Headlines, Cultural Context, and Meaning

Today I saw this tweet from my old friend Dima Khatib, who is now the South American correspondent for Al Jazeera, and it immediately caught me:

Dima_Khatib Dima Khatib أنا ديمة

Many ask why protests in Syria always come out of mosques. The answer is that assembly is forbidden and impossible anywhere else in #Syria

It made me think of my childhood, when I heard about things happening in mosques or temples in countries I was unfamiliar with, and wondered what place mosques and temples really had in those people's lives. News stories are by necessity limited in length. That means that they cannot include all the necessary underpinnings, and are quite easily skewed by our own underlying assumptions about how life works. "Protest at a mosque" - what does it mean? Does it mean that religious people get angry, for instance? Does it mean that people are protesting somehow against the mosque? Or does it mean - and as Dima points out, it does - that this is the only place people can gather in large enough numbers to protest anything?

I think it would be easy to throw up my hands and despair if I always took headlines at face value. I've seen many posts recently about how Fox News headlines quite differently from CNN, for example. What I take away from it all is that no matter what you hear, if it's important to you, then it should be worth looking into more of the details than you can get in six words, or even 200.

Psychogeography? What's that? An enormously rich worldbuilding topic

I attended a fascinating panel at WorldCon in Reno about Psychogeography, featuring David Cake, Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, and Renée Sieber - and I was amazed at how well it fit my worldbuilding interests, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about it. Here's a (rather daunting) quote from the convention program: "Psychogeography is variously defined as 'the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals' or where psychology and geography meet in assessing the emotional and behavioral impact of urban space."

Think about it this way. What kind of physical spaces do you move through as you go through your day? How many of them have been planned by you? If it's the furniture in your home, you've probably been able to decide where it went on your own. But how about the layout of your house? How about the layout of your neighborhood, or the neighborhood where you work? The public spaces in your town, or in the towns you've visited as a guest? Each of these physical layouts will influence the way you move and potentially the way you think.

Here's an example from my local area. I have a mall nearby - within walking distance of my house, if I care to take the twenty minutes required. But do I walk there? No... not unless it's Christmas season and I don't want to get involved in the traffic (in which case I have walked there on principle). The way the place has been laid out is inimical to pedestrians. It's an indoor mall surrounded on all sides by broad parking lots which add a full five minutes to the walk even when I'm going quickly. There are no pedestrian entrances to the lots, and no pedestrian walkways leading across them. You have to walk right through all the car aisles to get to the main entrances. Is it any wonder that nobody walks there?

In the typical medieval town, there was always a market square. This was a central open space where people could gather to sell their goods, and gather they did. Those squares could also potentially be a place where unhappy people could gather to protest. If there were a ruler who didn't want unrest, he might crack down on the people, but it would still be hard to get rid of that central gathering space.

One interesting example mentioned by Cory Doctorow about London was that a lot of the London buildings had been destroyed by bombing after the second world war, and the planners of the city had to rebuild them, so they were thinking about making the streets easier to navigate by straightening them and making the streets rectilinear. However, the people refused to go along with this, and insisted on moving markers and traveling the paths they remembered of the old tangled road system, and in fact in the end the old roads were restored almost precisely as they had been.

Think about the cities you know, and how different they "feel" based on the way they're laid out. I think of Kyoto, Japan, where the north-south-east-west grid layout meant I never felt entirely lost even when I didn't know where I was, and where I learned my cardinal directions in a way I never had comprehended at any previous point in my life. I compare that with Tokyo, where you have to follow directions with absolute precision because the streets are not on a grid and a single wrong turn can diverge you into a totally different neighborhood where side connecting streets are not certain to deliver you back to your previous path. I compare each of those cities, with their narrow streets and tightly packed neighborhoods, with the wide-streeted towns of California where the lack of density means it takes twice as long to get anywhere and walking to the grocery store is an impractical plan...so neighborhoods are larger and people who live near one another are less likely to encounter one another in the street unless they happen to be walking to the local school (the local school being a very interesting "meeting point" and a huge creator of solidarity across the surrounding neighborhoods).

I'm sure you can already see the worldbuilding opportunities bursting out of this topic at every seam. What are your spaces like in your world? How wide are streets? Where do people gather? How easy is it to travel using various modes of transportation? My underground city of Pelismara is five levels deep and organized on a radial system, which means that it's actually rather compact and easy to traverse, especially at the deeper levels. People who use vehicles can cross it very quickly. People who walk have to be in excellent shape (for all the stair-climbing), but can get across town in relatively short order.

The panel at the convention also talked about technology and how it influences the use of space. Surveillance was one of the major discussion points here. The sense that one is being watched and recorded in any given public area can totally change behavior... but won't always do it the same way. During the discussion we also talked about the perceived "space" of the internet, Twitterverse, etc. Clearly, as seen in many instances of unrest across the world including China, the Arab world, and other places, the texting arena, and the Twitterverse, have become hotly contested virtual spaces where people can "gather" and their governments in response try to exert control over them by controlling the "space." In a city, these real and virtual environments lie side by side, and augmented reality can potentially blur the boundaries between them so that two different people can experience the physical spaces in entirely different ways. Mind you, our own subjective judgments of spaces can already cause us to experience spaces in vastly different ways, as I have previously discussed, but the possibility of augmented reality will only magnify that effect.

This is an enormously rich opportunity for worldbuilders, as you can see. I hope this very brief and cursory introduction gives you plenty of ideas for going back and considering the links between spaces and thought in your own stories. Have fun with it!

Cultural expectations about food

Food is very cultural. Our overall menu and sense of what is edible have built up over thousands of years, during which we've learned things like, "Gee, tomatoes actually aren't poisonous." A good thing to know. We've had massive changes in world food culture, such as those that came about after trade began between the Americas and the other continents of the world (chocolate!). What we eat and do not eat may seem "natural" but it is mostly the product of learning. It can become very extreme, and it is subject to fads, as are most other aspects of culture.



Here is an example that has been in my face lately with all our travel adventures. When I was little, a children's menu was a relatively new thing. I suppose it was the effect of the social "promotion" of children from people who should not be seen or heard to people who should be included at restaurants (a development I approve of). I remember that the children's menu typically featured smaller portions of adult meals. This was nice for those adults who didn't want to eat as much food (though some restaurants didn't allow adults to order from the children's menu). These days, though, the children's menu doesn't have smaller versions of adult dishes. It has what our culture expects children to enjoy eating. Chicken nuggets. Fries. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Pizza. Macaroni and cheese. Hamburger/cheeseburger. And that's about it. Can you think of anything else you've seen on a kids' menu? Fish and chips I suppose, at a stretch. I've given up looking at the children's menu these days because my children don't really like anything on that list except pizza and burgers, and they can't be eating pizza and burgers every time they go out.



The funny thing is, this kind of expectation is self-enforcing. Parents worry that their kids won't like vegetables and so they act all scared around vegetables and don't feed them to their children. Parents worry that their kids won't like spicy food, so they don't feed it to them - not even in mild doses. Suddenly the routine centers around bland non-vegetable food - so should we be surprised when that's what kids tend to ask for? I'm actually not here to talk about parenting and food, but you can see that this is an important piece of the entire food culture of a society. There is also science and health and how those relate to food choices... it's definitely a complex mix.



