The Club, The Wheel, The Mind

When I’m sick – yeah, let’s just say that my respiratory system is a walking liability – I can’t read fiction. This is part of the reason I’ve fallen so far behind on my fiction reading. It doesn’t seem to be a rare affliction. When you’re sick you can’t handle emotion and, of course, all good fiction is emotion.

However, I can’t stop reading. Reading is what gets me through the stupid stuff that must happen in life, like washing dishes, cooking, cleaning. I have yet to figure out how to read in the shower. Someone must make a better, water-proof ereader.

So, instead of fiction I read non-fiction. The more tired/sick I am, the dryer my reading material. Years ago, when pneumonia put me in the hospital (ICU for eleven days) I read a collection of nineteenth century biology manuals. No, you probably don’t want to ask.

And I know I’m at least becoming somewhat more human because I either start having story ideas, or I start figuring out how what I’m reading applies to some aspect of writing.

This last month and a half, as I’ve been spiraling deeper and deeper into illness (And no, I don’t even know if it’s the same illness or a succession of respiratory bugs) I’ve been reading about the pursuit of the Indo-European language and culture.

Yes, this morning I finally decided enough was enough and this afternoon I dragged self to doctor and I’m now medicated. While I’m still not substantially better – except the fever must be down because my head is clearer – in the “up” points of this er... bug sequence I’ve been able to realize what I’m reading is both a wonderful seed for stories, possibly a setting for a series of novels which has deviled me (my last run at it was ... fifteen years ago, when I was definitely not ready) and, more importantly, a world building tool.

What I’ve been reading, particularly, which attempts the reconstruction of an ancient culture that might have been homogenetic, but was almost certainly heterogenetic (same or different genetic heritage), might have been located over a region or another, and might have worked out one way or another, has made me realize how things are connected, things we don’t tend to think about.

No, I don’t know how much their guesses are true, but I do know that there are certain “rules” that tend to apply and that these archeologists use them to reconstruct a culture just like a paleontologist reconstructs a dead animal from a loose tooth. Will they sometimes be wrong? Oh, yeah, heck, yeah. Remember the dinosaurs that have changed name or shape as more has been found out about them? But still, there are certain things that apply. If you find a certain shape of tooth, you know you’re dealing with an herbivore, for instance. And if you find human craniums with largely cavity-free teeth, you know you’re dealing with a culture whose diet was low on carbohydrates. Oh, there might be some genetic freak that keeps them from getting cavities, but, more than likely, you’re dealing with a diet based on protein.

The same goes for population replacement, for instance. One population disappears, another comes in. Was it war? Maybe. Sometimes you do find a population where the graves show women of the previous population and men of the new one. You could be dealing with a Rape of The Sabines situation. Alternately, you could be dealing with some elaborate treaty and bride price, and perhaps the men of the tribe moved elsewhere to marry women from the other tribe. Yeah, that wouldn’t be total, but these graves never represent everyone, just the powerful families.

And then there’s that too – what was powerful at the time? What was “wealthy”. A man is buried in a grave that would require immense labor with only a few shards of pottery and a dagger. Was it because the culture was terribly poor, or were the gifts symbolic. You only know by comparing to smaller graves of the same culture.

I’m not going to go into details, but it is important, not just for historical fiction but for science fiction and even for fantasy to think through these details. “What does my culture use for transport?” for instance, limits how far your character can travel. That much is obvious. But it will also limit the ideas of the world; how far her parents’ married; how many languages there are in the immediate vicinity; what they eat and possibly how they pray. “What do they eat?” again limits or shapes what the culture is like. If they are mostly agriculturalists, their culture will be different from if they are pastoralists. And if they are pastoralists with frequent cattle raiding (which also correlates to weapons) the culture is yet different. (And if they eat mostly stew, you’re caught in The Tough Guide To Fantasyland.)

I confess that even with as much as I know about history and how cultures evolve, and how economics influences daily life, I’ve caught at least a couple of mistakes I’ve made in one of my cultures – where they could not possibly be settled agriculturalists with those habits.

