L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 10

Project October 2018

I’m going on my yearly hiatus to do Project October, 31 days of intensive writing that will hopefully result in 31,000 words. I’ll post weekly updates showing my progress.

Regular blog posts resume in November.

Wish You Weren’t Here: Stereotypes in Fiction

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Have you ever started reading a book and thought to yourself, “I know this character from somewhere else.” The reason might be because stereotypes exist in spades throughout fiction of all genres. The worst of the worst seem to occur in threes. Here are the stereotypical females, males, teenagers and children.

Just a word about where they come from: history. And since historical writing was dominated by men, most stereotypes are how men perceived (and to some degree still do perceive) themselves, the people in their lives and even people they didn’t know well or at all. Of course, that means they’re not very complex or even accurate but they persist in writing today. They’re best to be avoided unless you can make them unbelievably original.

Female

Somewhat unsurprisingly, all of the three main female stereotypes originated in the Bible.

Mother – The Ultimate Support

It shouldn’t come as any great shock that mothers are one of the biggest female stereotypes. After all, until quite recently, there weren’t many other options for socially acceptable life goals for women (even in fiction). Still now, there is an expectation that every woman will (and should want to) be a mother (barring infertility).

The mother stereotype goes all the way back to Eve, an instinctive mother who bore and raised many children without having any examples to guide her in her motherhood (what a saint).

Of course, mothers do exist and it’s not unrealistic that a female character of a certain age might be a mother. But she won’t only be a mother and it’s not enough for her motherhood to be her defining characteristic. It’s everything else that she is in conjunction with being a mother than helps her escape the clutches of stereotypicality.

Virgin – The Ultimate Sport

Before a woman can become a mother, she must first be a virgin. Motherhood is a pure calling and therefore virgins are the ones who answer that call. Total bollocks, of course. But what better way to convince women that sex is evil unless it is for the purpose of procreation?

The virgin stereotype, while probably existing long before the New Testament, was really crystallised in Mary, mother of Jesus. Wow, would you look at that, two stereotypes in one! Mother and virgin in one perfect woman.

Nowadays, virginity is code for innocence and wholesomeness and a well-worn trope in romance fiction – women who are saving themselves for “the one”. It’s horribly unrealistic, especially in light of a figure that says only three percent of women go on to marry the first man they sleep with (there wasn’t a citation so I can’t verify it but anecdotally it sounds about right). As with mothers, virgins do exist but there are very few of them who are solely defined by it.

Whore – The Ultimate Slut

If you’re not a virgin or a married mother, then that only leaves one other alternative: the whore. Spat on by men, shunned by other women, the whore does not occupy an envied place in history or in literature. Even now, slut-shaming (attempting to humiliate women who do not fall into the first two stereotype categories) is a popular pastime for many.

The Biblical example, at least for the uninformed, is Mary Magdalene. She was one of the unofficial disciples of Jesus and is often erroneously confused with an unnamed “sinful woman” (presumably a prostitute or promiscuous) who anoints the feet of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Still, mud sticks, just like in real life.

The whore may also be known as a seductress or a femme fatale and even though she has to be having sex with someone, it’s interesting to note that there is no equivalent stereotype – heck, there’s no equivalently disdainful term – for a man who enjoys sex with multiple partners.

Male

It’s no coincidence that the three main male stereotypes are all positive, even the marginally negative one.

Brave – Big Heart

Ah, the traditional hero. He’s gorgeous, he’s honourable, he’s adaptable, he’s always got someone to save. James Bond, Jack Reacher, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Batman. While others cower in the corner in the face of danger, he’s busy saving the day. He has no concern for his own safety and he’ll sacrifice himself if he has to but he’d rather live to have the tale of his heroic deeds told and to live off the glory for years to come.

The truly stereotypical brave hero will have military, martial arts or law enforcement training because physical strength and skill are generally how they defeat the villains. He might be brave but he’s also a bit violent and if we look a bit closer, he likely relishes the biff. Still, it’s all a means to an end. And when the violence is over, he’ll sweep a girl off her feet and they’ll live happily ever after until the next time he feels the needs to save someone.

Billionaire – Big Brain

If a man isn’t making oodles of money, then he’s just not worth writing about (apparently). After all, you have to be pretty cluey to make a fortune, right? (Or maybe you just need to be part of an already wealthy family that gives you a great starting point.)

Christian Grey of Fifty Shades fame is the most well-known recent fictional billionaire. Yeah, he’s a bit of a weirdo (more than a bit) but he’s rich so there are certain things Anastasia Steele is willing to put up with, things she never even contemplated. I haven’t read the books (apart from laughingly flicking through a few pages of someone else’s copy in the work lunch room one day) and I’ve only seen the first movie adaptation but I’m still a bit baffled about why he’s such a sought after bachelor. Oh, wait, I’m forgetting the money.

The thing about real-life billionaires is that most of them are workaholics who have very little time for anything not business related, certainly not extended sessions in red rooms or lengthy pursuits of women who don’t instantly accept their advances. A realistic account of a billionaire would actually be someone who is rarely seen by friends, family and love interests but the story demands someone who’s around a little more often, so the stereotype doesn’t let reality get in the way. No bad stereotype does.

Bad Boy – Big Dick

Forgive my crudeness but the recently created phrase “big dick energy” really sums up what it is to be a bad boy. He’s sexual, he’s only just on the right side of the law, there’s likely a leather jacket and a motorcycle thrown into the mix somewhere, and he’s not the kind of man you take home to meet your mother. If you do, he’s likely to seduce her as well.

The bad boy in fiction is such an appealing character – for a good time, not a long time – because bad boys in real life tend to be awful. The reality of bad boys is usually having to escape from the law, then escape from debt collectors, then escape from him when the domestic violence that was always bubbling just below the surface finally emerges. Thank God for fiction.

