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!

Do characters really need to be likeable?

I've seen multiple discussions recently, in various locations, of whether characters in stories need to be likeable. At last I was inspired by Janice Hardy's post yesterday on what makes one POV "better" than another to write out my thoughts.

I don't personally think that all characters have to be likeable - not by a long stretch. I can see the point of those people who say much of a story may be lost if everyone has to be likeable. But I do remember feeling that I just couldn't stand the characters of "Seinfeld" - and for that reason I couldn't be bothered watching them for more than five minutes without feeling they'd robbed me of valuable time. What is the critical criterion?

My answer is going to seem overly simple, but I think characters have to be relatable, not likeable. There has to be some quality about them that makes you feel like you recognize them, and that they are real.

So what makes a character relatable?

This is a question that I've done a lot of thinking about. I write science fiction and fantasy, and that involves creating lots of alienness - alien languages, fantasy cultures, characters who are not human and characters temporally or physically (even physiologically) far divorced from our day-to-day experience. I don't get to work with the girl or boy next door, unless that person is about to encounter something really unexpected! However, in my writing I always strive to give my readers the insider's viewpoint. That means that if I want the story to succeed, particularly if I want to push a reader out of his or her usual way of thinking, it's absolutely essential for me to try to achieve that relatability, in order to invite reader investment in even the most unusual characters.

Every point of view character should have at least one relatable element - even antagonists. It's also likely that you'll want to find relatable elements for non-point of view characters. This kind of element could be:

• a relatable goal - e.g. wanting to fall in love, or wanting monetary or other success, wanting freedom or justice, wanting to create or protect family, or even just wanting to keep a full stomach and a roof over their heads, etc.
• a relatable external conflict - e.g. being up against racial or other discrimination (in the case of sf/f, we often see "other"), facing peer pressure, facing bullying, dealing with bureaucracy, dealing with a rival for the same goal, etc.
  
• a relatable personal characteristic (good or bad) - e.g. being deeply religious, being dedicated to one's work, having a disability, experiencing self-doubt, depression, or a recognizable mental illness, trying to pursue a virtuous life, being haunted by one's past mistakes, caring deeply for others, being unable to make a decision, etc.

At this point I'll give some character examples from my own writing, to try to make this a bit more concrete.

From "Let the Word Take Me":
David Linden is a kid who is trying to win the approval of his father.
Allayo is a gecko-like alien. She is deeply principled and understands her life through her faith.

From "Cold Words":
Rulii is a 6'4" wolflike alien. He is discriminated against as an oppressed minority, and has paid a steep price for the power to help his people: he's addicted to a cocaine-like substance because it keeps him from shivering and thereby losing his ability to work toward justice.

From "At Cross Purposes":
Lynn is an engineer who loves her work and resents a boss who doesn't understand what she does.
Tsee is an otter-like alien. She would do anything to protect her twin brother, and she loves science and beautiful things.

From my WIP "For Love, For Power" (with special thanks to beta reader Jamie Todd Rubin for pointing this out):
Tagret is a privileged boy who loves his mother, suffers because his mother and father hate each other, and experiences awkwardness in trying to approach the girl he likes.
Aloran is born a servant, but believes in gender equality and becomes angry when he sees anyone abused.
Nekantor is a power-hungry boy (the antagonist) who suffers from mental illness including paranoia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

From this list you may notice that I find character psychology to be a great ally. Even a character like Rulii who seems very strange, or someone very unlikeable like Nekantor, can be relatable. Funny enough, suffering for a recognizable reason - and by that I mean really experiencing distress - has huge potential for increasing relatability.

What about your characters do you find relatable? Are they likeable? Do you see a difference?

It's something to think about.

A character of mine on the couch...

Today one of my characters is being psychoanalyzed over at The Character Therapist. The funniest part for me is seeing how she changed the names "to protect the fictional"! If you've been reading my blog awhile, you may recognize one of the characters mentioned. Anyway, thanks to Jeannie for taking the time and running such an interesting blog. I encourage you to check it out.

Character arcs - how characters change

Do you have character arcs in your story? Chances are you do, even if you aren't aware of them, or don't call them that. On the basic level, character arcs are the changes that your character goes through over the course of the story. This can include coming to a decision, learning to make particular kinds of decisions differently, learning something important about life, getting to the bottom of a mystery, or any kind of development within the character's mind or personality.

