Monday, November 28, 2011
A blind man sees
This is an amazing link. A man who was always blind describes what it is like to see for the first time.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
On Anne McCaffrey and Genre Borderlines
I was deeply saddened today to hear of the passing of Anne McCaffrey. I first discovered her work because, as a child, I had a propensity to pick up from the library or bookstore any book I found featuring the keyword "dragon" in the title. ("Magic" was also a strong indicator that I would like a book.) The first one I ever read was actually Dragonsinger, and I think it was the combination of the word "dragon" and the enticing illustration of a girl surrounded by miniature dragons that first drew me in.
Perhaps because I had dragons and fantasy on my mind, for many years I figured that McCaffrey's world was one of fantasy. It bore some key similarities - low technology living and societal structure being two examples - to prototypical fantasy worlds. However, because I loved the books so much, I continued to read on and on, and as those of you who have done the same will know, I eventually discovered that Pern was not a fantasy world after all. It was a science fictional world. In fact, it wasn't until this year that I realized Dragonflight had first been published in Analog!
Over the years I've spent getting to know the science fiction and fantasy-writing community as an author, I've realized that the borderlines between genres are both highly contested and relatively fluid. They follow the pattern of most categories that we identify: that is, there are some works that are considered prototypically one or the other, but in fact each genre is characterized by a number of features. The number of features possessed by any given work can vary, but only a very few are strong "genre-breakers," and even these - like dragons - can be fit into a different scheme if we pay close attention to the features that surround them.
When we read, we draw conclusions based on either the presence of a thing, or its absence (like, say, electricity). The easiest world models to grasp are the ones that fit with our existing expectations of the world, where the presence of one aspect of our technological life, or our social life, will automatically imply the rest. Those world models are the prototypes, that fall smack in the center of what we imagine fantasy or science fiction to be. The ones I've always admired most, however, are the ones where our expectations are defeated in one way or another. Books where every aspect of the world fits seamlessly with the rest, but in a configuration that does not conform to our expectations.
This was the kind of world I imagined when I first set out to create Varin. And while I take Ursula LeGuin's worlds as models I want to emulate, I think that the stamp of Anne McCaffrey on my fundamental concepts is unmistakable. Both Pern and Varin are worlds where technology has gone into decline (though Varin's technology level hasn't fallen nearly as far as Pern's). Both are worlds where certain phenomena appear to be magical, since though they are central to the people's lives, they aren't deeply understood. Both are worlds where societal structure has taken on an archaic feel for locally important reasons. And both, as a result, have one foot in fantasy and the other in science fiction.
I am grateful to Anne McCaffrey for what her books have taught me - personally as well as in my writing. I can only hope that what I create will live up to the example she has shown. And I hope also that all of us will take inspiration from her vision, which crossed over genre borderlines and created an enduring world that felt alive, and at the same time was constantly surprising.
Perhaps because I had dragons and fantasy on my mind, for many years I figured that McCaffrey's world was one of fantasy. It bore some key similarities - low technology living and societal structure being two examples - to prototypical fantasy worlds. However, because I loved the books so much, I continued to read on and on, and as those of you who have done the same will know, I eventually discovered that Pern was not a fantasy world after all. It was a science fictional world. In fact, it wasn't until this year that I realized Dragonflight had first been published in Analog!
Over the years I've spent getting to know the science fiction and fantasy-writing community as an author, I've realized that the borderlines between genres are both highly contested and relatively fluid. They follow the pattern of most categories that we identify: that is, there are some works that are considered prototypically one or the other, but in fact each genre is characterized by a number of features. The number of features possessed by any given work can vary, but only a very few are strong "genre-breakers," and even these - like dragons - can be fit into a different scheme if we pay close attention to the features that surround them.
When we read, we draw conclusions based on either the presence of a thing, or its absence (like, say, electricity). The easiest world models to grasp are the ones that fit with our existing expectations of the world, where the presence of one aspect of our technological life, or our social life, will automatically imply the rest. Those world models are the prototypes, that fall smack in the center of what we imagine fantasy or science fiction to be. The ones I've always admired most, however, are the ones where our expectations are defeated in one way or another. Books where every aspect of the world fits seamlessly with the rest, but in a configuration that does not conform to our expectations.
This was the kind of world I imagined when I first set out to create Varin. And while I take Ursula LeGuin's worlds as models I want to emulate, I think that the stamp of Anne McCaffrey on my fundamental concepts is unmistakable. Both Pern and Varin are worlds where technology has gone into decline (though Varin's technology level hasn't fallen nearly as far as Pern's). Both are worlds where certain phenomena appear to be magical, since though they are central to the people's lives, they aren't deeply understood. Both are worlds where societal structure has taken on an archaic feel for locally important reasons. And both, as a result, have one foot in fantasy and the other in science fiction.
I am grateful to Anne McCaffrey for what her books have taught me - personally as well as in my writing. I can only hope that what I create will live up to the example she has shown. And I hope also that all of us will take inspiration from her vision, which crossed over genre borderlines and created an enduring world that felt alive, and at the same time was constantly surprising.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Hard Choices Require Consequences
One of the most compelling things you can encounter in a story (either short or long) is a hard choice. The character gets to a certain point in the story and has to decide whether to take this path or that one, whether to hurt someone by doing one thing or hurt another person by doing something else. I don't know about you, but when I sense a hard choice coming it engages me wonderfully. Oh, my goodness, look at the conflict that is going to come out of that!
This is good. However, the big risk with setting up a hard choice is that you have to follow through.
I've read a number of books recently that involved hard choices, and at least two of them have let me down. The author has gotten me deeply engaged in the question of what choice will be made, and what the consequences of that choice might be... and then suddenly changed the game. Either the choice became unnecessary, suddenly, or the protagonist decided she was going to have her cake and eat it too, and for some reason that was okay with everybody.
I found this very disappointing, but when I think about it now, I wonder to myself why it is that I feel so disappointed. Why shouldn't I be happy that this horror for the protagonist isn't going to take place? Why shouldn't I be pleased that in the end, everything is going to work out?
In part it may be because this feels to me like what Janice Hardy calls "nice writer syndrome," where an author isn't hard enough on his/her characters and the story has less impact as a result. It's important to remember that one of the reasons we care about a character is because that character might have something bad happen to him or her. If there are no consequences, it's easy to think that the character's choices simply don't matter. As you can imagine, Janice herself doesn't suffer from this! (Just read The Shifter and all will become clear...)