If you're creating a society, imagine what its people will eat, as a start. But consider also the food culture of that society. How food is grown, and where, will affect its value and availability. Then there is how important food is as a social activity, and as a ceremonial activity. I mean, how would anyone ever go on a serious date if not for food? Some societies place a special value on regional foods, while others have one big staple that rules the diet surrounded by other smaller ingredients. Some societies have tons of available spices and others do not. Would your people flavor their food predominantly with herbs? Or would they prefer the bland?



There are a thousand questions that can be asked, and if you can spend some time thinking about them, your world will become much more interesting.





P.S. This could easily become an entire dissertation or more, if I started talking about the quantity one is expected to eat, and how, and when, and eating disorders, etc. Suffice it to say that I encourage you to explore food culture to the extent that you can as you are creating your world!

Creating unexpected social interaction/Japanese empathy and business cards

Because I write stories with aliens, language and culture, I'm always looking for ways to give the same kinds of situations different value across cultures. This is something that has a rich history in science fiction! I remember the little sequence in Star Trek TNG where Counselor Troi was coaching Captain Picard about how to pronounce a greeting sequence - because if he got it wrong, it would have been a major diplomatic incident, not just an embarrassing moment.

Exaggeration, you say? Well, maybe, and maybe not.

The fact is that when you look at world cultures, there are all sorts of things that have one value here and one value there. In my left side bar I have a series called "A Different Value" which explores exactly this sort of thing - places where a particular object, idea or activity has dramatically different value across contexts.

Just a few weeks ago I was reminded how valuable this type of thinking is: we had Japanese guests staying with us for a couple of weeks, and there was a little activity my daughter was doing for her kindergarten homework that turned into a "major diplomatic incident." Well, in fact, no one got really upset, but it left both me and my husband shaking our heads and talking it over later in the day.

My daughter was asked to cut out five photos of animals from magazines, glue them on a page, and bring them into school. This turned into a major cultural lesson about teaching empathy and object-person symbolism in Japan.

She sat down at the table and we picked out the photos. When she started to cut them out, both of our Japanese guests were suddenly right on top of her (one from each side), verbally coaching in an extremely active way. If my daughter was cutting just the right shape the coaching was "good, good, okay" (sometimes in English, but mostly in Japanese as neither one of them spoke much). If she appeared to be turning her scissors in such a way that the borders of the animal in question would be cut, the comment was NOT "hey, turn your scissors" or "you're not doing this right" but this:

"Ow, ow, oh, ow!"

This did not happen one time, but over and over throughout the activity, with such intensity that my husband and I watched in amazement. Our two guests were both preschool/kindergarten teachers (the system is organized a bit differently there) so it wasn't as if we could write it off as the naiveté of our guests with children! We decided that several things were being deliberately taught.

1. How to cut out a photo correctly
2. How to imagine the feelings of others (empathy)
3. How objects are direct symbols of living entities

This fits in with our experience with Japanese business cards. A business card in Japan must be treated with respect, taken with two hands, placed in the shirt pocket and never the back pocket. It must not be left on a table in a spot where it might accidentally be wet by condensation from a nearby glass of water. My husband saw an instance when this happened and the entire roomful of Japanese businessmen went frantic.

Very often we hear people talk about how in Japan, people are sensitive to the feelings of others. We also hear that you have to be careful with business cards - but we rarely see the two in action together. The thing that makes this stand out to me is that this - and the photo-cutting activity - all grew naturally out of the same mindset in which objects can directly stand for people and animals and also be imbued with the emotional reactions of those people and animals.

When you're writing a world that's unfamiliar and new, think about the way your people think. In particular, if you're looking to have some kind of very important cultural trait play directly into your plot, spend some time thinking about how far that cultural trait extends across the behaviors of the people involved, and how it might be taught to the young. I've gotten multiple comments about the moment in "Let the Word Take Me" when I put in a child alien and showed his mother instructing him (here). It was the tiniest moment (in a short story, so it had to be), but it really resonated with some people. That kind of moment can really suggest the larger historical continuity of your society and give it a lot of depth. If you can place something like that picture-cutting activity incidentally early in your story (this will be easier with novels since you have room), then you can use it to set up a more plot-critical cultural surprise later in the story. The interaction will stand out in your story as feeling "real" and giving real insight, and the plot-relevant incident won't have to stand alone, so it will have less a feeling of being a cultural "twist" or sleight-of-hand and more a demonstration of the integrated qualities of the aliens or the fantasy race you've created.

It's something to think about.

Gender in job ads, and subconscious bias in language

You don't know what you are saying.

Sure, you think you know. You've chosen the content of what you want to say. You're thinking about what linguists call the "propositional content," or the "message" of what is being said. The fact is, though, that you're saying so much more. The complexity of language carries all kinds of information about social alignment, and the individual's stance in relation to social groups and in relation to larger discourses in society (other times the same topic has been referenced).

Yesterday I ran across this link through @geardrops on Twitter. I was fascinated, but not at all surprised, given my background in linguistic anthropology. The article talks about a study in which it was demonstrated that job postings contain language that is "gendered," or biased toward either a female or male expectation - and that potential applicants can feel this when they read the postings, and gravitate toward the ones that match their gender. Wow, right? Interesting. Within three minutes of having picked up this link, I ended up in an argument about whether we had left behind bias in the workplace, and whether a person could be considered sexist for writing an ad in this way, and whether or not "gendered" language was just something made up by academics that had no basis in reality. Geardrops' conclusion, which I loved, was this:

"Hey guess what language bias exists and is subtle."

That's right. The social messages in language are not just subtle, they are subconsicous. So let's look at what that means for a second, starting with the question of politeness.

If you ask someone, "You need to ask your professor for a pen. What do you say?" that person will give you an answer, but chances are it won't be exactly what that person would say if you recorded them in the situation. It will be - and this is important - what they think they ought to say. This is a trend backed up by all kinds of politeness research: live recordings will get you different results from what people say they do. In fact, I found precisely this in my own research. When I studied polite and casual forms in Japanese, I asked three teachers how much of each type they thought they were using in the classroom, and each one said they used formal forms most of the time. When I went in, took a videotape, transcribed and counted these forms, it turned out that they were using formal forms 35% of the time.

I'm sure you can see the difference.

The propositional content of what you say is consciously chosen. But for the most part, the manner in which you say it, and the social messages conveyed, are outside of your conscious control.

Can we say that there is "fault" involved, or accuse a person of being sexist, because of what they express in a subconscious manner?

Well, yes and no.

I often imagine language use within a culture as an enormous piece of fabric. Each person's contribution is a tiny thread within that fabric. The color of the fabric varies depending on which part you look at, but each thread will tend to be roughly the same color as the ones around it. We don't speak in a vacuum. The patterns of speech and expression that we use are learned from those around us, and the more closely our color matches the surrounding pattern, the more likely everything is to appear normal. Sexism, racism, and any other -ism that you might care to identify are mostly built into the fabric. If you're a member of an insider group, chances are pretty good that the language use patterns that show bias will be difficult to see. It's the whole "by saying mankind I mean all people" thing. The distinct color of the thread containing the word "man" will be more easily recognized by someone who doesn't match it - i.e. a woman.

I think it's more effective to talk about "gendered language" than "sexist language" because the latter implies intent. Intent is a tricky thing. In our society these days "bias" itself is seen as being wrong - which is I think a good thing - but what it means is that people can get attacked for subconsciously engaging in the fabric of the discourse around them. Should they be blamed? Probably not. Engaged with, probably yes. Every time we question biased language we're acting on the front lines of societal change. Increasing our consciousness of these mostly-invisible markers is the way to get people to notice biases they don't mean to convey, and act to change them.

