On Showing You All

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Once at the writers’ group we all sat down and had a serious discussion on how to motivate ourselves to write.  Around the table came various suggestions: stay off the damn internets, try Pavlovian conditioning (playlist you only listen to when writing if you’re a music type, a certain space in your house where you only do writing, etc.), have a deadline.  Pretty good ideas all around—then it was my turn.

 

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” I said, “but I am motivated largely by reactionism and spite.  If I’m stuck, I just go read something that pisses me off, and I’m good to go.”

 

Everyone cracked up.

 

Probably because they know exactly what I’m talking about.

 

I am not ashamed to admit it: my creativity often gets sparked to life by an urge to Show Them All.  My final push into conlanging didn’t come when I read of John Ronald’s exploits, but rather a random encounter wherein a grammar nazi nailed his point home with the bizarre comment, “You will never be able to make up your own language with a working grammar, so just abide by the rules of English.”  My response to this bit of pithy weirdness was, “Oh yeah?”

 

I write strong female characters because they’re cool, but also in some part just to show that it can be done.

 

My Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic contains many bits that are there just to flip off writers whose epics had something in them I didn’t like, or were cliché.

 

And, of course, there’s all my stuff on worldbuilding and created cultures, which are fun and interesting and diverse—and are also often worked on after I’ve read some crazed conservative’s assumptions that his cultural values are absolutes for The Way Things Are and The Way Things Should Be.  An article on how heterosexual monogamy is and has always been the default for all humans will get me writing humans in a polyamorous open relationship, or in a marriage that both parties completely ignore.  Or I’ll write about a culture—human or otherwise—that uses a different system and does just fine with it.  A crazed assertion that Everyone Else’s Religion Is Silly But Mine Makes So Much Sense will get your ass parodied with a religion based on One-Up Mushrooms, or will spark a conversation with a very confused outsider to your religion. I will build aliens simply to mess with your ideas of what’s objectionable!*

I know it’s not just me. All you gotta do is read something by Philip Pullman, or Tamora Pierce, to see that it's tradition to turn spite into a really awesome story. And art is the same way—hence ursulav’s latest piece (probably NSFW—you’ll have some explaining to do, anyway), which is a reaction to having this one (definitely NSFW) pulled from DeviantART.**

And I love it. I love that such a petty, human emotion as “screw you all” gets itself turned into art—and sometimes good art, at that. They say art is a reflection of humanity. I don’t know about you, but I think spite is as human as you can get.


*These guys, for example, were actually based on that idea.

**Yes, that’s what inspired this entry. 

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Another big damn motivator for me. "Why does no one ever put PoC in their sci-fi? ... Anyone? FINE, I'LL DO IT MYSELF."

In a related note, I always wondered why places that are very clearly not Earth always seem to be populated by people who look like Caucasians. After all, you've got a fucking world with three moons and unicorns and dragons and shit, but you don't think maybe the people might have a slightly different phenotype? Genetic drift, people! That annoyed me enough that I paid special attention to it, so that if the humans from the world my Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic showed up in our world, they'd be hard to place in any of our ethnic categories, because they've got their own distinct genetic populations.

Did I ever tell you about the critiquer who took issue with the name of the only human character in one of my stories? Apparently, "Faruq" is not a human name. I will notify the Arabic peoples of the world forthwith.

[10cents.livejournal.com]

I worry about how to handle this a lot... in my head, my books have a lot of genetic and racial diversity, but I don't really picture any PARTICULAR character as having ANY particular skin tone, light OR dark OR a unique variation (I really just don't have very clear pictures of anyone). So my general policy is that if I mention ANYONE'S skin tone, I have to try to find a way to mention EVERYONE'S, so that if I do mention that someone has a darker shade of skin, the readers won't go around assuming that that character is the ONLY darker-toned person in the book. On the other hand, more often than not I really don't CARE what skin tone any of the characters are, so I don't feel a compelling need to address the issue AT ALL--but if I mention no one's, I worry that people will assume that everyone is white, when really, you're welcome to picture them as whatever you want, because they just as easily CAN be whatever you want, and there is no "canon" about the issue at all. Finding a way to mention EVERYONE'S is tedious, but I don't want it to be seen as White As Default, and ergo they're white unless otherwise specified. On the OTHER hand, I don't REALLY want to lock all of my characters to ANY shade, because that comes with a whole other set of potential tricky points (e.g. I don't want people to think I'm just tossing in Token PoC, even if I make the ratio balanced and non-biased amoung the range and roles of characters; and also, if a person WANTS to picture everyone as black, for instance, then who am I to tell them that they're NOT?). This issue drives me crazy, because I really don't know what the best approach is.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Really? I see most of my characters in rather shocking detail. I'm very visual, so I have to describe people at least a little bit.

In other people's books, what I picture often depends on how much diversity I can expect--in a Star Wars book, I'm pretty much free to diversify the humans at will, but in a book like the Prydain Chronicles, where you're in a smaller area with limited travel abilities, I'm going to assume everyone looks much more similar.

I rather liked Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series, where people's race actually had something to do with their identities. Of course, in the world she built it wasn't always a neutral thing, but that did add to a well-built world.

The story I'm writing is set in a country that's mostly homogeneous within itself, although there are enough immigrants that they're not very unusual. But I start by setting a "default" sort of look (reddish-brown, in this case) and then mentioning the people who differ from it.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*nods* I feel exactly the same. And then there's also my concern of having characters who look to be PoC, but don't come across that way (Anita Blake, for example, has never struck me as remotely Hispanic, despite being described as such). Because, let's face it, I write people like me, more or less, minus actual autobiographical details. I don't write British characters, or German characters, or Hispanic characters, or anything like that, unless I make a conscious effort at it, and I'm usually afraid that I'm getting it wrong. Heck, I rarely even write men as main characters. And if you're writing sci-fi you get the sticky questions like what "culturally Black" is going to be like in 300+ years...

But I'm working on it. Botheration, now I actually kinda want to get back to that story...