The other part of it, I think, is the sneaking suspicion that the author might be playing with us as readers. That we're being led to anticipate an enormous consequence, getting worked up with excitement at the prospect, and then told that it really wasn't important anyway. The only way I think one could get away with this as an author would be by leaving so much evidence through the story that there was another way out of the situation, that when readers finally got there the whole thing would click together and we'd say "why didn't I see that option before?"
I realized just recently that I'd set up a big choice in For Love, For Power. Unlike in the last novel I wrote, the choice isn't central to the climax of the book (does she go into the magical world or not?); in this case it has to do with the relationships that happen between the characters. I hadn't really thought through it until recently, but I'm realizing that readers will think Tagret has to choose between his relationship with Reyn and his relationship with Della. If I defuse that question too early, say by having Reyn lose interest, or (God forbid) die, then I'm not taking advantage of all the potential conflicts that my book offers. I think of it as an opportunity that I'm happy not to have lost through lack of attention. Once I started thinking about it as a hard choice, then I realized some changes that could happen in later chapters of the book that would really make things fraught with tension, conflict, and doubt. Since tension, conflict, and doubt all increase the amplitude of the story's impact, I'm definitely going to head in the direction of facing the choice rather than defusing it. There have to be potentially bad consequences either way the choice goes, because a choice that is too obviously good on one side and bad on the other really isn't a choice at all.
What choices do your characters have to make? What kind of consequences do they entail?
It's something to think about.
This is good. However, the big risk with setting up a hard choice is that you have to follow through.
I've read a number of books recently that involved hard choices, and at least two of them have let me down. The author has gotten me deeply engaged in the question of what choice will be made, and what the consequences of that choice might be... and then suddenly changed the game. Either the choice became unnecessary, suddenly, or the protagonist decided she was going to have her cake and eat it too, and for some reason that was okay with everybody.
I found this very disappointing, but when I think about it now, I wonder to myself why it is that I feel so disappointed. Why shouldn't I be happy that this horror for the protagonist isn't going to take place? Why shouldn't I be pleased that in the end, everything is going to work out?
In part it may be because this feels to me like what Janice Hardy calls "nice writer syndrome," where an author isn't hard enough on his/her characters and the story has less impact as a result. It's important to remember that one of the reasons we care about a character is because that character might have something bad happen to him or her. If there are no consequences, it's easy to think that the character's choices simply don't matter. As you can imagine, Janice herself doesn't suffer from this! (Just read The Shifter and all will become clear...)
The other part of it, I think, is the sneaking suspicion that the author might be playing with us as readers. That we're being led to anticipate an enormous consequence, getting worked up with excitement at the prospect, and then told that it really wasn't important anyway. The only way I think one could get away with this as an author would be by leaving so much evidence through the story that there was another way out of the situation, that when readers finally got there the whole thing would click together and we'd say "why didn't I see that option before?"
I realized just recently that I'd set up a big choice in For Love, For Power. Unlike in the last novel I wrote, the choice isn't central to the climax of the book (does she go into the magical world or not?); in this case it has to do with the relationships that happen between the characters. I hadn't really thought through it until recently, but I'm realizing that readers will think Tagret has to choose between his relationship with Reyn and his relationship with Della. If I defuse that question too early, say by having Reyn lose interest, or (God forbid) die, then I'm not taking advantage of all the potential conflicts that my book offers. I think of it as an opportunity that I'm happy not to have lost through lack of attention. Once I started thinking about it as a hard choice, then I realized some changes that could happen in later chapters of the book that would really make things fraught with tension, conflict, and doubt. Since tension, conflict, and doubt all increase the amplitude of the story's impact, I'm definitely going to head in the direction of facing the choice rather than defusing it. There have to be potentially bad consequences either way the choice goes, because a choice that is too obviously good on one side and bad on the other really isn't a choice at all.
What choices do your characters have to make? What kind of consequences do they entail?
It's something to think about.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Aligning characters ambiguously (remember The Princess Bride?)
I'm a sucker for ambiguously aligned characters. Good guys who turn into bad guys, bad guys who turn out to be good guys, those folks are just plain fun. I write stories with this kind of character all the time, but I was reminded of them recently when my kids and I watched The Princess Bride.
I'm sure most of you are dearly familiar with Inigo and Fezzik. During our first viewing I became fascinated by the fact that these two characters are immediately likeable despite the fact that they've just kidnapped the princess along with Vizzini. So during our second and third viewings (since people, especially children, like to see fabulous things more than once) I took a look at our introduction to these two characters.
Basically, after our first view of them which involves them knocking out Buttercup, we immediately shift, not to her point of view of them on the ship, but to their own internal squabbles. Inigo demonstrates curiosity about what exactly they are doing ("what is that you are ripping?"), showing that he's not entirely aware of their mission. Then when Vizzini describes the basics of of his plan to frame Guilder by killing Buttercup and leaving her on the frontier, Fezzik reveals that he wasn't totally in on the plan either, and that he has morals well-aligned with our own ("I just don't think it's right, killing an innocent girl."). We then get an opportunity to witness Vizzini's cruelty applied to his own accomplices as he dresses them down.
This is a good start, but on its own, I don't think it would be enough to convince me that Inigo and Fezzik were anything more than weak bad guys, or at a stretch, decent guys forced into nefarious deeds by circumstance. The point where I really start liking them is when I see Fezzik clearly have hurt feelings as a result of Vizzini's tirade, and then Inigo comes over to him and starts deliberately consoling him by starting the rhyming game. At this point, these two characters are no longer simply henchmen who do their boss' bidding. They are actual people, friends in fact, who care about each other and also have a sense of humor... a sense of humor which they are entirely willing to use at Vizzini's expense ("Anybody want a peanut?"). This pattern is then confirmed as we go forward into Vizzini's mercilessness and Fezzik's inability to use his considerable power (the fact that he's literally dangling Vizzini over a cliff) to win an argument. It continues into Inigo and Fezzik's interactions with the Man in Black, where we are also given glimpses into the backstory of each character. In fact I don't think that it would be nearly as difficult to guess the identity of the Man in Black if we immediately concluded he had to be a "good guy" because Fezzik and Inigo were "bad guys."
