Thursday, May 30, 2013
Video: The Body as a record of personal experience and cultural identity
Here is last week's discussion of Bodies in worldbuilding. We had a very good discussion; it wasn't so much about clothing etc. as piercings and tattoos, wrinkles and scars etc. Gender transitions were mentioned but only briefly, since none of my transgender friends were able to attend. I hope to take up that topic at some point in the future.
Video: Families in Worldbuilding
Here is the video for the Families in Worldbuilding discussion which we had a couple of weeks ago. It turned out well even though technical difficulties meant there were only two participants! I hope you enjoy it.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
"Deepening in" to a scene of oppression
How many of you have read, or written, a story which begins with a scene of oppression? I think there must be a whole lot out there, particularly since righting wrongs and freeing oppressed people can be really exciting in a story. Generally speaking these scenes will show the oppressed interacting with their oppressors, being insulted indirectly or directly, or even being physically assaulted. These scenes often strike me as very broad-brush in approach. They are extreme. I'm not trying to say that oppressed peoples never experience extreme oppression - far from it. What I am trying to say is that because this is the kind of scene we are accustomed to, it can be done too simplistically, using default values, and therefore ring false.
If you've read my blog for any length of time, you have probably heard me talk about conveying what is normal. Normal is the hardest setting to establish, because people typically don't notice the things that are normal in their lives. However, the normal is extremely important, because unless we establish what it is, we can't accurately express to the reader the significance of departures from it. In the first chapter of For Love, For Power, my young nobleman Tagaret goes to a musical concert, which he does quite often. He sets up its emotional significance for him, and then is immediately able to talk about departures from his expectations, like the larger number of guests, and the annoying intrusion of an official speech before the concert starts. These departures are nonetheless part of the normal, so that when something really terrible happens, readers have something to compare with Tagaret's extreme shock. Without the initial norm, the shock is robbed of significance.
And that's the problem I see with an opening that features extreme oppression. Is this the norm? we ask. Or is this a departure from it? How can we know?
Therefore, as I start my next Varin novel (temporary title, Fires of Change, Book 1) among the undercaste, I'm looking to do something like the same thing. I want to start with something normal, and then have the departures from that norm become more and more extreme, so that their significance can be perceived more effectively.
This is harder than it looks, so I thought I'd tell you about some of my discovery process.
The main character in scene 1 is a man named Akrabitti Corbinan, 29 years old, who works as a trash collector. I therefore thought I should start with him on the job. However, his job is not where he's going to get himself in trouble. In a multi-caste world like Varin, it's really important to show inter-caste interaction from the very beginning so that you get a sense that the castes do interact. On the other hand, Corbinan would almost never find himself having to interact with someone in the street. The undercaste are avoided, more than anything else. Besides which, the inciting event I'm driving him towards has nothing to do with meeting Highers in the street, so that option is out.
He can, however, interact with his bosses, who are members of Higher castes. The garbage services are run by the government, which means that Corbinan's boss is a bureaucrat and a member of the Imbati servant caste. Knowing this, I thought maybe he should have an interaction with his boss, so I drafted a scene in which he was going to get his pay from his boss, and the boss acted as though he didn't know Corbinan, and then underpaid him.
It wasn't right, for several reasons. First, it set up the boss as too much of an antagonist. We're not even close to meeting the real antagonist yet. Second, how many of us get our pay directly from our bosses? And why would the boss put himself through meeting all of his employees every week? Even more important than that, the undercaste get paid in cash, but the Imbati make a point of avoiding cash money. Of course, I only figured this out after I'd drafted it and wasn't feeling right, and called up Janice Hardy to ask her advice (she saw the problem right away, bless her).
We decided I needed an intermediary from the Melumalai merchant caste (which is lower than the Imbati, only one rank higher than undercaste). A cashier.
At this point, things started coming together. Corbinan goes with his work crew to pick up his weekly pay from the cashier, and they are underpaid. It was important that there be a reason behind the underpayment - this is a working national system, and can't be subject to the whims of lowly cashiers. Even vindictive bosses have to track payroll, and would find other ways to be vindictive. Janice and I came up with the idea that there had been a piece of equipment that failed while one of the team members was using it, and therefore the entire team would have been docked as a penalty. This is a more realistic type of institutional injustice that requires absolutely no ill will on the part of the Imbati boss or the Melumalai cashier in order to make Corbinan's life miserable. The trash workers would have known this piece of equipment was on its last legs, and been passing it around like a hot potato (to use an Earthly simile) trying not to be the one using it when it finally broke. Corbinan wasn't the one who broke it, but one of his teammates (Basi) did, and was too embarrassed to tell the group, so they end up learning this at the pay window in front of the Melumalai.
