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Why Ignorance is Bad For Feminist Glittery Hoo Haas

Over at According To Hoyt today (linky), Sarah has quite a bit to say about the sterility of what the Social Justicy Glittery Hoo Haas call “proper” creative/artistic/literary pursuits. She’s right. More than that, she knows the emptiness of the kind of ideologies that have to lock people inside neatly labeled little boxes to “protect” them from the big bad world outside (hint: if merely being exposed to something else is enough to turn someone against your faith (or ideology or whatever the hell you want to call it), your thingummy belief whatsis sucks.

One of the side-effects of the sterility and mental walls is breathtaking ignorance from people who should – in theory at least (wonderful place, theory. Everything works the way it’s supposed to) – know what the freaking hell they’re talking about. And that in turn leads to the kind of nonsense that I, being a charter member of the Evil League of Evil (but not the Beautiful Evil Space Princess – that’s Sarah’s job) am obliged to poke fun at.

Exhibit howtheheckdoIknowIlostcountmonthsago: a book review column from the NYT. A little over halfway down the page you’ll find the review for the sequel to the Hugo winning Ancillary Justice (yes, yes, I know, but trust me I do have a point here. Remember what I said about breathtaking ignorance a paragraph back?). Now, the esteemed reviewer starts with the credentials of Ancillary Justice, then moves on to a truly impressive piece of ignorance, which I quote:

The central question is whether the story’s structural gimmick — the protagonist’s tendency to refer to all people as “she” regardless of actual gender or even humanity — is sufficiently mind-blowing as to merit all the accolades. It isn’t a gimmick, though; it’s a coup. Rather than seriously entertain the endless, if stupid, debate on whether women have a place in stories of the future, Leckie’s book does the literary equivalent of rolling its eyes and walking out of the room. Her refusal to waste energy on stupidity forces her audience to do the same: A few pages into the first novel, the reader gives up trying to guess each character’s actual gender, and just accepts that this will be a story full of interesting women doing awesome things.

Okay. First – if you have to say “It isn’t a gimmick”, it’s a gimmick. Second, this is only “mind-blowing” for a) English speakers who are also b) criminally ignorant of science fiction. Aside from the well-known efforts of Ursula Le Guin, I recall books from the Golden Age where there were species with sexes that completely defied human or earthly categorization. Of course, those were written by males, so they must not count.

Second, the grammatical gender one uses is a cultural thing. English has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Most English-speaking cultures consider it highly impolite to refer to people by the neuter gender: if you’re talking about a person, you’re supposed to use he or she. Not, under any circumstances, it. Heck, some people are uncomfortable referring to their pets with neuter pronouns (which, just in case anyone is thinking of saying so, has nothing to do with getting said pet neutered).

Third, picking one quasi-random grammatical gender and using only that is not by any stretch of imagination, a coup. I’ve seen frigging fan fiction – and crappy fan fiction at that – do a better job of questioning so-called gender norms.

Fourth, while I agree that the so-called debate on whether women have a place in the stories of the future (when did they ever not have a place? There have always been women in science fiction and they’ve occupied the same wide range of niches that the men occupied. Sometimes you just have to know enough about the conventions of the times to read between the lines to see it) is as stupid as it’s become endless, the book (and its sequel) does not do “the literary equivalent of rolling its eyes and walking out of the room”. Would that it had. No, the book goes into a lengthy explanation (in the first damn chapter) of the POV character’s native language not having separate gender pronouns. The author could just as easily have rendered the pronouns as the English masculine or the English neuter but that wouldn’t get the Glittery Hoo Haas of Social Justice all hot and happy, would it?

Finally (well, not really finally but I can’t be bothered wasting any more time on this: it’s a work night and my alarm goes off at oh god AM each morning), just because everything in the book is referred to by a grammatical feminine pronoun does not make the book “a story full of interesting women doing awesome things”. For starters, the preview that was available before the Hugo ballot was anything but awesome. For seconds, since there’s some familiar anatomy there the odds against every character of note being actually female is kind of small. And for thirds, anyone desperate and stupid enough to claim that a bit of pronoun trickery is enough to make the book full of… well. Yeah.

There’s more ignorance to the review, claiming new and original for plot lines where Star Trek has gone before – repeatedly (and frankly in at least some episodes Star Trek did it a damn sight better). No, Ms Jemisin, Leckie is not “attacking the self-absorption of science fiction itself”. She’s following a very well-trodden path of which you, with your breathtakingly arrogant ignorance possess neither knowledge nor understanding.

