Writing Wisdom

A collection of quotes, websites, thoughts, and discussions about writing.

[fozmeadows]

Bad TV Romance: Could You Not?

Despite the vast quantities of domestic!AU fanfic that exist to the contrary, there’s still a common misconception in TVlandia that romantic relationships are only really interesting when imminent or imperilled; that any sort of emotional contentment or continuity between the characters will be boring to watch. And yet platonic relationships, in which we’re also meant to invest, are just as frequently treated as rock-solid: inviolable except, potentially, at a few plot-critical junctures. And that’s a big problem for romantic pairings – or rather, for our ability to invest in them, because the plain fact is, you can’t successfully threaten to destroy a thing you’ve never committed to building. Not only will nobody care, but there’s literally nothing to tear down except your own expired eviction notices. When you make it your telegraphed aim, week in, week out, year after year, to perpetuate a will-they, won’t-they dynamic, it becomes increasingly hard to give a shit about the won’t-they episodes, because, just like a child threatening to run away to the circus, it doesn’t matter how loudly you scream And this time, I mean it! – we all know you’re bluffing.

 Having gone this route, the writers then wonder why fandom is often far more invested in seeing those platonic (predominantly male/male) relationships become romantic than in their canonical (predominantly male/female) pairings. Which: yes, we want queer representation, and yes, we enjoy our own interpretations of the characters, but at base, the problem - as far as you TV writers are concerned, anyway - is trifold. Firstly, you’re limiting your romantic male/female interactions to fit a preordained narrative, which paradoxically weakens the same relationship they’re meant to promote by shallowing its development. Secondly, because you’re worried portraying a platonic male/female relationship in addition to your romantic one might confuse viewers as to who, in fact, the girl is meant to end up with, you don’t create any extraneous narrative potential between characters of the opposite gender. Which means, third and finally, that your same sex interactions are likely biased towards male-male, as most shows tend to have fewer female characters overall – and when they do appear, as per the first point, you’re usually orienting their participation around a single particular man, instead of letting them talk to each other – which means the most naturally developed, complex relationships portrayed are, overwhelmingly, between men. 

 Thus: having firmly invested your audience in the importance of a romantic relationship, you then proceed to use all the juiciest romantic foundations – which is to say, shared interests, complex histories, mutual respect, in-jokes, magnetic antagonism, slowly kindled alliances and a dozen other things – in male/male scenes, and then affect gaping surprise when your fanbase not only notices, but expresses a preference for it. 

Keep reading

[anythingforaquietlife-blog]

I would be interested to get Foz on a panel with Javi Grill-Marxuach.

[fozmeadows]

For the record, I would be 9000% down with this.

[hawthornewhisperer]

Manpain vs. Feelings

Manpain: when a male character takes something that happened to another character (almost always female) and makes it about him, e.g. “The villain kidnapped you, tortured you, and threatened you with a horrible death; I am very upset by this and will proceed to make your trauma less important than my guilt about being tangentially related to this situation.”  Manpain is about appropriating someone else’s trauma and making the male character’s feelings about that trauma more important than the trauma itself.

Feelings:  When a male character experiences grief, guilt, or sadness about an event that directly impacted him because feelings are not inherently feminine.

[curlicuecal]

Another variety of manpain is the “I was rescued from certain death by my girlfriend–oh no I must have lots of feelings and a plot arc about how terrible it is for me to have such an awesome kickass girlfriend.”

[witwitch-deactivated20160508]

we probably lost a lot of medical knowledge during the witch hunts because of how many mid wives were persecuted, and how men took over the field of medicine. I bet a few hundred years ago a mid wife might actually have some kind of knowledge about conditions that affect women exclusively which we still haven’t bothered to research in our modern society.

[victoriassecretpolice-deactivat]

ok now I’m fucking mad

[vaervaf-deactivated20160101]

how many got killed cuz of witch hunts seems like youd have to kill a lot

[00000000000000000000000000000-d]

“It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.

    Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the Devil themselves.” (pg 129-130) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin 

“The witches used drugs like belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they could. It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than mid wives. ” The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both.” (pg 139-140) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin 

“The magic of the witches was an imposing catalogue of medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge of telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion, hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew the medicinal nature of herbs and developed formulae for using them. The women who were faithful to the pagan cults developed the science of organic medicine, using vegetation, before there was any notion of the profession of medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous physician of the Middle Ages, claimed that everything he knew he had learned from “the good women.” (pg 140)  Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin

****************get the PDF here *********************

Bolded sections are by me. Honestly I don’t think I need to explain much. We lost some of the most important women in the world, who were the pioneers of medicine for a “curse of eve”.  Basically saying if you relieve another woman’s pain we’re going to call you a witch and kill you “in the name of god” because having a child is punishment upon women and relieving their pain is illegal because this book written by men told me so.

Also check out the part where men can’t be witches because jesus and his “phallic divinity” “preserve the male sex”. 

[sparklyjacquelee]

Ever heard of the Voynich manuscript? Big, huge, herbal / medical / astronomical lexicon from the 1400s, depicting lots of naked women clearly performing rituals that serve medical functions, lots of them pretty clearly related to childbirth.

You know, this book that is written in a language that nobody has been able to read for 600 years, but nobody, and I mean NO MAN has ever even thought about the simple reality of WOMEN having written it. 

I found one blog post by a woman about how this text is very clearly written by women, and the knowledge within it has been completely annihilated or co-opted by men who now don’t even consider the possibility that a woman, or multiple women, could have written something like this.

Seriously, look it up. Naked women. Fat, short, in baths, all of it. And the entire academic world is absolutely convinced this must have been written by a man. In the wikipedia article, only male linguists and historians are mentioned, because only they matter. And every single one of their theories is laughingly phallocentric and simply wrong.  

They go so far as say that aliens wrote it before they consider that women actually had herbal and medicinal knowledge and passed that knowledge on, in secret, written in languages only they knew, so that no priest or holy man or inquisitor could read it and kill them. 

Open your eyes. This has been going on for hundreds of years. Women had to hide in the shadows, had to invent languages, just to avoid being killed by men for trying to help themselves and other women. This is reality.

[benyw]

It wouldn’t be the first time women have had to invent their own language because of the rights men withheld from us. 

[writingwisdom]

Things to look out for in research: the way histories have been erased, co-opted, or ignored.

[thefourthvine]

Hi, I was just reAding your defence against bad writing and I agree with it but I was just wondering what you meant by Mary Sue? You referred to it a few times. Thanks

The short answer: Mary Sue is the author’s idealized self-insert. (If you want to know alllll about Mary Sue, including the history and origins of the term, TV Tropes has your back. Also, if you aren’t careful, your mind and soul. Pack a lunch.) A Mary Sue story is one that primarily features a Mary Sue.

The slightly longer answer: That story you used to tell yourself, about the awesome girl who was totally pretty and everyone liked her and she maybe had magic powers and also like fifteen skills that you wished you did and also her hair never did that, you know, THAT THING your hair always does? And she was in your favorite fictional (or real person fictional) world, and all the characters or people that you loved the most loved her, and she married them or solved their problems or saved them or made them awesome food or held them when they cried? That story was a Mary Sue story, and that girl was a Mary Sue. Sometimes people write those stories down and post them. (AND THAT IS FINE.) Often the stories have limited appeal beyond the author and maybe her friends. (BUT THAT IS ALSO FINE.)

The “Sorry, you kind of touched a nerve” answer: While we can all identify our own Mary Sues, even if we’ve never written them down, people tend to spend a lot of time figuring out if other people have maybe written a Mary Sue, and checking every female character for potential Mary Sueism. In fandom times of old, the letters “OC” (original character) in a story header were a giant flag that meant Potential Bad Story Here, and the letters “OFC” (original female character) were translated as Guaranteed Bad Story Here. So people mostly stopped putting original female characters in their fan fiction.

But that couldn’t stop the inexorable progression of the Mary Sue Hunt. Canon female characters in fan fiction became the focus of intense scrutiny. Is this character being, perhaps, idealized? Is she better than she should be?