Keeping conscious control of character arcs is a really valuable tool in crafting a story, particularly when you're working with a novel. You can have whole-novel-long story arcs, or smaller arcs like the protagonist's relationship to a minor character, or the protagonist resolving a subplot about something (say, a key he found). These typically all happen concurrently. One nice way of thinking of the climax of the story is to imagine your character arcs bouncing across your story like rocks skipped across water, and then to imagine that several of them must all land at the same spot at the same time - for maximum effect!

At this point I'd like to think about character arcs from two major angles: the plot direction, and the character direction.

Approaching character arcs from the plot direction is something you can do without even having conscious awareness of your plot arcs. You know what needs to happen in the story events, and you know what does happen in the story events, and as the character goes along, he or she just changes with his/her natural reactions to the story events. This is good. It's important (in my view) to keep two things in mind.

1. Story events will make your character react and learn. If they don't, you're missing an opportunity.
2. Some actions by the character will require them to learn things/change before they can happen.

This is where it's helpful to be able to trace the arc backward. If your protagonist needs to be able to fly a helicopter, then it would be good to set that up - either he knows how to do it already (mention how), or he learns how to do it, or he learns different sub-components of the skills at different points (the arc approach). Take the example of Trinity in The Matrix. She very quickly learns to fly a helicopter in the midst of the action, without any time for explanation. But the preconditions that make that possible (she has a data port; people can learn through data loads) have been set up in her actions, and in the actions of others, previously in the story. So if you find your beta readers going "huh?" when your character pulls out his sword and starts swinging, you might want to check his arcs and make sure swordsmanship and/or its precursors, were included in there somewhere. Another possible arc example is if your character has to make a very bad decision that runs contrary to his/her morality - think about how to lead into that decision with smaller plot elements that show the character's non-reliability, or his/her doubts, the ability of another character to sway him/her, etc. so as to prime the possibility of that uncharacteristic decision.

Then there's approaching a character arc from the angle of character change. "Over the course of the story my protagonist has to go from being a bigot to learning to accept others." "My character believes in the status quo, but when he finds out about X, he has to accept that the status quo has always been a lie."

This is what I do a lot, because a lot of my stories are about people changing their minds, or learning what the key to understanding is, etc. I go very psychological in my stories. If you're doing something similar, take a look at that change that needs to happen, and try to break it down into smaller components. The bigger the change, the more different conditions will have to be in effect for it to happen. If my bigot must change his mind, then he probably needs to be put in an extreme situation where only a member of his despised group can help him, and that person becomes a friend/exception as a result. But there will be many things that need to happen in order to create an extreme situation like that - and many things that must happen thereafter, once the bigot has actually engaged with the despised person, to solidify his impression and expand his doubts about his previous views into a broader personal change.

I'll be a bit more specific with another example. My highly educated and informed character X isn't someone you could call a bigot, but has always been taught that people have different fundamental natures. He then meets character M who is in disguise as a member of the same group as X. What will it take for him to accept that M and he have enough in common to maintain a relationship when he finally discovers who M is? He will:

• discover the history of how the different groups were formed out of the same population
• discover that M's group was the victim of a terrible injustice
• go through a series of interactions with M during which he will come to have a high opinion of her.
  

Only when all these things are operating at once does it seem plausible for X to have the reaction he does when he finds out the truth.

Before I leave the topic of arcs, I want to mention a couple more things. First, do you need character arcs if you're writing about real characters and events - say in a memoir or in historical fiction based around factual events - when you know "what really happened"?

My answer is emphatically, "Yes." Character arcs are patterns of systematic change that build on themselves and give a story the sense of being strongly coherent and tied together. If you're working with real events, those should work their way into the character arcs. Character arcs don't have to be predictable, and they don't have to be uniform, but they should be logical and readers should be able to see their plausibility in the context of events - whether those events are fixed by history or not.

Second, what happens when you end up with an arc that you weren't intending to create? I'll take an example from my super writer-buddy Janice Hardy (because I'm sure she'll forgive me!). When I was helping her with an early draft of her Book 3 of the Healing Wars trilogy, I noticed that her character had changed. Nya had gone through so much and experienced so much pain that she appeared to have become less hurt by it. So I asked Janice whether that was what she had intended, and she told me it wasn't. I felt helpful, because after that Janice was able to go through and consciously track how Nya reacted to pain - so that it still made sense in context, but so it didn't accidentally lose the poignancy that it had had through the first two books.

