Last week, Stina Leicht (pronounced "Light") joined us to talk about her worldbuilding, with a specific focus on her series The Fey and the Fallen, set in Northern Ireland in the 1970's, a tumultuous period politically, which was known as The Troubles. The main character in the series is Liam, a young Catholic man who thinks his dad is a Protestant who "knocked his mother up and ran," when actually his father is a Pouka (shapeshifter).
Stina told us that the idea for the series started when she read a book called Those are Real Bullets, about Bloody Sunday in 1971, a protest that started because of lack of jobs and housing for Catholic families, and went bad (very bad). She wrote a short story about the character who stepped into her head, and then that story turned into a novel - a novel which involved four years of research including Irish language classes, tons of reading, and interviews with people who lived in Derry and Belfast in that era.
Stina emphasized that we should not only rely on what is written down, because there are plenty of aspects to historical events that don't get written down. There are things people just assume that everybody knows, when really only insiders know them. It is certainly a case of the victors writing the history - and the warnings associated with that should apply across contexts. Watch out when you are researching only based on one type of history. When you are in the middle of a conflict it's a lot messier than it appears 200 years later. Stina recommended the movie Harvey to us (Jimmy Stewart) as a source of some of her inspiration.
Pouka (Púca) are really dark in Irish legends.
One of the most interesting things to come out of the discussion (in my opinion) was that this conflict is talked about most commonly as a dispute between Catholics and protestants, but it really has to do with power, and who has all the jobs and who has to rely on the dole. Having a Catholic school on one's resume would mean one was ruled out for jobs. Unemployment for Irish Catholic men reached 40% in this period. There was similar discrimination in the area of housing, and its effects were especially bad because votes were linked to homes. This inequity and the inspiration of the American Civil Rights movement led to protests where families marched. Bloody Sunday saw 13 people killed between the ages of 15 and 22.
I asked Stina "What goes on the page?" She told us that research is like an iceberg, and what goes on the page is just the tip, but what is under the surface still affects the plot (though it is unseen). A writer has to make many decisions of "How much is too much?" "What precisely affects the plot?" It was particularly tricky because people who were present during this period are still alive. She described how careful she was about having respect for the people and the situation, and not treating it as cut and dried. She said that a couple of people expressed anger after the book was published, but not very many.
Stina wanted magic to be an undercurrent in these stories, because she likes stories where you can't quite tell what is real and what is magic (and she does a great job in the series). The first book is where protagonist Liam's life "becomes a train wreck" and the second is about coping and getting hope. The third book has been outlined... (I can't wait to see it, personally!)
Recently Stina has been working on a "Flintlock Fantasy" set in the late 1700's with strong American Revolutionary influence, but set in a secondary world. She says, "You always start with a question," and her question for this new project was "What if Tolkien were American?" The story involves racism and classism as well as magic etc.
We asked Stina what the difference was between writing in the real world and writing in a made-up world. She said that in the real world, often a lot of the worldbuilding has been done for you. There are interesting and hard-to-research details like how you can see a bus full of people and say "They are all Catholics." The secret to that one is apparently that Catholics support certain soccer teams and will wear those team colors. There are also other things like how you pronounce "h" and what side of the street you walk on. The same kinds of details are important in secondary worlds: markers for different sides of a social division.
It's useful to pick a place and study it to see the social markers. Stina mentioned two of her own choices on the day: blue hair meaning a punk connection (though some observed it could also mean a geek connection, or an artist identity), a cowboy hat indicating where she's from (Texas). This kind of close observation can inspire you for creating the same kinds of distinctions in secondary worlds.
Stina mentioned that she has an animation background that informs her writing. She said that often successful stories start with key elements that audiences can recognize and relate to, and then hang extra futuristic or fantasy elements on top. She mentioned admiring the worldbuilding in Blade Runner, where there were layers and layers in the background, including a lamp in the police office with scenes from a buffalo hunt on it. How people talked about the androids as "skin jobs." It's very important not just to consider the alternate reality but how people talk about the markers of identity as well. Stina mentioned how "leadbellies" was a word to describe people wearing gray uniforms. Liam, her protagonist, does not drink tea because he's a good Republican...
It's too easy to make a fantasy world seem antiseptic because details are left out. Write between the cracks. Think about how a world fits together ecologically. How do its people get by financially? What is their poitics? What kind of agriculture do they have? What is the technology level, and how does this interplay with magic? Art? Architecture? Design? Linguistics? If you are going to fill a room with stuff, make sure that the stuff it contains isn't random, and has connections to the world and to the characters who occupy it. It's good also to consider how things change over the course of history.