If you can get brave, billionaire and bad boy into one character, you’ve got just about every shorter romance fiction hero ever written and a likely bestseller (but critical failure) on your hands.

Teenager

Teenage stereotypes are a much more recent phenomenon (because previously there were children and adults and no real acknowledgement of the precarious years in between) and have mostly developed as a result of people who aren’t teenagers anymore trying to remember what it was like. These three main stereotypes are also distinctly American. While other countries may have similar categories, they will likely be given different labels.

Jock – Good at Sports

In the stereotype world, almost any problem a teenage boy has can be solved by being good at sports. Because being good at sports leads to scholarships at university, then to professional sports and finally to multimillion dollar yearly earnings.

The jock is a derivative of the brave man, overcoming insurmountable odds with the support of a good woman (more accurately described as winning the game and getting the girl). It’s been done to death. And unlike the mother stereotype, which can be justified by pointing to all the women with children out there, jocks like this are actually few and far between. Yes, plenty of people play sport but very few are good enough to make it into the upper echelons. Reality rarely gets in the way of a bad stereotype.

Nerd – Good at School

The nerd is the diametric opposite of the jock. He’s not good-looking (or if he is, he does everything he can to disguise it). He doesn’t have any girls lusting after him. He’s hopeless at sports. In fact, most of the jocks and cheerleaders don’t even know he exists and if they do, he’s their punching bag. But he’s got one thing going for him: he’s smart as smart can be.

He’s top of the class, he’s the partner everyone wants for school projects so they can ditch him to do all the work and still get an A, he’s the guy in the small town who will leave for an Ivy League university and never come back.

A stereotypical nerd often comes good in the end, losing a pimply complexion and whatever it is that seems to repel girls during the teenage years to become wealthy and attractive thanks to a genius invention or a booming business. Yawn.

Cheerleader – Good at Sex

The cheerleader is a derivative of the whore with one exception; she is the devoted girlfriend of the jock and spends all of her time motivating, supporting and pleasuring him and him alone. She has no goals of her own that don’t revolve around him and all things going well, she will transition smoothly into the mother stereotype.

Snore.

Mother, virgin, whore, cheerleader – the pattern here is pretty clear. All the female stereotypes, even the teenage version, are defined by their relationships with men. Mother, a vessel for the children of a man. Virgin, a vessel for the sexual goal of a man. Whore, a used vessel for the sexual goals of many men. Cheerleader, a vessel for the ego of a soon-to-be-man. It truly would be an awful world if this were all women could be.

Child

Child stereotypes also suffer from primarily being written by people who aren’t children. Even worse, they suffer from being secondary and often incidental characters, people no one would really care about from a fictional perspective if something terrible wasn’t happening to them or they weren’t doing something terrible to someone else.

Victim – Possibly Dead

The child victim is simply a chess piece on a very large board, bringing out the maternal and paternal instincts of whoever is trying to either save them or avenge them. They’re not old enough to have developed into complex characters themselves yet (or maybe it’s just that the writer isn’t prepared to devote that much time into developing them into complex characters because it’s only the idea of them that appears prominently, not the actuality) so their importance is defined entirely by their relationships with their parents/guardians/saviours.

They’re also a shortcut to imbuing adult characters with good traits. Cares about children? He or she must be a good guy or girl.

Orphan – Parents Are Dead

Aww, so sad, mummy and daddy are dead. What better way to garner sympathy from a reader? Cue tiny violins. There’s also their corresponding subconscious fear of abandonment to really ramp up the pity party. And just to make it super confusing, they alternate between being ridiculously clingy and determinedly independent.

The percentage of orphans in fiction is enormous compared to the ratios of them in the real world. And while, yes, just like all the other stereotypes, they do exist, rarely do any of them end up living in the lap of luxury with Daddy Warbucks. Most likely, they will end up living with extended family or going into the foster system and contending with many of the same issues that children with one or both their parents still around do.

Brat – Wish You Were Dead

And finally, there’s the child character that everyone wishes would just go away because of how annoying they are. You know the old saying that children should be seen and not heard? These characters are why. Just think Veruca Salt saying, “I want a golden ticket!” and “I want an Oompa Loompa!” and “I want a golden goose!”

The truth is that children generally only behave this way because they have parents who let them get away with it or who have never taught them to have compassion for others. Should we blame the kids or their parents? Or should we blame the writers who create them, usually only for dramatic tension?

*****

Stereotypes will never go away completely. They’re too deeply ingrained and also plenty useful as starting points for writers. But if you use them, make sure they don’t stay stereotypes for long. Your readers will thank you for it.

It’s a Fine Line between Pleasure and Pain: Dedicating Your Book

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All writers devote an enormous amount of time, effort and passion towards writing their books. And while finally holding a completed book in your hands is right up there, one of the other most emotional moments usually comes just before the end of the process: deciding on a dedication.

They aren’t compulsory but they appear in almost every book. As a way of showing our loved ones, our peers, our mentors, our inspirations just how much they mean to us. In recognition of a particular period in our lives. As an inside joke.

But deciding on a dedication can also be a little stressful. After all, most of us have support networks of more than just one person and we want to pay tribute to them all. We certainly don’t want to put anyone offside. And while a writer can include a veritable list of thank yous in the acknowledgements (usually at the back of the book), a dedication that focuses on just one person – or sometimes a couple – (usually at the front of the book) tends to top getting lost amongst the crowd.

Most writers seem to start by dedicating their first books to parents or partners. As I write this, I’m in the middle of reading The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty and when I opened it up to check, yep, there’s evidence to back me up. “For my parents, Diane and Bernie Moriarty, with lots of love.” And it makes sense. Parents and partners are usually significant influences on everyone, not just writers.