Thanks to the folks at Absolute Write forum for giving me the idea for this post.

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.

Human - vehicular relations?

Here's a hilarious link to a story from BBC news about research (conducted at Stanford University) into how to get your car to talk to you, help you drive better and become your friend. The fun part is how systematic the research is, and how much they've learned about the linguistic details that influence your emotions.

Check it out here.

Perceived Boundaries

I started thinking about how we perceive boundaries this weekend, while I was in Yosemite. What brought it on initially was our walk on the nature trail that surrounded Evergreen Lodge where we stayed. This trail was marked by the occasional numbered post, where we were to read things about local flora and fauna and their history, and by different sorts of boundary markers in different locations. At one point we walked along a barbed-wire fence. At other points there were long dead sticks of varying size laid along the borders of the path. In some places where we climbed over rocks, the boundaries of the path weren't marked at all. Somehow we managed to find our way all the way around the loop and have a good time without getting lost.

There was another form of boundary-marking in play on the paths within the Lodge cabin areas. The paths were paved, which made their boundaries very obvious, but I found when it was dark that the lights they put on both sides of the path weren't quite close enough for me to perceive the boundaries of the path when I looked from afar. What with the number of different paths, and their proximity to one another, looking at them at night was a lot like gazing at a bunch of random lights.

At the Lodge this weekend, someone was getting married, and given that the weather was very cold, they had the reception in a giant tent. This tent had transparent plastic walls, a very clear boundary. But once when I circumnavigated it, I found myself wondering if I should "count" the ropes that tied down the tent as part of the border, and skirt them, or not.

All of these struck me as questions of how we perceive boundaries. I've read that human minds like to perceive boundaries - we look for them. Our brains even exaggerate them, as when we perceive a larger difference in color between two adjacent blocks of color than actually exists (for an example, go here and look for "the shade of the center dot is the same in all the squares").
My children just noticed for the first time the other day that in the movie "The Jungle Book," the character of Mowgli has black lines surrounding him, while the jungle backgrounds do not. I remember noticing the same thing about the movie Totoro - the characters were outlined and clearly animated, while the backgrounds looked more real. Here's a little illustration of the difference between outlined and non-outlined colors.

Perceived boundaries can vary across cultures. I'm thinking in this regard particularly about perceptions of personal space (I've blogged about this before in Are You Being Invaded?). The boundary of personal space in the US differs significantly from that in Japan. In the US people typically stand and talk at handshake-distance. In Japan they do so at bow-and-don't-conk-heads distance, which is farther. However, the sense of personal distance in Japan alters radically when you change contexts from the social to the commuter train. In a commuter situation the boundary of personal space seems to me to move straight to the skin - people in a train station in Tokyo will walk right into you and pass by without appearing to notice that they just slammed into your shoulder. I remember coming back from Japan and encountering an entirely different type of perceived boundary: a woman in the grocery store had extrapolated the future path of her shopping cart, and mine, and having determined that they would intersect, apologized to me. I was floored by this after spending eighteen months using the Japanese system (to the best of my ability - I've never been able to handle jostling crowds well). I think there are some contexts in the US where that crowd impersonality takes hold and people jostle one another without perceiving an invasion of boundaries - a packed rock concert, for example - but I've never encountered it here to the same degree as in Japan.

Here's another example of children and how they perceive boundaries - or how they learn to change their behavior as a result of a perceived boundary. I have some neighbor kids who occasionally play with mine, and one day I was working in my garden weeding when they came over. I had one of them help me a little with my weeding, but her younger brother started pulling out plants I liked, so I asked him to stay out of the garden. This was very difficult for him. I don't imagine that he couldn't perceive the border of the garden, just that he hadn't learned to perceive that border as one that should stop his forward motion. So after that day I went out and bought a very short wire fence, to exaggerate the sense of the edge of my garden as a barrier. So far it appears to have worked.