Stina said, "Writing is like cooking." She said this meant that it wasn't a really exact science, and if you approach it as super-exact, you miss out. "Sprinkle it in."
We had a great conversation and even ran over a bit! Stina is super awesome and I swear she talks in quotes, which I was often unable to write down with complete accuracy. Thank you so much, Stina, for attending, and thanks also to the other attendees, Glenda Pfeiffer, Reggie Lutz, and Christian Stiehl.
Tomorrow's discussion will be Music, so I hope to see you there! Google+. 11am PDT.
This, folks, is going to be one heck of an issue. I was honored to write an essay to help the Kickstarter, and I'm even more thrilled that my essay will be included in such a powerhouse lineup of awesomeness. Go check it out!
On spring break I went camping, and one of the things we did was go on a guided hike with a docent. Our docent, Cathy, was an expert in the plants of the redwood forest, and over the next four hours, she found, identified, and spoke about more than twenty different plants. She told us that people who walk in the woods and look only at the tall trees will often think there is little biodiversity in the redwood forest, when in fact there is enormous biodiversity (especially in fungi!). We had such a good time with her, and heard a little about her life - she lives six miles out of town, in the midst of the forest.
She was a delightful and fascinating person to spend four hours with. And as I often do, I started thinking about writing - characters, in particular.
Characters should have expertise. We all have things we are especially interested in, and things that inspire us. We pursue those things. We gain expertise. A person who does not have expertise in anything is something of an outlier. So it's worth asking:
What is this character's expertise?
Hub Girl is a hacker and really good at coordinating her large gang of kids in raids on vending machines (which is how they get food to eat).
Rulii is an expert fighter and also has a unique view on the social divisions in his society that result from his struggles as a member of the oppressed minority.
Nekantor is an expert at perceiving patterns and anticipating nefarious political motives.
Felo is an expert at knife-fighting technique and is also a kind teacher.
Almost any character will have some kind of expertise. Nekantor is an antagonist. Felo is a secondary character in a short story I'm writing. Even a unique way of looking at the world can give a character insights and expertise that other characters don't have.
Expertise is not just about what people are good at. It affects how they think, and what they perceive in the world around them. The way a character understands something conceptually will affect how they act in the story. An expert will take leaps rather than going step by step. An expert will pay no attention to what doesn't matter, but will pay extra close attention to the details that do matter - and she (or he) may be the only one able to perceive what matters and what doesn't. Their motives will be intriguing, and further examination will reveal aspects of expertise that other characters, or readers, might not have been aware of.
Diversity has been lacking in our fiction for too long. This has been said many times, by many people, but it bears repeating. This history is what has created the white/straight/cisgendered/able defaults.
After all, where does a "default" come from? It's an expectation established by a long history of stories told without diversity - a long history where the stories told by other voices were marginalized or silenced. It's not just a conscious expectation, either - like many of the other patterns in our lives, it becomes so ingrained that we stop noticing when we see it.
Our psychological expectations are very powerful. Once we've learned a pattern, we learn to correct it. Take listening to language as an example. If we are on the telephone and have a bad connection, we can still understand a lot of the conversation because our knowledge of language will fill in the blanks. Or if we're speaking with someone and that person sneezes or makes a speech error or adds some other extraneous noise, we know how to filter it out and return to the fundamentals of the message.
When it comes to diversity in fiction, this psychological tendency is a real problem. People who are writing diverse worlds often have to fight their own unthinking smoothing of diverse patterns - smoothing which is born of their understanding of the pattern of the milquetoast past. Similarly, people who read in diverse worlds may not notice their diversity. The expectation of the default can cause readers to see the default in what they read, even when it is not there. In other words, we've been handed all-white, all-straight, all-cisgendered, all-able fiction for so long that when we're handed something different, some people will go so far as to subconsciously erase the descriptions that do exist in the text. Thus it can happen that when some readers see the actual diversity of the text represented visually, they cry out in surprise (and often enough, disappointment).
Right now, we're in an exciting time for fiction. Stories are starting to be diversified, and a great many people are working actively to achieve this. A lot of these people are members of the historically marginalized groups in question, but quite a number are members of traditionally more privileged groups. (Privilege is a complex concept because it exists simultaneously on so many different parameters.)