We live in a time where the world is our backyard, where food of all seasons and all continents is available to us and transport is cheaper and easier than it’s ever been. This divorces source from event in our minds, so that we have trouble creating even complex, future cultures.

Of course, the classic work with everything integrated is Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness. I’m not saying I don’t have problems with some of her extrapolations. I do. She and I come from widely different philosophical traditions and that always shows. Also, though I liked it originally, the presentation itself now seems incredibly dated to me. BUT at least she tried to show a culture integrated in all facets of myth and daily living and its natural environment. And managed to hint at a full fledged society, which of course never fits in a book.

What is your favorite such example? Do you have one? What would you like to see? How do you think archeology can help us learn world building?

When The Music Stops

(With footnotes, which is how you know Mad Genius Club is CULTURE.)

Years ago, when – I thought – I lay dying in a hospital bed at 33, I realized I could no longer afford to play at writing. Instead I had to go into it fully, no holds barred. Because other than the obvious regrets – my younger son was only one a couple of months. My older son was five and a very little – what loomed largest in my mind was the fact that all my unpublished worlds would die with me. The feeling that I had been given something precious that I failed to pass on.

What does this mean? Don’t worry. There’s no dire announcement coming. Though we’re all mortal, and I’m starting to hit the age where I hear of friends’ deaths more often than we attend weddings. *

However, since that moment of clarity, on that hospital bed, I’ve been driven to write and submit, and try to infect others with these worlds in my head before I die. I am humbly aware that at the rate ideas rise up, I’ll probably die with three or four – or more – books unfinished. But I view it as my duty to write as many of them as possible. Or at least my need.

This week I had a minor reminder of this – very minor – as I came down with a serious case of stomach flu. Possibly the most severe I’ve ever had. Now some of you know it takes a lot to bring me to a complete stand still, but this did it. All of yesterday, I slept and woke and slept again, until... the evening. Then the evening and today, I was in true torment – I was well enough to want to write, but not well enough to write.

I know they say that when time comes to die no one regrets spending too little time at the office. This might be true for most people. It’s not for me. Yes, I love and enjoy the time with my family, but I feel the same need towards my writing. Balancing the two is a never ending act.

What do you feel compelled to write? If you faced the end, with no buffer, what do you think you’d regret? Is there a story you’d particularly regret leaving unpublished? A world that calls out for other minds to make it live? A character you’d mourn no one else having known?

Carpe Diem*1and tempus fugit *2 Oh, yeah, and Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.

* This is because few people have the foresight of the Portuguese king Pedro (O Cru -- i.e. the Raw) who is said to have married his five year dead mistress Ines de Castro, in a high ceremony the whole court was required to attend. Oh, yeah, and kiss the queen's hand. This is denied by a lot of Portuguese historians but embraced by others. No reports on whether the wedding breakfast included brains.
*1-The monkey is wrong – this means “the days are crxp”)
*2 (which means “if I put you in a temporary fugue state, can I write a novel before you realize it?” Trust me. Very compact language, Latin. Admirable, really.)
*3 (which means “my xrse is getting large, but I’ll write a brief biographical novel.”)

Utopia-Dystopia: One man's Utopia is another's Hell

Thomas More's Utopia is arguably the first science fiction ever written, because the piece is effectively people living in a perfect world. Plato's Republic doesn't count because it's a treatise on how to create Plato's vision of a perfect world.

The fact that I find both these perfect worlds horrifying is actually not that uncommon: no matter who builds a perfect world, we imperfect humans will always go and mess it up. On top of that, my idea of perfection is not going to be someone else's - quite possibly anyone else's.

So naturally, any kind of utopia is actually going to read as a dystopia to most people.

On the flip side, dystopias have a long history in literary, sometimes as moral lessons of the 'if this continues' type, satires, and of course the mess the heroes have to try to fix.

Okay, this ramble does actually have a point. Just let me find it again. Oh. Yes. Literary utopias are usually a resounding failure because either they're assuming humans... aren't, or because they just can't work with human nature. Or - more usually - both. (Funnily enough this applies to political utopias too. Whodathunkit?)