Here's an important point, though. Social language is not a plus-or-minus proposition. You can go one direction or another on the road, but you're still on the road. We will always, always mark our social position, our posture, relative to others. We will always express our membership in social groups. We will strive to distinguish ourselves from groups that we don't want to be a part of by emphasizing our membership in other groups. I don't see "gendered language" ever going away; I do, however, see it changing.

Language is something that reinforces itself, and at the same time changes itself, every time that it is used.

So to be a positive force for cultural change in the world, think about increasing consciousness - your own as well as that of others. Go easy on yourself - be aware that you yourself are constantly enacting culture and social alignment without thinking, and you won't be able just to "stop." Don't blame yourself terribly if you find yourself doing something you don't want to do - just think through it and try to exert your conscious will to change it. Be willing to engage with others. Be willing to question yourself.

And next time you're looking for a job, be aware of gendered language. Be aware, too, that the person who wrote the ad probably didn't try to exclude anyone. Choose not to let that shut you down.

Change takes time, but it's worth the effort.

Put your secondary world to the test

I had a pretty funny experience yesterday (one day early for April Fool's, I guess). I had gone to the grocery store for a few items, and as I passed the pharmacy I remembered I had just sent one of my characters to the pharmacy in my book. I stopped my shopping cart right in front and started studying it, trying to see what aspects of it were going to be common to the world of my book, and what aspects of it would be different. The poor pharmacists, not having dealt with a writer staring at their workplace before, finally asked if I needed help. I told them what I was up to.

They seemed a bit bemused by my explanation.

Here's the thing, though. A pharmacy in a secondary world isn't going to be like a pharmacy in ours, especially if all the social conditions underlying it are different. For my world, I can't go back to the historical Earth model of the apothecary, because it won't fit. I have to figure out what would make my pharmacy right for the world I'm working with.

Here was my detailed pharmacy logic: to look like a pharmacy, it has to have a front counter, a person responsible for dispensing medications, and shelves of medications. However, in my Varin world, there's a strict caste separation that keeps the drug designers and manufacturers - members of the knowledge workers' caste - from working with the product sellers - members of the merchant caste. Thus, none of the bottles can be branded. They are labeled by contents, and by whether any special caste-based dispensation laws apply to them (members of the nobility are restricted in their use of certain medications, such as birth control). Then, because this pharmacy is designed specifically for use by medically trained members of the servant caste, the front counter worker is not a knowledge worker, but another servant - a warden, whose special function is to serve as guardian of the pharmacy's contents.

This location is "onscreen" for a single small scene, and is in primary focus for roughly 225 words. But because I want my world to be whole in all of its details (and I'm a little nuts), I care. I care about
1. giving the place common characteristics with our world that make it recognizable as a pharmacy, and
2. giving the place three special details that make it distinctly Varini (warden, unbranded bottles, caste-restriction labels).

Frankly, I would recommend this type of thinking to anyone working with a secondary world or alien environment. If it's a place your character walks by with hardly a glance, the information may not be important enough to spend time on. However, if your character is interacting with the place (as mine is), the contrast you set up between the familiar and the strange will make the difference between the place feeling bland, and the place feeling right. Don't take anything for granted. Put your world through its paces; chase it around corners and into nooks and crannies.

For each environment your character must interact with, here are some things to think through:

1. Is this character doing something that readers will recognize from the real world?
2. What elements of the activity will be familiar?
3. What elements of the activity will be unfamiliar?
   
4. What kind of people are present there, and what function do they serve?
5. How might large-scale physical differences between our world and this world influence the conditions in this location (this might be architecture, economy, natural resources, etc.)?
6. How might large-scale cultural differences between our world and this world influence the conditions in this location (this might be population, manners, rules, etc.)?
7. Can you find two or three specific details to include which will reflect these differences?
8. Is there a comparable setting you can visit in the real world to get detail ideas?
   

It's something to think about.

The Cultural Question of Girls and Princesses, Boys and Battles

Modern gender culture frustrates me.

I say this as a mother trying to steer a straight course between the Charybdis of Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony - the pink and purple whirlpool where wondering what gift to get for a friend is sufficient central conflict for an entire story - and the Scylla whose many heads are made of battle weapons, battling monsters, battling robots, battling aliens... battling everything. I walk into clothing stores and head for the clearance racks because at least there the clothes are all in one place and not divided into "boy's side" and "girl's side." Why do people insist on painting our children in pink and blue?

I'm not trying to say that we haven't come a long way. Certainly we're in an age of coed universities, coed dorms. We can tell girls that they can be anything they like - inventors, astronauts, scientists, mothers, writers... It's important to be aware, though, that the old way remains. It's embedded in our institutions, but most importantly, it's embedded in our subconscious. Because I'm an anthropologist and very culturally self-conscious I thought through what I wanted to do about gender with my kids well before they arrived, but because I'm a realist I knew, even then, that there would be gendered things in the way I treated my children.

I'm okay with this, actually. To eradicate distinctions of gender would be to create a world of unisex robots that all looked the same. In fact, I think just the opposite should be our goal: to recognize the nuances of gender, and diversify our understanding just as we diversify our understanding of races and world cultures. The most important part of it for me is cultivating self-awareness and openness to other people's understanding of themselves.

Feminism has played a terribly important role in all of the freedoms I have today, and I am grateful for it, but I hate to read articles describing women being criticized for embracing roles that are considered "traditional," or for dressing in a feminine way. Part of the liberation of women is freeing women to take on roles traditionally assigned to men - that is certain, for keeping women confined to those roles is misogynistic. However, it is also misogynistic to say that the traditional roles and concerns of women have no value. Indeed, any individual, however they may define their own gender, should be free to embrace these roles without censure; only then can we see true balance.

Can we teach our daughters to be critical thinkers and reject pandering advertising that tries to define them restrictively? Yes. But when we express our extreme distaste for artificial princess garb or dolls with unrealistic body shapes, we must at least explain ourselves. There's a huge risk here of making our daughters feel shame for liking what they may simply like for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Whenever we shame our girls for being who they are, we're doing the male chauvinists' job for them. In the same way, we should teach our sons to reject the advertising that tries to define them by encouraging "boys will be boys" excesses and suppressing the flexibility of their thinking, while at the same time recognizing value in the skills they learn and turning it to best effect in other aspects of their lives.

There's another trend in modern thought about gender that bothers me, and I believe it is related to the shaming of girls (and boys) for liking feminine things. This is the idea that oppressed women have been, and still are, entirely powerless; that females of the modern age should reject the women of the past because of their helpless submission to partriarchy. Ironically, I see this trend in all sorts of stories (and associated products) that are supposedly linked to "girl power." These are unrealistic stories in which a female placed in a past historical setting will feel ill-used, rail against the restrictions that confine her, and set out to break down those restrictions and "follow her dream." You might ask at this point, "How can it be bad to follow your dream?" - and I understand the point. However, too often these characters have dreams that could not possibly have grown out of to the actual social context of their lives - the kind of dreams that could only be conceived by a girl in a post-feminism world. Thus the characters will rail against a life that, because every aspect of it is normal and has been since their birth, should not be foremost in their attention at all. Instead, they would more realistically set themselves against injustices that stand out against that context. Lastly, too often the women of the past (real or fictional) are given no credit for understanding the complex rules within which the nature of their power is defined. Whatever tools of influence they possess, however small, they will learn to use to greatest possible effect.