I've heard people say that it shouldn't be necessary to specify things like skin color, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. in some contexts. I disagree, particularly given the strength of the expectation we are fighting against. If we are not explicit in the ways we portray diversity, they are far more likely to be ignored or elided by readers.
Yes, it's possible that people who try to diversify their fiction will do it badly. That's why books like Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward are so important. Fortunately, the more people try, the more people are likely to start getting it right, and changing that expectation by creating a new pattern. And it's about time we started teaching people to see diversity in fiction, because it will help the cause of equity and empathy in our own societies.
Here are a couple of valuable questions to ask yourself if you are designing a fictional world:
1. How does diversity happen in a society? What types of diversity are genetic and exist already within a given region? What types of diversity occur between and within cultural subgroups of this region? What other regions exist in this world for people of different backgrounds to come from, such as travelers or traders, or royalty who marry for alliances, or people of different nationalities come together for a major project (public works or space travel, etc.)?
2. How is diversity envisioned within a society? Once you've answered the question of how to get readers to envision the diversity of your world, it's worth taking the extra step and asking how the different populations of your world envision the diversity around them. Some cultural groups (often insiders or the privileged) can be blind to the existence of others. Some can be more explicitly aware.
Take a look at your work and the diversity you are trying to portray with an eye for how integrated that diversity is into the world and the story - how *essential* it is to an understanding of the world works, so that readers will be less likely to miss it. Think of yourself not only as portraying diversity, but as teaching readers (and characters) how to perceive the diversity of this world.
We had a great discussion on this topic with today's group, including Lesley Smith, Lillian Csernica, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Reggie Lutz.
Disability is an issue that is often problematic in fiction - either avoided entirely, portrayed as a problem to fix, or portrayed as something that can only bring suffering (or leads to people wishing they were dead). People with disabilities are either marginalized by the work, or excluded altogether.
We listed some books we had enjoyed where people had disabilities. I mentioned Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick. Glenda mentioned Miles Vorkosigan from the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, who struggles to differentiate his disabilities, caused by poison, from mutants who are feared by society. We wondered whether Tyrion Lannister from A Game of Thrones would count as disabled (and someone mentioned the character who loses his hand). The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey is an amazing one. Participants also mentioned The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, and Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Lesley told us about working with her service dog, Uni. She told us that dog behavior changes a lot between times when the dog is on duty and off duty. Apparently Uni accomplishes a "Red Sea thing," parting people on the street when Lesley is walking, as well as helping her cross streets. Uni also knows routes, and if Lesley says, "Let's go to Starbucks," will happily take her there.
Lillian told us about her two sons. Michael has cerebral palsy and seizure disorder. From her experience caring for him, she knows how to use a hospital bed, a lift, a wheelchair, a suction machine, and all kinds of medical equipment. John is on the autism spectrum and has language processing difficulties. Lillian says that they are an adaptive household, and are accustomed to doing whatever works.
I mentioned that adaptive technologies include such things as glasses, or ear horns. Every single one of us at the hangout was wearing glasses! Adaptive technologies have existed for a very long time. Lafcadio Hearn, who had bad eyesight, had a special table built for him that would hold his papers right up close to his eyes.
We spoke about the deaf community. Because their disability leads to them using a different form of language (sign language), this means that the deaf also become a language community, and thus also a unique cultural community. Therefore an accommodation like a cochlear implant, which would be a way to eliminate the disability, becomes problematic because it becomes a threat to that person's membership within the linguistic and cultural community of the deaf. There is no guarantee that an accommodation to disability, no matter how effective, will be automatically welcomed by those it is supposed to help - especially if cultural identity and group membership are at stake.
Lesley also emphasized that a disability described by an umbrella term like "blindness" can be caused by any number of different issues, and that this is why there are no miracle cures. Lillian remarked that "autism" is a similar umbrella term, which lumps together all kinds of different non-neurotypical issues. She emphasized that there is no "band aid" to deal with a phenomenon of such complexity.
Historically, disability in fiction has sometimes been an indicator of an evil character - but in this day and age, that approach has become (dreadfully) inappropriate and insulting to disabled people and communities.
We spoke a bit about accommodation of disabilities in Japan. Lesley shared that she had a great time traveling in Japan without her dog. I mentioned that the accommodation of wheelchairs has increased enormously since I first lived there, probably because of Japan's aging population. Lesley told us that service dogs are not allowed on escalators without training because of the risk of them catching their feet at the top of the escalator.