Some writers know exactly who they want to dedicate their work to, some need a little help. And the more books they write, the closer they might come to running out of easy choices. Here are a few options.

Dedication to Yourself

The dedication at the front of Psychos: A White Girl Problems Book by Babe Walker reads, “Dedicated to the strongest person I know: me.” It’s an entirely honest and worthy dedication option. After all, you wrote the book, you did most of it by yourself and you deserve the credit. And it doesn’t come across quite as self-absorbed as thanking yourself when winning an award.

Dedication to Nobody

As Arika Okrent puts it so succinctly, John Neal “had a stubborn temperament that would never let him settle for just a ‘screw you’ where a ‘screw you all’ would do”. The dedication in his 1822 book, Logan: A Family History is probably one of the best dedications to nobody ever written.

“I do not dedicate my book to any body; for I know nobody worth dedicating it to. I have no friends, no children, no wife, no home; – no relations, no well-wishers; – nobody to love, and nobody to care for. To whom shall I; to whom can I dedicate it? To my Maker! It is unworthy of him. To my countrymen? They are unworthy of me. For the men of past ages I have very little veneration; for those of the present, not at all. To whom shall I entrust it? Who will care for me, by tomorrow? Who will do battle for my book, when I am gone? Will posterity? Yea, posterity will do me justice. To posterity then – to the winds! I bequeath it! I devote it – as a Roman would his enemy, to the fierce and unsparing charities of another world – to a generation of spirits – to the shadowy and crowned potentates of hereafter. I – I – I have done – the blood of the red man is growing cold – farewell – farewell forever!”

I have no words (unlike John Neal).

Dedication to You

There are plenty of books that are dedicated to you. Sometimes it’s the you reading the book, sometimes it’s a you the writer doesn’t name (but usually accompanied by the immortal words, “You know who you are”). Here’s the dedication Neil Gaiman included in Anansi Boys:

“You know how it is. You pick up a book, flip to the dedication, and find that, once again, the author has dedicated a book to someone else and not you. Not this time. Because we haven’t yet met/have only a glancing acquaintance/are just crazy about each other/haven’t seen each other in much too long/are in some way related/will never meet, but will, I trust, despite that, always think fondly of each other! This one’s for you. With you know what, and you probably know why.”

Dedication Not to You

In EE Cummings 1935 book, No Thanks, his dedication was a list of the fourteen publishers who had rejected it in the shape of a funeral urn.

NO

THANKS

TO

Farrar & Rinehart

Simon & Schuster

Coward-McCann

Limited Editions

Harcourt, Brace

Random House

Equinox Press

Smith & Haas

Viking Press

Knopf

Dutton

Harper’s

Scribner’s

Covici-Friede

Genius!

Dedication as Message

I’m not sure I could stand waiting for a book to come out if I used the dedication as a message, particularly if it was a question that needed an answer as in The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter Leeson: “Ania, I love you; will you marry me?” That’s dedication in all of its meanings!

No Dedication At All

If it’s all just too hard, it’s also perfectly fine to have no dedication at all.

My Dedications

The dedication in Enemies Closer, my first book, was to a fellow writer and his scantily clad women. I’d written the book directly as a response to a book he’d written and entrusted me to read during the draft stages, which seemed to contain an inordinate number of scantily clad women. I wanted to demonstrate that women in action fiction could play a substantial role and not just be the sexual playthings of the hero and the villain. They could be the heroes and the villains! He didn’t change his book in any of the ways I’d suggested in this respect but I couldn’t be too aggrieved since he was ultimately the reason I wrote my first published novel.

The Project December dedication does seem a little flippant in retrospect but since I didn’t actually realise I was writing a book at the time – and compiled, edited and published it within a very short time frame – it felt right to me at the time. It’s dedicated to all the cats I’ve loved before and names all sixteen who have ever lived with me since I became a crazy cat lady. It was right around the time that I was fostering six cats in addition to my own three and I was loving it.

Project January was dedicated to my maternal grandparents. My grandmother died while I was writing the book (and was an avid reader), my grandfather was left bereft without her (and loved reading as long as it was about football) and I knew he would be honoured by the gesture. I lived with my grandparents for eleven years while I studied for two degrees and then ventured out into the workforce at the start of my career; they are like my pseudo-parents.

Black Spot is the only book I wrote the dedication for before I started writing the novel itself. It reads, “For Zac, who didn’t make it. For Gen, who did. And for Jess – this book would never have been written without you.” I did a lot of planning for this book so I had a very good idea of what it was going to be about, a girl who had struggled with mental health and come out the other side (amongst other things). Earlier in the year I started writing it, my cousin Zac had committed suicide. Prior to that, he had decided he wanted to be a writer and knowing my background, he had sought me out for advice on both his writing and his writing journey. I’d done a manuscript assessment on his novel and recommended he begin a writing course to improve his skills. He was only one term into his studies, which he said he was loving, when he killed himself.

I hadn’t known about his mental health issues, still don’t really, I guess I just assume he had them based on what he did. But he didn’t make it. My sister Genevieve, however, did. She’s struggled with eating disorders, clinical depression, borderline personality disorder and a long history of doctors refusing to believe there was anything physically wrong with her (even though she has now also been diagnosed with chronic fatigue and rheumatoid arthritis – she’s still in her very early twenties by the way). She’s made it. She makes it every day. And she was a very great inspiration for the main character in the book.

