Becoming "A Writer"

Did you feel like "a writer" when you started to write? I didn't. I suppose I felt 1. like a person trying an experiment, 2. like someone who'd discovered a dangerously absorbing hobby, 3. like a person writing alone in a closet (not literally!) when she should have been doing something else.

To take the closet metaphor a little further, there came a point when I decided to "come out." This meant talking to other people about my writing - at first, those people were friends who were interested in science fiction and fantasy already. Sometimes, though, I ended up having cool sf/f related conversations with people on airplanes, or in other relatively anonymous circumstances where I could "try on" the identity I felt I was striving for.

At a certain point in this process I had one of my little disconnected anthropological epiphanies.

I wasn't going to feel like "a writer" just because I was writing. I needed to take a public stance - in a sense, to declare my identity as a writer within a community that would recognize me as one.

This was a project.

Changing one's identity isn't as easy as slapping another label on. I take the identity of "writer" very seriously, in the sense of taking writing as a vocation, and I didn't want to be a person who was pretending to be a writer (I felt like this in some conversations). Fortunately I discovered something: the community of science fiction and fantasy writers is an extremely welcoming one, willing to help you join them.

That said, I think it's important to realize that entering any social community needs to be done with care and respect. It helps if you can recognize early on that this is what you are in fact doing, and think through the steps you want to take. It's not enough to go out and say to others, "I'm a writer. See how good I am? You want to read and publish* my work!" You need to enact writer-ness at the same time.

*This isn't really a post about getting published, though getting published is related to the process of becoming a writer. The nice thing about getting published is that people go to the trouble of writing down steps to take and rules to follow, so that you can take/follow them.

So how does one enact writer-ness?

If you're paying attention, the closer you get to writers, the more you'll learn about what they (we!) are like. Of course, I know enough writers by now to tell you definitively that there is no one single way to be a writer. However, I still think there are some helpful ingredients worth mentioning.

1. WRITE.
If you're not doing that, then why are we talking about this anyway?

2. Strive to improve your craft.
There is no pinnacle, and there is no "done" until the words are on the page the publisher has printed for you. There is only, "this is as good as I can make it right now." Every conversation you have, and every new thing you learn can open your eyes to more depth and possibility.

3. Listen respectfully.
So long as it addresses the content of your text, every word of feedback you receive on your work is worth listening to. If your aunt or your mom says they get confused at the beginning, believe them, and think about what that might mean for your approach. If you are on a critique group like Critters, consider each piece of feedback and why the reader might have had the impression they had. If you are lucky enough to get feedback from an established writer, be grateful and think through its import very carefully. There will be much to learn there even if you disagree.

4. Read attentively.
Read both to experience the range of story, style and voice, and to "get to know" authors in your field.

5. Try to meet and talk to other writers.
This can be literal face-to-face meeting or it can be engaging on the internet through blog comments, etc. Face to face opportunities are more valuable, I believe. One important thing to note here, however: going fangirl or fanboy is not going to be particularly effective for your learning process (as tempting as it is!). I think the place where I learned the most about writers was when I went to the Nebulas weekend - which was all writers and a very very few fans. I realized that most writers love to talk about their work, especially in direct and specific terms, so if I had a story of theirs that I could make comments on, I would have something meaningful to contribute to a conversation in which I could learn a whole lot.

You may have noticed at this point that I think it's valuable to approach the community of writers from the stance of a learner. I still take this stance all the time. This doesn't mean that you have nothing to offer of your own - of course not - but from the point of view of writing craft, it's important to recognize the experience and resulting expertise of others. Even if that person's writing is not your favorite kind, their success in the community will be related to their expertise in any of a range of different areas (gorgeous prose, great pacing, "story," inventiveness, marketing savvy, etc. - and not necessarily all at once).

