five years of practicing the skill 8 hours a day to become an international-level expert or competitor.

This is especially true once you get into extremely specialist fields, particularly the sciences. While all scientists share some basic background knowledge, a heart surgeon has been far too busy studying the human heart to have expert-level knowledge of the human brain, or about microsurgery to reattach hands. If your character has multiple areas of expertise, you need to explain it in their backstory, rather than just assuming they know it due to 'being smart' or 'being a scientist'.

Realistically, your character will not have the sum of human knowledge stored in their brain, especially not by the age of 16. And that's okay. Your character can still have in-depth expertise in several fields due to their diligent practice and study, and be an exceptionally clever on-the-fly problem solver. Honestly, I think it's important to have characters who are clever, but still essentially human and aspirational, rather than a superhuman pinnacle far beyond our grasp.

F is for Fundementalists

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
— Winston Churchill

Everyone, everywhere has encountered some type of fundementalist. Whether they're a militant vegan, a gun-rights supporter, a die-hard Republican, or unhealthily fixated on Harry Potter, these folks won't rest until they've convinced (or coerced) everyone in earshot to agree with them. You might, on occasion, turn into this person yourself when presented with a particular topic.

Given this wide field, I'd like to focus on how the media-- both fiction and news reporting-- present the idea that fudementalism is inextricably linked to religious belief. Speculative fiction can be particularly bad for this trope, and I have noted before the urban fantasy tends to draw on religious fundementalists as automatic villains. The idea seems to be that it's a zero sum game: either you are outwardly secular, or a frothing fanatic. As anyone who has boarded a plane while wearing a head covering is well aware, this attitude leaks out of news stories and book series and into real life.

I don't have any issue with religious extremists turning up in fiction. After all, it's part of the human condition. However, it would be nice to see a continuum of different views represented, rather than a diametric choice between non-belief and fanaticism. For perspective, of the 2.2 billion Christians in the world, about 1% are the extreme American Protestants, with a similarly small number number are the type of Catholic that Dan Brown seems to think dominate the world. Less than 5% of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims would be described as radical. (I'd include other religions, but Hindus, Jews, and Buddhists are conspicuously absent from Urban Fantasy City and its surrounding environs).

There needs to be an acknowledgement of this diversity, and of the fact that most people of faith are reasonable folks who find guidance and peace in whatever spiritual path they follow.

E is for Evolution

For any of you who can't watch the video (it's mildly NSFW), it shows Southpark's Mr/Mrs. Garrison attempting to explain evolution as a convoluted orgy involving mutant fish, a squirrel and a monkey. A good number of you-- even those who went to school in fairly liberal areas-- probably cringed with recognition. Part of me honestly wonders if this botched version of Darwin's theory is responsible for the high number of Americans who think it's nonsense*.

As someone with a degree in evolutionary biology, I can tell you what's portrayed in the media (and, disturbingly, in any number of classrooms) is nonsense. There are actually enough regularly repeated misconceptions to form a TVTropes category.

What's unfortunate here is that real evolutionary science is fascinating. Science shows from documentaries to crime dramas (Bones, CSI, and Numb3rs, to name a few) have been wildly successful, proving that people enjoy learning about complex science concepts when they're presented in an engaging way.

If you're curious about evolution but don't have an extensive science background, check out the excellent video series Crash Course: Biology and Crash Course: Ecology to get started. I'd also recommend the second episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos: A Spacetime Journey.


*In all fairness, I have met a distressingly large number of people who find out I'm Christian, then proceed to tell me they are liberal and 'believe' in evolution and also that I am stupid. Usually I let them explain some mangled version of the squirrel-frog-monkey theory, then inform them I started my science career as an evolutionary biologist.

D is for Darkest Africa

'The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.'
--Binyavanga Wainaina, 'How to Write About Africa'

In his bitingly satirical essay 'How to Write About Africa', award-winning Kenyan author Binvavanga Wainaina skewers the dozens of cliches that infect fiction (and worse, nonfiction!) about the continent of Africa. In spite of having every landscape imaginable-- deserts, rocky coasts, jungle, grasslands, bustling cities, mountains, and temperate forests, to name a few-- and being the most genetically diverse continent on Earth (encompassing several thousand distinct ethnic groups), the continent frequently gets represented as a non-specific mashup of noble savages, political dysfunction, ignorance, poverty, benevolent Westerners, and misplaced ecology.

It's an old problem, and has had far-reaching negative effects on the relationship of Africa to the rest of the world, most notably Europe. The idea that the continent is populated by the ignorant, violent and victimised, all of whom need to be tamed or rescued, was one of the leading justifications for the transatlantic slave trade. It justified genocide, exploitation, and invasion.

