Emerging from Hideous Coccoons

So, the progress on The Skybound Sea is…solid.  It's moving, in any event, and moving in a forward direction.  That's not a bad thing.  It is, however, not moving as fast as I would like it to and as a result, blogging and general forms of communication are taking a hit for it, which is also not a bad thing.  Presumably, you enjoy my writing as much as my blog or you probably wouldn't be here and, as a result, you might not take offense if the latter bleeds a little for the former.  Hopefully, that's not a bad thing.

But since this is my blog and we are here to talk about bad things, I would like to expose you all a little to Scott Adams' latest insanity.

I'm not linking directly to his site because I don't at all mind denying him some traffic and I'm not going to list the previous episodes of the great saga of Mr. Adams' douchebaggery which, at this point, is becoming something that can only be described as mythical, as in so fantastic it can hardly be believed.  Mr. Jeff Fecke of the blog I just linked does a fine job of it, anyway, which was lovely of him to write.  But, in the interests of not being completely useless, let me summarize things for you.

Inceptum: Scott Adams draws Dilbert, a cartoon that hasn't been relevant in a format that hasn't been relevant for years now.  And given that everyone now knows what a memo is and isn't really stirred to laughter by the observation that managers can sometimes be incompetent, our boy Scott is desperately looking for a new way to keep from fading out of notice.

Medius: Scott Adams discovers that people who say stupid shit online often get a lot of attention.

Terminus: Scott Adams puts his certified genius to work for him by making sweeping revelations to astound the minds of mere mortals by likening women to angry children, the womens' rights movement to a weary joke, men to slavering rape-machines incapable of controlling themselves and people who don't agree with him to simpering chimps at keyboards.  Any contradiction or question angled toward him is met with the rolling of eyes and the gentle reminder that this is just fact and if you have a problem with it, you're living in denial.

It's that last part we should pay attention to because it's that last part that actually has some relevance on what we should talk about as writers.  Because frankly, we've probably all been guilty of it at some point.

The thing is, you've probably heard that before in a few ways and with good reason.  The blatant acceptance of fact tends to be rather closely linked with some common complaints of SF/F in general: that it's conservative, that it doesn't do a lot of pushing of social mores, that it's insensitive and underutilizes characters of different orientations.  And likewise, we tend to accept it all with our various reasons: "a woman couldn't beat up a man, that's just impossible," "women didn't have equal rights in a medieval society," "a gay person couldn't function normally in this kind of society so we can't use it here" and variations on "that wouldn't happen."

Which baffles me.

I mean, presumably we're writing in this particular genre because of the freedom it allows, because of the worlds we can create and because of the characters we throw into it.  Why some people are so eager to slap down rules, constraints and the same sort of legalities that govern our every day life is, to me, more than a little baffling. I mean, why invent a vast, sprawling world if you want it to act, look, feel and work exactly like medieval England except with one or two twists ("yes, well, my peasants shovel their own feces instead of animals'").  Why not do whatever the hell you want?

By that, of course, I'm not suggesting that you do just throw things around willy-nilly with violent whimsy and fuck whoever takes exception to that.  I'm merely suggesting you think carefully about the discrepancies between rules and logic.

Logic suggests that the wilting flower of a woman wouldn't be able to fight off a big man, logic suggests that a homosexual character probably wouldn't find acceptance very readily in a society that is theoretically more regressive than our own modern one in which this is still a challenge, logic suggests that a society based on patriarchy wouldn't value womens' rights very much.

But logic doesn't say that a woman couldn't find a way to fight a big man through one way or another, logic doesn't say that a homosexual character couldn't exist, persevere and even find some measure of happiness in the face of adversity, logic doesn't say that women wouldn't think of rights as being all that important even if not a lot of people do, logic doesn't say "that can't happen."

Rules do.

Logic is something you can twist, bend, mold and adapt, like clay.  You can use it to change a character, to change society, to change reality and readers will love it because you're offering that by changing the world around them instead of pulling stuff out of your anus to fit the plot.  Rules are just constraints.  They do not change.  They do not alter.  Your reader will be bored because, once they figure out the rules, they know what's going to happen.  You need logic.  You don't need rules.

But the reason we bring Scott Adams into all of this is because he represents a very real danger from following the rules, from accepting fact too easily, from twisting yourself until your logic becomes as immutable as rules: you can start thinking that people on an individual level have rules, that people act a certain way, that black people do this, that white people do this.

That's not just insane.  That's not just unsatisfying for a reader.  That's the antithesis of writing, regardless of genre.  You are not there to tell people how everyone in the world is.  At least, not directly.  You're there to tell them how these people are and how these people relate to the world around them, which is not something that anyone else would do, because you're writing them and you aren't anyone else and people will read you because of that.

And if you're playing by rules, then you simply aren't being yourself.

Doubt fact.

Forget rules.

Challenge everything.