I was very lucky going in, because I had my academic background, and I was able to use it to help my craft and to hone my ideas. Linguistics and Anthropology are great resources, and I was able to have wonderful conversations with writers where I felt like I actually did have some expertise - not in being a writer (yet, at that point), but at least in language and culture (topics which are clearly useful to stories). This blog has done wonderful things for my writing career: it helps people to learn my name, it helps me focus my own thoughts, and it creates a community that I can feel a part of on a daily basis, so that I don't feel any more like I'm writing in that little closet. The best part of it for me is that I started it out of love of the topics I discuss, and I still enjoy writing it - it helps me, and yet is not a chore.

We are so lucky to have the internet. Online is where the community of geographically separated writers can "meet" and interact - one of the reasons why it's worth spending time there.

But don't forget to write.

Our writing lies at the core of our identity as writers. I might meet an author at a convention or see them appear online, but unless I've read their work I don't feel like I really know them. I think this is the case for a lot of us. Similarly, it's possible to hang out with writers all the time and yet never be one, either because you're not writing or because no one cares to read your work. This points to a critical step in entering the community of writers: getting people to read your work.

Getting published is a terrific way to get read, no doubt about it. But remember all those rejections? If the editor read past the first sentence, they shouldn't be considered a waste. A rejection with comments is true gold, because it means the editor cared. It might look like a "no," but it might better be phrased as, "no, but I can see you're a writer." Other writers will respect you for having rejections like that, especially if they can see you're using them to improve your craft. And when you finally get an acceptance, your identity in the editor's mind will not be on that story alone, but in your history of interaction (as impersonal as those interactions might seem at first).

Because your writing is at the core of your identity as a writer, asking someone to read your work is a more high-stakes activity than you might imagine. Don't push it. Approach it with care, and with an awareness that professional active writers are extremely busy. Chances are good that they're either slammed with deadlines, excited about putting together the climax of the story they're working on, or trying to fit their writing in around the other busy parts of their life (like full-time jobs, children, etc.). Don't be offended if they say no, and similarly, be thrilled if they say yes. Not only is that gift of their time and attention extremely valuable, but they're expressing their willingness to consider you as a potential colleague. One great way to approach this is to comment on published stories in a constructive and respectful manner, and to volunteer to critique for someone if the opportunity presents itself. Your ability to provide a helpful critique can demonstrate your willingness to contribute to the other person's success - and writers help each other.

There is probably a lot more I could say about this topic, but at this point I'm going to close by saying I'm extremely grateful to all the many people who have taken the time to read and comment on my stories. I've learned a lot from you, and I know I will continue to learn in the future. At this point, though, there's one thing I can say with joy and confidence:

I am a writer.

Whether by telephone or text message, communication is learned

I came across this link today thanks to my friend Andrew Sullivan. In it, a college student expresses how she feels awkward speaking on the phone and thus prefers texting. The comments and quotes around it express how this phenomenon is a sign of our times, etc. - and it is, but I have to think that the true sign of our times isn't the phenomenon itself, only the form of its expression.

Communication is learned. Ever since humans started this whole language thing, it has been a learned behavior. It doesn't matter whether you believe in Universal Grammar or not (which I really don't; see my recent post) - the specific form a language takes, and the way it associates sounds (or gestures!) with meaning and action and social forms is learned. Not only that, but not every person learns it to the same degree, even among native speakers. There have always been those people who have more difficulty with language, and with specific forms of its use.

When I was doing my Masters in Linguistics, I did a small study about how children learned to talk on the telephone. This involved doing some recordings of friends' children (at the time I had none of my own) and taking a look at the patterns of their speech. It quickly became clear to me that telephone talk is managed differently from face-to-face talk, and while the ability to speak well face to face will correlate with better telephone talk, the two are not the same. Children will develop their telephone talk at a similar rate to their regular talk, but appear to be delayed in it because of the increased demands of the telephone as a means of communication. Over the telephone, you have to adjust for the fact that even though you can see everything in front of you, the person you're talking to cannot. This is actually quite a tricky basic concept, and because children learn to speak on the phone very early, you can actually watch them trying to learn it.