If there is any testament to the flexibility of human nature, it is this ability we have to take what we are given by circumstance and make the most of it. Which is why I refuse to demean my children for learning what society hands to them, at the same time that I try to help them think beyond it.

The Images We See, and their cultural messages

After my post Wednesday about the study on male and female reactions to seeing nudes, I got to thinking about the idea of the images we see. One of the points in that article was that there is not only a quantitative, but a qualitative difference between the presentation of male and female nudes, and that there is also a distinct difference in the way males and females react to them.

We're constantly surrounded by images and messages. I remember when I had serious eye strain and was trying not to read or look at things close by me - it was nigh unto impossible! In our society, these images and messages come from various sources, but many of them are advertising related and financially motivated. They are a product of what the culture (or a dominant subculture) is perceived to want, and their presence not only caters to this culture, but reinforces and re-enacts it.

The supermarket, for example, is a barrage.

This isn't necessarily the case in all cultures, however. Some products are sold visually and some are sold auditorily, as were the roasted sweet potatoes that a man sold in my neighborhood in southern Kyoto. He used to stroll through the street with his cart singing, "Yaaaaaki-imooooo!" through a loudspeaker (it drove me bonkers). It hasn't been true in all time periods, either. People used to hawk their wares with their own voices much more than they do now.

Most of the time we're able to move through our familiar environments without noticing all of the images or their messages. At other times we spend more attention questioning them.

When we're writing and creating worlds, it strikes me that there's some value in considering what kind of images our fictional people create. What do they see in their familiar environments? Who is responsible for disseminating those images? What kind of messages do they send about the culture that created them?

I remember being quite struck by a system of political radio advertising that Ursula K. LeGuin wrote into her book, The Telling. It wasn't something I'd seen done for an entirely alien society before.

I want to see more of this sort of thing, because every society has its way of sending messages, both economic and social. Fashion is one major way that people send their own messages about their wealth and place in society. And if print is available and easy, and people can advertise, what would they advertise? What would they consider art, what commercial, what inappropriate?

When I designed Varin I wanted it to have high technology but not to be like our own society. One of the parameters I changed was that of image-acceptance. The Varini believe that art is a perfectly acceptable form of visual expression, but that photography is too disconcertingly realistic (for underlying religious reasons). As a result, their highest forms of technology haven't gone the direction that photography started. The images they create are painted or lettered, and they don't have live action movies or sophisticated graphic computer monitors.

What cultural messages do your people want to convey? What methods do they use to convey them? What images will your readers see when they enter your world?

It's something to think about.

Fascinating post about gendered responses to viewing nudes

I came across this link today, which was traveling across Twitter, and clicked over. From the point of view of an anthropologist, this is fascinating. Here's the opener from the article by Dr. Lisa Wade (no relation):

Last year in a post about the truism “sex sells,” I asked:

But whose sex is sold? And to who?

“If it was simply that sex sold,” I continued…

…we’d see men and women equally sexually objectified in popular culture. Instead, we see, primarily, women sold to (presumably heterosexual) men. So what are we selling, exactly, if not “sex”?

I argued that what was really being sold was men’s (presumably heterosexual) sexual subjectivity, the experience of being a person in the world who was presented with images that were for his titillation. Women do not live in the world this way.


The author then follows up with a study on male and female responses to viewing nudes. It's absolutely fascinating, and I highly encourage you to look.

Social Labels: YA and beyond!

Latchkey kids. Jocks. Nerds. Stoners. Fuzzies. Techies. Geeks. Divas.

Not all of these terms may be ones you've used, but you've probably heard most of them. They're labels for social groups. According to Wikipedia, "Latchkey kid" originated as a term in 1944 because of an NBC documentary. Jocks, nerds and stoners were commonly used terms around my high school. Fuzzies and Techies were labels at Stanford university for students in humanities vs. math/science. Geeks is a term I'm still coming to terms with as it is used for sf/f fans. Divas is a more modern term applied to girls of a certain stripe.

One of the things I've noticed and rather admired about YA books is their sensitivity to labels like this. Labels are big with teens, so for example when I see Scott Westerfeld titles - Uglies, Pretties, Specials, just to name a few - they speak "real" to me.

I think social labels deserve attention even outside of YA. SF has a few, but could always use more; even epic fantasy wouldn't suffer from some attention to these fine social distinctions and how they are marked.

The term "latchkey kid" came up in a discussion I had with the marvelous Deborah J. Ross yesterday. I was writing along in For Love, For Power and realized that two of my characters had something in common: both were children growing up in the care of their household servants rather than in care of their parents, because of laws that require them to stay in the capital for their own health and safety while their parents had been appointed to positions running other cities. While I was thinking about what that meant to them, it hit me that this wasn't an uncommon condition in Varin. It would have a label.

Deborah Ross and I tossed some things around, including the real-world-grounded terms "latchkey kid" and "rugrat" etc. to get some ideas. These terms need a certain ring to them, and can't be too complex. Also, I realized that there would be at least two terms for the same group: one that would be a relatively value-neutral term, and one that could be used insultingly. In the end I chose these:

leadership orphan - This is the relatively value-neutral term. It's very self-explanatory, which is important, because I can't use a bunch of words explaining it. But it's only relatively value-neutral, because "orphan" evokes sympathy for the kids in this condition.

Household brat - This is the insulting term (no surprise). I chose brat over rat because the animals in Varin aren't entirely congruent with ours. Brat is insulting by nature, but it's also insulting to juxtapose it with Household, because it implies that a noble child is being "run" by his own servants.

I've said before that there's value in considering the social subgroups within larger "types" of people. In "Cold Words," the Aurrel were divided into heavy-furred and Lowland groups, and this had consequences for the usage of the words "cold" and "warm" throughout the language. In "At Cross Purposes," the Cochee-coco were divided into groups by their chosen Purpose, and this influenced their work and thinking processes. Varin is my mega-world, and it has groups (castes), and subgroups (Great Families of the nobility), and sub- subgroups (leadership orphans/Household brats)! But why not? We have far more ways to label people, both to good and to notably ill effect.

How do the people in your world label each other socially? Are there general categories of people? How do those people get subdivided and labeled? Who gets scorn? Who gets the prestige?

It's something worth thinking about.

Alien body language

How many of you have ever read anything like, "then the alien waved its tentacles at me"?

Last week I put up this link here, about body language. If you saw the original post, I put up a caveat about the fact that body language differs across cultures. Well, after thinking about it for a week I had to revisit the question.

This list goes through and gives very specific meanings for a lot of body language cues - in the head, eyes, upper body, and lower body. Here's a great example:

• Failing to look someone in the eyes displays a lack of confidence.
• Lowering the eyes is a sign of submission, fear or guilt.
• Staring is interpreted as aggression and implies a person feels dominant and powerful.
• Looking directly into another person’s eyes without staring signifies self-assurance.

This is what we, as Americans, typically interpret from eye contact body language. However, it is not at all universal. In many cultures, including Japan, looking into the eyes directly is interpreted as a similar message to staring. Failing to look someone in the eyes is a sign of respect. Note that it can be interpreted as submission, but submission with none of the negative connotations you see in the American association of submission with fear or guilt.

We are taught these things through both immersive experience and instruction when we are very young. Some kinds of gestures can be interpreted as specific, intentional messages while others are more subtle and sent subconsciously.

So, as to the question of alien body language, how should we approach it?

First, the approach to alien body language will depend on whether you are treating your aliens as strange and incomprehensible outsiders, or as friends, or from the insider's point of view. You'll have to do less work if you're going the "strange and incomprehensible outsiders" route, but I would still encourage you to think through a few things.