No matter what your background, you as an author can do better. Research your setting carefully and give us a detailed portrait of your characters as people, rather than props to support a message.

C is for CSI: Crime Solving Illusions

I'm very glad that I am a citizen of a country, and resident of another country, where 'beyond reasonable doubt' is the threshold for convicting someone of a crime*. In recent years, however, jurors have demanded a higher and higher threshold of proof, sometimes beyond the laws of physics or available technology.

This insistence on forensic evidence has been traced back to the rise of popular crime dramas, in particular CSI.  Because of the format of the show, evidence collection and processing is done at a breakneck pace that's just not possible in an overworked crime lab. Some of the technology in the show doesn't even exist-- for example, the ability to enhance a grainy photo into a high-res image, or look at it from another angle. In several high-profile cases, a jury has actually failed to convict someone based on the absence of forensic evidence that would have been impossible to gather. Ironically, the necessity of forensic evidence to get a conviction has put a huge strain on already overloaded crime labs, slowing the process further.

It's not all bad news though. Some studies indicate that fans of the show were more likely to think critically about expert testimony in the courtroom. Outside the courtroom, they were also less likely to disturb a crime scene and accidentally destroy evidence before law enforcement arrived. Finally, some lawyers were happy to see jurors engage with forensic evidence presented instead of ignoring scientific findings in favour of flashier (but less reliable) eyewitness accounts.

In the end, the CSI effect is a combination of education and science wish fulfillment, of the encouragement of investigation and critical thinking and of unrealistic expectations for crime scientists. But in the end, if it's encouraging us to do better and seek answers harder, it may be a good thing in the long run.

*Scotland actually has three possible verdicts: guilty, innocent, and 'not proven'. The third is basically indicates the accused is suspicious, but there is reasonable doubt as to their guilt or insufficient evidence. 

B is for Blue Meth

I try to keep this blog PG. 'There is no such thing as an anti-war film.'--François Truffaut
While Breaking Bad fans mourned the end of the show by making crafts or binge-watching True Detective , an enterprising few decided to piggyback on the show's popularity with entrepreneurial spirit: by cooking blue meth (sometimes while sporting fan attire!). This darkly humorous trend is probably due in part to the fact that it's difficult to make something look truly despicable on film if the protagonists are participating.

I'm not the first person to point out that Breaking Bad is an unrealistically optimistic take on the the meth trade. Nor is it the first profession or activity to get a glamorous upgrade. On some level, this is to be expected: no one wants to see the cast of Game of Thrones scooping dire wolf poop (supposing there even are any dog fouling ordinances in Westeros), or see an FBI agent filling out paperwork after a case. We want stories to get to the 'good bits'. 
At the same time, some genuinely bad ideas-- such as keeping demanding exotic pets-- are shown as easy and desirable to the extent that real-life behaviour is influenced on a noticeable scale. Again, we assume fiction will turn experiences which would be horribly unpleasant in real life into an adventure we can enjoy (or at least experience catharsis from) as the audience. But there is a difference between that experience and the framing of some actually dangerous or ill-advised activity within the narrative as totally consequence-free and cool. As a writer, just use the opportunity for extra conflict--whether physical, emotional or moral-- that's be dropped into your lap, and run with it. 

A is for AD(H)D

First medically described in the 18th century, AD(H)D effects about 5% of the global population. Statistically, this means you probably know at least one person with the condition, particularly if you work in a creative field. So it's surprising that the condition rarely shows up in Fictionland, except as a poorly researched comedy gag. I could only dig up two examples where the condition was not the focus of comedy, and both are in fantasy storylines. Shawn Spencer of Psych is the only example I could find of a character who uses the upsides of AD(H)D, and even then it's all within the context of his comedic antics.

Possibly this limited portrayal is because many cases of AD(H)D go unnoticed due to a disproportionate focus, even within the medical field, on more stereotypical manifestations: the loud, disruptive, disobedient kid who can't sit still. However, the idea that all people with AD(H)D are feckless, goofy, and unfocused is perpetrated by the media, and has a lot to do with the widespread stigma surrounding the condition. One study found that in spite of the high occurrence, over half of teachers surveyed did not know the symptoms of the condition, and furthermore believed myths-- such as the idea that people with AD(H)D are lazy or potentially dangerous-- which almost certainly sprang directly from Fictionland to real life.

Contrary to popular belief, AD(H)D is completely separate from someone's personality. My Lady Life Partner, who has AD(H)D, is a retired ballet dancer and will go after her goals with indefatigable determination.That isn't to say that goofballs or slobs with AD(H)D don't exist, because people with AD(H)D come in every personality type imaginable, not just 'punchline'.