Glenda noted that the presence of accommodating devices and infrastructure says a lot about the culture that creates them, and about their understanding of disability.
We also spoke about invisible disabilities, such as autism, depression, heart conditions, cancer treatment, PTSD etc. People dealing with these disabilities also often have to deal with other people who won't accept the fact that they are disabled. Lesley asked, "Why should you have to justify your disability?" There are even hate crimes against the disabled (attacks on people with service dogs for example). Lillian mentioned an incident where she had to explain to someone why her son John was talking to himself in order to avoid a more serious altercation.
Lesley said that once you have a guide dog "you become public property." People always want to touch your dog, even when it is on duty. They also have opinions about how you should be treating it, and some people have even been known to be reported to the police for taking their service dogs out on very hot days. Are you abusing the dog under such circumstances? Is it reasonable to expect people who need service dogs never to go out when it's hot? We also spoke about pregnancy and how people often try to touch pregnant women.
It's important to acknowledge that disability exists - and to have characters and fictional societies recognize that it exists.
Reggie said (rightly) that we often represent the differences that exist in our world in the fictional context. Fiction is used as a metaphor for our own world, and fiction is ideal for exploring issues of difference, which is why it's important to have representation of different groups. We should be careful to provide a model of society that has optimal relevance to our story plot.
This weekend we watched part of The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. We only watched part of it because it happened to be a film of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's 1939 production, and as it turned out, it was too excruciating to watch.
I have always enjoyed the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas as light and often silly pieces reflecting the culture of their time. I was in The Pirates of Penzance once, and it was incredible fun. I have some ideas about what took this particular production and turned it into "arrrrrgh!" Part of it was that the sets and costumes were so incredibly elaborate - it became much harder to think of it as light and silly. Part of it was that they had no clue about Japanese language and had fake kanji scrawled inexpertly all over the place. Part of it was that they mixed a lot of realistic things with a lot of totally ridiculous things. Part of it was of course that none of the actors were Asian (though to expect that of D'Oyly Carte in 1939 of course is a stretch to start with).
A few minutes in I started to realize that I probably should have treated the whole thing as an exercise in anthropology and history, a sort of teachable moment from the perspective of social justice and historical awareness.
And it was that. We just couldn't endure it for very long.
My son was offended. My daughter was, as she termed it, "embarrassed."
I can't say that I'm unhappy with their reactions. I totally agreed with their assessments, and I'm very happy, in fact, that they have developed a kind of social awareness that I never had until I was much older. I did feel disappointed, though, that this had been their first introduction to Gilbert and Sullivan.
At the breakfast table the following morning, my husband and I spoke with our kids about an experience we'd had - the experience, in fact, that had motivated us to suggest the movie. He and I had been to a performance of The Mikado in the town of Chichibu, Japan. Chichibu is in the outer suburbs of Tokyo and is hypothesized to be the town on which the "Town of Titipu" was originally based. After many years of being banned in Japan, this was the first time it was being staged there, and so he and I went out to see it. It was amazing, and we both really enjoyed it. For one thing, the costumes were done by a kabuki company, and let me tell you, they were incredible. For another thing, the audience was into the spirit of the thing. The song about the list of potential candidates for execution had even been revised to include "kids on cell phones." It was delightful.
It was utterly, utterly unlike what we saw in the movie.
At this point I'm pretty sure that The Mikado itself is so problematic in its ignorant portrayal of Japan that I may not ever be able to enjoy it again. In a sense this is a shame, since I have liked the songs a great deal in the past. I'm happy to continue enjoying The Pirates of Penzance or other goofy pieces that make fun of English society, of which Gilbert and Sullivan were a part. I feel very lucky that I got to see that production in Japan, which I see in a sense as Japanese people taking the opportunity to reclaim the piece and turn it into something that belonged to them. That is a memory that I will value, and share, but when I try to introduce my kids to operettas again, I'll be going in a different direction.
I feel good that we were able to talk about our feelings as a family, and reinforce my kids' sense that it's a complicated issue, but that they were entirely right to object.
I was blown away today by this rare footage from 1930 of Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher, talking about how she taught Helen how to speak with her mouth. Just fascinating, and an incredible accomplishment for both of them.
I just had to share this fabulous link with you. It's a very short video, but this fellow is just amazing the way he can take you from one accent to the other all over the map in a single take!
We had a delightful hangout with quite a large group this week, including Deborah Ross, Reggie Lutz, Lesley Smith, Che Gilson, and Christian Stiehl. Our topic was the issue of making sure that the characters we write fit into the worlds we have created.