And then there’s Jess. Jessica Vigar is not only my book cover designer and marketing go-to person, she is also the reason Black Spot exists. We were desk neighbours at a company we both no longer work for and when she found out that I wrote novels, she insisted I should write something to take advantage of the appetite for young adult/mainstream crossover novels (it was around the time that The Hunger Games, Twilight and Divergent were all very big). I had a few ideas but she really helped me by vetoing several and then giving the go ahead to the one that eventually became Black Spot. Then she read early drafts and as I write this, she is designing the book cover for it. How could I not acknowledge the essential role she played?

*****

Whatever direction you decide to head in, just remember you don’t owe anybody a dedication. It’s an honour and a privilege and hopefully a lovely surprise when you give them their copy of the book and they open the front cover to see their name.

The Rise and Rise of the Unreliable Narrator

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Whenever I meet new people in real life, I always start out with the assumption that they’re perfectly pleasant individuals. Even when I might have heard other people’s opinions about them, I figure it’s only fair to give them the benefit of a clean slate and it’s only right that I should form my own judgement based on my experience with them, not simply perpetuate someone else’s adoration or resentment, which might be completely prejudiced.

I’m the same when I pick up a book and start reading. I don’t read reviews beforehand so that I can avoid being consciously or subconsciously influenced and I begin with the assumption that the person telling the tale is telling it truthfully (not factually, because that’s a different thing, but truthfully, which means honestly to the best of their recollection). After all, why wouldn’t they? The narrators are fictional characters and will never need to worry about any reader’s judgement.

Of course, in both cases, there are plenty of instances of people who don’t always disclose the absolute truth or the complete story. Sometimes they’re frustrating as hell (in the case of real people, especially when you figure out you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes), sometimes they’re exactly what’s needed (more likely in the case of a fictional character only). In the real world, we would call them liars but in the fictional world, they’re known as unreliable narrators.

Wayne C Booth, an American literary critic, coined the term “unreliable narrator” in his 1961 book, The Rhetoric of Fiction. His obituary in the New York Times explained that he felt “literature was not so much words on paper as it was a complex ethical act” and his “lifelong study of the art of rhetoric illuminated the means by which authors seduce, cajole and more than occasionally lie to their readers in the service of narrative”. A pretty good description of what it is the unreliable narrator does.

Types of Unreliable Narrator

There are actually quite a few types of unreliable narrator:

*The deliberate liar: The deliberate liar is, of course, the most obvious one. The deliberate liar has an agenda and will do and say whatever it takes to achieve it, even if it has no resemblance to the truth and no matter how many other people get hurt along the way.

*The half-truther: The half-truther shares some things in common with the deliberate liar and has an agenda as well but tries to achieve it by simply leaving out the parts of the story that don’t suit them.

*The self-deluder: The self-deluder is convinced that things are other than they seem to everyone else. The relationship that’s actually more of an acquaintanceship. The significant events that others believe are innocent coincidences. The connection that exists only in their mind.

*Someone who sees things differently: There are two sides to every story, right? This is the other side, the perspective less commonly considered, the unconventional view as opposed to the mainstream.

*Someone with medically-induced unreliability: Amnesia, multiple personality disorder, psychotic breaks, substance abuse – all can result in a narrator unsure of themselves and the real story.

*The absent narrator: There’s nothing more unreliable than someone who is trying to relate a story they don’t actually have any first-hand knowledge of, someone who wasn’t even there. In non-fiction, it requires huge amounts of research to overcome; in fiction, characters are more likely to jump to conclusions rather than go to all the effort of finding out what happened.

As you can see, not all types of unreliable narrator are trying to deceive. Some of them are actually desperate for the truth.

Revelation of Unreliable Narrator

An unreliable narrator is not always immediately obvious. In the case of medical-induced unreliability or someone who was completely absent from the event that the novel is based around, it’s apparent upfront. But with the deliberate liar, the half-truther, the self-deluder and the narrator who simply sees things differently, their unreliable status may not be revealed until very close to the end of the book. Often with novels such as these, the instinct of the reader is to want to read the book again immediately in order to reassess everything they took on face value when they first read it.

Examples of Unreliable Narrator

*The deliberate liar: Amy in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn can’t keep it up for the entire book but she does everything she can in the first half to make the reader feel sorry for her. By the second half, the reader realises she’s not the one who should be getting our pity.

*The half-truther: Pi in Life of Pi by Yann Martel undergoes a miraculous journey, trapped on a lifeboat and lost at sea for 227 days with a spotted hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan named Orange Juice and a tiger named Richard Parker. By the end of the book, Pi reveals he hasn’t been entirely truthful and gives the characters he’s been narrating his story to two options. He will reveal the absolute truth to them and they can decide which version they prefer. Unsurprisingly, once you know them both, they decide they prefer the half-truth version.

*The self-deluder: Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid suffers from ideological self-delusion. “I am a lover of America,” he states at the start of the book but as he narrates his story, and particularly as he cheers the falling World Trade Centre towers on 9/11, it becomes clear that this is not the case.

*Someone who sees things differently: Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon has Asperger’s (or if you keep up with medical bureaucracy, which says this condition no longer exists, he is on the autism spectrum). In his neighbour’s front yard in the middle of the night, he discovers the body of a murdered dog with a large garden fork sticking out of it. He decides he will find out who killed the dog so that the perpetrator can be punished. And so begins a book completely lacking in emotion but entirely logical – in Christopher’s mind, anyway – as he begins his detecting. About half the book has absolutely nothing to do with anything as Christopher goes off on scientific and mathematical tangents, which help him stay calm in a chaotic world. About one quarter of the book focuses on his murder investigation and the other quarter of the book follows him as his world unravels around him when he finds out who the murderer is. The main character thinks a lot about stabbing people with the Swiss Army Knife he always has with him and tells the reader that his best dream is the one where everybody on earth who isn’t on the autism spectrum has died and he can go anywhere he wants without hardly running into anyone else.