I think there are some good lessons to be learned here about what it is that makes a character likeable. Readers and viewers collect evidence in a character's interactions which they use to establish that character's qualities and alignments. Clearly even criminal behavior (kidnapping) can be quickly outweighed by evidence of reluctance and human caring. It's good to remember this if you're creating ambiguously aligned characters, and even if you have a protagonist who has to do bad things. We don't blame Janice Hardy's Nya for stealing, because she's stealing eggs when she could potentially choose to steal something much worse, and then only because she's starving. Her human qualities come to the fore much more quickly.
What do your characters do to show us that they are human? Does it make them seem more complex? Does it make them likeable?
It's something to think about.
I'm sure most of you are dearly familiar with Inigo and Fezzik. During our first viewing I became fascinated by the fact that these two characters are immediately likeable despite the fact that they've just kidnapped the princess along with Vizzini. So during our second and third viewings (since people, especially children, like to see fabulous things more than once) I took a look at our introduction to these two characters.
Basically, after our first view of them which involves them knocking out Buttercup, we immediately shift, not to her point of view of them on the ship, but to their own internal squabbles. Inigo demonstrates curiosity about what exactly they are doing ("what is that you are ripping?"), showing that he's not entirely aware of their mission. Then when Vizzini describes the basics of of his plan to frame Guilder by killing Buttercup and leaving her on the frontier, Fezzik reveals that he wasn't totally in on the plan either, and that he has morals well-aligned with our own ("I just don't think it's right, killing an innocent girl."). We then get an opportunity to witness Vizzini's cruelty applied to his own accomplices as he dresses them down.
This is a good start, but on its own, I don't think it would be enough to convince me that Inigo and Fezzik were anything more than weak bad guys, or at a stretch, decent guys forced into nefarious deeds by circumstance. The point where I really start liking them is when I see Fezzik clearly have hurt feelings as a result of Vizzini's tirade, and then Inigo comes over to him and starts deliberately consoling him by starting the rhyming game. At this point, these two characters are no longer simply henchmen who do their boss' bidding. They are actual people, friends in fact, who care about each other and also have a sense of humor... a sense of humor which they are entirely willing to use at Vizzini's expense ("Anybody want a peanut?"). This pattern is then confirmed as we go forward into Vizzini's mercilessness and Fezzik's inability to use his considerable power (the fact that he's literally dangling Vizzini over a cliff) to win an argument. It continues into Inigo and Fezzik's interactions with the Man in Black, where we are also given glimpses into the backstory of each character. In fact I don't think that it would be nearly as difficult to guess the identity of the Man in Black if we immediately concluded he had to be a "good guy" because Fezzik and Inigo were "bad guys."
I think there are some good lessons to be learned here about what it is that makes a character likeable. Readers and viewers collect evidence in a character's interactions which they use to establish that character's qualities and alignments. Clearly even criminal behavior (kidnapping) can be quickly outweighed by evidence of reluctance and human caring. It's good to remember this if you're creating ambiguously aligned characters, and even if you have a protagonist who has to do bad things. We don't blame Janice Hardy's Nya for stealing, because she's stealing eggs when she could potentially choose to steal something much worse, and then only because she's starving. Her human qualities come to the fore much more quickly.
What do your characters do to show us that they are human? Does it make them seem more complex? Does it make them likeable?
It's something to think about.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Gender: A Google+ Worldbuilding Hangout Report
So finally here I am to report on the Gender hangout, which took place on November 2. Cheryl Morgan, Dale Emery, and Kyle Aisteach came to talk with me and we had a terrific discussion; Harry Markov joined in for a few minutes at the end.
We started out by taking about one of the classic SF/F tales about gender, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. I've heard people characterize this book as too preachy, but I've never found it so. It's always seemed to me more of a thorough thought experiment, and my fellow discussants felt that it reflected some of the social issues at the time that it was written (1969, and I agree). Briefly, the people of LeGuin's planet Gethen have no gender unless they are in their four-day-a-month sexually receptive phase, when they may take one gender or the other depending on the circumstances. LeGuin approaches this in a very interesting way, too, both giving the outsider's scientific (and thus explanatory) viewpoint and local tales of human interaction that introduce us to the social rules of Gethenian societies from an insider's viewpoint.
The question of gender in stories isn't just about stories that focus on gender questions, however. There are tons of gender issues in all kinds of stories which are ostensibly "about" other things. I had a fascinating discussion with author Myke Cole about his upcoming novel, and he was thinking deeply about his portrayal of women, so that the context of a military plot wouldn't make them come out as men with women's names (I'm very curious to see his book; it's about the modern military with magic-users, and sounds fascinating). Kyle mentioned the question of female characters in video games. One game he mentioned portrays women as pilots "without much character," and he said he'd heard divided opinions on this portrayal - one friend who said the characters weren't feminine enough, and another who was happy to see them "not turned into the typical woman." Cheryl noted that in video games you also get the issue of gender change. Some games, like Mass Effect, allow particular characters to be either male or female, which changes the nature of the social interactions they engage in (including romantic liaisons that then can be either hetero- or homosexual depending on the gender chosen for the characters in question).
We talked a little about stories in which people change genders. Cheryl mentioned Steel Beach by John Varley, in which gender reassignment is very easy. Dale mentioned the film Orlando; there was also My Brother's Keeper, in which a monk receives a visitation from an angel, and apparently later changes gender. There are also stories where genderless characters are interpreted to have different genders by different people (or the reader). Kelley Eskridge's Dangerous Space was mentioned, as was John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, and apparently Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series takes gender as a prominent secondary theme.
One thing that is very interesting to do as a writer (which many authors are already doing to great effect) is to engage with the question of gender from the angle of deliberately altering the social contracts that surround gender. That is, taking our current expectations of behavior that is masculine or feminine, and turning those expectations on their heads. Another is to engage in a world where many of the same gender issues occur that currently occur in our world, and then bring attention to them so that our subconscious acceptance of behaviors can be questioned.
It is very difficult to tease apart which aspects of gender are societal, and which are genetic.
Kyle told us of a friend who had written a story and then went through and switched the genders of all the characters. This is a very interesting experiment to try, because you will discover that changing the gender of a character has an enormous effect on a reader's (and our own) expectations for them. If you do this, you may decide that you would prefer to change a character's actions in one scene so they become less stereotypical. I myself recently changed the gender of a minor character in the story I'm writing because I felt that putting a woman in that position was too stereotypical: the woman was complaining about being asked not to take a dress fastened by magnets onto the planet (where there is a magnet prohibition), and declared she wasn't going to undress in front of a thousand people. When I changed the character to a man and the dress into a bodysuit, the entire interaction felt much fresher and less clichéd.