This kind of boundary perception is something that may be worth considering in the process of worldbuilding. It's easy to assume that another group of people will perceive physical boundaries in the same way we do, but it might be more interesting to ask how they might not. Personal boundaries. Physical boundaries. The edges of objects. City, state, or national boundaries. All of these can potentially be called into question - either in their sensory perception, as with some kind of alien species, or in their interpretation. In a science fictional or fantasy world, or any other situation where culture is at stake, I think it's fascinating to play with misunderstandings (like the one about my garden!) surrounding the perception and interpretation of boundaries. What are we taught about what boundaries mean? Why might good fences make good neighbors (or not)? Why do nations need to draw lines between them, and how far can these disputes go (very far - witness Kashmir!)? Do the disputes of nations directly parallel the way that we treat our personal boundaries? And what about our psychological ones?

There are lots of implications there worth exploring.

Point of View, Unreliable Narrators, and Subjective Experience

The other day I was writing about point of view and the value of separating a character perceiving, noticing, and understanding - and I realized that there was a connection there with the idea of unreliable narrators. I've posted about unreliable narrators before, here, and one of the things I remarked was that every narrator can be unreliable to some degree.

Because anyone can make a mistake.

Let's say you have an event - say a line uttered by someone - that your character witnesses. And let's say that your character mishears that line, because he or she is in a state of shock at the time, having just....something. Learned terrible news, or had an arrow shot through her arm, or discovered his lover was unfaithful, etc.

First of all, let me refer to the tried and true (if frustratingly opaque) adage, "show don't tell." In a close point of view, I personally would rather not be told by the narrator that a character is in shock and can't hear properly - that dumps me right out of the narrative. So what I would look for is evidence inside the text that the character is in shock. This would be things like incoherent thoughts, distraction by pain, etc. that you can demonstrate easily if your narrative is directly reporting the internalization of your narrator. Here's an example (made up on the spot :) ).

"Donner fell back, staring at the arrow that had impaled his arm. Anika was shouting - God, he couldn't move his fingers, he'd never be able to join the guard now! A figure in black loomed over him, while her footsteps thumped up behind - was this the physician?"

Ok, so at this point if you have Anika say something, the reader will know that Donner is in a highly distracted state and not able to string thoughts together rationally. The choice for the writer then becomes whether to have Anika actually deliver the line.

If it's not important for the reader to know the content of Anika's message, then you can just have Donner pass out, or you can figure some message was delivered when she shouted but Donner didn't get it. If this is the case, you can have Anika refer to this event later, saying something like "but I warned you that that was Ghori coming to finish you off - I couldn't have shouted it any louder." To which Donner could reply "Good thing you'd brought your broadsword, Darling."

On the other hand, if it is important to the reader to know the message content, you can have her deliver the line perfectly clearly. "Watch out, Donner, that's Ghori - and he's got the crystal!" Donner can perceive the words, allowing the reader to do so also, but so long as he doesn't react to them in a way that shows he has noticed or understood, he can show his lack of comprehension later and readers will not be surprised or confused.

Close rendering of subjective experience is a great way to show a character's understanding without leaving readers behind. In the case of a large battle, for example, the author would do well to know what is going on behind the backs of the nearest soldiers, but the point of view character will only perceive the most local evidence of that larger picture. As a writer, you can choose to use other points of view to put the larger picture together later.

If you happen to be working with a very unreliable narrator - an insane person, for example, or someone who is drunk or high, then all of these tools for the separation of perception and judgment - even action and judgment - will come in very handy. Cold Words (which is written in first person) contains a sequence where Rulii eats a drug-containing plant and then runs home: I had to take him from rational to irrational, gradually removing all of the kinds of thoughts that showed measured judgment, before I could finally have him take actions that were impulsive and dangerous to his friend Parker (and very uncharacteristic of Rulii's normal personality). In that scene, I reported Parker's actions only in the most basic way, and I wrote all of Parker's lines quite clearly, but never had Rulii respond as though he took them seriously.

A final observation: one of my pet peeves in reading stories is when I feel an author is keeping secrets from me. My measure of that comes from the choice of point of view. In a movie, where I have no evidence of people's mental states, I'm more willing to accept that "wait, that guy was working for the secret society all along." If I've been in his head, though, his motives are very important to his internalizations and his choice of action, and if the character knows something, I feel I should know it too. I actually find it more suspenseful when I know who's working for the bad guys, and I know that the good guys aren't aware of the same things that I am. This is one of the reasons why I tend not to use omniscient point of view, because then my authorly hand is more obvious, and I think readers can tell when I'm deliberately hiding/avoiding certain information. But when I can filter the story through a character's subjective experience, then I have a perfectly good reason for a piece of information to be secret: it isn't known to the POV character.