Something Must Happen – Novel Workshop 3

*Sorry to be so late.  We have ROOFERS, which means early mornings are not my own and late night is the only time I can concentrate to write, without roofers hammer-hammer-hammering on heaven’s roof.  Or something.*

Something Must Happen

When you’re starting to write, you don’t think of the parts of a novel or whatever. You think “I have a story and I’m going to tell it.”

Except that very few of us get fully-built-stories in our heads, by which I mean fully functional narratives with fully functional characters, an interesting build up, a solid climax and for preference a good emotional kick.

No, what we get, what you’ll hear at any gathering of writers, is “prompts.” You know “I have this idea for a novel where the sky is made of sponge cake.” Or “I have this idea for a world where the males are the ones who give birth.” Or “I have this character, right? He’s the king, but he finds out his father was illegitimate. The guy making war on him, otoh, is the bastard grandson of the real king. And because magic in this world goes with the blood of the kings, he’s all conflicted…”

The last one is the least interesting when you’re telling it. It’s also, I’m afraid, the type of newbie writing who has a hard road ahead. I know this. I was there once.

What I got were fascinating characters, but they didn’t do much of anything, except sometimes angst. Which makes for boring reading.

After a few people told me I needed a plot (ah!) I started reading how to write books, where I found the following definition of plot “plot is where things happen.”

Uh. Right. Thanks muchly.

Some of the books went into a lot more detail about the sort of things that should happen, but either they didn’t explain well enough for a born character-writer, or I was more obtuse back then, in my twenties. (It has to be the first, right, because I could never have been obtuse.)

I never made the most likely mistake in these circumstances. I know it’s the most likely, because I’ve seen a lot of fledgelings make it.

This is:

Make a lot of things happen around your character. Sometimes your character reacts to them. Sometimes he’s like a uber-Aspergers character and just wonders around, relating things as volcanoes blow up, Earthquakes destroy the land, monsters eat all his friends and corpses tumble from the sky at his feet. (This is the accurate description of the “plot” of a friend’s story when we were all beginners.)

This is things happening. It might even be fascinating things happening. But this is not plot. Not only does it reveal nothing about your character (unless your character is a camera) but it does not “pull” the reader forward. There is no reason to see what happens next, if what happens next is a random disaster, and we don’t care about the characters to whom the disaster happens.

This is also, btw, 90% of the drek on Amazon.

So, the next level, which I did fall into for a while (and which is why there’s a long trilogy awaiting a full rewrite) is to have things happen TO your character. This is mildly more interesting, at least if your character isn’t a simpering Sally like mine was, who just sat and cried about everything that happened to him and all his misfortunes. If you care for the character, you’re going to care that he gets eaten by monsters, has lava erupt under his feet, etc.

Only after a while it gets really tiring. You can get away with it in a short story. But not in a novel. After a while this process, which my friend Kate calls “dropping walls on characters” – i.e. the character is going along, and another unexpected event flattens him – gets really boring. And if you’re like me and start with a character that grows organically, after a few hundred pages of this treatment, he becomes mush. He doesn’t care anymore. He just wants you to kill him.

The next level up from that is to have stuff happen that’s in a crescendo. This is a “things get worse” plot. Yeah, you’re still dropping walls on the character, but they’re GRADUATED walls, and people watch, if nothing else out of the same morbid fascination that draws us to train wrecks. Works pretty well for short stories.

For novels, it tends to be curiously unsatisfying. It can work, mind, provided the disasters are interesting enough, but it leaves much to be desired. (Almost all novels of apocalypse, zombie or otherwise, written by beginners, follow this.)

So, Sarah, since you’re a know it all, what is a plot, optimally?

Optimally a plot, after a precipitating incident, consists of things that happen due to the actions of your character, which are in turn informed by this character’s flaws, and which proceed in a crescendo of seriousness and difficulty, until they reach a climax where all is either lost or won.

Yes, it bears a superficial resemblance to the things above, but the difference is it proceeds from the situation and the character, and resolves or highlights the character’s flaws or strengths. (Or both.)

Translated into human speech this goes something like this:

-there is an alien invasion

-Bob is caught at the office, where, out of a sense of decency, he tries to save as many people as possible. Which makes him responsible for Sobbing Sally.

-Sobbing women irritate Bob, so he tries to ditch her, which leads to drawing the aliens to them.

– This makes Bob have to fight them off.

-Sobbing Sally realizes Bob was trying to ditch her and walks off, which is okay with Bob who hates Sobbing Women, but Sobbing is captured and leads the aliens back to Bob.

-So Bob now gets he’s stuck with Sobbing, and has to escape and drag her alone.

– this escalates in problem severity, until Bob gets that Sally is Sobbing because she’s missing her favorite gun and can’t fight the aliens.