We started out talking about our pet peeves in this regard - especially kickass female characters appropriate to the modern era being plunked into alternate worlds or historical frames where their attitudes would make no sense. Che said (and generally we agreed) that she is really bothered by steampunk settings where kickass girls complain about their corsets, or wear them on the outside, or complain about hating balls and disliking tea. If we consider the inspiration for the steampunk environment to be the Victorian cultural milieu, then there is value in having the cultural values of the era match the clothing and other things that grew out of them. There was plenty of female rebellion during the time period, such as women breaking out to become doctors and writers. This can be stretched, too, if you have the right character, but sudden kung fu kicks stick out as anachronisms - and so do modern ideas about feminism.
Deborah talked about the problem with having a monolithic idea about cultures. No culture is entirely uniform; all have internal variations, sometimes wide ones. Within a time period or scenario, not everyone will have the same cultural reference.
1. Don't make everyone in a single culture the same. 2. Don't rely on Mary Sue characters, because the person you would ideally like to be probably won't fit well into a cultural environment that is not your own.
Christian mentioned liking the way that George R.R. Martin handles his female characters, because though most women wear gowns and dresses, some of these are powerful politically, and while most are not very physically active, Brienne is a notable exception with a backstory to fit. He took issue with Keira Knightley's character in Pirates of the Caribbean because he felt she was too waifish to be a good fighter (this ties into all kinds of issues with body image for women but we didn't follow that thread within the hangout).
There have been seriously kickass women in history, and it is worth looking them up and checking out how they came to their accomplishments within the context of their historical periods. This would include Joan of Arc, Boudicca and many othes. Deborah mentioned Doña Agracia Nasi, a member of Jewish family expelled from Portugal who became the head of the largest spice trading group in all Europe. Do your research, because strong women were all over the place! Also, things were not uniformly oppressive. There are always backcurrents against prevailing norms.
We want to create the sense that characters have "grown up" into their environments rather than being "dropped in." Don't have your characters declare "I am X, therefore I do this" or "You only say that because you are X."
Deborah described the three different peoples in her Seven-Petaled Shield series: nomadic horse people (like the Sarmatians or Mongols), city people (like the Romans), and a very educated people (like Judeans). Characters from each have their own distinct advantages within their own cultural contexts.
People typically have a relationship to their cultural values. Ask what culture-internal axes of privilege exist. Where do characters stand relative to these? Who gets marginalized, and why? In this world, what constitutes transgressive behavior?
Stereotyping is a great tool, but it is NOT a tool for laying out and defining the peoples of your world. It is instead a great tool for exploring the interrelations between those peoples, imagining how they would view one another, and thus what kinds of misunderstandings and plot points might arise.
Che encouraged us to look out for the default character of a rebel out to change the system. These are harder to find than you might believe. I told a story of how I'd gone back and changed a character completely so that instead of being the default rebel, readers could come to understand how he had arrived at his revolutionary ideas. Reggie talked about a scenario where the oppression visited on many built up into a group idea that change was necessary.
Deborah talked about how, in the director's commentary on the Hobbit movie, they spoke about the appeal of Bilbo Baggins. Tolkien portrayed virtue in small ordinary folk and their behaviors, not sword-swinging heroes. In a way, ordinary folk are easier to identify with. Bilbo starts with ordinary life and then undergoes a gradual journey of personal change that puts him always on the edge of being in over his head, allowing him to gain resources as he goes. In this way, we can have a stepwise development of a character who can then become powerful (even kickass!). This starkly contrasts with C.S. Lewis, where Peter is given a sword and instantly can use it (we theorized that it must have inherently magical properties of endowing skill upon its owner!).
You can have people start out as exceptional, but it's important to work on giving readers ways to relate to them (metaphorically at least). We always want to see the stakes raised in a story, but we don't want to top out. After you've beaten Grendel, will you have to go beat his mom? Or will you have to suddenly discover your kryptonite to level the playing field after the fact? It's fun when we can see characters who have great skills but are nevertheless always struggling in some way. If you are going to give characters skills, think through how they came about getting them. Were they educated in these skills? By whom, and how, and what did that education mean to them?
As you write, make sure to create links between how your world works, and the kinds of actions and thoughts your character can have within it. Keep asking "why."
Thank you to everyone who attended! This week's topic is Disability and Accommodation in worldbuilding. I hope to see you there!