I love point of view tools. They can do some really amazing things.

The Importance of Character Motivation

When I read a book the thing that keeps me going is the sense of drive, and that sense of drive comes directly from the main character. That person's goals, why he or she wants them, what happens if he or she doesn't get them.

This is almost entirely separate from the plot, i.e. the sequence of events.

My novel has been written. And it has been rewritten. And it is currently being edited again. In all this, the sequence of minor events might have one or two things added to it, but the sequence of major events changes not at all.

What changes is what these events mean to the protagonist, and how that propels her on to the next piece. It's that propulsion that matters: that's the drive. That's why I care about reading further.

In my current sequence of edits, I'm trying to address a very big but very nebulous problem: critiquer dissatisfaction with the ending. Nebulous because it's not something you can point a finger at a piece of text and fix. So I've been going back and tracking the character motivation through the story, and I've made two key reversals.

1. In the character of the romantic lead, Étienne. He doesn't speak much, in order to protect himself, but he needs to speak to the main character, Chloe. In the last draft he wanted to stay quiet, and did most of the time, but when he spoke was very purposeful and passionate. As a result, his acts came across as too calculating - problem. So I reversed his motivation. Now he really wants to speak, but he's been protecting himself with silence for so long that he has trouble when he tries.

The effect of this change is huge. It changes what he says and how he says it, but he's still capable of saying the things he needs to (things he said in the last draft that are critical to the plot). It doesn't change anything about his actions - but suddenly he doesn't come across as calculating any more. From the standpoint of his relationship to Chloe, this is a big improvement.

2. In an event propelled by the main character. At a certain point she goes to dinner with her mother and starts telling her stories. The effect of this is a change in their interaction that allows her to resolve a key conflict between them (at least for now). In the last draft she had the idea to tell stories, and after things had changed she said it felt like magic, with a sense of deep satisfaction. Oddly enough, this was a huge problem. So I reversed her motivation completely. Now she has the idea to try to imitate magic to change her mother, and therefore tells her stories. When things change she's surprised and pleased to get what she wants, but she also understands that it doesn't feel like magic.

The difference this makes is critical. Now the satisfaction is replaced with a vague sense of insufficiency - and this is what allows her to progress on successfully to the next sequence of events.

It's worth taking at least one entire read-through of your manuscript just to address the question of character motivation and drive. If it isn't there, readers will lose momentum and stop - and we don't want that. You may be surprised to find that a complete reversal of motivation in one place or another makes little difference at all to the events you need for the plot to hold together. But it may just be the key to making the story feel alive.

Workshop: Pushing Further

Thank you all for the responses you've given me. (Catreona, will I be seeing more answers coming from you? I hope so. I'm also waiting on Khajidu.)

I'm fascinated by the answers I've seen; I'm also fascinated by how different they are from the ones I got in my last workshop. Last time I started with questions to the author, and moved on to questions from the POV of the character. This time I went straight for the character questions - and the interesting thing is, they turned into interviews with the characters!

This is very cool.

But I'd like to see us, as a group, push our awareness a little further. Maybe the way I'd describe it is instead of interviewing the character, giving the character an opportunity to speak as he or she would in public, go a little further into your own sense of the psychology of the character. Many characters have things they feel instinctively but for personal reasons (embarrassment, standoffishness, shame, lack of self-knowledge) are unable to describe. Many have past experiences that give them pride, strength, or vulnerability. What might some of those things be for your character? Below, I'll respond directly to each person's questions, both to let you know what I'm getting, and to be more concrete about what I'm still looking for.

Catreona and Khajidu, I don't have all your answers and I'd like to address them all at once, so they won't be here below.