They are all angry. However, they can't take their anger out on a Higher without facing unpleasant repercussions, so instead, they take it out on Basi who was unlucky enough to have broken the machine and then didn't tell them. Basi will respond by proposing to lodge a protest with the Imbati boss. However, Corbinan won't let her go, because he doesn't want her to get in trouble. This strengthens the sense that avoidance is the preferred method, and that the Higher the person, the scarier they are. It also helps Corbinan be a good guy, even though he's definitely on the rough side. By the time he's convinced her not to take the risk, the rest of the team has left in retaliation.
You may notice that I'm deliberately having the group be unfair to each other as a result of pressure coming from above. One of the things that took me ages to figure out is that the undercaste would prey on each other when they were desperate. So in order to make this chapter take one more step toward the extreme, I'm going to have Corbinan and Basi get attacked by a gang on the way home.
Let me stress that this kind of thing (a gang) can't be random or arbitrary. The societal underpinnings of the gangs have to be clear. The undercaste gangs are run by the occasional unscrupulous adult, but most of their members are people too young to hold down a job within the system, or who can't get a job for other reasons. They prey specifically on the trash workers, because the trash workers are paid in cash (prison workers are paid in food and clothes and housing). Corbinan used to be a member of a gang himself because he ran away from home to distance himself from his parents, who were crematory workers (who are disparaged even within the caste).
So at this point, after Basi has lost some of her money to the gang, there is a more serious problem: the team doesn't have enough money to pay rent for their shared apartment. Corbinan, who was helping Basi to fight off the gang on the way home, gets asked to teach her a lesson for putting all their housing in danger. He's not going to do that, but the two of them will hatch a scheme for him to go looking for a big stash of money. Imagine it like treasure hidden by Basi's family, and she's got the map but can't decipher it without Corbinan's help.
And there's (finally) our real inciting event, that takes Corbinan fully off the path of the normal.
Of course, it's fully possible that I'll still find something wrong with the scenario and have to change it again. But I did want to show how much thinking - thinking in layers - it took to get to a place where I felt like I was engaging real oppression. I'm trying to portray the kind of situation that doesn't require anyone to fling insults or to commit assaults. A situation based on avoidance, and institutional oppression, and desperation. I'm also going to be working hard going forward to keep these factors in play, because the kind of inequities that I want to draw attention to are the microagressions that so often slip beneath notice.
I hope you find my musings interesting.
If you've read my blog for any length of time, you have probably heard me talk about conveying what is normal. Normal is the hardest setting to establish, because people typically don't notice the things that are normal in their lives. However, the normal is extremely important, because unless we establish what it is, we can't accurately express to the reader the significance of departures from it. In the first chapter of For Love, For Power, my young nobleman Tagaret goes to a musical concert, which he does quite often. He sets up its emotional significance for him, and then is immediately able to talk about departures from his expectations, like the larger number of guests, and the annoying intrusion of an official speech before the concert starts. These departures are nonetheless part of the normal, so that when something really terrible happens, readers have something to compare with Tagaret's extreme shock. Without the initial norm, the shock is robbed of significance.
And that's the problem I see with an opening that features extreme oppression. Is this the norm? we ask. Or is this a departure from it? How can we know?
Therefore, as I start my next Varin novel (temporary title, Fires of Change, Book 1) among the undercaste, I'm looking to do something like the same thing. I want to start with something normal, and then have the departures from that norm become more and more extreme, so that their significance can be perceived more effectively.
This is harder than it looks, so I thought I'd tell you about some of my discovery process.
The main character in scene 1 is a man named Akrabitti Corbinan, 29 years old, who works as a trash collector. I therefore thought I should start with him on the job. However, his job is not where he's going to get himself in trouble. In a multi-caste world like Varin, it's really important to show inter-caste interaction from the very beginning so that you get a sense that the castes do interact. On the other hand, Corbinan would almost never find himself having to interact with someone in the street. The undercaste are avoided, more than anything else. Besides which, the inciting event I'm driving him towards has nothing to do with meeting Highers in the street, so that option is out.
He can, however, interact with his bosses, who are members of Higher castes. The garbage services are run by the government, which means that Corbinan's boss is a bureaucrat and a member of the Imbati servant caste. Knowing this, I thought maybe he should have an interaction with his boss, so I drafted a scene in which he was going to get his pay from his boss, and the boss acted as though he didn't know Corbinan, and then underpaid him.
It wasn't right, for several reasons. First, it set up the boss as too much of an antagonist. We're not even close to meeting the real antagonist yet. Second, how many of us get our pay directly from our bosses? And why would the boss put himself through meeting all of his employees every week? Even more important than that, the undercaste get paid in cash, but the Imbati make a point of avoiding cash money. Of course, I only figured this out after I'd drafted it and wasn't feeling right, and called up Janice Hardy to ask her advice (she saw the problem right away, bless her).
