Assuming the Worldview

We've had some interesting posts this week about assumptions and world views and how we can absorb aspects of someone else's writing - which in a lot of ways encapsulates their assumptions and world views (usually not in the overtly lecturing sense, thank goodness, but in the sense that things strongly believed or part of the unquestioned assumptions that grow up with you from childhood have a tendency to 'leak' into your writing).

Of course, this meant that I, in my usual sideways fashion, ended up following the thread to somewhere completely different: how do you convincingly write a world view that is different, even alien to yours? When the base assumptions are totally different, how do you present it? And if the assumptions and world view are something that is repellent now, how do you present it in a way that is understandable and allows the character to be sympathetic?

That is, after all, what science fiction and fantasy is about. Well, kinda-sorta-maybe. Take some fundamental of our life, twist here, break there, and see what emerges.

Usually I go about it bass-ackwards because I almost always start with a story just sitting there insisting I write it. So I have to figure out what's driving the story. Okay, vampire king is killed, usurper is going to want king's heirs dead or firmly within his control. That's a pretty basic start. At this point the usurper's motives don't matter, since my characters are the king's son and his niece. So I ask myself what they're going to do. Then I ask myself why they'd do that, particularly. Bit by bit the world view and religous beliefs emerge, until I eventually know how their culture works - and that their base assumptions are very different from mine.

A quick check-point: all people are intrinsically equally valuable (Yes, it's a paraphrasing of the famous 'all men are created equal') - every person, adult, child, male, female is valuable for nothing more than the fact that they exist. I don't think too many readers here would disagree with me there. I'm not going into political arguments about anything beyond that: that's not where I'm going at the moment.

How universal is that belief?

You don't have to look far to realize that the answer is "not bloody much". The majority of humans today don't subscribe to it, and it's only very recent, historically speaking. At the time "We hold these truths to be self-evident" was written, some of the most civilized parts of the world included subscriptions to the divine right of kings (which itself started as a notion of responsibility towards those under one's protection, rather than 'oh good, let's oppress some peasants'). The idea that just by being born you had value was quite literally revolutionary.

Even now, in places where this notion has been around for generations, the tendency to slip into the more tribal view of "my kind is better than everyone else" is quite noticeable - although I'd hazard a guess that most of the readers here would still have far more respect for human life than... oh, pretty much anyone alive three hundred years ago - which of course makes their world-view and their basic assumptions pretty alien.

As for actual aliens... Well. Welcome to the House of Fun, my dear. Step inside, carefully now, and don't take anything for granted. You never know what you'll find...

Species with no concept of the individual, only the role one plays within the clan, species that make the individual-less society look comfortable and homey, spore-minds that regard all animal life as mobile incubators, cats...

How do you portray the other in an understandable way?

When Good Shortcuts Go Bad

Hands up everyone who knows what a redneck is. Rather a lot of hands there, I see. Hooray for cultural imperialism (for those who are wondering, yes, that is sarcasm). How about an ocker? Yeah, that's what I thought, thanks Rowena and Chris. A bushie? Same two hands. Hmm... I think I see a little problem here.

I've got an interesting view from where I sit, because I'm not 'Merkin, but I live in the USA. It's very easy for 'Merkins to forget that not everyone has the same cultural references as 'Merkins. Yes, a lot of USian stuff gets exported, enough that most of the rest of the English speaking world has a fair idea of what the main US idioms actually mean.

It's not that the USA is necessarily more insular than anywhere else, either. It's just so flipping big that by the time you get through the USA stuff there's no room for the rest, kind of like the way it gets inside a large university.

Add to that the human norm is to assume you are normal and anything that isn't like you is not, and you've got a recipe for some serious confusion.

Say you want to write about the Australian equivalent of rednecks. No, I'm not asking why. I don't want to know. I'm just assuming it's something some crazy person might want to do at some point. You go do some research, and you find that lo! 'bushie' seems to fit the bill.

Only you're going to have the Aussies pissing themselves laughing at your masterwork, because you won't find a bushie with a truck up on blocks living in a trailer. He's in a tent, or a tin shed, or camping in the back of his ute, and he knows how to live off the bush. He likes beer, but that's normal.