It was surprising how often she was better than she should be.

I mean, it’s one thing if we write John Sheppard being brilliant and solving a Millennium Problem while being extra super badass and a sharpshooter and extremely hot and having a troubled past and also he can play the piano and small children love him and he rides a horse. It’s one thing if we write Stiles as a badass motherfucker who can hack and do MMA and make small explosive devices and he saves everyone, and also it turns out he’s a surprisingly sexually skilled virgin, and also there’s this scene where he wears skintight leather and he has two boot knives. It is fine to write those things. (AND IT IS.) You could give Sheppard’s horse a telepathic soulbond with him and have Stiles elected president of universe (because he is awesome), and you’d still potentially have a significant and delighted readership. (WHICH IS ALSO FINE. Who doesn’t sometimes like a President Awesome with a Psychic Horse story? Give Sidney Crosby a psychic horse and you’ve got my click.) That’s just having fun and extrapolating from the canon. (Or, in the case of the telepathic soulbonding horse, it’s a crossover. From real actual published original fiction. And people call us strange.)

But if a female character does one of those things in fan fiction, she’s declared a potential Mary Sue. It’s out of character, it’s over the top, it’s wish fulfillment (as if there’s something wrong with wish fulfillment), it’s a self-insert. And that. That is less fine with me. 

And the Mary Sue Problem is not limited to fan fiction. Turns out Mary Sues are also surprisingly prevalent in the canon itself! A tiny sample of the female characters I have heard described as Mary Sues:

Hermione Granger

Nyota Uhura

Natasha Romanov

Haruno Sakura

Rose Tyler

Bella Swann

Katniss Everdeen

Buffy Summers

Basically, think of any female character who gets more than eighteen lines, from any popular canon. Someone has called her a Mary Sue. Because she’s competent, because she’s smart, because she’s talented. Because she can do stuff, or because she tries to. Because she loves someone, or because someone loves her. Because she thinks she’s interesting. Because the author thinks we should care about her.

Mary Sue, in short, has become another way of dismissing female characters. Of telling women that we can’t be awesome. Of drawing the line between people who do (dudes) and people who are done to (ladies). Yet another entry in the long list of All the Unacceptable Female Characters. Yet another way of viciously scrutinizing every woman, real or imaginary, and either finding her excessively flawed (and therefore terrible) or excessively without flaw (and therefore terrible).

And also, of course, if the author of the Mary Sue story is a fan fiction writer, we make fun of her.

Which is why my actual definition of the term Mary Sue is: it’s a phrase that is useful for describing a certain common tendency in fan fiction that, taken to an extreme, is often pretty repetitive and uninteresting (but not, let me note, actually criminal or anything). Unfortunately, it has, over time, warped into a tool for knocking down ladies who write, and also other ladies, so I’m trying to learn not to use it any more. (But that is hard. Because see above about usefulness. Almost everyone has dreamed up at least one or two of these, and it’s so nice to have a name for them!)

[seananmcguire]

This is a beautiful explanation of why I hate the term “Mary Sue” like I hate fire ant sandwiches.

[sunspotery]

So according to an interview with Neil Gaiman in the back of Good Omens, before Terry Pratchett became a full time writer he wrote at least 400 words a day.

I’ve been trying it out for a couple weeks now and let me tell you 400 words is a totally awesome goal. It is very approachable and not intimidating, often leads to more than 400 words cause well now I have to finish this scene. 

Seriously I probably would have written nothing in the last couple weeks, instead I’ve written 1000′s of words. 

10/10 would recommend.

[neil-gaiman]

Terry would be proud.

[writingwisdom]

Women Characters In Film And TV Should Do More Than Struggle | Nicola Griffith

Women are people, real human beings—with and without friends, with and without family, with and without personal problems. I want to see film and tv reflect that.

I want to see women save the world—from the asteroid, the virus, the aliens, the terrorists. I want to see women winning—the medal, the office, the job. I want to see women creating, or destroying, or being fools, but as ourselves, as people, human beings. I want to see women who are gods and superheroes, criminal geniuses or musical geniuses, mountain climbers and clowns.