Letter writing involves a lack of context, and people have studied to learn how to do that for a very long time (at a later age than they would learn speaking on the telephone, because they need to know how to write). If you compare letter writing to texting, the desire to compress the length of a text message operates against any need for eloquence that might be cultivated in the longer, letter form. Yes, in texting there is the assumption of lack of visual context, but this assumption is precisely the same one that exists for letter writing and for other writing contexts such as writing for a homework assignment. Texting may appear to be easier to learn simply because by the time we're doing it, some of its base assumptions have already been learned and are well established.

Both face to face communication and telephone communication involve a very fast real-time response, while texting and letter writing do not. When people don't feel comfortable with these speed demands, and the risks that accompany an instant response to something that might be misunderstood, they'll typically choose the written format of communication. In this context, Twitter would more closely resemble texting, while instant messaging would fall somewhere in between the telephone and the text message.

Overall, I think that we need to realize that we learn all these methods of communication through practice, and we need to cultivate those skills that will be needed for our success, both socially and in our work lives. As the medium of communication changes, we adjust our behavior and learn what's next - but the underlying principles don't change as much as we might think.

Psychic links and channels of communication

Everybody knows that we communicate using language. Ask how humans communicate, and that's the first thing that pops into our minds. However, it's not the only way we communicate. Even if you don't count writing, there's a lot more going on in any conversation - particularly face to face conversation - than you might immediately realize.

Today I'm going to talk about both linguistic and non-linguistic communication in terms of sensory "channels," with one channel corresponding to each of our five senses. And then I'm going to talk abut the idea of a sixth, psychic channel - which was one of the things that I found simultaneously intriguing and disappointing about James Cameron's Avatar.

The auditory channel is typically the first one we think of when we consider communication. It's the channel where verbal linguistic information gets expressed and conveyed. It's where we find our phonemes and morphemes and syntax - the structure of language - being expressed most of the time. Science fiction and fantasy are full of examples of invented auditory languages.

We can also use auditory codes like Morse code to send linguistic information. But the auditory channel doesn't just convey language structure. Prosody, or tone of voice, also conveys a lot of information. Prosody is the use of volume and pitch to convey information about emotions and about emphasis on the words that we speak. If you look at written descriptions of verbal speech, you'll often see emotions associated with the way someone says something. Our judgment of that emotion comes in part from our interpretation of tone of voice. Tone of voice also conveys a lot about gender identity and attractiveness, but there's enough there for an entirely separate topic, so I'll leave it alone for now.

Emotional information also travels on the visual channel. The muscles in our faces pull and twitch and suddenly we can see information in another person's face - and even in the faces of non-human animals! The facial expressions of happiness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, and sadness have for some time been considered universal to human cultures (though see this story which says that east Asian men and women concentrate more on the eye area than the mouth area, suggesting that some elements of expression are culturally based).

The visual channel can also be a primary channel for linguistic information, as in sign languages like ASL. I find it fascinating that ASL is able to use this single multidimensional channel to convey both linguistic structure and emotional information, by combining gestures (and the manner in which they are executed) with facial expressions. Codes can also be transmitted in the visual channel (immediate flash of Monty Python's skit including the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights and Julius Caesar on an Aldis lamp). There are numerous examples in science fiction and fantasy of languages using the visual channel, such as the light-language of Sheila Finch's octopus-like aliens in "No Brighter Glory" (The Guild of Xenolinguists).

My favorite example of using the tactile channel of communication is the language that Anne Sullivan used with Helen Keller - basically, English written with a finger on the palm of Keller's hand. There's clearly no barrier to communicating linguistic structure through a channel like this, even though we don't typically use it that way because we're focusing on other options. One could argue, though, that we communicate on this channel all the time, expressing non-linguistic messages about comfort, care, love and intimacy.

I've discussed the olfactory channel before, early in the history of this blog. For dogs and other animals, a great deal of information is channeled through the sense of smell - mood can be communicated through scent, and identity can be communicated through urine or musk even after quite a bit of time has passed (and in fact, smell allows animals to gauge how much time has passed since the message was left.). Taste isn't used quite as much as a communication tool, but one could argue that the culinary adventures of "Like Water for Chocolate" grew out of a keen sense of emotions being conveyed through cuisine!