– they break into a gun store, get the gun and Sobbing and Bob defeat the aliens. (Yay.)

Yes, that plot is stupid and simplistic, but it is a functional plot.

Now grab your favorite novel and do a dual diagram, chapter by chapter – How do things get worse in each chapter? (be warned in novels there might be respite “catch your breath” chapters.) How did the main character bring this about by what he’s done and what he’s failed to do? How does this highlight his flaws/strengths? (If you don’t have a favorite novel, do this to Monster Hunter International.)

Next Week, Twirling our moustache and plotting – W plots, Thriller plots, romance plots, twisty plots.

The Wild and the Tame

No, no Elf Blood, and yes, I promise it will return. I’m still hip deep in Through Fire though I THINK we’re reaching a detente. Maybe.

But lately I’ve been – through the magic of indie and mentoring – watching a lot of writers come to a level of maturity. And I thought I’d write about it, in case some of you are beginning writers.

Writing starts as a wild thing. All these things come at you, and they fall into your story because you don’t know how not to have them fall into the story. The elements just drop in. And when you’re done you think the story is brilliant.

You think that because all the elements are deeply significant TO YOU. If they weren’t you wouldn’t have dropped them in. On you they have the desired emotional effect.

Writing is not about words, and thinking it is is a great mistake. Writing is about emotions. When you first start writing, your only emotional model are the things you think deeply and feel deeply about. Writing is so difficult that only the greatest of emotional drives can push you to do it.

So you do.

And often you show it to someone and they look at it and go “Uh?”

One of my first novels (realistically novellas. I was writing long hand) at fourteen shocked me because when I showed it to my friend she didn’t cry. I’d cried wildly while writing it, but for her it was “uh.”

I’d dropped into it all my emotional triggers, see, redheaded young men, and a betrayal of innocence, and the sound of rain on the roof, and a lost kitten. How dared she not cry?

Little by little – and I’m ashamed it took me another 14 years – I came to realize that those emotional triggers are different in everyone, and that success comes from aiming for the “general triggers.”

Unfortunately me being me, and not particularly liking to commit emotional strip tease in public (what else would you call it?) I used this as an excuse to make my writing bland and anodyne, or in other words, to stay completely away from MY OWN emotional triggers and write generic.

The problem is that when you don’t have your own triggers in, when you’re not feeling it, when you’re not writing a wild, barely controllable feeling yourself, your writer won’t feel it either.

It is perfectly possible to write competent fiction without being consumed with emotion.

What is not likely is that you’ll write great fiction, the kind that stays with the reader for years and years.

And so, fourteen years after I broke in, I find myself not so much shutting out the wild: those impressions and feelings and things that come from the deep subconscious, but taming it.

Writing fiction – that is packaging emotions – as I’ve come to understand it is like translating from that space behind your eyes to the world at large. Yes, you need to be able to speak the language of those people, out there. But you also need to have something to say. And what is in you that wants to write is often so deep that the language it speaks in isn’t even fully rational.

So you have to let the irrational fall into your story – and more often your novel – and then integrate it and make it, by circumstances and surroundings, understandable to others, so they feel it with the same impact and force as you do, there, behind your eyes.

It’s not easy. It’s particularly not easy for the thinking, word-smithing self to allow the wild in. You let it in once, but only because you didn’t know any better. And it came in and painted itself all over walls, because it didn’t know any better. And it either repulsed people or, more often, confused them.

It’s much harder to let the wild in and tame it, and make it serve your purpose.

It can be done. It relies on reproducing the feelings that those things make you experience. There is a reason Heinlein left a trail of interest in redheads (not my interest, that seems to be instinctive, and before you ask, my husband is dark haired. This is good. I don’t think rationally around red-headed males) and fondness for cats in his wake, because he associated these with the same feelings they inspired in him. He ported them into other people’s brain, alone with more important concepts, such as the importance of giving one’s life to save the future (be it a nation or a child.)

I was recently talking to my older son about writing. This is normal, since he’s also a writer, and he told me that he thought for any piece of writing to be truly good, it needed to have something not quite rational in it, something not fully under the control of the creator. I think he’s right.

But I think to make it work, you need to be enough of a craftsman to bring the wild in and put a leash on it. You need to be able to tame the wild just enough it can live in other brains.

So, if you’re a beginner writer, yes, it’s likely you need more control over how these things spill into your prose.

And if you’re a more advanced writer and have filed away all the wild bits that fueled you into the beginning, let the dream time in. Let it in just enough to make your book a living dream and to impart emotions and a sense of completion to others.