I want to see women burning bright. And I want to see a lot of us: fifty-one percent. Fifty-one percent of the janitors and soldiers, dentists and bricklayers, parents and accountants. Fifty-one percent of the politicians and CEOs, teachers and pupils. Fifty-one percent of protagonists and antagonists, ensemble players and extras. Women make up more than half the population. But our stories are not being told on screen.

Read It All (It’s Well Worth It)

[writingwisdom]

#HowWeWrite

[writingwisdom]

Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

This video is a mashup and filled with quotable quotes. Like this:

“You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”

BrainPickings has a nice summary plus links to other advice from fancy writers.

[writingwisdom]

1. Get your stuff in on time. 2. Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t say out loud – don’t say “perhaps,” say “maybe.” Don’t say “yet” when you mean “but.” And so on. 3. Read read read, all you can, all the time. Don’t worry about other people influencing you, that’s a good thing. Your voice will still be your own. 4. Write write write. Writing is a craft not a gift. You have to practice. 5. Get lots of sleep. 6. Make an outline. 7. Don’t assume other people are smarter than you, or more talented than you, or more magic than you. Nobody knows anything. Everybody’s faking it.

From this Quora session (which has other great advice as well)

[ellenkushner]

I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

Anne Patchett, quoted by @terriwindling here (via ninamazing)

[writingwisdom]

This week I’m working on revising fiction with my undergraduate and grad students at Fordham. Below are some of the tips and ideas I’ve collected over the years that my students find most useful. (...

From author Christina Baker Kline:

1) First, answer these questions:

What is my story about? Another way of saying this is: What is the pattern of change? Once this pattern is clear, you can check your draft to make sure you’ve included all the crucial moments of discovery and decision. Is there a crisis action?

2) Write three new openings. 

4) The dramatic elements of a story/novel are often mirrored on a smaller scale within a scene.

Try analyzing one of your own scenes.

Read all 5 ways plus the excellent explanations at the link.

[diversehighfantasy]

Screw the “slow burn,” seriously.

It might work for white couples on US TV where everyone is rooting for them, but it’s become clear that it’s actually harmful when half of the pairing is a Black woman.

Slow burn works when the default is the fast burn, instant infatuation, of course they’ll get together. When the default is invisible, romantically irrelevant, or I just don’t see it, it doesn’t work. It looks like all it’s doing is reinforcing those defaults – and for all we know (looking at Sleepy Hollow and The Walking Dead especially) they are reinforcing them.

We don’t have precedent to assure us that it probably really is a slow burn (not on US TV). It’s important that they follow through, but it’s also important for shows to give Black women love stories that develop faster than slower (and where they’re not the dirty secret, PLEASE).

Sleepy Hollow is getting a lot of criticism (including from me) for seemingly choosing to play it safe by pairing two secondary characters (Jenny and Joe) in an interracial relationship instead of/before Abbie and Ichabod. I suspect they are using Joenny as a diversion, hoping it will placate Ichabbie shippers (it won’t), but in doing so they’ve actually highlighted all that’s wrong with their treatment of Ichabbie. Joenny, imho, wasn’t rushed or undeveloped (they have less screen time than Abbie and Ichabod, but they do have their own arc, and it did build their relationship). Them getting together within seven episodes makes sense. Drawing out Ichabbie for years and giving him all kinds of extraneous love interests is what doesn’t.

Bottom Line: The unromantic Black Best Friend is a tired and racist trope that leads directly back to Mammy, and when a Black woman is put in a “slow burn” relationship, that’s what she becomes for an extended period. US Media needs to realize that they’ve not yet progressed to the point where the Black woman as best friend instead of romantic interest is empowering, positive, or feminist. All it does is make Black women feel unworthy of love while they play games and throw romantic attention on white love interests instead.

[writingwisdom]

The 50 Most Unacceptable Sentences in City on Fire, In Order

Like many a novel before it, City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg’s overlong debut that takes place during the 1977 New York City blackout, comprises a series of sentences. Here are fifty of them. 50. “Just then, a horripilating ...