We decided I needed an intermediary from the Melumalai merchant caste (which is lower than the Imbati, only one rank higher than undercaste). A cashier.
At this point, things started coming together. Corbinan goes with his work crew to pick up his weekly pay from the cashier, and they are underpaid. It was important that there be a reason behind the underpayment - this is a working national system, and can't be subject to the whims of lowly cashiers. Even vindictive bosses have to track payroll, and would find other ways to be vindictive. Janice and I came up with the idea that there had been a piece of equipment that failed while one of the team members was using it, and therefore the entire team would have been docked as a penalty. This is a more realistic type of institutional injustice that requires absolutely no ill will on the part of the Imbati boss or the Melumalai cashier in order to make Corbinan's life miserable. The trash workers would have known this piece of equipment was on its last legs, and been passing it around like a hot potato (to use an Earthly simile) trying not to be the one using it when it finally broke. Corbinan wasn't the one who broke it, but one of his teammates (Basi) did, and was too embarrassed to tell the group, so they end up learning this at the pay window in front of the Melumalai.
They are all angry. However, they can't take their anger out on a Higher without facing unpleasant repercussions, so instead, they take it out on Basi who was unlucky enough to have broken the machine and then didn't tell them. Basi will respond by proposing to lodge a protest with the Imbati boss. However, Corbinan won't let her go, because he doesn't want her to get in trouble. This strengthens the sense that avoidance is the preferred method, and that the Higher the person, the scarier they are. It also helps Corbinan be a good guy, even though he's definitely on the rough side. By the time he's convinced her not to take the risk, the rest of the team has left in retaliation.
You may notice that I'm deliberately having the group be unfair to each other as a result of pressure coming from above. One of the things that took me ages to figure out is that the undercaste would prey on each other when they were desperate. So in order to make this chapter take one more step toward the extreme, I'm going to have Corbinan and Basi get attacked by a gang on the way home.
Let me stress that this kind of thing (a gang) can't be random or arbitrary. The societal underpinnings of the gangs have to be clear. The undercaste gangs are run by the occasional unscrupulous adult, but most of their members are people too young to hold down a job within the system, or who can't get a job for other reasons. They prey specifically on the trash workers, because the trash workers are paid in cash (prison workers are paid in food and clothes and housing). Corbinan used to be a member of a gang himself because he ran away from home to distance himself from his parents, who were crematory workers (who are disparaged even within the caste).
So at this point, after Basi has lost some of her money to the gang, there is a more serious problem: the team doesn't have enough money to pay rent for their shared apartment. Corbinan, who was helping Basi to fight off the gang on the way home, gets asked to teach her a lesson for putting all their housing in danger. He's not going to do that, but the two of them will hatch a scheme for him to go looking for a big stash of money. Imagine it like treasure hidden by Basi's family, and she's got the map but can't decipher it without Corbinan's help.
And there's (finally) our real inciting event, that takes Corbinan fully off the path of the normal.
Of course, it's fully possible that I'll still find something wrong with the scenario and have to change it again. But I did want to show how much thinking - thinking in layers - it took to get to a place where I felt like I was engaging real oppression. I'm trying to portray the kind of situation that doesn't require anyone to fling insults or to commit assaults. A situation based on avoidance, and institutional oppression, and desperation. I'm also going to be working hard going forward to keep these factors in play, because the kind of inequities that I want to draw attention to are the microagressions that so often slip beneath notice.
I hope you find my musings interesting.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Nebulas! and BayCon Report!
As I sit down to write this I'm reminded that I never wrote up a report of my experience at the Nebulas. The fact of the matter is that I've been so overwhelmed by these conventions that I'm scarcely able to gather my thoughts. So, quick summary of the Nebulas:
Amazing people! Great ideas! Late nights! Lots and lots of amazing people! Interviewing Aliette de Bodard! Talking to Stan Schmidt and Sheila Williams meeting Trevor Quachri! Aliette won a Nebula! Did I mention lots and lots of amazing people?
Okay, deep breath....
Basically, a week of school with lots of extra activities is not the best way to recover from something as overwhelmingly awesome as the Nebulas and really be ready for another convention. However! Here I go, to tell you about BayCon.
Summary: BayCon was terrific. Better than it has been in a number of years, in my opinion.
I got off to a rocky start on Friday because I was relying on my knowledge of past years as a guide to this one, and thus didn't figure out that Meet the Guests had been moved from 8pm to 7pm. So I missed it. On the other hand, I was able to get my registration handled, get my bearings, and meet some friends and some new people as well, so it was worth going down.