1. Consider the alien's physiology. What are the regions of the body which can most easily be employed for body language, through motions of various sorts?
2. Once you've identified those body regions, ask how those motions can be systematized. What kind of motions would be considered specific messages, deliberately sent? What kind would be more subconscious? A human watching body language on the part of the alien might be better at interpreting subconscious cues than specific messages, because of the way specific messages are typically taught.

Now, if you're going with the aliens as friends, or taking the insider's route, it's important to go into more depth. Unless you're designing an alien with an entirely different philosophy of communication, you'll find that communication travels through multiple channels (verbal and physical) and is highly redundant. If you look at descriptions of human interaction, you'll find that the interpretation of body language is very important. If you don't pursue the question of body language for your aliens, you'll be missing out on a great opportunity, and people may indeed miss it.

As you write the story, look for places where a human in the same situation might make a gesture of one kind or another. Consider whether the message your alien is sending is one that is common or important enough to warrant a specific-message type gesture. If so, consider how that message might be delivered. When you are using an alien that resembles an earth creature, particularly an earth mammal, it's good to go with familiar gestures that fit the physiological type (particularly for the subconscious ones). But be creative! And be creative especially with the iconic, specific-message gestures, because those are the ones that depend most completely on culture and instruction. Remember, for example, that beckoning (which seems at first glance to be a highly universal signal) is executed very differently in the West and Japan, so much so that if you are a Westerner you may think you're being shooed away. And this with precisely the same physiology.

Think about the body language system. Integrate physiology with culturally accepted messages. Think through how those would be expressed, and then think through how that code will be interpreted by a human outsider.

You could come up with some really interesting results.

Seeking Uniqueness? Make a Twist

I've been thinking lately about what makes a story unique. I'm working with young people right now, and I hear a lot of ideas from them, many of which bring in familiar elements from stories that I've read, or archetypal plot elements from the classic fairytales, etc.

Just because we've heard an idea before doesn't mean it can't be done in a novel way. But what can we do to make sure that the story we have is unique, and not like others of its type?

Twist!

A lot of the stories we're familiar with come with a set of underlying assumptions about their execution. Settings in which they're expected to take place. Characteristics that their characters are supposed to have. Ways their cultures are supposed to work. Technologies that are supposed to go together.

But why?

There's no real reason why these things have to be maintained as they are. Pick one and change it - not a little, but in a way that will make your story utterly different, so you'll really have to sit back and THINK: wow, how far do the consequences of that change really go? Here are some ways to try.

• Set the fantasy story in a technological setting. Steampunk did this, and look what happened!
• Take an expected technology away. I rarely see this done, but I'm doing it myself: Varin has no visual tech, for cultural reasons (no movies, computer monitors, etc. and a sense that even photography is inappropriate). And what if you did something really radical? Took away fire? Or the wheel? What would happen then?
• Change gender roles. Reverse them, okay sure, but what if you altered them? Ursula K. LeGuin did that by taking away gender in her own way, and bang! You could even have gender roles look one way in one part of your society, and totally different in another part, so long as there are solid cultural reasons behind it.
  
• Change diet. And don't stop with what's on the table, but contemplate the consequences for agriculture, for lifestyle organization, for food culture and values.
• Change character. I usually do this by changing culture, because that then changes the fundamental way that a character thinks - changing the metaphors they use to describe the world, and changing the rationale behind the decisions they make. You want readers not to be able to predict what your character will do? Alter their cultural morality and see what happens!
  

What I'm advocating here is not easy to do. A change as fundamental as the ones I'm describing has lots of far-reaching consequences for your world, for your characters and for your story.

But that's the whole point.

If you can make a twist, and explore its consequences on a larger scale while maintaining the internal consistency of your world and its cultures, believe me, you'll have something different.

It's well worth thinking about.

Point of view: triangulating pronouns, names and description

I just finished writing a scene in close third person limited point of view where I switched from one person's point of view to another's halfway through. I insert a chapter break at that point, but it occurs during a single ongoing event. At a certain point it struck me that this might be an interesting little microcosm to consider for point of view questions. Same room, same four people present for a continuous sequence of events, but at the point where you make the switch, the two different points of view have to feel completely different in spite of their third person pronouns, or there will have been no point in switching points of view at all!

The characters are as follows:

Grobal Garr, 56 years old, powerful member of the Grobal nobility and Speaker of the Cabinet.
Imbati Sorn, 58 years old, Garr's manservant (political assistant, valet and bodyguard).
Grobal Tagret, seventeen years old, Garr's son.
Imbati Aloran, eighteen years old, member of the servant caste interviewing for a position with the family.

The two points of view are the two boys, Tagret and Aloran. How do we distinguish their points of view?

First, by the way they indicate the other people in the room. Sometimes you know by gut feel how they'll do it, but it can't hurt to plan this out if you're feeling unsure. Keep in mind that how people are referred to, including titles, names, etc. depends on their social position, their relative rank, their special identity relative to one another, and the surrounding context. Here's what my characters call the others in the room:

Tagret => Garr

• "Father" when speaking or when thinking.
  
• "Garr" only if he's really mad.

Tagret => Sorn

• "Sorn" when speaking
• "Sorn" or "Imbati Sorn" when thinking of him as an individual
  
• "Father's Sorn" when thinking of him relative to his father.

Tagret => Aloran

• "Imbati Aloran" for first reference (the first time he refers to him in a stretch of discourse).
• "Aloran" for references thereafter, OR
• "the Imbati boy."
  

Tagret's references to his father and his father's servant reflect intimate knowledge. His references to Aloran suggest formality but also higher status. He's free to refer to him as Aloran even though they don't know each other well; he can also refer to his caste affiliation (his caste name).

In Aloran's point of view, things are very different.

Aloran => Garr

• "sir" when speaking.
• "Grobal Garr" when thinking, for first reference or thereafter, OR
  
• "the Master."
  
• in reference following a focus on Tagret: "his father."
  

Aloran => Sorn

• "sir" when speaking privately with no Grobal caste members present.
• in Garr and Tagret's presence, he doesn't speak or refer to Sorn at all.
• "Garr's Sorn" when thinking, for first reference.
• "Sorn" for references thereafter, OR
• "the senior servant."

Aloran => Tagret

• "young sir" when speaking.
• "Grobal Tagret," when thinking, for first reference or thereafter, OR
• "the young Master" OR
• "the Grobal boy."
  
• in reference following a focus on Garr, "his son."

Aloran's use of terms reflects both his lower status and his status as an outsider. He is not socially authorized to utter the names of any of the individuals in the room, and he must think of them formally. He is permitted to think of them by full name, or by caste rank (Grobal), by their relationship to each other, or by their status relative to the Household he is attempting to enter (Master/Young Master).

It's interesting to note that neither boy thinks of Garr as the Speaker of the Cabinet. This rank is not relevant to Tagret (obviously) but neither is it relevant to Aloran, who is not trained in politics and is not expected to engage with Garr in his capacity as Speaker but as a member of his Household.