If you ever feel bad about your sentences, take these steps:

Click this link.

Read the sentences there.

Read them again.

Look at your own work.

Feel better.

Write better.

[thymoss]

i know people are constantly talking about the american/european equivalents of hogwarts but who do i have to kill to learn more about nonwestern magical schools

magical school set in the outskirts of mumbai or shanghai or even idek chiangmai have you seen their rolling hills i mean obviously singapore is way out bc i can barely breathe much less imagine space to stick a magical school in but one set in malaysia or pakistan and you can’t convince me that baghdad still doesn’t have one after the glorious golden age they enjoyed come on

[gehayi]

I am certain that there’s at least one in Tibet. India has to have more than one; it’s always been my headcanon that the Patil parents and their extended family had a long, long debate about whether to send Parvati and Padma to Hogwarts, an Indian school, or a Pakistani one.

The Pacific Islander magical schools must have the best secrecy charms in the world because they go on right under the noses of not only Muggles but tourists. And the schools by indigenous Australians—nothing like any school in the West, but powerful.  

And imagine all the different kinds of schools there could be on the continent of Africa.

This is the kind of worldbuilding that I’m almost afraid to to wish for an author to work on if he or she hasn’t thought of it already.Because it could be awesome—or it could be a collection of the worst stereotypes known to humanity.

[improbable-pirate]

My sister and I got into indigenous magic in Aotearoa New Zealand early this year, and the first problem we came across was the matter of genetics and exactly how many magical people there would be in island nations with small populations. Maybe one or two families across the country? In which case would they even know about each other and consult each other, or would they develop idiosyncratic systems fully integrated into the muggle society around them? 

Small population sizes also means colonising wizard families probably sent their children away to boarding schools in Europe until a Western-style school was created for Oceania this century when population growth supported it. And hopefully, given the school’s late founding date, indigenous magic studies would be a core component of its curriculum as a matter of course.

I’m pakeha so there’s a fine line between my speculation and cultural appropriation, but my headcanon is that pre-colonisation Maaori magic systems were needed to weave anti-nuclear charms into A/NZ  territorial waters in the late eighties.

[tariqk]

I… sigh.

I recall trying to fit in anything that wasn’t English into Harry Potter’s universe, and having a hell of a time at it, because… to Rowling, anything outside of Eng-a-lond was semi-unreal, exotic and just plain weird. It was only in the final books do we see anything of the wider world, and really, what was it? Germany?

I just couldn’t find any traction. And I couldn’t reconcile the cheerful obliviousness of wizardom with colonialism and suffering, and I don’t know if I could bear the idea of having another community, willingly severing itself from the historical suffering of its people.

I mean, if you can find the space and the traction to carve a headcanon over what happened to your culture and its magic in your mind, more power to you. I couldn’t.

[talesofthestarshipregeneration]

What tariqk says. I cannot reconcile magic schools with the reality of colonialism in my mind. 

[ktempestbradford]

Right! Because if wizarding powers are endemic across the human race, then the story of colonization would be VERY different. You wouldn’t be able to just wipe out a huge chunk of a population with smallpox blankets, for instance. And in other cultures, wizards wouldn’t necessarily be hidden away from muggles. There are so many things! Ugh, this is why we need more multicultural fantasy. Most white, western writers don’t even know to consider these questions.

[fozmeadows]

a note on worldbuilding

It occurs to me that failure to properly worldbuild an SFFnal story is - sometimes, though not always - less reflective of a writer’s creative ability than it is a consequence of their real-world privilege. The concept of culture as something with multiple facets, that can be experienced from different perspectives and which - crucially - has consequences beyond the obvious is learned rather than innate, and if, in your own life, you’ve never stopped to consider (for instance) how class differences impact access to basic necessities, or the problem of social mobility, then that’s going to influence how you craft, or fail to craft, those elements in your narratives. Because while, in stories set in the present day, you can either compensate with research or write wholly within familiar contexts, in an invented setting, it’s going to be harder to hide the gaps in your knowledge.