How often have you read about the idyllic lifestyle of this or that people and thought there was no way that kind of society could work because people just aren't like that? If you're anything like me, it's more than a few - but if we sat down and compared notes, there's a good chance that you'd like some of the ones I hate, and vice versa.

So, let's take a look at what makes a Utopia/Dystopia.

Start with the theoretical one size fits all, which in practice quickly turns into one size doesn't fit anyone very well and doesn't fit some people at all. If you're one of the ones that it more or less fits all right, you can probably live with the place, but if it fits too badly or doesn't fit at all the place quickly becomes sheer hell (this, incidentally, is one of the reasons I loathe pantyhose. I'm in the 'sheer hell' group). Not even clones will flourish in a monoculture - there will be enough experiential difference to ensure that some are misfits.

Now add human nature, which isn't changing any time soon. We're social critters, with all that implies: namely hierarchical and with deeply ingrained enforcement behaviors. Whether they're instinctive or not isn't relevant, because they're so strongly wired that they might as well be instinctive. No matter how you raise your kids, how carefully you keep them from the whole notion of competition and leaders and such, within seconds of meeting a new person they're sizing that person up and figuring out where they 'fit'.

When you watch someone - anyone - meeting a new person, a lot of what goes on in the first few seconds is working out whether that person is above, equal, or below in the social hierarchy. If the two have different ideas of who belongs where, there'll be quite a bit of work on the part of whoever thinks they should be superior (i.e. both of them) to establish superiority in a way the other recognizes. The winner will stand a little taller, the loser slump a bit - and as often as not neither one is consciously aware of what just happened.

That covers the leaders and followers (shepherds and sheep). There's two other very general 'types' you'll find in any large enough group. They're rarer than shepherds and sheep (this is why you need a larger group), and both of them will get attacked by shepherds and sheep if they reveal themselves. Predators (wolves) are kind of obvious. They pretend to be sheep so they can profit from other people. And no, this does not mean profit per se is evil. Using other people is - if you get all the benefit and don't pay any of the costs, you're a predator. If it's a crime with a victim (and yes, this includes running a company into the ground to get everything you can from it then walking away and leaving a bankrupt company and thousands of ruined lives), it's a predator thing. So is mooching off someone all your life - although that could be argued as a more parasitic behavior.

Then there are the goats - the independent-minded explorers and questioners who won't go with the herd unless they've decided independently the herd is the right place for them. No-one likes them: they often identify predators first, they make the sheep uncomfortable, and they question the shepherds. This is why you get a lot of misfits in certain areas - they identify each other and band together for their own protection. (As a side note: the USA is a nation settled and founded by goats. Over 200 years after the war of independence, that still shows - and is why the other 'colony' nations have the most in common with the USA. It's also why a heck of a lot of the inventions that materially changed people's lives originate in the former colonies. Penicillin: USA and Australia, cars: USA, planes: USA, drought-resistant damn near anything, Australia (Yes, I've left a lot off. It's not meant to be exhaustive)).

There is no such thing as a society where even all the sheep are happy. The best thing you as an author can do is build something that mostly takes into account human nature and has a whole bunch of incentives that tend to guide human nature towards improving things for their fellow-humans rather than destruction or power games (trying this in real life tends to end badly. We're perverse critters).

Some of the best fictional societies are - of course - Pratchett's, which take all of the variety and perversity of human nature into account. Sarah covers some interesting ground with Eden and Earth in DarkShip Thieves, and what Dave does to all the cultural myths about who is superior, the noble/innocent savage, the simple religious folk, the - oh, the heck with it, what Dave does to practically every cultural myth ever in Slow Train to Arcturus has to be read to be believed (if you haven't already read it, go and buy it. It's worth it.)

Who else has good fictional societies? Conversely, whose alleged utopias horrify you?

Getting Under the Skin

For once, the Kate feeelthy mind (tm) isn't involved in this topic... Well, mostly. I can't make guarantees.