You may notice that I talk about "first reference" here. This is a topic I've wanted to engage with for a while, but I find it tricky to discuss in a meaningful way. I'll do it briefly now. In discourse, and by that I mean stretches of narrative larger than a sentence, we don't use the same terms to refer to people or things every time we mention them. Typically it works something like this:

For objects:
first notice - a table
subsequent reference - it, OR
if some text has gone by and we need to be reminded - the table

For people:
first notice - a person
subsequent reference if gender is known - he/she, OR the person
if we know the person's name, first reference - full name appropriate to status and context
subsequent reference - he/she, OR shortened version of the name appropriate to context, or description of identity relative to social position

You can see that the introduction of the object or person generally includes the most information, and thereafter we relax a bit because we can refer readers back to that information by using pronouns or shortened references. I've seen cases, particularly in beginning writing, where people are not following this pattern, and it tends to be jarring.

Okay, back to differentiating two points of view. There are some other little things you can do to enhance this. When I am in Tagret's point of view, I try to use his name as little as possible (people don't typically think of themselves in third person). Since all three characters are male, however, I do need to use his name quite a bit to differentiate him. When I use it, I try to keep it in subject position rather than object position, so that we get the sense of the character being someone who does things, and to keep it out of anything resembling internalization. Here's an example:

Speechless with disgust, Tagret allowed Father to escort him to the Master bedroom, where Imbati Sorn opened the door to let them in. It didn't matter any more what this was about - the faster he got in, the faster he could get out and go back to Mother.
In his parents' room, daylights shone in the windows, and cast delicate shadows through the sheer curtains of the bed. The chairs from the lounge corner had been pulled out into the room. Between them, with his face expressionless, stood Imbati Aloran.

Then, of course, you also can differentiate by showing the two characters with different mental states and attitudes. Tagret is angry; Aloran is scared and trying to make a good impression. As you can see in the above description of the room, Tagret is in his home territory and knows every object there (note how he uses "the" for everything). He notices only particular conditions of light and furniture placement that might be different from other times he's seen the room. Aloran is not on home territory; he knows little about Garr and less about the lady he's supposed to be interviewing to work for, so he approaches what he sees entirely differently. Here's an example from immediately after the transition:

Aloran fought the urge to tense his arms and shoulders. Distance yourself, the lesson said. [...] The calm mind is observant and prepared.
He forced himself to review what he'd learned from the room. A wide bed with a filmy canopy indicated the Master and Mistress did sleep together, and the brocade curtains on the wall behind it hinted of manservants' doors. The watches atop the rich wooden dresser suggested it was the Master's, while a table of smoked glass set in a delicate gold-plated frame demonstrated the Lady's tastes.
His mind struggled, though, trying to drag his attention back to Grobal Tagret. If only he could be alone with Grobal Garr as before!

Point of view is not just about those pronouns we're always talking about. It's about tuning names as well, and also about putting the character's judgment into the way you treat everything else that is happening. Physical descriptions reflect social position and mental states just as much as internalization or action. In close point of view (whether it be first person or third), the judgment of the character affects everything that person notices or describes. Even actions are not just actions, but that character's interpretation of the action and what it suggests about the other character's motives.

It's something to pay attention to as you switch from one point of view to another.

Too cool to be normal

I've known a lot of people who've endured the stress of a parent or friend asking why they can't be more "normal." When the topic came up with my kids the other day we started asking, "What is normal?" Of course, with an opportunity like that, the anthropologist in me can't resist speaking out.

Normal, even in statistics, is defined relative to a particular group. Collect the data from this group, then calculate the mean and figure out a bell curve. That's how it's done when you can precisely identify the members of the group in question. In the social sense, though, the group is much harder to define. Asking someone to be "normal" implies that they don't belong to the "normal" group. Usually, but not always, it implies that the speaker does belong to that group.

So the first thing I'm going to ask is why we use this term at all? I found myself using it a few days ago to talk about people who do violent acts - "they're not normal." I'm pretty okay with that, I guess since the group I'm defining is good citizens of the world. But believe me, I know my kids are going to run across "not normal" comments about their love of school, and their intelligence, and their love of good stories, and on that one I'm going to be ready to go into battle.

"Not normal" isn't always a bad thing. I definitely consider myself "too cool to be normal" - something I definitely associate with being a lover of science fiction and fantasy - and I hope my kids will feel the same.

If you have ever been a victim of the phrase, "not normal," use your writing as your chance for revenge. First of all, take pride in the fact that you're above average. And second, redefine normal in your writing. Use the word shamelessly in whatever world you've created, and think it through, making sure it means something utterly different there from what it means here in our world. In Cochee-coco society, it's not normal to seek privacy. In Aurrel society, it's not normal to cook vegetables (and only your pets would eat them anyway). In the Realm of Words, not saying what you mean isn't only "not normal," but against the law.

We all know people who use "normal" as a sword. It's time for us to give that sword a second edge.

Culture isn't uniform!

Way back in the very early life of this blog (in 2008!) I wrote a post about making sure your characters aren't all the same. Not surprisingly, the post was called "Don't make them all the same," and I encourage you to go back and look at it.

Today's post deals with culture, but it has the same message. Not only aren't different cultures the same as one another (on a very fundamental level), even cultures that are spoken of as if they were uniform aren't really uniform.

American culture. Which one? From the point of view of Australians or Japanese, our culture is what they see on the television and in the movies. I remember having to explain over and over when I was living as an exchange student in Japan that just because they hear stories about Americans who own guns doesn't mean that every American owns a gun. Just because they hear Americans talk about Christianity doesn't mean every American is a Christian. As my Aussie husband has remarked, "America has Utah, and it has Nevada, and the two are side by side."

You shouldn't be surprised to learn that Japanese culture varies a lot also. There are a myriad dialects across the Japanese islands (as should be expected given the length of time that the population has lived there). The Japanese are particularly proud of their regional delicacies, but the differences go beyond just that.

In fact, culture isn't necessarily uniform even in a single location. In a tiny town dominated by a printing plant, you might have a microculture for the people who work at the plant which distinguishes itself from the people who work in service positions for the plant workers. In a major US university you'll have African American groups and Asian American groups as well as groups based on religious affiliation, hobbies, etc. People align themselves based on professions, religions, neighborhoods - almost anything can become the basis for alignment, or realignment. When I was an undergraduate one of the major issues that came up was that the Asian American group was splintering into subcomponents - the Filipinos and the Chinese, the Koreans and the Japanese were starting to want their own groups. In the US we often talk about the culture of a company, or the culture of sports, etc.

So let's say you're creating a fictional culture. It could be aliens, or elves, or humans in a secondary world - that part doesn't matter. The characters that you create will differ enormously based on the culture they are a part of, but also upon the subcultures they belong to. And here's another thing - different subcultures aren't necessarily even aware of one another's existence, even when they interact all the time. Let's say that you have one group that works as servants to another group - the master group will know a lot about the servant group as pertains to their interaction with the master group, and the expectations for intergroup relations. However, they may not know much if anything about the norms for relations inside the servant group, when the master group is not present. People can live side by side and interact constantly but have no idea how members of another cultural group think.

I encourage you to think this through as you build a world. A character doesn't behave the way he/she does because he/she is a member of X labelled group. That character is a product of his/her own experience and has layers of cultural awareness. That character will also have ideas about how other groups work - and those ideas probably overlap with other groups' views of themselves, but they probably miss a lot too.