Whenever you are working with oppressed characters, it's important to realize that these characters aren't necessarily weak. They may have few areas in which they can exercise power, but they will most likely have a finely tuned sense of how to use that power to their own advantage. If a woman's only power is to choose a husband, she'll choose very carefully!
Kyle made the interesting observation that comedy about women with power used to be far more common than it is now. He gave the examples of Vaudeville and the television show "Bewitched." Cheryl mentioned a show with advertising men and dumb women in charge. Kyle also pointed out that "Mr. Mom" was a comedy, but that men who care for children at home are so much more common now that making a whole comedy about it would seem strange. (Comedy generally flirts with borderlines of unacceptability in one way or another; things that make people uncomfortable. If women with power ever become entirely normal, the impetus for comedy will have to shift somewhere else.)
Society is not uniform in its expectations of gender behavior. Different cultures see the role of women and men differently, and even see the divide between them differently. If we start looking into the behavior of other animal species, the expectations differ even more widely. Lions have specific gender-related roles related to hunting, dominance, etc. Spiders have even more dramatically different gender behaviors (human women are not likely to bite their husbands' head off literally!). Raccoons follow a pattern where the females with young drive the males off, and the males live in group homes separately from the mothers. Pronghorn antelopes tend to divide into herds of all males and all females, but some males run with the females. Every animal species which has been studied for gender relations exhibits some homosexual behaviors, and some pairs form stable families, as for example pairs of female albatrosses.
When we write portrayals of gender orientation behavior, it's important to think through how readers will see what we portray. By this I mean that we should pay close attention to whether we are giving value judgment messages. When I was first designing For Love, For Power, I knew that my antagonist, who is a sociopath, was going to have a homosexual relationship during the story, and so I realized that I needed to be careful to have my protagonist's side of the story portray homosexual relationships between non-sociopaths, or I'd accidentally be seen as delivering the message that all homosexuals are sociopaths. When I spoke about it as having a "grid," Kyle immediately picked up on this and explained to us that people who write for TV shows literally have grids they fill out so that they can make sure to have characters with different racial, gender-related, and behavioral characteristics. The danger of this, of course, is that viewers or readers may be able to detect the grid you were working with (ex. "We have the homosexual crazy guy, so we need a heterosexual crazy guy, and then a homosexual sane guy, and a heterosexual sane guy, oh, and there should be women too, which boxes do we need to fill in for them?"). It's worth taking the time to make sure you're developing the details of each character and making each person "fill in his/her box" in a way that is subtly grounded in character and backstory, rather than just setting up cardboard box-fillers.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. First of all, it's vitally important for human survival that we be able to create categories out of things that may only vaguely resemble one another - if we couldn't recognize an apple because it was the wrong color or shape, we'd go hungry, and if we couldn't recognize a lion because it was a bit too small, we'd get eaten. Second of all, behavioral trends exist, and gender characteristics tend to pattern in predictable ways. For each category we create, there is the stereotype at the dead center, and a range of core/prototypical group members around it (which vary to some degree), and then further out there is a wide variety of less typical group members and individuals whose group membership is ambiguous. It's good to keep this in mind whenever we work with categories in our worldbuilding.
Dale mentioned that he has been working with a small breakaway community where gender roles differ because of the need to increase the population. Demographic pressures can have varying effects on the social roles expected of different genders. In his world, these pressures lead to a greater degree of gender equality, while in my own, similar pressures result in extreme oppression of women. What is happening in the worlds you are designing?
In amidst our discussion, Dale perceptively pointed out a pattern he's observed in some classic works of science fiction, including Asimov's Foundation and Empire and Robot stories: Men were referred to by last name, while women and robots were referred to by first names. The simplest explanation for this is that there is a subconscious perception of both women and robots as those who serve men - at very least, the pattern suggests that robots and women pattern together in social estimation, while men pattern differently.
At the end of the discussion Dale asked me if there was anything I had to say about gender in language. I nearly burst out laughing, because I have nearly an endless amount of stuff to say about gender in language... so we decided on that as the topic for the next hangout. That hangout took place last week, November 9, and I'll be writing that one up as soon as I can.
Thanks again to Cheryl, Kyle, Dale, and Harry for coming to speak with me. It was a wonderful chat. Since I'm writing this up late, please do feel free to comment with anything I may have forgotten!
We started out by taking about one of the classic SF/F tales about gender, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. I've heard people characterize this book as too preachy, but I've never found it so. It's always seemed to me more of a thorough thought experiment, and my fellow discussants felt that it reflected some of the social issues at the time that it was written (1969, and I agree). Briefly, the people of LeGuin's planet Gethen have no gender unless they are in their four-day-a-month sexually receptive phase, when they may take one gender or the other depending on the circumstances. LeGuin approaches this in a very interesting way, too, both giving the outsider's scientific (and thus explanatory) viewpoint and local tales of human interaction that introduce us to the social rules of Gethenian societies from an insider's viewpoint.
The question of gender in stories isn't just about stories that focus on gender questions, however. There are tons of gender issues in all kinds of stories which are ostensibly "about" other things. I had a fascinating discussion with author Myke Cole about his upcoming novel, and he was thinking deeply about his portrayal of women, so that the context of a military plot wouldn't make them come out as men with women's names (I'm very curious to see his book; it's about the modern military with magic-users, and sounds fascinating). Kyle mentioned the question of female characters in video games. One game he mentioned portrays women as pilots "without much character," and he said he'd heard divided opinions on this portrayal - one friend who said the characters weren't feminine enough, and another who was happy to see them "not turned into the typical woman." Cheryl noted that in video games you also get the issue of gender change. Some games, like Mass Effect, allow particular characters to be either male or female, which changes the nature of the social interactions they engage in (including romantic liaisons that then can be either hetero- or homosexual depending on the gender chosen for the characters in question).
We talked a little about stories in which people change genders. Cheryl mentioned Steel Beach by John Varley, in which gender reassignment is very easy. Dale mentioned the film Orlando; there was also My Brother's Keeper, in which a monk receives a visitation from an angel, and apparently later changes gender. There are also stories where genderless characters are interpreted to have different genders by different people (or the reader). Kelley Eskridge's Dangerous Space was mentioned, as was John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, and apparently Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series takes gender as a prominent secondary theme.