Maybe ocker, then? They are kind of working class-ish, and tend to have that sort of feel... Except you get them everywhere. And there are some very wealthy ockers out there (Paul Hogan comes to mind. He made millions out of Crocodile Dundee by being himself. Hell he made himself plenty by being himself on the Naked Vicar Show (Yes, that was a real TV show, and yes, it was shown in Australia in prime time), himself being a smart-arse painter on the Sydney Harbour Bridge crew. The old footage if you ever find it, he's in grotty old shorts and a flannie shirt with the sleeves pulled out.). But wait! There's a catch. There's a bit of ocker in most Aussies, because ockers are usually also battlers. Oh, and ockers aren't inbred. Or dumb.

You go looking further, and come across the yobbo. This is a peculiar subspecies of ocker found mostly at sporting events, usually with six-pack (beer, not abs) and thongs (footwear, absolutely NOT underwear. If these guys wear undies - and quite a few don't, which leads to the unfortunates who get an eyeful of what's under the shorts developing a phobia of guys with beer guts and short short shorts - it's usually the jockstrap or Y front variety). Not right at all...

Which is the thing. The redneck is very much a USian phenomenon. Now the redback... Oh, never mind. You'll find out about that on your first visit to an old-style Oz dunny (outhouse, and yes, they're still around). Redbacks are spiders. They like nice dark, moist places and have no sense of smell. I think you get the idea. But I digress.

The point of this ramble is that every culture has its unique subgroups and stereotypes. You can write a redneck in anything US-based, and be fairly sure most of your readers will be know what you mean. There are others where that's not the case. Calling someone a liberal as an insult in the US has damn near the opposite meaning in Australia, where the Liberals are the conservative side of government.

So what are some of the groups you've seen dropped into books with the assumption that you'll know exactly what sort of person this is because he, she, or it is a 'redneck'? Or a 'yobbo'. Or a 'Tory'. Or... whatever.

p.s. For those who are wondering, you can get a start on some of the unexplained Aussieisms here.

What's the Best Balance in Conveying a Foreign Setting?

With Sarah still traipsing around Portugal, we've got another guest blogger today. Sean Kinsell thinks of himself as a newbie in fiction writing, not realizing just how good he really is. Sarah, Kate and I are currently aiming our steel-toed boots at him as a means of encouragement for him to finish his first novel. This blog stems, I think, from one of the questions he's asking himself right now as he writes. -- Amanda

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One of the first things you're hit over the head with when you study Japanese literature is how hard it is to translate. That's partially for easily explicable reasons: Japanese and English are structured very differently, and ambiguities and associations are possible in each that are not possible in the other.

But of course with Japanese it goes much further than that. Even more than the rest of East Asia, Japan has a reputation for mystery and paradox that, one is frequently given to understand, the Western mind doesn't have the tools to grasp. That the Japanese have equal difficulty understanding us, despite our reputed forthrightness and literal-mindedness, somehow gets less play. Users of any language (such as writers) rely on shared cultural assumptions that may not obtain for the audience of a translation, and there are times when that barrier is impossible to get around. The problem with a lot of authors who deal with Japanese is that they tend to assume that that barrier is a feature, not a bug. Lots of translations of Japanese literature have a resolutely flat quality; it's supposed, I think, to suggest a placid surface with a lot actually stirring underneath, but it often just comes off affectless.

And the problem doesn't just come up with translations; literature written in English about Japan often has the same kind of flaws--sing-song prose and would-be profound paradoxes on every page. An example that really stuck in my craw was Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, which opened like this:

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, “That afternoon when I met so-and-so…was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.” I expect you might put down your teacup and say, “Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can’t possibly have been both!”

Well, of course it can have been both, dear lady. What are you going on about? The conflict between opposing but equally strong forces--moral duties, affections, predilections, desires--animates much of the world's greatest literature. For a novelist to put into the mouth of a narrator the idea that it's only natural not to believe one could hold two opposite feelings simultaneously is a shocking display of bad faith. (And Golden's novel gets far, far worse from there.) But he was writing about Japan, don't you know, so Sayuri's patronizingly patient explanation of why such a thing is possible was considered charming, if not profound. Objecting would be spoiling the Zen.

So my question is…what's the best balance when trying to convey a foreign setting? What authors are good at realizing an exotic setting without being smug about how esoteric it all is? When is it good to sprinkle in foreign words, and when does it become show-offy and jar the reader out of the world of the story?