*Someone with medically-induced unreliability: Rachel in The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is an alcoholic who suffers from blackouts – sometimes entire chunks of her memory go missing when she’s been drinking heavily. When a woman she knows only by sight goes missing, she involves herself deeper and deeper in the lives of the main players until the police start to think she might have something to do with it. It’s even revealed she was in the area the woman was last seen and at the same time but Rachel can’t remember what happened. She can barely remember even being there or even why she was.

*The absent narrator: Diedrick Knickerbocker in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving tells the story of Ichabod Crane and his encounter with the Headless Horseman. There is a note at the beginning of the story and a postscript describing how it was found in Knickerbocker’s papers after his death. It is an interesting device because I kept wondering who he was and why he was so interested in this story. But that is part of the story’s brilliance. It feels like so much is left explicitly unexplored so that readers wonder about the importance of what they aren’t being told.

Choosing to Use an Unreliable Narrator

Some have posited the theory that all narrators, other than the omniscient kind, are unreliable in one sense or another. But it’s important to make the distinction between outright lies, sneaky omissions, forgotten acts and selfish perspectives (which all perspectives are – not in a mean sense but in an awareness sense). And it’s not just a matter of intentional misdirection. This is the nature of all stories: everyone remembers them slightly differently. Just ask the police when they’re interviewing witnesses.

The important thing for a writer when choosing to use an unreliable narrator is that you must keep track of two stories: the one the narrator reveals and what actually happened. And then you have to decide how many of the narrator’s inaccuracies will be exposed at the end of the book. You also have to be careful about how you do it. If the entire book has had only one narrator who has lied all along, then a sudden and complete revelation by that narrator of the truth might seem inconsistent. A sudden and complete revelation by an entirely different narrator might also seem forced since they’re only being used for that purpose. It’s a very difficult balancing act.

But it’s one that more and more writers are attempting and succeeding at. If you’re having a go at writing one, good luck to you. And if you come across one in a book you’re reading, enjoy the ride. It’s not about lies or even damned lies, it’s just a rising statistic.

Book Review: The Returned by Jason Mott

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Jason Mott is primarily known as a poet and that helps make sense of this book because just like a lot of poetry, it’s beautifully written but it’s not really clear what it all means.

Harold and Lucille Hargrave are in their seventies and have lived most of their adult lives with the trauma of their son drowning when he was just eight years old. And then one day, one ordinary day, an FBI agent shows up on their doorstep with Jacob Hargrave. He hasn’t aged a day since he died and much to everybody’s confusion, he’s very much alive. And he isn’t the only one. The Returned are turning up everywhere.

Nobody knows why and nobody knows what to do with them. Some families happily take their former loved ones in. Others shun them. Those whose loved ones haven’t come back wonder why. And then the government gets involved (always the point at which things go to hell). They start setting up internment camps, capturing the Returned and confining them while they try to figure out what to do with them. When they come for Jacob, Harold refuses to let him go alone even though he isn’t sure that the boy is really his son.

The internment camp quickly becomes overcrowded and the basic facilities fail and become non-existent. (It’s all very reminiscent of refugee camps.) And the True Living movement, basically a group of old white guys, insists there’s no place for the Returned and that they need to go back to where they came from. (It’s all very reminiscent of the anti-immigration movement.) And if they won’t go of their own accord, then they’re willing to help them on their way (kill them).

It’s clear that this book is a commentary, it’s just not clear on what. Jacob seems more like a prop than a child and the rest of the characters all seem to be either the very worst or the very best kind of people with few showing a complexity of actions and emotions. The only exception is the FBI agent who brings Jacob home but we don’t see enough of him for his complexity to break through the black-and-whiteness of everybody else.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the one thing everybody wants to know is the one thing that everybody seems to be avoiding asking about. I have no doubt that it was done deliberately by the author to heighten the suspense. So what is it? The thing that everybody wants to know? The thing that everybody avoids? You know, that thing? You know? See how annoying it is?

That thing is they ask the Returned every question except the one that everybody reading the book wants answered: what do the Returned remember about their deaths and their return and more specifically the time in between? And when they finally do, the answer and subsequently the end of the book are both wholly unsatisfying.

I’m almost indifferent to this book. While the writing is lovely, when I closed the back cover for the last time, I realised I didn’t really have an opinion (kind of a problem for someone who writes a lot of book reviews). I think the intention was to make people think but I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be thinking about.

In a word: hmmm.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 10 March 2018

Euphemisms: The Politics of Words

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One of the first pieces of advice given to writers is to write from the heart, to write honestly. Most of us take it. Because it’s good advice. Honesty helps readers relate to the writer and to what is being written.

But, of course, just like anything else, words can be used to manipulate. Through the omission of facts, the selective use of facts, the use of emotive language and, perhaps the most insidious, through euphemisms.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary, a euphemism is “the substitution of a mild, indirect or vague expression for a harsh, blunt or offensive one”. Sometimes it’s to soften the blow as in the case of saying someone has passed away so that we don’t have to say that they died. More often these days, though, euphemisms are being used to protect the writer or speaker rather than the recipient of the words.

Perhaps less surprising is the fact that most of these kinds of euphemisms used today occur in the realm of politics. Gone are the days of statesmen and women, replaced by people who are in it for the money and the power. And when they’re caught out doing the wrong thing, the euphemisms come out as frequently (and as easily) as breaths.

Have you ever watched a politician being interviewed after it becomes public knowledge that they have done or said something they shouldn’t have? You’ve likely sat through it (if you can stand to) thinking to yourself, “Why don’t they just admit they were wrong?” The words “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong” rarely form part of their explanation without being followed by a justification that contradicts the admission of regret or inappropriateness. And if they do, there always seems to be an unspoken component. “I’m sorry (I got caught).”