One thing that is very interesting to do as a writer (which many authors are already doing to great effect) is to engage with the question of gender from the angle of deliberately altering the social contracts that surround gender. That is, taking our current expectations of behavior that is masculine or feminine, and turning those expectations on their heads. Another is to engage in a world where many of the same gender issues occur that currently occur in our world, and then bring attention to them so that our subconscious acceptance of behaviors can be questioned.
It is very difficult to tease apart which aspects of gender are societal, and which are genetic.
Kyle told us of a friend who had written a story and then went through and switched the genders of all the characters. This is a very interesting experiment to try, because you will discover that changing the gender of a character has an enormous effect on a reader's (and our own) expectations for them. If you do this, you may decide that you would prefer to change a character's actions in one scene so they become less stereotypical. I myself recently changed the gender of a minor character in the story I'm writing because I felt that putting a woman in that position was too stereotypical: the woman was complaining about being asked not to take a dress fastened by magnets onto the planet (where there is a magnet prohibition), and declared she wasn't going to undress in front of a thousand people. When I changed the character to a man and the dress into a bodysuit, the entire interaction felt much fresher and less clichéd.
Whenever you are working with oppressed characters, it's important to realize that these characters aren't necessarily weak. They may have few areas in which they can exercise power, but they will most likely have a finely tuned sense of how to use that power to their own advantage. If a woman's only power is to choose a husband, she'll choose very carefully!
Kyle made the interesting observation that comedy about women with power used to be far more common than it is now. He gave the examples of Vaudeville and the television show "Bewitched." Cheryl mentioned a show with advertising men and dumb women in charge. Kyle also pointed out that "Mr. Mom" was a comedy, but that men who care for children at home are so much more common now that making a whole comedy about it would seem strange. (Comedy generally flirts with borderlines of unacceptability in one way or another; things that make people uncomfortable. If women with power ever become entirely normal, the impetus for comedy will have to shift somewhere else.)
Society is not uniform in its expectations of gender behavior. Different cultures see the role of women and men differently, and even see the divide between them differently. If we start looking into the behavior of other animal species, the expectations differ even more widely. Lions have specific gender-related roles related to hunting, dominance, etc. Spiders have even more dramatically different gender behaviors (human women are not likely to bite their husbands' head off literally!). Raccoons follow a pattern where the females with young drive the males off, and the males live in group homes separately from the mothers. Pronghorn antelopes tend to divide into herds of all males and all females, but some males run with the females. Every animal species which has been studied for gender relations exhibits some homosexual behaviors, and some pairs form stable families, as for example pairs of female albatrosses.
When we write portrayals of gender orientation behavior, it's important to think through how readers will see what we portray. By this I mean that we should pay close attention to whether we are giving value judgment messages. When I was first designing For Love, For Power, I knew that my antagonist, who is a sociopath, was going to have a homosexual relationship during the story, and so I realized that I needed to be careful to have my protagonist's side of the story portray homosexual relationships between non-sociopaths, or I'd accidentally be seen as delivering the message that all homosexuals are sociopaths. When I spoke about it as having a "grid," Kyle immediately picked up on this and explained to us that people who write for TV shows literally have grids they fill out so that they can make sure to have characters with different racial, gender-related, and behavioral characteristics. The danger of this, of course, is that viewers or readers may be able to detect the grid you were working with (ex. "We have the homosexual crazy guy, so we need a heterosexual crazy guy, and then a homosexual sane guy, and a heterosexual sane guy, oh, and there should be women too, which boxes do we need to fill in for them?"). It's worth taking the time to make sure you're developing the details of each character and making each person "fill in his/her box" in a way that is subtly grounded in character and backstory, rather than just setting up cardboard box-fillers.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. First of all, it's vitally important for human survival that we be able to create categories out of things that may only vaguely resemble one another - if we couldn't recognize an apple because it was the wrong color or shape, we'd go hungry, and if we couldn't recognize a lion because it was a bit too small, we'd get eaten. Second of all, behavioral trends exist, and gender characteristics tend to pattern in predictable ways. For each category we create, there is the stereotype at the dead center, and a range of core/prototypical group members around it (which vary to some degree), and then further out there is a wide variety of less typical group members and individuals whose group membership is ambiguous. It's good to keep this in mind whenever we work with categories in our worldbuilding.
Dale mentioned that he has been working with a small breakaway community where gender roles differ because of the need to increase the population. Demographic pressures can have varying effects on the social roles expected of different genders. In his world, these pressures lead to a greater degree of gender equality, while in my own, similar pressures result in extreme oppression of women. What is happening in the worlds you are designing?
In amidst our discussion, Dale perceptively pointed out a pattern he's observed in some classic works of science fiction, including Asimov's Foundation and Empire and Robot stories: Men were referred to by last name, while women and robots were referred to by first names. The simplest explanation for this is that there is a subconscious perception of both women and robots as those who serve men - at very least, the pattern suggests that robots and women pattern together in social estimation, while men pattern differently.
At the end of the discussion Dale asked me if there was anything I had to say about gender in language. I nearly burst out laughing, because I have nearly an endless amount of stuff to say about gender in language... so we decided on that as the topic for the next hangout. That hangout took place last week, November 9, and I'll be writing that one up as soon as I can.
Thanks again to Cheryl, Kyle, Dale, and Harry for coming to speak with me. It was a wonderful chat. Since I'm writing this up late, please do feel free to comment with anything I may have forgotten!
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Worldbuilding hangout postponed to Nov. 30
Life has attacked! I think it must be the lead-in to the holidays.
The blog will continue as usual...
And I'm still planning to hold a hangout where we discuss Colonialism/Imperialism...
but the hangout can't be this week, or the week of Thanksgiving. So I'm moving the Colonialism/ Imperialism discussion to Wednesday November 30th (sorry everyone). In the meantime I'll try to catch up on the reports of the last two discussions, and get on top of my writing, which means getting a story out the door to submission, and getting stuck into a new chapter.
The blog will continue as usual...
And I'm still planning to hold a hangout where we discuss Colonialism/Imperialism...
but the hangout can't be this week, or the week of Thanksgiving. So I'm moving the Colonialism/ Imperialism discussion to Wednesday November 30th (sorry everyone). In the meantime I'll try to catch up on the reports of the last two discussions, and get on top of my writing, which means getting a story out the door to submission, and getting stuck into a new chapter.
Monday, November 14, 2011
A checklist for deep POV (in 1st or 3rd person!)