On Saturday, my first panel was at 9am, and we talked about creating settings for science fiction and fantasy. One of the things we discovered, logistically speaking, was that all the panels had gone from 50 minutes to 90 minutes in length. Once we got over the initial shock, it was actually a really nice change. Our moderator was Todd McCaffrey, who was a good moderator and clearly a super-nice fellow. Other panelists included my friend Chaz Brenchley, Analog buddy Paul Carlson, and Aaron Mason. After the panel I met my family and we surfed the convention a bit, then had lunch. I saw my friends Margaret McGaffey Fisk and Colin Fisk and also my friend Lillian Csernica, who was wearing a really hilarious "Loki Charms" shirt. This one:
After lunch I had a 2:00 panel on Fairy Tales and Mythology, which the group convinced me to moderate. All in all I thought we touched on a lot of interesting things. Fairy Tales as teaching tales, and how they change over time as the storytellers perceive that different things need to be taught. We tried to get to the bottom of what endured at the center of each, but that was trickier. Any given story (for example, The Little Mermaid) can have different interpretations depending on the version you're hearing, and even single versions can end up with multiple interpretations.
Sunday was my crazy day. It started out at 9am with a panel on Worldbuilding which I moderated. That was a lot of fun (well, no surprise to you folks since you know how I love the topic). We had a great mix of people on the panel including David Peterson, expert on language design and language-culture links for HBO and SyFy, Paula Butler, expert on creating planets and ecosystems as part of the Contact conference, Aaron Mason, novelist, and Leslie Ann Moore, novelist. This was a great panel, mostly because everybody on it had such great things to say. Because we had 90 minutes, I was able to let each participant have time to really dig into their views on the issues of created worlds, and we covered everything from "the alkalinity of the soil" to language and cultures and still were somehow able to tie it all together.
After lunch with my family and with David Peterson, I headed into the BayCon Writer's Workshop. This is actually a really fun workshop where you get to sit around the table with (in our case) five people who have submitted stories and three professional writers, and one moderator. We'd received the stories in advance and written up critiques, and we were then able to deliver them and discuss them with the group for each person who had submitted. I like to participate in this workshop because it was actually the first place I submitted a short story (back when I'd only ever written one), and I like giving back to the community as well as looking out for good new writers who may not even realize how good they are.
The workshop ended at 3:30, and at 4:00 I was back in a panel, this time with David Peterson and Taunya Gren, about creating alien and fantasy languages. Taunya brought the perspective of a non-linguist faced with having to create a language (for a TV pilot), and was a great contributor to the panel not least because she kept me and David from getting incomprehensibly geeky. David and I actually complement each other quite well because he works in the visual media and I work in the written medium, and each of those requires a different kind of language design. Of course, it's always a kick to talk about the range of human languages and how to explore different features while creating something workable yet fascinating. Some of the languages discussed were not auditory ones.
Between 5:30 and 7 I sneaked down to dinner at the hotel restaurant with Deborah J. Ross. They had a nice buffet, which was tasty, and I managed not to get too much food (which can sometimes be challenging). Thereupon Deborah and I went up for our last panel, which the lovely Programming directors allowed us to add at the last minute: Worldbuilding discussion and reading. This was just a kick. Basically Deborah and I spent about half an hour talking about worldbuilding - but not in a general sense. She talked about the world she had created for her novel Collaborators, which was inspired in large part by the city of Lyon in France, and I talked about Varin and the inspirations behind it, including the pervasive metaphor of being trapped (trapped underground, socially trapped, trapped in a marriage, trapped in one's own head). Then she read from Collaborators, and I read the first chapter of For Love, For Power. I really enjoyed the sections she read, especially the use of detail to provide world information but simultaneously to further character and plot. It reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness in that the aliens here have no gender - but it was fun to see her approaching it more from the insider's point of view than from the human point of view. I have to admit I loved reading my chapter. Normally when I'm on a panel I feel a bit like I used to when I was teaching, but this time I felt like I was on a stage. We had a terrific audience of about 15 people, and they really got me amped up! Both Deborah and I autographed and gave away the pages we had read from, and we left the room grinning and giggling with how much fun we'd just had. I really hope we get to do something similar next year.
At this point I've had a day to fall in a heap and so I should be back to blogging today and tomorrow, with a hangout on Thursday at 11am. I know I'm behind on some hangout reports too, so I'll catch up on those as best I can.
What a couple of weeks it has been!
Amazing people! Great ideas! Late nights! Lots and lots of amazing people! Interviewing Aliette de Bodard! Talking to Stan Schmidt and Sheila Williams meeting Trevor Quachri! Aliette won a Nebula! Did I mention lots and lots of amazing people?
Okay, deep breath....
Basically, a week of school with lots of extra activities is not the best way to recover from something as overwhelmingly awesome as the Nebulas and really be ready for another convention. However! Here I go, to tell you about BayCon.
Summary: BayCon was terrific. Better than it has been in a number of years, in my opinion.