I have a big trilogy in my future (something I wrote before when I wasn't as good a writer!) and I'm having ideas for it on and off continually (which is why I'm sure I'll go back to it). One of the things that's developing is the social structure and the intra-cultural contrasts. It's a Varin trilogy, so it's set in a society with seven caste levels. I used to have three point of view characters, but now I have four planned, and contrast is the reason for this. It's going to look like:

1. Imbati #1
2. Imbati #2
3. Akrabitti #1
4. Akrabitti #2

Each of the two members of the Imbati caste have very different ideas about what it means to be Imbati, which grow out of very different sets of experiences - and as you can imagine, the same is true for the Akrabitti characters. There's also going to be an important contrast between the noblemen that Imbati #1 and Imbati #2 work for. These contrasts give the portrayal of the castes and the world far more depth than they could have if I used only a single character from each group. In my reading of science fiction and fantasy I've met a lot of quest groups, and other groups, with different races and cultures - but usually only one representative of each. It's not a problem, per se, but when you want to create a truly three-dimensional society, it can really help to get a stereoscopic view of the cultural groups from which it is formed.

Focus Your Worldbuilding Efforts

You're creating a world. You want to write a story in it, and you want it to feel real. How best do you go about that?

Well, you have to have all the underlying basic principles down. Climate, ecology, economy, etc, etc, etc. It all has to fit together and make sense. But a lot of that stuff isn't precisely relevant to your plot. The temptation might be to explain things - and that leads you into trouble. You want people to believe in you, yes. But don't tell them things and ask them to believe. If you show those things effectively, then they'll believe in spite of themselves.

I'm sure you've all heard this "show don't tell" advice before. I have a whole post on its different meanings, but I'm not trying to access all those meanings today. I just want to say that if you can bring your worldbuilding efforts into sharp focus, you can achieve that "show don't tell" feeling, and a little bit of worldbuilding can go a long way.

A good place to start explaining this is with a short story. Say your story is short, so you don't have room to try to explain the world - and yet, you want to make sure that the world feels large. One really good way of doing this is picking a single object to start with. This object has to be one that has high relevance to the character - but not necessarily to the plot. I recommend everyday objects. Not something like a fork which has become nearly generic, but something that is slightly off what in the real world we would consider normal. Maybe it's a ceremonial object, or an object of significance to the main character. Maybe it's this Roman "Swiss army knife" that Astrid Bear pointed out to me on Facebook this morning (thank you!).

The reason why I enjoyed the Roman knife-tool was that it was so detailed. So much to be learned from its discovery about the habits of the person who carried it. The fork and spoon. The blade. The spike which may have been used to remove the meat from snails. The toothpick; the spatula.

If you can pick one highly relevant, salient object, its nature can imply many things about the world around it. In my story, "Let the Word Take Me," (Analog July/Aug 2008) I gave my alien girl two objects like that - a ceremonial knife, and "sun armor." Here's a quote:

On top [in the artifact case] was a ceremonial knife in a scabbard of intricately worked grazer-leather, with a leaf-shaped blade and a hilt wound with stone beads. Underneath was a mass of white feathers. Lifting the top layer, he found himself unfolding a hooded coat of perforated leather densely clad with yorro plumage. ... David suspected it was an heirloom; the unblemished feathers were layered without gaps, but the leather inside showed that patches had been resewn, and two of the worn tie-thongs had been replaced.

I spent this many words describing the two objects because of what they said about the technology level and culture of the people who had made them. Find the right object, and its significance will radiate outward, accomplishing far more than general descriptions on a larger scale.

The fact of the matter is, while this technique is very convenient in short stories where you have fewer words to work with, it is equally effective for longer works. The objects don't have to be ceremonial or have special importance. They can be small things that the characters consider quite mundane. A lot of large-scale principles become evident in the tiny details of the everyday. Focus your worldbuilding efforts and you can get a lot of power out of a very few words.

It's something to think about.

Body Language: eye gaze (in life and animation)

Eyes are important. You remember all those scenes where the bad guy is questioning a child, trying to find people who have hidden, watching the kid's eyes to see if they flicker off in any direction to indicate the location of the hiding place. You probably also remember that the character Violet's first line in The Incredibles is, "He looked at me." In real life, and in the movies, we're constantly watching people's eyes - characters' eyes - to learn things about what they are thinking and feeling.

Just because you're working in words - writing a story rather than a movie - doesn't mean you should ignore the power of eye gaze. It's one of the most important non-verbal cues that we watch for, and if it's missing, readers will sense a huge gap in your story.

Eye gaze is an excellent tool for reinforcing point of view. To me there's a wonderful contrast between talking about the things seen by the POV character - where I explicitly try to avoid saying "I saw" - and giving descriptions of the way that a non-POV character's eyes move. In this context, having your pov character "look" makes it a conscious gesture of the eyes. Here's an impromptu example:

I turned. Josephine was standing in the doorway. (1) When I looked at her (2), she dropped her gaze away (3).

1. POV character's observation, no mention of "seeing"
2. POV character makes a deliberate eye gesture: placing gaze on Josephine.
3. POV character observes movement of Josephine's eyes, which suggests an emotional state.

We are taught throughout life to manage our eye gaze. "Look at me when I'm talking to you!" "How dare you give me that look?" "As you speak, make sure you're looking out across the crowd and making eye contact with individuals." Because of this, we form expectations about what different eye gaze positions and styles mean, and those expectations can help you in your story. Talking about eye movements or what someone is looking at is a great way to externalize one character's assessment of another character. It's also a great way to "show don't tell."

Different cultures place different value on eye gaze. I had a friend once who was having a period of difficulty with job interviews, and someone else suspected that his style of making eye contact might be at fault. In my local culture, students in school are expected to make eye contact with teachers as a way of indicating that they're paying attention. In other cultures (such as Japanese or Native American), making eye contact with a teacher is considered inappropriate and presumptuous, possibly an affront. If you're working with an alien group or an alternate world, keep this in mind, because it can give you lots of opportunities for creating difference and possible misunderstanding.

Because I like this stuff, I've created a special instance of eye gaze that I'd like to share from my own work. The Imbati servant caste of Varin has a special set of "gaze-gesture codes" that manservants use in order to communicate when speaking is not appropriate (for example, when their masters are speaking and they can't interrupt). It's not a language, and not universal to the caste, since it's taught explicitly to the elite manservant group. However, the most basic gaze gestures are known to most Imbati and can be used in place of speech whenever they would like to use them. Some examples are "permission," "apology," "request," etc.

Recently I've noticed a sort of common gaze language - or more accurately, eye language - emerging from the portrayal of eyes in animated films. Both Pixar and Dreamworks make use of what I call the "shrinking eye." When characters are shocked or frightened, their pupils shrink down to tiny dots. When Toothless the dragon is angry and ready to pounce, his pupils are small; when he's friendly, they're large.

In fact, this is contrary to my observations of nature. I used to play a game with my cat Folly. I'd stare her down and try to get her to pounce at me by using nothing more than my eye gaze. I could always tell when she was about to pounce because her pupils would abruptly expand. Expand - they'd get so big I could scarcely see her irises, and a split second later, she'd jump.

I've asked myself why in the world the shrinking eye would be so effective at conveying fear or shock, and I've come to this conclusion: pupil size is only one indicator of shock. The wideness of the eyes is another major indicator - probably even a more obvious one. When an animated character experiences shrinking eye, not only the pupils but the irises get smaller, leading to a significant expansion in the white of the eye. By using the shrinking eye, the animators are able to convey an extreme widening of the eye without having to have the eyes expand and take over the head (as they, and mouths, do quite often in anime-style animation). In the case of Toothless the Dragon, the pupil not only expanded but distorted, becoming less oval and more square. The result was an optical illusion that made his eyes look more round - more cute - without requiring the animators to change the shape of the eye and create a weird distortion effect on the dragon's face.