Have you ever wondered what "deep point of view" is, or thought you might like to try to achieve it? Essentially, deep point of view means feeling "close" to the narrator in a story. It's a question of narrative distance: instead of being a distant storyteller aware of the story being told, the deep narrator feels as close to the protagonist and her/his instinct and gut reactions as possible. Since I've always loved feeling like I am experiencing the story in a visceral way alongside my protagonists, I've spent a number of years developing techniques for deep POV, trying to push closer and closer. The first article I ever wrote on point of view appeared in 2006 for the Internet Review of Science Fiction: "Point of View: Reading Beyond the I's." Since I've seen people discussing the question of deep POV again lately, I thought I'd put together a checklist of things you can do in order to create it.
I think the most important thing to keep in mind as you enter the task of creating deep POV is this: deep point of view is not created by personal pronouns. It has almost nothing to do with whether you are using first person or third person - you can make third person feel close or first person feel distant if you really try. Any text contains lots and lots of different opportunities to get closer or further away from your narrating character, and the more "close" opportunities you take, the closer your narrator will feel. The list below will give you a sense of where to look for these opportunities. Please do keep in mind that none of these are "rules," and you do not have to do all of them.
I'm going to go through each point of the checklist in detail first, and then repeat it at the end as a summary so you can run through it more easily. (So if you want to get the overview first, you can skip down to the end now and then come back.)
Here we go:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
Personal pronouns are the ones people always ask about first when they talk about point of view. Usually they're either "I" (first person) or "he" or "she" (third person) but sometimes can be "you" (second person). Just because you've chosen one or the other of them does not mean that every sentence, or even every other sentence, should start with one. As a guideline for where you should use these pronouns and where you should not use them, think about dividing your character's narrative into action, perception, and judgment. Action sentences are the ones where your character is doing something, and those are the ones which will use personal pronouns. Perception sentences are the ones where your character is remarking on something that he/she perceives (sees, hears, smells, feels, etc.), and those should not use personal pronouns. Judgment sentences are the ones where your character is expressing an opinion about something that's happening, and those shouldn't usually use personal pronouns either. Chances are, if you're using personal pronouns for perception or judgment, then you're filtering.
2. avoid filtering
Filtering means putting extra words into your sentence that remove the reader from the experience of the character. When you go through your life you probably don't think distantly about what you're perceiving. You hear a car horn and you don't think, "I'm hearing a car horn." You think, "Hey, that's a car horn!" The filtering words in this case are "I'm hearing." Anything that describes the narrator's thought or mode of perception "I heard," "I saw," "I felt," etc. should be considered a filter between the reader and the character's experience. Expressing opinions is similar. You don't think to yourself, "I think that slime is disgusting." You think, "Eww, that's disgusting!" In a way, by writing down "I thought," or other filter words, you're reminding readers of the character's presence, drawing attention to the fact that he/she is a character in a book they're reading. If you do this as little as possible, your point of view will feel deeper.
3. use internalization
I'm going to pick up here on what I said in #2 above about what one thinks to oneself. Your character is going through the story, acting on the basis of what happens to him or her. In deep point of view you're trying to create the sensation that your reader is deep in the character's head, and that means listening directly to the character's thoughts - most often, right as they are having them. If you try to think of everything in deep point of view as internal in some way, then all description becomes perception. I'll come back to this below, because I'll be looking at a lot of tools to make description feel internal. My point here is that only what the character perceives should be described. Then, once something has been perceived (the character sees a rose; the character gets stabbed, etc.), then the character will have an emotional reaction, possibly one which evokes memories of backstory. After that, the character will form a motivation to respond and then he/she will respond.
Now I'm going to move into some more detailed techniques that involve specific grammar, and will contribute to the success of the first three above.
4. use deixis, or pointing words
When you move through life, you spend a lot of time pointing, both physically and verbally. Which one do you want? That one. Whose is that? Mine. Your character should be doing this, too. The trick to remember as a writer is that all pointing words indicate a "center" where the speaker is standing. Remember when the teacher called your name in class? You answered, "Here!" The word "here" points to the center; it points to yourself. In your narrative, the pointing words should all indicate your point of view character as the center. It's not actually very hard to make pointing words point to the character as the center in the case of dialogue, but it's much harder to remember to pay attention to the pointing words in general narrative. Every time you write "the night before" instead of "last night," you're taking a step away from your character's deep perspective. It's very easy to make pointing words in narrative point to you, as author, without even thinking about it. But in deep point of view, you don't want anything pointing outside the character. That character isn't aware that he/she is in a story, and thus you don't want author-centered pointing to remind readers that the author is still there. Here's a list of some kinds of pointing words that you can look out for (it's not an exhaustive list, so make sure to keep your eye out!).
This one is directly related to the question of the character's action as I mentioned above. A character's action is anything from "He held perfectly still" to "She grabbed the knife and dived over the edge of the platform." I like to think of it as things the point of view character does which involve intent. Even things like "She looked at him" and "He didn't move" can be deliberate actions on the part of the protagonist. Mind you, they could be external too - they are open to either interpretation - but if everything around them is indicating an internal point of view, then these will be read as internal as well. The guidelines below basically are saying that you want to indicate that your deep point of view character is in charge of her/his own action by placing her/him in the subject position of the main clause of the sentence as much as possible.
I'm going to explain this one a little bit. Notice that my protagonist, "she" is not present in this sentence. That's because we're not looking at an action sentence. This is a judgment sentence, and thus, if I said "She thought it was ridiculous..." then putting her as the subject would create filtering, not a sense of action. We often use the empty "It is"/"It was" with judgmental adjectives to think about situations in our experience, so I encourage you to do this for deep POV.
This one is related to my point above about not putting the protagonist in object position. If I wrote out the whole situation, "He walked up to her," then she would appear in a non-subject position. If I leave "to her" off, then I find it seems more like what someone would think internally.
One last note of caution on syntax: when I say to avoid something, I'm not telling you you can't put your protagonist in these syntactic positions. I'm only trying to say that the effect will be different if you do: the emphasis will seem to rest somewhere other than on the protagonist's intent to act. Sometimes this is what people are actually referring to when they say to avoid "passive" constructions. However, if that different effect is what you want (for example, if you want the protagonist to be perceived as victimized) then no problem.