Here are a few euphemisms currently doing the rounds in political circles:

*“You’re in my thoughts and prayers” really means “I don’t care enough to actually do anything about it so you’ll have to content yourself with my thoughts and prayers”.

*“You’ve taken me out of context” really means “That’s exactly what I meant but I don’t understand why you are getting all up in my grille about it”.

*“It’s just a witch hunt” really means “All the allegations are true but I don’t want to give up my huge salary, cushy perks and/or position of power”.

*“Free speech is everyone’s right” really means “I’m going to say the meanest, nastiest things you’ve ever heard and encourage others to do the same and you can’t do a damn thing about it”.

*“Alternative facts” really means “lies”. This is the newest iteration of euphemisms that have been floating around for decades, if not centuries, such as “economical with the truth”, “misspeaking”, “terminological inexactitude”, “post-truth” and “misinformation”.

*“The silent majority” really means “most of the people who contact me about this say the opposite to what I’m going to do but I’m going to assume there are a lot of people out there that just haven’t contacted me and think like I do because that suits my agenda”.

*“Working families” really means “people I’ve never met and will do everything I can to avoid ever meeting in the future if at possible”.

*“Family values” really means “those things that I talk about in public to shame others while I think about screwing the mistress I have holed up in a million dollar apartment in the city”.

*“Tax relief” really means “a cut so miniscule individually you’ll never notice the difference in your weekly wage but so huge collectively that you’ll really notice it when you need education or health care”.

The great thing about politicians is that they can be (and frequently are) mocked when they use this kind of language and if they don’t knock it off, they can be (and frequently are) voted out of office. If we’re really lucky, they’ll disappear quietly into retirement (less and less frequent these days unfortunately).

The great thing about writers (all good writers anyway) is that if euphemisms have somehow managed to wriggle their way into our work, we can rid our writing of them during the editing process. Once you have an awareness of them, they’re quite easy to spot.

I’ll give the final word to a man who wrote a rather famous essay on the decline of the English language because of euphemisms and other bad writing habits and wrote the definitive novel, 1984, on what has come to be known as “doublespeak”:

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn out and useless phrase… into the dustbin where it belongs.”

Politics and the English Language, George Orwell

The Cultural and Historical Context of Words

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Last week, Senator Fraser Anning of Katter’s Australian Party gave his maiden speech in the Australian Senate. In it, he called for a ban on Muslim immigration and a return to the White Australia policy (actually a collection of policies barring people of non-European descent from migrating to the country – the policies were effectively dismantled between 1949 and 1973 and officially legislated against in 1975). That was bad enough in itself. But he then went on to say that the “final solution to the immigration problem” was a plebiscite, a non-binding and hugely expensive opinion poll of the entire Australian voting population.

The speech was widely condemned for its racist overtones and blatant lies but the two words that reviled people the most were “final solution”. I read an article about his speech only hours after he had given it and before the outcry began in earnest. As soon as I saw that he had used those specific words, I was shocked. I am by no means a Holocaust expert but even just from watching a couple of documentaries years ago, I knew that “final solution” was the euphemism used by the Nazis to that they didn’t have to call it “our plan to kill six million Jewish people”. Thus, those two words, as innocent as they are when used separately, become something to be avoided as a pair regardless of what they are being used to describe.

Senator Anning’s response to having this explained to him? “Claims that the words meant anything other than the ultimate solution to any political question is always a popular vote are simply ridiculous. Anyone who actually reads them in context will realise this.”

So I must conclude that either Senator Anning did not know that those two words already had a malicious context – in which case he is horribly uneducated (something we all love to see in the people running our countries and making choices that affect millions of lives) – or he knew about the context and chose to use them in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fury he would stir up (in which case he’s just horrible).

Words, symbols and even lives in general only have meaning because they are given meaning by the people who use the words and symbols and live those lives. And once a word, collection of words or symbol has a well-known context, it’s difficult to pry it free from that understanding and imbue it with another. The word “gay” is a good example. It originally meant “carefree” or “cheerful”. Now it is exclusively used to define a type of sexuality. The swastika symbol is another example. The word “swastika” comes from Sanskrit and denotes something that is “conducive to well-being or auspicious”. And long before the Nazis adopted it, the distinct symbol was widely used in Middle Eastern and Asian religions as well as Byzantine and Christian art.

None of that matters now because it is recognised as a representation of hate and bigotry and those who do display it today tend to be embracing Nazi ideals, not ancient religion ones. So the rest of us who don’t embrace those ideals understand that using it is considered poor form.

I’ve previously written about euphemisms – how they were traditionally used to spare people’s feelings such as saying someone had passed away instead of saying someone had died; and how they are more and more being used to pull the wool over people’s eyes, particularly in politics and the corporate world (you can read this blog post next week) – but a phrase like “final solution” falls into another category entirely. Because as Todd Haugh explains in Ethnic Cleansing as Euphemism, Metaphor, Criminology and Law (2011), the “history of mass atrocity is awash with euphemistic rationalizations”. The phrase “final solution” is the most well known of all of them. “Special treatment” is another lesser known euphemism used by the Nazis to describe Jews being gassed to death in extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Perhaps the most concerning part of Senator Anning’s use of the term “final solution” is that this does not appear to be a one-off from people of a particular political persuasion. In January 2018, Manfred Weber, the leader of the Centre-Right EPP group in European Parliament used it while talking about immigration as well. And in May 2017, Katie Hopkins, a British tabloid writer, tweeted that a “final solution” was needed in the wake of the Manchester bombing. She quickly deleted it and tweeted the same message again, replacing “final solution” with “true solution” but the damage was already done.