Sarah talked yesterday about character and plotting that fails to deliver what it promises. In my not at all humble opinion, part of that failure is the inability of the author to get inside the head of the character. If you don't understand this person, sooner or later you'll write them doing something that's completely wrong for them because it makes perfect sense to you. This is why the best authors have a kind of self-induced multiple personality order (it can't be a disorder, it's more or less under control).

Sure, there are times and and places where it isn't necessary to be that close to your characters. I've yet to encounter one where your fiction isn't improved by that level of understanding. Even extremely formulaic fiction comes alive when the author knows and lives the characters.

Yes, lives. It's a weird state for me, where I'm aware of the real-world considerations around me, but my mind is in a different universe. Oh. Right. That's normal for me. It's when my mind is being a different person in a different universe that gets weirder than Kate-normal. I describe it as channeling that character, because the effect is precisely that. When it's working well, I'm simply the medium by which the character's actions, thoughts and feelings find their way onto the screen.

I know, intellectually, that it's a kind of self-hypnosis where I get myself into the right state and let my subconscious do the heavy lifting. It knows more than I do. My descriptions reflect the way I perceive what's happening.

So, after that lengthy introduction, how does one actually channel a character?

We all have tricks we use to get in the zone. 'Soundtracks' for a book, images that work for us, routines we use to settle our minds so we can focus. Getting inside a character's mind is, for me, a step or two deeper. If I'm working with a historical era - or a setting that closely parallels one - I read as much as I can about it, particularly things like the lives of people in the area and social class I'm looking at, the importance of religion, typical upbringing, and so forth. What I'm looking for here is the environment my character was raised in, because that shapes innate tendencies and governs acceptable actions. Quite simply, no matter who you are or how you were raised, some thoughts are literally unthinkable because the mental scaffolding they need simply doesn't exist. What those thoughts are depends entirely on the culture and language: culture by shaping what is considered 'good' and 'bad' (there are some human universals. There's also a lot of wiggle room), and language by building the scaffolding to frame thought. To take a really simplistic example, a couple of hundred years back, the Inuit probably had no way to think of a hot, arid environment. Neither their cultural experience nor their environment provided any kind of framework. On the other hand, they had any number of ways to think about cold and snow - leading to the old "twenty words for snow" meme. I'd be surprised if they had any cultural reference point for 'introvert' or 'loner', simply because an environment that harsh isn't survivable solo.

So... in a hypothetical historical, even an introverted loner Inuit character is going to be much more people-oriented than a modern introverted loner. He/she will also live within his/her tribe's views of the roles of men and women because moving outside that framework is literally unthinkable. As you learn more about the culture, you'll learn more about the beliefs that affect how your character views the world - how the arrival of a particular kind of wind signals that it's time to move south, the many layers of meaning surrounding every aspect of the tribe's world, the skills that are valued and those that aren't (it doesn't matter if you're the world's greatest mathematical genius when your people don't need to count past 'many' and you've got no access to anything else). Ultimately, the more you know about the world your character lives in, the more you know about how your character has been conditioned to respond to life.

That's when you, as the kind and caring author you are, turn your character's life inside out and upside down to start the story (okay, usually there'll be some kind of introductory stuff first, where your character is living his, her, or in some cases its normal life). At first, your character's going to respond to the new stuff by working with the closest match to 'normal', then there'll be a gradual change and growth. This is the easy part.

The difficult part is doing the same process when you're dealing with the villain. You can always tell someone who can't manage this - their villains are shadowy, offstage menaces that fall flat the instant you see them clearly. It's something of a given that it's a whole lot harder to write convincing evil as opposed to 'decent person who happens to be on the opposite side' or even 'misguided but well-intentioned' - the reason is pretty simple. Most of us can't imagine someone with absolutely no redeeming features at all. If you can't imagine it, you can't get inside and look through its eyes, and you sure as heck can't write it convincingly.

The same process applies, but if you can get inside an evil person's mind, it's... disturbing. One character I've written, after spending time in his point of view I wanted to scrub inside and out. Fortunately I haven't needed to write anyone like that in a while - but I can pretty much guarantee I will have to write evil again. The places my stories go pretty much guarantees it. I'm still not sure whether I was more disturbed because I could write him, or because he was one of the very few who actually is evil, knows it, and chooses to be that way.