And so we get stories whose cultures are founded on stereotypes: Noble Elves vs the Barbarian Orcs, an endless parade of faux-medieval Europes, and dystopias built around a single, reductive premise with no effort made to explore its wider consequences. This last seems especially troublesome to me, given that dystopias are, generally speaking, meant to be the sort of stories that understand class and subversion - but when written by someone who’s never considered that their own society operates on more than one level, that nuance may well be lost. The point of worldbuilding is to create new worlds, but they’re always going to be influenced by how we view our own.

[elodieunderglass]

I also think about these fantasy and science-fiction worlds. These authors - usually American - trying to describe some ~*~exotic market~*~ or ~*~bustling spaceship port~*~ with words they’ve read in other people’s books. Think about how they falteringly describe those markets: “They had lots of spices and some colorful rugs.”

(What spices? What color were the rugs?)

“You know - spices. Foreign spices. Foreign rugs.”

(But is it bright turmeric and cumin, cut with flour, glowing yellow in glass jars to attract the tourists? Is it the cinnamon and star anise of the Christmas market, the paper cup of mulled cider? Where are we supposed to be, again?)

But these authors copy-paste the rising and falling call of the muezzin and the air heavy with foreign spices and the hungry children with flies in their eyes - maybe even take a beautiful woman with her face veiled out of the box, or some exotic songbirds - and think “Nailed it.” Check out this exotic worldbuilding - we’ve really traveled here! Look: colorful silks and barbarians. Is this a good story, or what!

And it’s splendidly, laughingly obvious that they’ve never seen a street sign in Arabic, never walked through a North African market at nightfall, couldn’t tell silk from satin if their life depended on it, and that they don’t even know their own local songbirds, let alone how to identify an exotic one. Armchair tourists, copying and pasting the TripAdvisor reviews of other tourists, coloring half the people green, and calling it worldbuilding: oh deary me.

Then there’s the realism of research. Knowing where goods and products and knowledge came from. If your elves are eating chocolate they’d better have contact with the Aztecs. Don’t put poison ivy in England. Your medieval faux-European story had better justify itself if people are wearing cotton and eating potatoes and tomatoes. 

(Pictured: someone whose civilization has apparently had contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. So THAT’s what all of that “into the west” stuff is about… elves seeking out new sources of carbohydrates!)

Don’t even get me started on science realism in science fiction; I am personally plagued by every written fictional description of viruses AND I’M JUST LIKE

So the Western SF/F canon swallows itself endlessly, a snake chasing its tail. It’s fun, but the tiresome bits get recycled, because people think that’s what forests and markets and ships are really like.

“That’s not realistic in this setting,” we scoff when someone wants a disabled princess or a lady king or - gasp! - a black woman in their literature.

But most of this shit is so unrealistic, say people like me, rolling their eyes politely: “What spices were they, precisely? They’re wearing silk, are they? Are you sure of that? Are you absolutely sure? And then the virus killed everybody, did it? In seven minutes? much wow.” 

So it sounds like I’m going “don’t write about markets unless you’ve been to a market” or “don’t write unless you have a really expensive education” or “don’t write.

But of course - this isn’t fair. Who am I to demand that people be well-traveled? Most people cannot afford to. And those who do travel rarely pay attention. They are expecting foreign spices and children with flies in their eyes, and they come back and regurgitate them.

(The spices were cardamom and cinnamon, you silly fool, and the children in your hometown are hungrier. The songbird was a woodlark, and the only exotic thing there was you.)

You don’t have to actually travel. You just have to care. As you type that someone is eating a potato you have to ask “where did they get the potato?” and as you type that someone is ugly you have to ask “why are they ugly?” and if you’re going to write about a prairie, look it up on Google Maps and sit with it for a while until you’ve got your own words for it.

People know the difference between waving your hands dismissively, using other people’s words because you don’t think it’s important, and when genuinely caring, especially when you’re touching something they love. You’ll fuck up, but people will usually forgive fuck-ups if you were being honest and wondering and respectful. 