Words are ultimately the most dangerous weapon we – not just writers but all of us – possess and words like “final solution” must be used with caution, with an understanding of how they can wound.

One thing is for sure: there is not a single person unaware of the damage words can do. They are used to hurt others every day. But wouldn’t it be great if politicians and journalists and you and me used words to heal instead?

Twitter Writing Wisdom

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Every time I sit down to write a blog post, I aim for approximately 1,000 words. But as I posted my most recent tweet (as of writing this), I realised that writing advice doesn’t always have to be quite so lengthy. Here’s a selection of my Twitter ramblings (right back to when I started tweeting at the end of 2012) to do with writing. Hope you get something out of it. (I got an entire blog post out of it!)

2018

29 June 2018: Don’t listen to any #writer who professes to know about #writing. They only know about their writing. #amwriting #amreading

27 June 2018: I respect people who just leave out #apostrophes entirely more than people who put them in the wrong place. (My #editing teacher always said, “If in doubt, leave it out.”)

27 June 2018: In honour of #NationalWritingDay, I did some editing. It’s the life of #writer to do things bass-ackwards, right? #amwriting #amediting

26 June 2018: Saw these while I was #book browsing. Is this a writer’s worst nightmare? #am reading #amwriting

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7 June 2018: My favourite picture book is The Big Orange Splot by @DanielPinkwater because I like the message it sends about how it’s okay (and sometimes wonderful) to be different from everybody else.

5 June 2018: Deliberately mean reviews say more about the reviewer than the book.

25 May 2018: Does it say more about me or the state of television that my current favourite show in The Amazing World of Gumball (considering a 4 is the first – and not the only – number in my age)? Maybe it’s because it’s brilliant #writing!

15 January 2018: I was told face-to-face by the Sales & Marketing Director of a well-known publisher not to even bother trying to get an agent, that’s how low her opinion of agents in general was. Every publishing option – including self-publishing – has its pros and cons, its highs and lows.

8 January 2018: Went to buy a t-shirt today and lectured myself before I went that I was not to buy any #books because I already have an enormous #TBR pile. Came home with 7 books. #amreading

2017

21 December 2017: My instinct to correct every misused or missing #apostrophe online is so strong, it’s really only my lack of the infinite time required to do it that holds me back. I am on holidays from my day job for the next 3 weeks though… #amediting #writing #amwriting #grammar #nazi

20 December 2017: Bored a colleague stupid at the office Christmas lunch yesterday about how I’m a #writer (thought I did anyway). Today she told me she’d bought a copy of my #novel, started reading it last night and thought it was really good!

A Guide to Writing Drunk

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“I was drinking a case of 16-ounce tallboys a night, and there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.”

On Writing, Stephen King

One of the persistent stereotypes about writers is their fraught relationship with alcohol. For some, it’s absolutely accurate. But for most of us who write, we know it isn’t true. While there may be plenty of creatives who struggle with sobriety, it’s no greater in percentage terms than members of the general public experience. Still, why let that get in the way of giving it go?

Stephen King is the cautionary tale but what he did was alcoholic writing. Drunk writing is less intense, less destructive to life in general and a much more rare occurrence.

My first (and only) episode of drunk writing (to date) happened coincidentally. I’d just finished another long week at my non-writing job, I was about to start yet another Project October (a month of intensive writing – 31,000 words in 31 days), but before that I wanted to wind down on a Friday night with a couple of cold beverages while watching the football on television.

I’m not much of a drinker. If I want something alcoholic, I have to specifically go out and buy it as I don’t keep spares in the house just in case I feel like drinkies. And I usually can’t get through more than three drinks before getting tired and falling asleep. I was about half way through my second drink when I wrote in big wonky capital letters on one of my whiteboards, “DRUNK WRITING.”

I was going to leave it at that. Great idea, my tipsy self thought. I’d follow it up in the morning after a good sleep when I was refreshed and ready to write. The problem is that nowadays with that full-time non-writing job I mentioned, more often than not when I put off writing until I am refreshed and ready, the writing never gets done.

So I kept making notes. I wrote – sometimes clearly, sometimes illegibly – on my whiteboard. Then I would retreat to the couch, take another swig of my preferred Smirnoff Double Black, rest the bottle in my lap, have a cat jump on me and spill the liquid over both of us, clean it up and wait for the next wave of inspiration.

This piece of writing is the result.

“But it doesn’t read like something written by a drunk person,” I hope with fingers crossed you are thinking to yourself. Of course not. I don’t – and nobody should – publish first drafts even when they’re written sober, let alone drunk.

If you’d like to give it a go, here are a few tips.

Step 1: Choose your moment

I recommend a Friday or Saturday night. Getting drunk during the day, no matter how productive you intend to be, isn’t a great look, more pitiable than experimental. Plus, the daytime commitments that many of us have (children, jobs, etc) don’t mix well with drinking.

Step 2: Get nicely drunk

Not so drunk that you pass out, not so drunk that you vomit on your keyboard (it’s counterintuitive if you have to spend your drunk writing time cleaning stomach bile and undigested food off and out of your computer, even more so if you do so much damage to your hardware that you need to purchase a new machine).

Step 3: Embrace weird ideas

Just go with them. After all, if you wanted to be sensible, you wouldn’t be trying this drunk writing thing in the first place. The weird ideas might not make sense in the morning but in these inebriated moments, they will be wonderful. And you never know how they might just evolve into terrific plots. A fight-to-the-death reality television show with child contestants probably sounded a little insane to begin with but now it’s difficult to imagine a world in which The Hunger Games books don’t exist.