More on that topic next week, unless I get derailed (this is quite likely). For this week, lets have some examples of books where the plot can't be separated from the characters and their environment. My pick (yes, I'm cheating and going for several in one) is the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch books by PTerry. It's impossible to separate what happens from Vimes and Carrot, and it's impossible to separate Vimes from Ankh-Morpork. He even manages to take the city with him (in a metaphorical sense) in The Fifth Elephant.

Who and what are your choices?

BEING Alien

When I first started writing, I KNEW that all the editors at every house were laughing at my submissions. Perhaps this is normal. Or perhaps it has to do with my being foreign-raised, knowing I was foreign-raised. No, not in the normal way. I wasn’t raised with English speaking parents, or even one of them.

I first learned English in the classroom at the age of fourteen. It wasn’t even my second language, which was French, but my third. And if I hadn’t fallen in love with it within six months – due in part to an excellent teacher – and started reading in English in my spare time, with a dictionary by my side, when I first came to the states, as an exchange student, I’d have spoken at best broken English, like my colleagues did. And four years later, I’d still have been fairly lost. Not only was my English skewed – I knew how to say "ontological doubt" but had no idea how to say "faucet" for instance – from being learned exclusively in the classroom, but my mental picture was skewed too.

Mostly you make up an image of your homeland by growing up in it. Oh, yes, into the pot DO go the books you read, but also a million other things that mark you as a native of your generation. Things you’re not even aware of. Things of which I’m only marginally aware, because at some time they felt odd – though not anymore

When you come in mid-movie, as it were, you have to make up what went before. Years ago, in a writers newsgroup I belong to, half a dozen of us who were born scattered throughout the world, talked about this. It took me YEARS not to feel like at any moment, someone would tap my shoulder in the grocery store; while out driving; in the park and say "You don’t belong here, get out." No, this wasn’t a fear of a police state. It was just a sense that I "didn’t belong", that I stuck out, that in the "normal narrative" of history, I had no right being here. That I was, in fact, the character who rebelled and refused to follow the plot outline. Most of these women still felt that way. Most of them, too, like I did at one time, shuddered at the thought of writing an American childhood. What if you got it wrong? The majority of your readers would KNOW.

Do I still feel that way? No. I’ve watched the kids go through school here. I’ve read a ton of biographies. In the beginning (I’m not a visual person, so this was odd) I watched A LOT of TV. Not soaps because I have my limits, just... news and sitcoms, and documentaries. I heard people make references to their growing up. People about my age. And the substratum of knowledge accumulated.

I’ve learned to swim in it. And I’ve lived in the US longer than I lived in Portugal (by about two years.) I haven’t memorized the music, but I can sight-read, and hum the difficult parts.
The tell though is that I can write a childhood in the twenties almost or as convincingly as a childhood now.

Other than that, except for the dastardly accent, I can pass. You could talk to me for hours and not know. And if you know I’m hearing impaired even the accent won’t tip you off. And a lot of my readers are shocked to find I have an accent.

So what am I saying here? I’m saying that wherever you come from, if you work at it, you can do it. I’m also saying that – remember I’m the woman trying to improve on your fears – that no matter how silly this idea of being a writer sounds, you can do it.

Of course, the industry seems to be crumbling – It’s a gift. If I’d stuck to teaching, my original profession, kids would probably be learning via implant. If I’d taken that scholarhsip in computer science, we’d be using slide rules, like in Heinlein novels (and then too, every profession seems to be crumbling as it is hit by the blunt edge of fast change. I found this out talking to my dentist.) But that doesn’t matter. If editors truly don’t gather around my manuscripts to laugh at them, it should be much easier for any of you. If I can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

So, lay down on that comfy couch. Speak up. Your mother already told me everything... No, seriously. Tell me your fears. What do you think happens when your article/story/novel hits the editors’ offices? What paralyzes you? – for years I dreaded cons for fear of offending anyone. I’m sort of over that now, but do you fear it? What about this process do you dread? I tell you right now, it’s probably unfounded. Let’s talk about it.