A breadth of critique

Today I participated in the writers' workshop at BayCon. I have a great deal of affection for this writers' workshop, because it was the first place I ever received professional critique for any of my work - and because this summer, six years after I first submitted it to the BayCon writer's workshop (and after much revision), the story that I submitted there is finally being published in Eight Against Reality! I felt the session went really well, and it also reminded me how important it is to get a breadth of critique on your work.

One of the participants had written an intriguing story in a really fascinating world, and she told us that she was shocked we liked it so much, because always before she'd gotten critique from people who focused on the literary genre rather than the sf/f genre.

I'll admit, this can be a problem. Many people from outside the sf/f genre will be turned off by science fictional or fantastical premises and be unable to evaluate a story for what it's actually trying to achieve. However, this is not always the case.

The best thing, to my mind, is to try to get a wide breadth of feedback. If you only give your work to the precise audience you intend it for, then you'll be getting only a partial view of how your work will be received. Readers who typically read different genres will be sensitized to different aspects of a story. For example:

• Literary readers will be sensitive to vocabulary use, to parallelism and to patterns of words that create impressions in a reader's mind.
• Thriller readers will be sensitive to issues of pacing.
• Mystery readers will be sensitive to information control and the development of hypotheses about what's going on behind the scenes.
• Naive readers - and by that I mean readers who aren't especially allied to any particular genre - can serve as a great measure of entry point success (how easy the book is to get into and understand at the hooking-point)

This of course is just a small sampling. I will note that I find it really useful to get naive reader opinions because I work with points of view that can be difficult to "get into." The important thing, I think, is to listen to where the critique most speaks to what you as a writer are trying to accomplish. A critique that just says "I like it" or "I don't like it" has no value at all as a guide to revision, but any critique that is able to address specific points in the text or specific aspects of the work can potentially be very useful.

I need to add a caveat here. That is, the things that other writers point out to you and tell you to do should not necessarily be taken at face value. Advice needs to be assessed in the context of what you, the writer, are trying to accomplish with the story. This is in fact a fine point, and a critical one for me. I do mean to say that you shouldn't simply follow advice. I don't mean to say that you should ignore advice and simply say "that reader doesn't get it."

The simple fact that a reader doesn't get it is worth your notice, every time. I never like to alienate a reader if I can help it. So I always suggest that someone doesn't get it, you should be asking why. The answer to that question why is sometimes in the reader - such as when someone can't accept your premise and that colors their judgment of the rest of the story. But more often than not, if you look hard, you can find the basis for their confusion in your text. And that will allow you to take action in your revisions to make things clearer for readers, even if it doesn't mean taking the critiquer's advice. Have enough confidence in yourself to remember that even if your reader can't see a way to fix a problem they've identified, that doesn't mean you can't fix it. It's your story; if anyone can fix it, you can.

So what I typically do is run my stories by a number of groups. If my story is intended for Analog, I go through my main critique group first (Written in Blood) to get their varying opinions on what it needs, and then once it's the best I can make it, I run it by a critique group of Analog readers to make sure I'm responding to their very particular needs (they're a wonderfully exacting group!). Then before I send it off I always make sure to run it by my special literary reader, because I know she can catch things that none of the others can - things that stand out to her because of her special point of view. When I've gone through all these steps, I can feel ready to send a story out.

I know that some people don't work with critique, and each writer needs to follow his or her own process. But at least for me, critique has been the reason for my success, and I like a lot of it, because I find it helps me raise my craft to a higher level and reach a broader audience.

Putting your self into your voice

This post will be a quick one, because BayCon starts today, but I wanted to follow up on my thoughts about tone of voice that came up in the post about channels of communication.

When we speak, we communicate a lot more than just the words we say. We convey emotional messages, too. Sometimes those involve emphasis on elements of language, and sometimes they are more general-level emotional. Tone of voice can convey basic emotions like happiness and sadness, but it also conveys aspects of our sense of self - like refinement, receptiveness to approach, and gender identity. These factors can vary across cultures.

Think about the female intonation pattern that ends each sentence with a question-like rise in pitch. Not all American females use this, though I know it is very common for many Californians. When a person uses this, it makes them sound uncertain, but it also gives an impression of "cute and feminine" for some. I'm not going to go into the larger feminist issues surrounding the femininity of uncertainty here, but suffice it to say for now that adopting an intonation pattern like this can give several impressions:

1. Uncertainty
2. Cuteness
3. Femininity
4. Annoyingness

The interesting part to me is that the choice of the rising intonation pattern is not likely to be made consciously, and that it does have a definite effect of annoying people who aren't accustomed to it, i.e. who haven't learned, or accepted, the association of this pattern with femininity.

Here's a second example, in differences between English and Japanese. In English, a male speaking voice is considered to be attractive when it's low but relatively smooth. A female speaking voice is higher, but when it's pitched to be sultry and attractive, it's lower. In the context of popular singing, high male (tenor) voices often make for success, as do lower women's voices. [Though this is of course not exclusive, and both very low male and very high female voices are an important part of opera.] The contrast in Japanese is that the manly male voice is low and not necessarily smooth, and the attractive female voice differs even further, being quite high-pitched and airy. If you've ever watched Pokémon videos you might have noticed that the female character's voice is quite high and can sounds to an English-speaker's ear overly perky and babyish. A lower tone of voice in females is not considered attractive, but rather masculine, and indicates lack of refinement.

What does that mean for someone like me, a learner of Japanese who is initially an English speaker? Well, in fact it has interesting consequences. If I speak Japanese in the same tone of voice that I'm accustomed to using in English, I don't come across as "myself." I suppose I'd describe my intended manner as feminine but confident and straightforward - but the tone that accomplishes this in English is much lower than it is in Japanese. So, to portray myself as myself in Japanese, I speak Japanese in a higher pitch than I do English. English speakers often find this funny, and it is, even for me.