Step 4: Ignore the rules

Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, chapters or generally making sense. Drunk writing is more of a stream of consciousness type of writing. The only thing you should expect of yourself is to get words down on a page (or a whiteboard or a napkin or whatever it is you have to hand). All of the things that need to be fixed to make it understandable for the sober reader can be left for the sober editor. (The sober editor will probably be you as well, just you the next day after the effects of the alcohol have worn off.)

Step 5: Don’t overdo it

The reason that drunk writing is appealing is because it’s something done rarely. If you’re drunk writing all the time, then you’re not drunk writing anymore, you’re just an alcoholic and while it worked okay for Stephen King in the short-term, it doesn’t do you (or any of your loved ones) any favours over the longer course of your writing (or general) life.

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So that’s drunk writing. I got this article out of it. But I’m not planning to do any more drunk writing for a while. Firstly, it’s incompatible with that Project October I mentioned above, which really requires focus and not falling asleep. Secondly, trying to edit 31,000 words of drunk writing doesn’t sound all that appealing to my sober editor (me). Thirdly, for every episode of drunk writing that requires three drinks, I could be spending that money on a book (and if you know me at all, you know I’d much rather be spending my money on books). And lastly, if I spent a month drinking, my medical bills would also likely skyrocket. (And since I’m doing this Project October in July – yes, that’s Dry July – it wouldn’t seem quite right.)

If drunk writing isn’t quite up your alley (after all, it is essentially getting drunk alone), then a nice social alternative is the drunk reading group. How does it work? I’ll get back to you once I’ve been to one.

Book Review: The First Stone by Helen Garner

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Helen Garner could write a book about painting one wall of her living room and it would still be fascinating, that’s how good a writer she is. But having now read three of her books, I’m seeing a theme: she is baffled at why everybody doesn’t think like her and more baffled when people won’t take the time to try to convince her to think otherwise, then give her the opportunity to do the same.

The First Stone is creative non-fiction, meshing tales from Garner’s own personal life, particularly emphasising her and her friends’ experiences with feminism and unwanted male attention, with the story of two accusations of sexual harassment at the University of Melbourne by two students against the head of Ormond College, one of the residences. It comes to her attention when she reads about it on the front page of The Age newspaper, as the students have taken their complaint to the police after being unsatisfied with the university’s handling of the matter.

Incensed that it wasn’t kept in-house, that it detracts from “real” issues of violence and inequality women face, and that it appears to have cost a man who is guilty at most of an “inept social blunder” his reputation, Helen dashes off a sympathetic letter to the alleged perpetrator. She thinks this will be the extent of her involvement but when the verdict in the case of the second instance is delivered in court, she is there in the crowd of people watching.

After earlier being found guilty on the first charge, the second charge is dismissed. On appeal, the first conviction is also overturned. Mostly, these results are because even though the accusers are highly credible witnesses, it’s a case of “he said, she said” and there’s still reasonable doubt. By now, Garner is determined to get to the bottom of it all. But she’s shot herself in the foot. The letter she penned to the alleged perpetrator has been copied and distributed widely, even to the alleged victims and their supporters. So when Garner asks to interview them for the book, they emphatically decline. You can hardly blame them.

Instead, she talks to anyone else she can find. She interviews the alleged perpetrator extensively, his wife, members of the college, former students, and winds it all into a narrative of her own experiences and the testimony of her many feminist friends. There seems to be a clear divide between the young feminists and the older feminists. The young feminists think that they shouldn’t have to tolerate being groped by men in positions of authority. The older feminists think because they haven’t been raped that they are making mountains out of molehills.

It’s interesting in the context of the #MeToo movement in 2017 and 2018 that this argument between feminists (or at least between women) is still happening nearly twenty-five years after the Ormond incident. Catherine Deneuve and a hundred other French women have defended men’s “right” to pester persistently, including non-consensual touching, as a means of opening a dialogue about a hoped-for romantic or sexual relationship. Rose McGowan (and about a million, possibly a billion other woman from what I can tell on social media) have defended their right to never be touched again without explicit agreement, especially in an employment setting. It seems like we haven’t come very far.

I read this book in six hours and, as with all of Garner’s books, it is exquisitely well written. The approach she takes is very similar to Joe Cinque’s Consolation – she comes into the story after a lot of it has already played out in court and attempts to retry the cases without access to the main players because they won’t speak to her. There’s no satisfying conclusion, no poetic justice, no real change in Garner herself as a result of her involvement in the events.

I can understand why this book was controversial. Many people boiled it down to this proposition: why didn’t the victims simply slap the face of the man who apparently said inappropriate things in the first incident and repeatedly groped a breast in the second? That would have been a proper comeuppance, they argue, but surely he didn’t deserve to have his reputation destroyed and to lose his job. I’m one of those younger feminists; I was still in high school at the time this was all playing out. As someone who was punished for responding to a bully in a position of power at work in not exactly but something like this suggestion in the mid-2000s, I can tell you it backfires spectacularly. We can’t win when we follow the rules and we can’t win when we don’t.

Still, it’s a credit to Garner’s talent that she can take a position I inherently disagree with and write about it in such a way that I still admire her. I read somewhere recently that we should all read more books written about and by people with views opposite to our own. If they were all such a pleasure to read as The First Stone, I don’t think we’d mind so much but those kinds of books – respectful, stylish, amiably exploring multiple sides and then agreeing to disagree – are few and far between.

This is an important contribution to the debate on feminism but I also feel like I need to read a book about the Ormond incidents with a perspective from the other side. I understand there are a couple of books that fall into that category so I’ll be searching them out, too. But I doubt they’ll have the readability of The First Stone, even if I agree wholeheartedly with their messages. I guess you can’t have it all.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 12 January 2018