(no subject)

[owlectomy]

Let me just say how exhausted and how energized I feel at the same time. This is a place where I feel that the things I care about are also things that other people care about. I think the sense of community that comes from that can do incredibly powerful things. There's that song,

Many drops can turn a mill, singly none, singly none
Many stones can build an arch, singly none singly none

And I think it's easy to fall in this trap of thinking, the only things that I can do are the things that I can do by myself. I'm, like, notoriously bad about being able to ask for help in the first place, and at the same time I'm notoriously bad on not following through on help I volunteered to provide. But I would like to think about what I can do, perhaps in the context of WisCon, perhaps in other contexts.

--

I want to come back to that authorial intent panel because there's this dichotomy that comes up that is so interesting to me. It's the things that slip out into your writing when you're not looking.



When I'm writing something, I am building myself a house, and I am building all these rooms for myself. And it's inevitable that eventually I'm going to build a closet, and I'm going to open the door of that closet, and a grizzly bear is going to leap out from inside. It's this scary issue that I'm writing around and trying not to talk about. And this is why I need to write a bad first draft, right? It's only once I'm finished the house that I'm able to say, Okay, there's a bear here, and I'm not going to get mauled by it and I'm not going to run screaming from it, and what am I going to do about it? And what I'm going to do about it is what gives power to my writing. This is what great books do. They find the scary thing at their center and they look it in the eye. And -- here I'm not talking about the writer but about the book, right? I don't think it's necessarily that the author consciously examines whatever scary issue they're writing about. I think that can sometimes result in books that are too obvious. Sometimes it's just a matter of the author writing in a way that's honest, and unflinching, and letting things develop as they will -- sometimes there's an honesty there that can only be seen in retrospect.

But when it's something like Jack Chalker's ungulate prostitutes (band name: Jack Chalker and the Ungulate Prostitutes!), that's not read as powerful, often. That's read as squicky, often. And what I feel sometimes when I read Chalker or John Ringo is embarrassed on behalf of the author. Like he's walking around with his underwear sticking out or toilet paper stuck to his shoe, and you just cringe.

I want the author to take me to a place that's dark and scary and deeply personal. But I don't want the author to take me to a place that's squicky and cringeworthy. So I'm still not sure where the dividing line is between one and the other.

So, I'm going to bed now. I'm going to think about that and think about my magical-realism-with-real-estate-broker story, and see if either one goes anywhere. (The magical realism story has a jaguar in it!)

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I... agree with this, sort of. But again, how do you know whether the author is scaring himself and when he's just being self-indulgent? (Male pronoun deliberate, because I feel-- rightly or wrongly-- like I can make a good guess which it is with female authors, just from the common experience.)

My instinct is to think the Chalkers and Ringos are being self-indulgent because, really, where's the threat to them in ungulate prostitutes? But it's conceivable they cringe at the thought of people knowing they fantasize about ungulate prostitutes but they're still going to reveal their shame to the world. Which I can empathize with, that being how I felt when I wrote my first porny stories.

(And now to look up 'ungulate.')

[meaghanchan.livejournal.com]

I don't want to speak for Emily, but I'm not sure that this is quite what she's talking about... If you read the transcript of the panel in question, I believe that she's more referring not to consciously dealing with certain issues, but to letting things get in your writing which your conscious mind didn't intend to be there.

It's about writing your supercool novel where all these cool creatures exist in the 'new world' because Asians had never crossed over the land bridge from Asia to the Americas... And putting it out in the real world and realizing, though reader opinion, that you'd written a novel about how cool it would have been if Native Americans had never existed (not having read the book, I hope I'm not getting things too far wrong). And of course that's not what you _meant_ to say, but... well... there it is.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the panel really addressed both. The experience of WisCon this year was a little odd because people would walk right up to the issue of MammothFail, in panels, and then say "We're not going to talk about that, this isn't the place." And they were absolutely right but this was also a bit odd. (Also, Pat Wrede was there.) So the panel ended up being as much about the personal as the political.

And I'm not even sure right now that I should make a distinction between the personal and the political. Because patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, all of it seeps into the well of our culture and that is the water that comes out of our taps, and there's no such thing as bottled water short of becoming Amish or something. But the ungulate prostitutes, and the hilarious middle-aged-woman's problems, and MammothFail, they all come from the same place.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Let me back up here to the very beginnings of MammothFail --

So, Patricia Wrede's book, The 13th Child. She wanted it to be a Little House on the Prairie kind of pioneer book, with magic and megafauna. So, by her own report, she didn't want to portray American Indians as being savages (noble or otherwise), and she didn't want to portray them as gentle ecologists in tune with nature. At the same time she believed the theory -- maybe she didn't realize how controversial this theory was -- that the extinction of megafauna in the Americas, mammoths and so on, was caused by American Indians. So if she could just make up an alternative history where prehistoric humans never inhabited the Americas, she would get rid of both these problems and she could have her pioneer story with megafauna and magic. And this was a conscious decision.

What doesn't seem to have been a conscious decision -- what seems to have slipped past her writing friends and editor and whoever else -- was that, by doing so, she was doing at least two really problematic things.

(1) She was playing in to this idea of manifest destiny: the Americas weren't "really" inhabited, we weren't "really" displacing anyone, the land was this blank canvas upon which we could impose our wishes. Native Americans didn't "really" count as people. And even though it's an alternate history, it can still play into those ideas. It can still reinforce those stereotypes. It's like, if you wrote an alternate history where a group of Jewish bankers controlled the world, that would be really icky, right? I mean, one of the things that came up during the imbroglio is that there are American History textbooks written during the 1980s that claim there was no civilization in the Americas before Western colonization.

(2) She's making the assumption that the colonization of the Americas would have proceeded in pretty much the same way without the presence of American Indians. I'm not sure to what extent this is true because I think I WOULD need to read the book to find that out. But you HAVE to consider that it was the native peoples who made food crops out of potatoes, and corn, and tomatoes. Who made a useful plant out of tobacco -- which was a driving engine of slavery before the invention of the cotton gin, which was a driving engine of commerce and one of the few real sources of riches in North America. Without tobacco, is there a reason to colonize the Americas at all? Religious freedom was a driving force in the North, but in Virginia and south it was all about the money and all about the tobacco. If you take away the American Indians, you upset EVERYTHING. And it needs to be a very different world, or you're completely discounting their contributions.

And it seems as if nobody caught this. Or they caught it and said, "Oh, nobody will care." And then it becomes -- either it is in effect a conscious decision, or it's something close to willfully closing your eyes to not see what you don't want to see. But, to bring it back to the whole idea of the author being dead -- yeah, I was making jokes about my own zombieness before the panel -- the line between a conscious decision and an unconscious one doesn't seem to matter that much.