I wonder if you've noticed this trend in animated movies, as I have... I hope the commonness of these effects doesn't lead to them becoming the accepted method. Too much uniformity detracts from creativity, in my mind.

Anyway, try spending some time concentrating on how people use their eyes. It could give you some ideas for your latest story.

Body language: are there clichés?

Recently on the Absolute Write forum I encountered a really good question about body language. In the midst of discussion on another topic entirely one writer asked whether there were any "good gestures" or whether all gestures were "clichéd, like smiling and shrugging".

I'd never thought about it this way, even though I've discussed body language before (here and on other forums). Would a gesture be cliché? Or would it only be the way the gesture was handled in written form?

I'll start with the second question, and then go back to the first. Anything we write can turn out badly if we handle it wrong, and if an author chose to use the same gesture too many times in close succession, that could definitely look repetitive. It would be a problem, but a problem of the writing. There are possible "show don't tell" issues surrounding gestures as well. There might be times when a more detailed description of a character's body movements is more appropriate than simple use of the word "shrugged." If you're writing along and you come to a point where a person has to show discomfort in their body language, there are many ways you can choose to have them do it - scratching an ear, shuffling feet, looking away, etc. - so you can make a conscious choice to have that behavior fit the character's personality or the formality of the context. For example, at a formal dinner party, a person might simply look away from the person he/she is talking to without showing any other physical signs of discomfort. Making good choices in such contexts is part of creating a successful story. By all means, don't say "he furrowed his brow" every single time someone has to express disapproval.

What about the question of whether gestures themselves can be cliché? My immediate instinct is to say no, they can't. Mind you, they can be repetitive. Body language isn't verbal or grammatical, but it does have a "code." Some gestures are "fixed expressions," such as the shrug or the handshake. Other gestures have different interpretations depending on the context in which they appear - eye-widening can mean surprise, fear, amazement, or exasperation, and we have to look at how it is described and what is happening or being said around it in order to understand its meaning. It's interesting to consider that sometimes we have different words to differentiate between these contexts - for example, "glaring" for the exasperated eye-widening, and "staring" for at least two of the other contexts. Smiling is another physical cue that can mean joy, evil pleasure, or nervousness depending on where it appears.

Many gestural cues vary across cultures - something to keep an eye out for. In Japan people point to their own noses while saying "Me?" rather than their chests; they point with the whole hand and not with just one finger; they beckon with the palm facing down, not up. These are the kinds of things one can vary when dealing with fantasy societies or aliens, and one can even exploit misunderstandings in gesture for critical plot moments.

Body language is extremely useful to a writer. It can and should be used. Because I usually write in very tight points of view (first person or tight third person), I find body language very useful. I use emotional description or internalization for the point of view character, and descriptions of body language and facial expressions for other characters in the scene (along with the pov character's judgment of their meaning). Here's an example:

[Tagret] risked a glance and caught Fernar gaping in horror, Della's Yoral in what could only be called a valiant effort not to look - something. Amused, hopefully, rather than insulted.

This allows you to create a solid sensation of point of view and keep your characters differentiated (even when they aren't speaking!).

So if you feel at this point that you may have a shorter list of body language tools than you would like to have, I'll give you a short list of possible body language cue types and what they may be useful for. Of course, there's no way to cover everything!

• The direction someone is facing - good for first impressions of a person's mood, where their attention is focused, and how safe they feel
• Where a person is looking (making eye contact or looking at a particular object) - good for showing what a character is paying attention to, and how ready they are for conversation or confrontation.
• Open or closed body posture - this shows mood and receptiveness. The more bunched up a person is, the more uncomfortable they appear (like my poor daughter at the dentist's yesterday!). A person can also close body to one side and open to another by crossing the legs and turning the shoulders, perhaps to show preference to one love interest over another.
• Placement of the hands - this shows mood, anxiety level, and can also give information about character and personality depending on what the person is holding or what they are doing with their hands.
• Height of the shoulders - another mood indicator
• Ease of breathing - great to show fear, relief, relaxation, excitement, etc.

This is just a short list, as I said, to get you started. One great thing to do is go out with your anthropologist's glasses on, set yourself in a public place and watch how people move. Figure out what your instincts tell you about certain body postures. Then you can enrich your own list of body language cues and work on incorporating these into your writing. It's the best way I can think of to avoid the problem of a body language cliché.

Edible Babies?

This post is NOT about Jonathan Swift's classic satire, "A Modest Proposal," though if you have never read it I highly recommend you do.

I'm thinking about how we use nicknames related to food.

This is most common with babies, and in particular with girl babies. There are a few words, like "honey" and "sugar" and "sweetie pie" (focus on the "pie") that can apply to both boys and girls. However, nicknames like "cupcake" and "peach" do not apply to boys at all, and it's nearly impossible to find food nicknames that are used exclusively for boys. The older the boys get, the less likely it is that they'll be cast in this food-related light. "Beefcake" after all is an unnatural word, invented as a response to the use of "cheesecake" for females.

What does it mean? Well, I'm not about to claim that food nicknames have any literal cannibalistic meaning. However, as a mom who very often threatens playfully to eat her children up, I have some thoughts. This metaphorical "eating" usually has to do with kissing, and I think there is a parallel between the use of eating nicknames and the appropriateness of affectionate kissing with children (usually within the family, but not always). Boys learn to disapprove of it much earlier, and to expect a kind of physical autonomy that makes rough play okay, but snuggly intimacy not okay (I personally think this is a shame). There's also an element of permission involved in being the one "eaten" that can be interpreted as submissiveness - more grist for the feminist mill, and I'm sure that could potentially generate some story ideas.

I think it would be useful to consider what form this sort of intimacy might take in a fantasy or alien society. One could explore an alternate avenue for the nicknaming - different foods might be an obvious direction to go. Another alternative might be to consider physical expressions of intimacy that don't involve the mouth (for cultural or physiological reasons), and see what directions your nicknames might take as a result.

It's something to think about.

The language you speak influences how you think!

I'd been looking for a good way to introduce the work of Stanford Psychology professor Lera Boroditsky to my readers, and today I found it in this fantastic article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Yes, the language you speak does influence how you think.

I think the first people to put forward the idea that a link existed between culture and language were the anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The last two of those are associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that differences in the way language encodes categories etc. affect the way speakers of that language think. There's been a lot of argument about this idea since it came out, and certainly one can argue against a strong form that says language restricts thought. However, Professor Boroditsky has been exploring exactly what the consequences of certain languages are for thought - and in fact, she's finding there is a huge influence between the two. Russian speakers who have more words for blue than English speakers are in fact better able to distinguish between colors of blue. Speakers of different languages conceptualize the "direction" of time differently: left to right vs. right to left vs. below to above. And those who use absolute direction instead of relative direction (N/S/E/W instead of Left/Right) use those directions to organize things chronologically as well as to think about spatial positioning.

I encourage you not only to read this article, but to think about how this affects your writing. What kind of society have you created? What language do they speak, and how does it frame its categories? Once you've figured that out, ask yourself how that categorization system might be further generalized into the society, its beliefs and its behavior. Language does affect thought - so something that shows up in the language should be evident in basic concepts of reality like how many different colors of blue there are, or whether something hanging on a wall is actually "on" it or "up" it. What kinds of distinctions might your people draw that we might not be familiar with?

When I create my societies, I like to see how far I can push these categories and the judgments surrounding them. In doing so, I hope not only to tell a great story, but to show my readers a new way of imagining and conceptualizing the reality that we all share.

I hope you find this article as inspiring as I did.