I think there are lots of possibilities for playing with this in subtle ways in a story. Xinta, one of the characters who appears in my novelette "The Eminence's Match," has quite a high voice. This to him is partly his natural voice (tenor) and partly a sign of refinement - but to members of the undercaste he encounters in the novel where he appears, it makes him appear very feminine. This entirely changes their assessment of what he's capable of, and leads them (for example) to underestimate him as a fighter.

It's something to think about.

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.

Worldbuilding, or world growing?

I was thinking about how I go about building my worlds - I've done quite a few by this time, each to different extents. So how is it that one goes about beginning a world? Where does it start, and where does it end?

The beginning of a world should be a story (or the seed of one).

You can start a world without a story, but then you may be taking the risk that you might never find a story in it - and while that's great for some people, it would never satisfy me. My Varin world started with the idea that ancient kings were cast down and became an undercaste that then had to redeem itself (a story), except the regular fantasy explanations weren't satisfying me, so how would that really play out if the world worked in a realistically logical way? The world of Garini (Let the Word Take Me) began with the question of "Okay, you've got a language entirely created from references to canonical stories, so how would that really work and be passed on?" Aurru (Cold Words) grew out of the idea that rank and injustice should grow somehow out of the distinction between warmth and cold. In each of my linguistics stories the story is inherent within the language concept, because the language concept itself is a sort of punch line that the human characters will have to figure out somehow.

Thinking of the story idea as a world seed is actually a useful metaphor, because the intermediate process of world building is like growing a plant. The original story idea sends you in a direction, and then you'll discover it's branched into a sort of cultural (or physiological, or ideological, etc.) dichotomy, and then communities will start to associate themselves with divisions of thought, and then you'll discover patterns of life and behavior for those communities, and start to ask yourself all kinds of niggly questions that branch in every direction. If the world is alive, you should be able to discover smaller twigs and leaves growing from every branch you might care to consider. The other reason I like to think of worlds as living plants is because everything in your world should be connected. The climate influences the housing and the scarcity of resources which in turn dictates behavior and indicates what things will be fought over. This will create winners and losers and people with terrible things at stake. It's all connected. If it seems unconnected - like for example if you have two people whose names don't fit in the same phonological system - then it needs to be connected in a different way. In the case of Varin, I had taken for granted that the undercaste had a different religion from everyone else - and then when I looked closely at it, I realized there was an entire thousand years of backstory behind that. An entire opposite side of their world, which explained some of the divisions I'd created without realizing it. Just the way that people assume that others speaking to them will be engaging in conversation cooperatively, and draw conclusions based on that assumption, I encourage you to maintain a strong assumption that everything in your world has a reason behind it. This will suggest hidden depths that even you can't initially imagine, but which will reveal themselves to you if you consider them closely.

Not every story requires the same depth of world building. I admit I go pretty far with world building in general. I do climate and demographics and all those checklist things, plus language and culture. However, my short story worlds still don't get elaborated to the extent that my novel worlds do. Varin in particular took me (on and off) about 20 years of work.

Now, once you have your tree grown to the size it needs to be for you to understand the story, what do you do? How can you end the process of building and create a story without getting lost in all the branches?

My answer is, find a character. The character, with his or her upbringing, identity, and judgments, will create a microcosm of the whole world - and furthermore, will take that massive world of yours and reduce it to a comprehensible size. If you'll pardon me taking my metaphor a bit too far, it's like looking at one cell of your plant, and realizing that it's got DNA in there, that if you could look at it the right way, you'd be able to learn some things about what the plant was like. A character from one section of your world won't know every detail of every little corner of that world. But if you've built the connections well, then the view from the spot where that character lives will give tons of hints about the existence of a larger structure - the bigger, more meaningful entity that is their world.

There's a reason why I love to use first person point of view, and third person internal point of view. When you have a world that big, it's hard to manage it all, and keep its information from overwhelming what the story is about. It's the wonderful myopia of a culturally situated character that allows you to cut it down in a way that makes sense.

So start with a story seed, then grow your tree with as much care as you think necessary for the story's needs, and finally identify the single part, the character, who will allow you to create the most meaningful view of the whole. Maybe it shouldn't be world building at all, but world growing.

At least, that's how it feels for me.

BayCon 2010

We're one week away from the BayCon convention, so before I worry about what else to post today, I'll take this opportunity to invite you. Come on over to the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara (CA) if you'd like to take part, and maybe bump into me and say hello! The link to the convention site is here. It's a testament to the perseverance and dedication of the convention team that the event is coming off this year after some bumpy weather back at the start of the year, and it looks like it will be a lot of fun.

For those who might like to see me there, I'll be on a panel at 4:00 on Sunday, May 30th about writing science fiction while science continues to advance, and I'll be having a reading at 2:00 on Monday, May 31st during which I plan to read from "The Eminence's Match," which will be coming out in Eight Against Reality in July:

An insane ruler obsessed with control - a flawed servant desperate to find a master - will they destroy each other? Or will Xinta become the Eminence's match?

And here's the terrific cover, art by Vladimir Krizan, design by Janice Hardy (who is quite a multi-tasker!).
Learn more about the anthology, including teasers for stories by Janice Hardy, Aliette de Bodard, T.L. Morganfield, Doug Sharp, Keyan Bowes, Genevieve Williams and Dario Ciriello, here.

I hope to see you at BayCon!

Language Demographics of Twitter

Cat Rambo (of Fantasy Magazine) directed me to this fantastic article on how Twitter can be used to track the use of colloquial language across different regions of the US. Interesting stuff!

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2334

Psychic links and channels of communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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