It’s the difference between the standard Western method of travel - showing up sneeringly in someone else’s house and expecting to be hailed as a savior, to be served by the unimportant natives - and the kind of travel where OH MY GOD WAS THAT ONE OF YOUR MAGPIES? THAT’S WHAT YOUR MAGPIES LOOK LIKE? ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW? OH MY GOD THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. GUYS. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THEIR MAGPIES? 

Because wherever you go in this universe, you are going to somebody’s home. Tread lightly, because you tread as a guest. If you fail to lovingly respect your beggar woman and lowly engineer because they’re more “boring” than your hero - well, you’ve just described what kind of person you are, and it’s not the sort that comes to my dinner parties.

Whether you are learning, or traveling, or writing, you have to care and you have to care about getting it right. You can be tongue-tied and broken-hearted and fundamentally lost. My favorite people usually are. But you have to care about the magpies and the trade routes and the cardamom. You’ll have to bring me with you, or you’ll lose me. (Believe me, I have so many wonderful places to be.)

So I don’t ask that authors be perfect in their worldbuilding. I only ask that they try, and take my hand, and believe that this place they have created is important and worthy and full of the most interesting things, and worthy of thought and care, because all places are.

[fozmeadows]

“The spices were cardamom and cinnamon, you silly fool, and the children in your hometown are hungrier. The songbird was a woodlark, and the only exotic thing there was you.”

In which elodieunderglass takes one of my posts and makes it about 9000% better. Honour on your cow.

[writingwisdom]

Young writers are subject to lots of advice today, much of it contoured by movie and TV writing. Much of it is some version of “Get right to the situation. Don’t waste time on description or emotion.” But the setting tells us a lot about the situation and the possible range of emotions that might occur in it. When a TV show or a movie starts, we get much of that “description of the setting” from a glance at the screen. The reason not to “waste time on it” is only if something else or someone else—the director, the set designer, the cinematographer—is going to do it for you. A novelist or short-story writer doesn’t have that luxury.

from the Appendix of About Writing by Samuel R Delany

Consider the following text:

Our story is about the conflict between a father and his grown son, which almost leads to the son’s murdering his father. At the last moment, however, the son pulls back ...

If the conflict takes place in 1938, on a May dawn at the edge of a half-plowed field of kale on a foundering Ohio farm, on which a bank is about to foreclose for the last seed-loan, likely we have one story—one kind of story.

If the conflict takes place on the night before Thanksgiving, two hours after the office staff has gone home from the empty executive boardroom of a major law most likely it’s another story—and another kind of story, even though the conflict can be described with the same words. Start with the setting, and by the time you come to the basic situation or action you will already have implied much about it, so that it will be easier to write.

From the different locations, we can intuit a lot about probable differences in the characters, their education, their dress, speech patterns, their motivations, and a good number of other situational parameters. Set up the location before you establish the conflict situation itself, and that information is already tacitly in place so that you, as a storyteller, can make use of it and develop it.

[writingwisdom]

“I urge my students to avoid present tense narration”

From “A Para•doxa Interview - Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions” in About Writing by Samuel R Delany:

...usually I urge my students... to avoid present tense narration. Today, the present tense has become the easy sign of the literary. It functions the way “thee,” “thou,” rhyme, meter, and grammatical inversions functioned in poetry in the first half of the twentieth century. ... (The writers who write such stories well do it, of course, with a great deal of thought—as do a number of formalist poets today.) ... It’s a purely artificial tense.

The various narrative past tenses (as well as the continuous present [“George is going into the room”], in which ordinarily we narrate what’s going on around us to someone who can’t see it—a very different matter from the simple present) are associated with innumerable tones of voice and specific experiences, which enrich them as we write and which the writer must learn to work with and modulate. The simple present has only a single, distanced tone.

Because it’s an unspoken and artificial tense, the present puts things at a distance and makes them seem thin, colorless, and voiceless. That’s all. (And sometimes muting the voice is a valid effect.) These are the only effects it should be used to achieve.

Like anything else, this is not a hard-and-fast rule applicable in all situations. But if, when presented with the question “Why use the present tense?” the writer’s first impulse is to blurt, “It makes things more immediate,” then you know the writer misunderstands the present’s use and effects and is almost certainly employing it poorly.