So finally we've arrived at the question of psychic connections, which for this discussion it's actually quite useful to think of as a "sixth sense." Telepathy could be considered the transmission of linguistic information and structure through this channel, while empathy could be considered the transmission of emotional information, in much the same way that facial expressions transmit emotional information.

Let's play with this idea. You've got a great new sense available (by whatever means it might be actuated) for conveying information. Empathy makes the assumption that the psychic channel is being used to convey the kind of information that we pick up from the visual channel in ordinary conversation, while telepathy makes a stronger assumption, that the psychic channel can be used for linguistic structure (which is typically available in either the auditory or visual channels). Given this, I have two questions that pop up in my head:

1. Why would linguistic information on the psychic channel take an auditory or visual form?

2. How might the use of a psychic channel influence the use of language in other channels?

When I consider the first question, I'm not at all sure that information in a psychic channel would necessarily parallel the forms of language we're already familiar with. In cases like that of Ursula LeGuin's Hainish series, where humans had existing auditory language and learned thereafter to communicate in the psychic channel, I really have no problem with the idea that existing language forms would transfer over. Language is not easily re-invented. On the other hand, if you were to have a species that evolved with telepathy, the form it took would very likely have a lot to do with its means of actuation. Variations in the strength of an ongoing signal? Pulses of something? Direct perception, somehow, of the electrical signals going on in another person's brain? If we're talking about direct perception of electrical signals, then telepathy might be able to borrow sensations from the other senses - but if it is indeed a sense in and of itself, that communication might take an entirely different form. That form might be difficult to describe for those of us who don't possess such a sense, and in fact it would make communication with such a species quite challenging.

But not necessarily impossible. Just because a species uses a psychic channel, that doesn't mean it wouldn't communicate in other channels too. The communication we use is highly redundant, both linguistically and between channels. We often speak in auditory linguistic form about emotions which can simultaneously be read on our faces and in our body movements, and likely perceived in our scent as well. In just such a way, a psychic species might make certain kinds of information redundantly available - it's easy to imagine them backing up their psychic communication with facial expressions and body language, for example. For them, adapting to an entirely auditory language form would not be easy, I don't imagine, much in the same way that adaptation to sign language can be difficult for people accustomed to dealing with auditory language.

This has brought us around to my second question, of how psychic communication might influence language. I have no doubt whatsoever that it would.

In Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, the use of the psychic channel is redundant with the auditory channel, but it is different. Because it's impossible to lie psychically, use of the psychic channel lends a sense of frankness and/or intimacy to communication.

I always wondered about the Na'vi in James Cameron's Avatar, who seemed to "link up" regularly with animals and plants, but somehow never with one another. Was that a lost opportunity for the storytellers? Possibly so - but that wasn't really a part of the story they chose to tell (which I thought was very effective for its audience). I would guess if the Na'vi were to communicate with one another that way, the need for direct physical contact would have a similar effect to the honesty requirement in LeGuin's case, making for a sense of intimacy associated with communicating in that way (what precisely is communicated in the Na'vi case is unclear, but it seems to be non-linguistic information). Might communication without that added channel then make for a sense of lack of intimacy? Rather than what we'd automatically assume, normality?

I'm sure you would also see direct influence of the psychic channel on the forms of auditory language. Vocabulary and expressions would reflect the influence of the channel's existence. Perhaps you'd see a proliferation of language used to describe the sensations and meanings associated with the psychic channel. Or perhaps you would see areas of auditory language that became impoverished because they were redundant with a more effectively communicated psychic equivalent. Quite likely in a species with a complex auditory language, you would see both forms of influence, in different areas of the language.

Whenever you are working with an extra sensory channel beyond the auditory, whether that be visual, olfactory, tactile, taste-based, or psychic, it's worth spending some time to consider how the increased importance of that channel would influence the forms of linguistic communication. Think about how we talk about what we perceive with our senses, and then ponder the impact of a significant change in the importance of any one of those additional channels. You might come up with some fascinating results.