Jeanne: Wrai
I loved your answers, because I really got a sense of Wrai's personality from them. At the same time, from a worldbuilding perspective, they left out a lot. I know that Wrai wouldn't go explaining the little details of things, but what would happen if someone asked him to, and he consented? What exactly is "nice" about the southron, for example? What exactly is going on with the "dung-eating father"? I think that's related to Wrai's contempt for nobles. Can you explain some of the backstory experiences to me? Also, are there police in this world, or just "guards?" I'd also like to know a little bit more about Sharista and the extended circumstances around her. What has his relationship been with her? How often would he think of her, and why, and what experiences would he think of? That sort of thing. Because your setting is quite strongly detailed in its physical aspects, I'd like to see about pushing further on Wrai's personal views and feelings about the things he experiences.


David: Jasmine
Wow, David, it was great to see you get into first person answers! The voice is fun. I think you've got some interesting possibilities going in the family of telepaths thing. It makes sense that she'd try to find a way to escape it, given her background. I'm getting the sense from you that engineered abilities are common in her world, and thus that she's part of a larger community where telepathy isn't so unusual? How would that affect her view of herself and her ability? In the Ben situation, you have some serious stakes for whatever it was she did. I think the question of her crime, and her motive, are critical here, and I'd love to see that appear somewhere in your piece. In the musical Chicago, one of the characters says "I didn't do it, but if I'd done it, how could you tell me that I was wrong?" I think that's a little like what I might like to see from Jasmine - tailored of course to voice and circumstances. I like Riko; also it seems her mother (or whoever grounds her) might be an authority figure here. You seem at a certain point to suggest that she dresses in embarrassing clothes intentionally to hone her ability. This is an interesting angle you might want to pursue. I'm not "getting" her father's ability at all, and I wish I knew more about broken mental powers (how were they broken? what broke them? if she doesn't know, then what does she know about others with similar problems?) Is the wardrobe large? Is it with her on her VoidWatch sentence? Finally, I'm curious about the coexistence of high-tech future with the Goddess of Justice. This is something unusual enough that you might want to mention it early, just so people don't get comfortable in a high-tech future mindset and then refuse to go with you when you go there later.


Colin: Lanuz
Your past world seems rather medieval England-y at first glance. I'd like to see you pin down a few concrete details of Lanuz's personal experience, so that he'll have some memories to use to judge the world into which he gets dumped later. You say for example that "in light of our job, petty squabbles are meaningless." This makes me curious, so give me something more. Maybe an instance in which a petty squabble led to something seriously bad (because just because people aren't supposed to squabble doesn't mean they don't). Would Lanuz have been the type to start the squabble and then learn his lesson? Or would he have been the horrified bystander who then became a zealous enforcer of the peace as a result? I hope you see what I mean. He sounds from his voice like the kind of guy who's actually pretty highly regarded in his group; why would this be? What has he done to prove himself? How does he feel about this? What is he proud of, and where might he be vulnerable? Your answer about clothing is vague, simply because for him it's normal, but for us, it doesn't say much. So is he in plate armor? Chain mail? Something else? I like the relation between his possessions and the village. Does he have a strong sense of his vocation? If this is indeed a medieval-like setting, he's got to be pretty well off if he doesn't consider himself lucky to eat meat regularly. Is this sword of his the sword of power? If he's tempted to get rid of it, does that mean he uses another sword in his work? Maybe you could clear that up for me. Also, the Reijak - are they considered a superior, peer, or inferior race? What are the general perceptions of them and what they do? (Are they going to show up in the future world?) I like what you say about the watch feeling estranged from the villagers; they've seen the harder side of life. Do they consider the villagers to be lucky lambs? How might that affect how Lanuz sees the barman and young mechanic in your scene? Finally, about Order. Who embodies Order? Who teaches it? Why is it considered to be of value? Is it something people perceive that they have lost? I'd love to know more about this.


These questions are intended to open a discussion, so I look forward to your comments. I know the workshop has been strung out a bit by my Nebulas visit etc. but I'm working toward suggesting some revisions to the scenes I've seen from you, and I hope to give you my specific requests in the next couple of days. Thanks for all your great responses so far.

More soon...

Insanity and Creativity

The word "insane" is one we tend to toss around easily without much thought most of the time (never mind the word "crazy"), but the details of mental illness and imbalance are at once horrible and fascinating.