I got off to a rocky start on Friday because I was relying on my knowledge of past years as a guide to this one, and thus didn't figure out that Meet the Guests had been moved from 8pm to 7pm. So I missed it. On the other hand, I was able to get my registration handled, get my bearings, and meet some friends and some new people as well, so it was worth going down.
On Saturday, my first panel was at 9am, and we talked about creating settings for science fiction and fantasy. One of the things we discovered, logistically speaking, was that all the panels had gone from 50 minutes to 90 minutes in length. Once we got over the initial shock, it was actually a really nice change. Our moderator was Todd McCaffrey, who was a good moderator and clearly a super-nice fellow. Other panelists included my friend Chaz Brenchley, Analog buddy Paul Carlson, and Aaron Mason. After the panel I met my family and we surfed the convention a bit, then had lunch. I saw my friends Margaret McGaffey Fisk and Colin Fisk and also my friend Lillian Csernica, who was wearing a really hilarious "Loki Charms" shirt. This one:
Sunday was my crazy day. It started out at 9am with a panel on Worldbuilding which I moderated. That was a lot of fun (well, no surprise to you folks since you know how I love the topic). We had a great mix of people on the panel including David Peterson, expert on language design and language-culture links for HBO and SyFy, Paula Butler, expert on creating planets and ecosystems as part of the Contact conference, Aaron Mason, novelist, and Leslie Ann Moore, novelist. This was a great panel, mostly because everybody on it had such great things to say. Because we had 90 minutes, I was able to let each participant have time to really dig into their views on the issues of created worlds, and we covered everything from "the alkalinity of the soil" to language and cultures and still were somehow able to tie it all together.
After lunch with my family and with David Peterson, I headed into the BayCon Writer's Workshop. This is actually a really fun workshop where you get to sit around the table with (in our case) five people who have submitted stories and three professional writers, and one moderator. We'd received the stories in advance and written up critiques, and we were then able to deliver them and discuss them with the group for each person who had submitted. I like to participate in this workshop because it was actually the first place I submitted a short story (back when I'd only ever written one), and I like giving back to the community as well as looking out for good new writers who may not even realize how good they are.
The workshop ended at 3:30, and at 4:00 I was back in a panel, this time with David Peterson and Taunya Gren, about creating alien and fantasy languages. Taunya brought the perspective of a non-linguist faced with having to create a language (for a TV pilot), and was a great contributor to the panel not least because she kept me and David from getting incomprehensibly geeky. David and I actually complement each other quite well because he works in the visual media and I work in the written medium, and each of those requires a different kind of language design. Of course, it's always a kick to talk about the range of human languages and how to explore different features while creating something workable yet fascinating. Some of the languages discussed were not auditory ones.
Between 5:30 and 7 I sneaked down to dinner at the hotel restaurant with Deborah J. Ross. They had a nice buffet, which was tasty, and I managed not to get too much food (which can sometimes be challenging). Thereupon Deborah and I went up for our last panel, which the lovely Programming directors allowed us to add at the last minute: Worldbuilding discussion and reading. This was just a kick. Basically Deborah and I spent about half an hour talking about worldbuilding - but not in a general sense. She talked about the world she had created for her novel Collaborators, which was inspired in large part by the city of Lyon in France, and I talked about Varin and the inspirations behind it, including the pervasive metaphor of being trapped (trapped underground, socially trapped, trapped in a marriage, trapped in one's own head). Then she read from Collaborators, and I read the first chapter of For Love, For Power. I really enjoyed the sections she read, especially the use of detail to provide world information but simultaneously to further character and plot. It reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness in that the aliens here have no gender - but it was fun to see her approaching it more from the insider's point of view than from the human point of view. I have to admit I loved reading my chapter. Normally when I'm on a panel I feel a bit like I used to when I was teaching, but this time I felt like I was on a stage. We had a terrific audience of about 15 people, and they really got me amped up! Both Deborah and I autographed and gave away the pages we had read from, and we left the room grinning and giggling with how much fun we'd just had. I really hope we get to do something similar next year.
At this point I've had a day to fall in a heap and so I should be back to blogging today and tomorrow, with a hangout on Thursday at 11am. I know I'm behind on some hangout reports too, so I'll catch up on those as best I can.
What a couple of weeks it has been!
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Different voices in your narrative - you're weaving them right now, and you might not know it.
Today I'm working on developing a voice for a character in my new novel (which doesn't have a good title yet). He's a hard guy to work with because he's a member of the Akrabitti undercaste in Varin, and he speaks in heavy undercaste dialect. I'm caught in a rather funny position. If I used a narrator that was omniscient and far from him, I could speak about him in any way I wanted. If I used first person narration, I'd have to put everything in his dialect, and that might be tough for readers to understand. In the Varin novels, though, I use close third person narration, which is somewhere in between. And I find that I'm trying to make decisions about how much dialect to use in each sentence as I write it.