In deep point of view, what you're describing isn't what you're describing. It's what your character is perceiving, noticing, and judging. Anything your character doesn't perceive shouldn't even make it into the description (I'll come back to this in a second). Whenever you describe a scene or an object, think through how your character perceives it. Describing something as "red" feels very different from describing it as "dirty red" or "sparkling red." Saying someone moves "reluctantly" is a judgment by the person perceiving it. Maybe that person is only moving slowly for some other reason. A character will compare something he/she sees to familiar things - so what is familiar? If you say her hair is like silk, presumably you know what silk is like. If your character compares something to silk but is too poor ever to have encountered it, you're looking at author point of view, not character point of view. I have a longer article about this, here.
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
Whenever you can, it's important to create a sense of internal judgment - even in contexts where you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find it. Modal verbs and evidential adverbs can help you do this. I have a longer article about this, here, but here are some examples of how to use these.
8. use articles "a" and "the"
I just wrote an article about this one last week, but I'm going to add to it here. "The" indicates known information. It is especially useful in indicating places or things that your protagonist is already familiar with. As such it's really useful when you want to create a sense of internal point of view, because you can use it to reflect your character's internal knowledge. Be careful not to use it to reflect your own (the author's) knowledge rather than the character's. "A" indicates new information. As such it's a really critical tool because "a" is the primary indicator of noticing. If your character uses "a" with something, that means he/she has noticed that thing. Watch out for this, especially if you're trying to get a message to your reader without having your character get the same message. For example, your character can walk into a room where there's a really important key (a clue, or something needed to advance the plot), and just see it as "a room full of junk" (in which case the reader won't know the key is there) or "a room full of junk like old books, keys, and stationery" (here the reader might be able to pick up that the key is there, especially if some other hint has caused them to look for it). Here's the trick: the minute the character says she sees a key, that means she's noticed it. It's then up to the author to decide whether to show how the character responds - whether she looks by without thinking it's important, or whether she goes, "hey, that's the key I was looking for!"
9. use voice
Voice is a topic about which whole reams of information can be (and have been) written. What I'll say here is that if you're striving for a deep point of view that directly relates the inner thoughts of your protagonist, then those thoughts should reflect the way that character actually expresses him/herself. If this is a person who speaks a dialect, then the dialect should influence the internalization as well as the character's dialogue (though the internalization doesn't have to be quite as extreme as the dialogue). If this is a non-native speaker of English, find a way for the narrative and internalization to reflect that (as well as the person's level of proficiency in English, and level of education, so they don't sound needlessly stupid). If this is a person who swears, then that should show up in internalization. Whenever you can, consider whether your character's reaction would be worth expressing with direct thought exclamations. These are things like taking "He wondered if he could..." and turning it into "Could he...?", or taking "He wished..." and turning it into "If only...", or taking "She didn't want to..." and turning it into "No way would she..." or even "Damned if she was going to..." These can of course be overused, but they certainly will deepen the reader's sense of your point of view.
So, now that we've discussed everything in detail, here is the summary checklist:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
3. use internalization
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
I think the most important thing to keep in mind as you enter the task of creating deep POV is this: deep point of view is not created by personal pronouns. It has almost nothing to do with whether you are using first person or third person - you can make third person feel close or first person feel distant if you really try. Any text contains lots and lots of different opportunities to get closer or further away from your narrating character, and the more "close" opportunities you take, the closer your narrator will feel. The list below will give you a sense of where to look for these opportunities. Please do keep in mind that none of these are "rules," and you do not have to do all of them.
I'm going to go through each point of the checklist in detail first, and then repeat it at the end as a summary so you can run through it more easily. (So if you want to get the overview first, you can skip down to the end now and then come back.)
Here we go:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
Personal pronouns are the ones people always ask about first when they talk about point of view. Usually they're either "I" (first person) or "he" or "she" (third person) but sometimes can be "you" (second person). Just because you've chosen one or the other of them does not mean that every sentence, or even every other sentence, should start with one. As a guideline for where you should use these pronouns and where you should not use them, think about dividing your character's narrative into action, perception, and judgment. Action sentences are the ones where your character is doing something, and those are the ones which will use personal pronouns. Perception sentences are the ones where your character is remarking on something that he/she perceives (sees, hears, smells, feels, etc.), and those should not use personal pronouns. Judgment sentences are the ones where your character is expressing an opinion about something that's happening, and those shouldn't usually use personal pronouns either. Chances are, if you're using personal pronouns for perception or judgment, then you're filtering.
2. avoid filtering
Filtering means putting extra words into your sentence that remove the reader from the experience of the character. When you go through your life you probably don't think distantly about what you're perceiving. You hear a car horn and you don't think, "I'm hearing a car horn." You think, "Hey, that's a car horn!" The filtering words in this case are "I'm hearing." Anything that describes the narrator's thought or mode of perception "I heard," "I saw," "I felt," etc. should be considered a filter between the reader and the character's experience. Expressing opinions is similar. You don't think to yourself, "I think that slime is disgusting." You think, "Eww, that's disgusting!" In a way, by writing down "I thought," or other filter words, you're reminding readers of the character's presence, drawing attention to the fact that he/she is a character in a book they're reading. If you do this as little as possible, your point of view will feel deeper.
3. use internalization
I'm going to pick up here on what I said in #2 above about what one thinks to oneself. Your character is going through the story, acting on the basis of what happens to him or her. In deep point of view you're trying to create the sensation that your reader is deep in the character's head, and that means listening directly to the character's thoughts - most often, right as they are having them. If you try to think of everything in deep point of view as internal in some way, then all description becomes perception. I'll come back to this below, because I'll be looking at a lot of tools to make description feel internal. My point here is that only what the character perceives should be described. Then, once something has been perceived (the character sees a rose; the character gets stabbed, etc.), then the character will have an emotional reaction, possibly one which evokes memories of backstory. After that, the character will form a motivation to respond and then he/she will respond.
Now I'm going to move into some more detailed techniques that involve specific grammar, and will contribute to the success of the first three above.
4. use deixis, or pointing words
When you move through life, you spend a lot of time pointing, both physically and verbally. Which one do you want? That one. Whose is that? Mine. Your character should be doing this, too. The trick to remember as a writer is that all pointing words indicate a "center" where the speaker is standing. Remember when the teacher called your name in class? You answered, "Here!" The word "here" points to the center; it points to yourself. In your narrative, the pointing words should all indicate your point of view character as the center. It's not actually very hard to make pointing words point to the character as the center in the case of dialogue, but it's much harder to remember to pay attention to the pointing words in general narrative. Every time you write "the night before" instead of "last night," you're taking a step away from your character's deep perspective. It's very easy to make pointing words in narrative point to you, as author, without even thinking about it. But in deep point of view, you don't want anything pointing outside the character. That character isn't aware that he/she is in a story, and thus you don't want author-centered pointing to remind readers that the author is still there. Here's a list of some kinds of pointing words that you can look out for (it's not an exhaustive list, so make sure to keep your eye out!).