I never really considered it as a resource for writing until I was initially trying to get to know the characters in my first Varin novel, and decided that in order for it to be as realistic as I wanted, the "evil king" character had to be inbred and mentally imbalanced. That sent me off into a whole bunch of encyclopedia research on mental illness until I found pathologies that matched his behavior (in this case, obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoia). For a time, my husband worked at a company that offered continuing education courses to medical professionals, and several of the seminar topics related to mental illness, so I gathered quite a bit there as well.

Then I read The Midnight Disease: the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain, by Alice Flaherty.

Oh wow.

That book is a revelation, and I encourage all of you out there to pick it up. It's not a difficult read at all, and it's amazing. The author talks about her own experiences with hypergraphia - the uncontrollable urge to write - and about all kinds of famous writers and creative minds which also happened to be not quite balanced.

One of the most fascinating things that Flaherty discusses is the possibility of an evolutionary link between creativity and insanity. Insanity is not exactly what you'd call an adaptively successful trait - but if it's the unfortunate product of overconcentration of the genes that give us creativity, then you can easily see how the success of highly creative individuals in natural selection would mean that the possibility of insanity would never quite go away.

I compare it to the case of sickle-cell anemia. A person with two matching genes for sickle-cell anemia gets the disease and is very ill. But a person with only one of these genes has a higher resistance to malaria than a person who doesn't have the gene at all. So the adaptive success of the single-gene trait leads to the continued presence of the disease itself.

Since reading that book, I have in fact written a character who suffers from hypergraphia. Let's just say it was a serious inspiration.

At this point I'm going to have to close this post - but I think I'll come back to the topic because there are a couple of things I'd love to talk about that relate to it tangentially, specifically:
1. unreliable narrators
2. narrative voice

Hopefully I'll get to writing those in the next couple of days. If in the meantime you have anything you'd like to contribute to my preparation for such a discussion (questions, comments, etc.) please feeel free to comment.

Character judgment and psychology

I had lunch today with a friend who wears rings on her toes - one on each foot. She told me that someone recently asked her if she was Indian (she's not), because apparently there is a tradition involving wearing one toe ring on each foot if you are a married woman. This isn't a tradition I'm familiar with myself, but I do have a necklace my mother brought back from India, which my mother told me is a "married woman's necklace."

This kind of thing provides terrific evidence of the fact that even the smallest things can be judged significant in people's lives. A man's earring worn on the right ear versus the left used to have significance in the gay community. The closing of a kimono left-side first or right-side first can be significant, or the way you pick up a teacup.

In each case, the significance of the object or act is in the head of the character doing the judging.

This relates to my post of yesterday, inasmuch as characters can be differentiated by the way they judge situations. I find it fascinating to write a conversation between two people from two different cultural groups, and to switch point of view halfway through, so that readers can share the difference between what the two people notice in the interaction, how they judge the significance of one another's clothing, posture, etc. The most fun for me is when the two don't understand each other because they can't entirely back off their own cultural categories and judgments.

Individuals can also have different ways of judging. Imagine the way that a detective looks at a room, compared to the way that a child looks at it. Each will be looking for different things, putting importance on very particular and personally relevant details.

And then there are the characters with extreme, or impaired, judgment. This is where psychology comes into play. When I write a character as simply mean-spirited I find I don't know where to go; I'm grasping at mean things for that person to do. When I go into their psychology to identify a traumatic event that has changed their judgment, or even to identify a mental illness that alters their perception and judgment of events, it has a wonderful effect: it ties down the driving forces behind their behavior. Suddenly their behavior is no longer random, but principled, and I can take their strangeness much further without straining credibility.

I'd like to add one last observation that comes from the "show don't tell" arena. Having a character with a complex cultural background, or a mental illness, doesn't mean that everything about their culture or judgment has to be explained. They can demonstrate it in the kinds of things they treat as unremarkable, or where they suddenly take offense. Even an offhand descriptive adjective can be turned toward illuminating their point of view. I've even gone so far as to try to build the mental characteristics of a character into the prose style I use to write their voice. I'm thinking in particular of an obsessive-compulsive Machiavellian character I'm working on, who has a tendency to fixate on a topic and return to it over and over in his thoughts, always judging things instantly and never questioning himself in any way.

I'll admit here that I have trouble writing non-chronologically. The trick is, I really like the feeling that each chapter will be different because of subtle changes in character viewpoint that grow out of the character's experience.

In any case, character judgment and psychology are productive avenues to explore, if you haven't already.