This dialect question brings to light something very interesting about close third person narration: it mixes voices.
What are these voices?
1. Dialogue
It's easy to think of dialogue as voices, because when our character says something we get to put it in quotes, and write down exactly what it was that came out of his/her mouth. We can contrast the voice of one character with another.
Examples:
2. Internalization
These are essentially the reported thoughts of the point of view character. Some authors put an internalized voice in italics, or go so far as to label it with the phrase "he thought" or "she thought." I don't, because I want really close point of view, and don't want to use filter words or other stylistic indicators that we're "switching into" someone's thoughts. However, the internalized thoughts of a character should match with that character's established voice, and this includes dialect. If anything, the dialogue should be more responsive to surrounding social context than the internalization, because how often do we censor our inner thoughts?
Examples:
3. Internalized Dialogue
Yes, there are some cases where you'll combine 1 and 2, directly reporting the internalized thoughts of your character. In my own writing, these are the only cases where I use italics for thoughts. You can often recognize them because they'll be in present tense (because a character is thinking about what's going on right now) even though your general narration is in past tense. In first person present tense, they typically don't need any special markers.
Examples:
It's only a fool makes trouble on payday.
How's that! Maman doesn't have a complete shield in her collection yet.
4. Narration
This is the voice that tells you what the character is doing. How it's handled will depend on where you place the narrator. A first person narrator who is reporting from the action, or immediately thereafter, will typically match the voice of the dialogue and internalization. A first person narrator who is reporting from a retrospective distance may sound different - as, say, when an older person is reflecting on the events of her/his young life. A third person narrator is to some extent always external to the character. However, a dramatically distant third person narrator can be someone with a completely different voice who isn't even from the same world as the character. By contrast, a very close third person narrator should match the tone of the whole, but can be more problematic to manage because it must be kept distinct from internalization. Who here refers to themselves in the third person?
Examples:
The Question of Description
Descriptions are tricky. Which voice do they fall into? In fact, as the author, you get to choose. Certainly you can make the descriptions part of your narration, and voice them accordingly. If you're describing anything that the point of view character would be incapable of perceiving, that's definitely what you have to do. On the other hand, if the point of view character can perceive it, then you can choose to put the description into the same style as internalization (and there's some description in my examples of internalization, above). When you're working with extremely close point of view, or Deep POV, you want to make everything internal to the character if you can. So imagine how the character would perceive this place or thing or person, and how he/she would describe it. Use the voice that you use for internalization, and make sure that your character's judgments are coming through.
When do I switch voices?
You're probably doing it without thinking, all the time. It's not something that happens without some kind of marker, but switches don't always happen between sentences. You probably could go into your work right now and find a sentence that switches voices in the middle. Maybe you've been writing along and you get to a sentence that really feels like it needs something, maybe a dash, or even just a comma, some way to show that the two parts of the sentence are separate from one another. The reason behind that instinct could be that you're switching voices.
Do I really need to worry about this?
Chances are, you don't. It takes a particularly challenging kind of narrative (like the one I'm working with now) to be difficult enough to require conscious thought. On the other hand, I always find that some conscious awareness is helpful. If you start thinking about these voices, it might help you tease out the reason why one punctuation seems awkward and another doesn't, why a particular passage isn't working the way you wanted, or why your instinct (or your critique partner) is telling you to use slang in one place and not in another.
It's something to think about.
This dialect question brings to light something very interesting about close third person narration: it mixes voices.
What are these voices?
1. Dialogue
It's easy to think of dialogue as voices, because when our character says something we get to put it in quotes, and write down exactly what it was that came out of his/her mouth. We can contrast the voice of one character with another.
Examples:
- "We'd like to smack that calm right off him."
- "Oh, crap. Tabby, hon, let me look at you."
- "Fool sheep, putting me to this trouble!"
2. Internalization
These are essentially the reported thoughts of the point of view character. Some authors put an internalized voice in italics, or go so far as to label it with the phrase "he thought" or "she thought." I don't, because I want really close point of view, and don't want to use filter words or other stylistic indicators that we're "switching into" someone's thoughts. However, the internalized thoughts of a character should match with that character's established voice, and this includes dialect. If anything, the dialogue should be more responsive to surrounding social context than the internalization, because how often do we censor our inner thoughts?
Examples:
- Handing over money shouldn't take this long. All-they'd have been home by now if not for one soul-dark Higher.
- She's dark, fact. Like a sock to the stomach after how long I spent cleaning out that weird 'test population R' malware she straggled in with.
- One lamb from the seaward field was missing. Not caught in the fence, nor mired by the stream. Fallen into the sea? Not possible, since the tide was out, with no water in sight across the sunset flats.