- demonstratives this and that (especially this)
- adverbs here and there (especially here)
- adverbs now, soon, today, tomorrow, last night
- verbs come, go
This one is directly related to the question of the character's action as I mentioned above. A character's action is anything from "He held perfectly still" to "She grabbed the knife and dived over the edge of the platform." I like to think of it as things the point of view character does which involve intent. Even things like "She looked at him" and "He didn't move" can be deliberate actions on the part of the protagonist. Mind you, they could be external too - they are open to either interpretation - but if everything around them is indicating an internal point of view, then these will be read as internal as well. The guidelines below basically are saying that you want to indicate that your deep point of view character is in charge of her/his own action by placing her/him in the subject position of the main clause of the sentence as much as possible.
- place the protagonist (or the protagonist's group) in subject position
- avoid placing the protagonist in object or other syntactic position
- avoid placing the protagonist in a subordinate clause for action
- use empty subject constructions to convey judgment
I'm going to explain this one a little bit. Notice that my protagonist, "she" is not present in this sentence. That's because we're not looking at an action sentence. This is a judgment sentence, and thus, if I said "She thought it was ridiculous..." then putting her as the subject would create filtering, not a sense of action. We often use the empty "It is"/"It was" with judgmental adjectives to think about situations in our experience, so I encourage you to do this for deep POV.
- use bare verb+preposition combinations
This one is related to my point above about not putting the protagonist in object position. If I wrote out the whole situation, "He walked up to her," then she would appear in a non-subject position. If I leave "to her" off, then I find it seems more like what someone would think internally.
One last note of caution on syntax: when I say to avoid something, I'm not telling you you can't put your protagonist in these syntactic positions. I'm only trying to say that the effect will be different if you do: the emphasis will seem to rest somewhere other than on the protagonist's intent to act. Sometimes this is what people are actually referring to when they say to avoid "passive" constructions. However, if that different effect is what you want (for example, if you want the protagonist to be perceived as victimized) then no problem.
In deep point of view, what you're describing isn't what you're describing. It's what your character is perceiving, noticing, and judging. Anything your character doesn't perceive shouldn't even make it into the description (I'll come back to this in a second). Whenever you describe a scene or an object, think through how your character perceives it. Describing something as "red" feels very different from describing it as "dirty red" or "sparkling red." Saying someone moves "reluctantly" is a judgment by the person perceiving it. Maybe that person is only moving slowly for some other reason. A character will compare something he/she sees to familiar things - so what is familiar? If you say her hair is like silk, presumably you know what silk is like. If your character compares something to silk but is too poor ever to have encountered it, you're looking at author point of view, not character point of view. I have a longer article about this, here.
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
Whenever you can, it's important to create a sense of internal judgment - even in contexts where you wouldn't ordinarily expect to find it. Modal verbs and evidential adverbs can help you do this. I have a longer article about this, here, but here are some examples of how to use these.
- can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, have to
- apparently, evidently, of course, clearly, surely, no doubt, naturally, likely, etc.
8. use articles "a" and "the"
I just wrote an article about this one last week, but I'm going to add to it here. "The" indicates known information. It is especially useful in indicating places or things that your protagonist is already familiar with. As such it's really useful when you want to create a sense of internal point of view, because you can use it to reflect your character's internal knowledge. Be careful not to use it to reflect your own (the author's) knowledge rather than the character's. "A" indicates new information. As such it's a really critical tool because "a" is the primary indicator of noticing. If your character uses "a" with something, that means he/she has noticed that thing. Watch out for this, especially if you're trying to get a message to your reader without having your character get the same message. For example, your character can walk into a room where there's a really important key (a clue, or something needed to advance the plot), and just see it as "a room full of junk" (in which case the reader won't know the key is there) or "a room full of junk like old books, keys, and stationery" (here the reader might be able to pick up that the key is there, especially if some other hint has caused them to look for it). Here's the trick: the minute the character says she sees a key, that means she's noticed it. It's then up to the author to decide whether to show how the character responds - whether she looks by without thinking it's important, or whether she goes, "hey, that's the key I was looking for!"
9. use voice
Voice is a topic about which whole reams of information can be (and have been) written. What I'll say here is that if you're striving for a deep point of view that directly relates the inner thoughts of your protagonist, then those thoughts should reflect the way that character actually expresses him/herself. If this is a person who speaks a dialect, then the dialect should influence the internalization as well as the character's dialogue (though the internalization doesn't have to be quite as extreme as the dialogue). If this is a non-native speaker of English, find a way for the narrative and internalization to reflect that (as well as the person's level of proficiency in English, and level of education, so they don't sound needlessly stupid). If this is a person who swears, then that should show up in internalization. Whenever you can, consider whether your character's reaction would be worth expressing with direct thought exclamations. These are things like taking "He wondered if he could..." and turning it into "Could he...?", or taking "He wished..." and turning it into "If only...", or taking "She didn't want to..." and turning it into "No way would she..." or even "Damned if she was going to..." These can of course be overused, but they certainly will deepen the reader's sense of your point of view.
So, now that we've discussed everything in detail, here is the summary checklist:
1. avoid overuse of personal pronouns
- Personal pronouns are for action with intent.
- Try to avoid them for perception and judgment.
3. use internalization
- all description becomes perception.
- demonstratives this and that (especially this)
- adverbs here and there (especially here)
- adverbs now, soon, today, tomorrow, last night
- verbs come, go
- place the protagonist (or the protagonist's group) in subject position
- avoid placing the protagonist in object or other syntactic position
- avoid placing the protagonist in a subordinate clause for action
- use empty subject constructions to convey judgment
- use bare verb+preposition combinations
7. use evidential adverbs and modal verbs
- can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, have to
- apparently, evidently, of course, clearly, surely, no doubt, naturally, likely, etc.
- "The" indicates known information.
- "a" is the primary indicator of noticing.
- dialect
- profanity/swearing style
- "direct thought" exclamations (if only, no way, damned if)
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