3. Internalized Dialogue
Yes, there are some cases where you'll combine 1 and 2, directly reporting the internalized thoughts of your character. In my own writing, these are the only cases where I use italics for thoughts. You can often recognize them because they'll be in present tense (because a character is thinking about what's going on right now) even though your general narration is in past tense. In first person present tense, they typically don't need any special markers.
Examples:
It's only a fool makes trouble on payday.
How's that! Maman doesn't have a complete shield in her collection yet.
4. Narration
This is the voice that tells you what the character is doing. How it's handled will depend on where you place the narrator. A first person narrator who is reporting from the action, or immediately thereafter, will typically match the voice of the dialogue and internalization. A first person narrator who is reporting from a retrospective distance may sound different - as, say, when an older person is reflecting on the events of her/his young life. A third person narrator is to some extent always external to the character. However, a dramatically distant third person narrator can be someone with a completely different voice who isn't even from the same world as the character. By contrast, a very close third person narrator should match the tone of the whole, but can be more problematic to manage because it must be kept distinct from internalization. Who here refers to themselves in the third person?
Examples:
- He ducked and pushed in, work's-end hands adding to the layer of grime on the door.
- I look up, into the adspace.
- Corise trudged the shore, calling, dried salt crunching on the grass under her boots.
The Question of Description
Descriptions are tricky. Which voice do they fall into? In fact, as the author, you get to choose. Certainly you can make the descriptions part of your narration, and voice them accordingly. If you're describing anything that the point of view character would be incapable of perceiving, that's definitely what you have to do. On the other hand, if the point of view character can perceive it, then you can choose to put the description into the same style as internalization (and there's some description in my examples of internalization, above). When you're working with extremely close point of view, or Deep POV, you want to make everything internal to the character if you can. So imagine how the character would perceive this place or thing or person, and how he/she would describe it. Use the voice that you use for internalization, and make sure that your character's judgments are coming through.
When do I switch voices?
You're probably doing it without thinking, all the time. It's not something that happens without some kind of marker, but switches don't always happen between sentences. You probably could go into your work right now and find a sentence that switches voices in the middle. Maybe you've been writing along and you get to a sentence that really feels like it needs something, maybe a dash, or even just a comma, some way to show that the two parts of the sentence are separate from one another. The reason behind that instinct could be that you're switching voices.
Do I really need to worry about this?
Chances are, you don't. It takes a particularly challenging kind of narrative (like the one I'm working with now) to be difficult enough to require conscious thought. On the other hand, I always find that some conscious awareness is helpful. If you start thinking about these voices, it might help you tease out the reason why one punctuation seems awkward and another doesn't, why a particular passage isn't working the way you wanted, or why your instinct (or your critique partner) is telling you to use slang in one place and not in another.
It's something to think about.
Monday, May 20, 2013
TTYU Retro: The illusion of "natural" electronics interfaces, and the book
I would like us to take a little step back and examine this idea of what "natural" means. "Natural" means something that we do as part of our nature - but our nature is quite complex. Humans are capable of all kinds of complex learned behaviors. When I examine different kinds of interfaces with electronics that we've used, what it commonly comes down to is a question of metaphor. Interestingly enough, the creation of metaphors is a very natural activity for human beings.
The original computer interface may not have felt natural, but really it involved learning a typed foreign language in order to interact with a user of that language (albeit a non-human one). This is something that has been done a lot, historically. It's not as natural as learning spoken language, but we all learn to write as children, and many people have the opportunity to learn foreign languages. The PalmPilot device allowed us to use handwriting as input...so long as we wrote it according to the language rules of the device. Would it be more natural if we could speak to a computer and have it understand us? Star Trek certainly seems to believe it is (and so does Dragon, not coincidentally subtitled "naturally speaking").
So here are a couple of possibilities for "natural" - one, that "natural" means we only need to learn something that can be done easily, and two, "natural" means that the computer should have to adapt itself to our modes of communication rather than vice versa.
The graphic user interface does something interesting. It moves the computer away from purely language-based self-expression into a visual mode of expression (though I remark this graphical mode is built on the basis of underlying layers of computer language). The visual interface takes advantage of the metaphor of art, expressed wonderfully by the painting "La Trahison des Images" (The Treachery of Images) by René Magritte:
What we use to manipulate them is another place where we might question "naturalness." The mouse, the touch pad, the tracking ball, and the tablet can all be considered less natural than the touch-screen interface, but what is "natural" here? Is it the indirectness of the interface? We work with indirect relations constantly without much trouble, every time we use tools. Think of cutting a piece of paper: tearing the piece of paper apart might be considered most "natural" but it's messy. Surely folding and tearing isn't particularly natural (at least in the "ease" sense of the word). The straight stroke of a knife down the paper is already starting to be indirect, though it is much simpler. And what of scissors? Would you call them natural or unnatural? A grasping action of the hand isn't at all obvious in its relation to cutting along a straight line, but we do it constantly, easily, starting before we even hit kindergarten.
The Wii was hailed as a much more "natural" way to play video games - instead of translating strenuous activities like fighting or boxing or skiing all the way down into a tiny joystick or keyboard arrangement, it used a wandlike apparatus that captured the momentum of the user's motions (and occasionally led to TV breakage). Now we have Xbox Kinect which apparently is able to take body motions within a particular region and translate them into video-game moves. This does seem to follow the pattern of making the machine conform more to our communication patterns (in this case, our physical movement patterns) than we do to its own patterns.
Three-dimensional theater is a slightly trickier example. It may be more natural to perceive images as three-dimensional, but it certainly is not natural to have to watch everything through a pair of glasses. Notice that I say that with authority, but I do bear in mind that I am among those people who (at this point in my life) observes reality through glasses all the time. Certainly we are able to perceive objects in two dimensions as easily as we are three.
So I'm going to go back to the question of whether the iPad interface or flexible electronics interface is more "natural." I'd argue that neither one is, really, more natural than the other (if anything, the flexible electronics interface is less natural). The touch pad interface uses the metaphor of a flat desk space with folders laid out on it, where one can influence objects by poking them or metaphorically putting one's fingers into a small opening and pushing outward to expand that opening; the flexible electronics interface uses the metaphor of (from what I've seen) the yoke of an airplane, pulling or pushing to move inward or outward, etc.
Last, but not least, let's compare this to the book interface. I'm not sure anyone would argue that listening to the story read aloud would be a more "natural" way of experiencing it. Certainly that's the way very young children interact with stories - but are the pictures in their books less natural than those of their movies? Maybe they are, and that illusion of no intervening mechanism is what makes us perceive something as "natural." The book is in a sense a metaphor for the process that the writer went through in writing it, if less so now that so many of us don't actually write on real sheets of paper, but on metaphorical sheets of paper made out of light. Still, our eyes follow the visual representations of words along the same path that the writer used in writing them out. The stack of paper sheets becomes representative of story time, the magnitude of the story measurable in weight and in width, and the reader can judge "how far she's read" with a glance. It's just another technology, with another type of operating system. It's been around longer. Because it is a three-dimensional object that can be manipulated with hands, it has a naturalness that the electronic version does not have.
In the end, it's all a question of learned behaviors, familiar objects/tools and agreed-upon metaphors. The child who tries to make a magazine behave like an iPad doesn't think that the magazine "doesn't work," he merely observes that despite superficial similarities, the two don't work in the same way. Any judgment of the magazine's "failure" comes from the adult observing, not from the child himself. Replacing one metaphor with another doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in "naturalness." If we make the user experience simpler and more similar to things the user already knows how to do (like speak, or manipulate objects on a desk) then that frees up some cognitive effort to be used elsewhere. That might be valuable. Or it might be unnecessary - humans have been learning and automating complex behaviors for a very long time.
It's something to think about.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Nebulas! and Baycon! So come and see me...
I'm having a busy two weeks. This is a good thing. This weekend I'm attending the Nebula awards, which is in San Jose this year. This is a great event for authors and agents and editors to attend, and I'm very excited to see some people that I rarely ever see because I'm so often head-down in my writing and real-life demands. I'll also be having the chance to interview some of the award nominees, and I'm very excited about it! I'll let you know how that turns out, and where to find the interviews afterward.
Next weekend, Memorial Day weekend, is the BayCon convention, and I'd love to see you there! I'm on some really terrific panels this time:
Location, Location, Location -- Setting Your Story in an SF World
Saturday at 9:00 AM in San Tomas
(with Paul Carlson, Todd McCaffrey, Aaron Mason, Chaz Brenchley)
World Building Basics
Sunday at 9:00 AM in Winchester
(with Bob Brown, David J. Peterson, Paula Butler, Aaron Mason, Leslie Ann Moore)
How Do You Create a Language for a SF/F World?
Sunday at 4:00 PM in San Tomas
(with David J. Peterson)
Busy but awesome is the name of the game. I hope to see you there!
Next weekend, Memorial Day weekend, is the BayCon convention, and I'd love to see you there! I'm on some really terrific panels this time:
Location, Location, Location -- Setting Your Story in an SF World
Saturday at 9:00 AM in San Tomas
(with Paul Carlson, Todd McCaffrey, Aaron Mason, Chaz Brenchley)
World Building Basics
Sunday at 9:00 AM in Winchester
(with Bob Brown, David J. Peterson, Paula Butler, Aaron Mason, Leslie Ann Moore)
How Do You Create a Language for a SF/F World?
Sunday at 4:00 PM in San Tomas
(with David J. Peterson)
Busy but awesome is the name of the game. I hope to see you there!
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