Month: July 2020

Uncategorized

Take the Work Seriously, Never You

Bruce Byfield

A decade as a technical writer has left its mark on me. Mostly, technical writers work anonymously. No one cared who I was — they wanted completeness, clarity, and structure. As a result, those were the things I concentrated on. I haven’t written a manual or a company blog for fifteen years — and am unlikely to in the future — but that emphasis has lingered with me as I moved into fiction. For that reason, I am always gobsmacked when I come across someone who thinks that wanting to write makes them special. It seems clear to me that such people have misplaced priorities.

You can hear this declaration of importance when the role of the writer is discussed. It crops up frequently when subjects like sensitivity reading comes up. “Never sell out your talent in order to prevent hurting people’s feelings,” one poster declared recently. “Writers are the epitome of free thinkers,” another declared, and still another, “If you’re not offending someone you’re not doing it right.” But my favorite was “It’s the responsibility of an artist to express what is within” — to which I replied, “Responsibility? Are you sure you don’t mean self-indulgence?” Such remarks rival Shelley’s declaration that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” — and at least he had a proven talent that demonstrably inspired people. But who are the unknowns make these grandiose claims?

Most writers, I suspect, fantasize about being published and remembered. But if you are a would-be writer, stop for a reality check. A single group on Facebook has over one hundred thousand members, and I’m confident that all the writing-related groups put together would make a minimum of half a million — perhaps even ten times that. So what makes me, or anyone else special in our aspirations? Even those who have actually published, traditionally or by themselves must be in the tens of thousands, and most of those have enjoyed a brief shining moment of publicity before disappearing into the mid-list.

As for being a free-thinker, all I can reply is, “Really?” Books don’t fit into a genre by accident. If you’re writing an imaginary world of long-eared, or a Regency romance or a cozy mystery, you make a damned unconvincing rebel. Far from being a free-thinker, you could hardly be more conventional. Thinking of yourself as an entertainer would be more accurate — nor is there a single thing wrong with that. Just don’t claim that your imagination is something precious that should be nurtured and cherished.

I mean, who gave you the responsibility to explore within? No one, unless it was yourself so that you could feel important. Being a writer does not make you exempt from common decency, let alone immune from criticism.

If you want to explore anything, explore the craft of writing. Learn how to tell a story, how to construct a plot, select a metaphor, and create a character arc. Instead of mentally replaying Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead with yourself as the misunderstood and under-appreciated main character, learn the craft that you claim to follow. That’s a lifelong study, and one that may actually gain you the respect you crave.

Or, as I like to put it: Take the work seriously, and never yourself. Otherwise, you’re not a writer; you’re just a daydreamer who has confused your dreams for reality.

General Writing

9 Signs A Fantasy Is Not Worth Reading

Bruce Byfield

In Facebook groups, dozens of people post pieces of their fantasy works every day. Often, they ask for readers of their entire manuscripts. However, I, couldn’t possibly read all of them, even if I cared to. As a result, I’m become skilled at predicting the quality of the whole work. These are some of the warnings that the work is likely to have problems:

  • Maps without any sense of geography: If continents are shown, do they look like continental drift occurs? Do cities occur at crossroads, or key points where a city would spring up? Is there a gradual transition from desert to forest?
  • Dull or awkward names: Names should create a sense that the people or places that carry them might actually exist. On the map, the names should create a sense that people with different languages have crossed the map. They should not be full of apostrophes – those are for contractions, not just cheap atmosphere, or, in some cases, meant to indicate a particular sound. In addditon, they should be believable. Nobody is going to name an ocean The Silvery Depths or a wooded area the Forest of Fear. They’re just not.
  • Use of anachronistic language like “Okay:” Unless the story takes place after about 1820 in our world, seeing “Okay”on the page is like grindng your teeth over tin-foil. It destroys the mood. In the same way, a character in medieval fantasy is not going to “change gears” – cars haven’t been invented yet. Nor are they likely to go for a workout or a date.
  • Tolkien races: Like many would-be writers, I grew up on Tolkien. But unless I’m reading fanfic, where the rules are different, any variation of dwarfs, elves, or orcs is just plain lazy. More important, races defined by morality are so out of keeping with modern sensibilties that even Dungeons and Dragons is finally dropping the concept.
  • Anime and Blockbuster Movies as Influences: I like animation and film as much as anybody. However, they are different media to the written word, with both advantages and limitations to it. You are unlikely to learn to write from anything except books. If you are more drawn to film than books, you really should consider writing screenplays.
  • Making Social Awareness the Only Priority: Diversity and racial issues are a social priority, and the publishing world specifically needs change. However, while representation and writing the Other are skills that every writer should learn, they need to be developed hand in hand with learning writing skills. You can learn to balance them from dozens of books, like Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Dispossessed. And if you’re not equally interested, perhaps you should consider non-fiction?
  • Commodified or Pseudo-Cultures: Is your China a place of tea-houses amid the rocks and the mist, with every second person a martial artist? Do your First Nations have a single culture across North America, with Sasquatches and dream-catchers? If so, then you haven’t done your research, and you need to live with the actual cultures.
  • Self-Published Works Full of Typos: Nothing is wrong with self-publishing. It’s a legitimate way to present your work. However, if you’re going to self-published, take the time to do it right. Hold yourself to the same standards as traditional publishers – or even higher.
  • The Writer Is Looking for Rules: Beware of writers who ask things like: how long should my chapters be? Am I allowed to delay the inciting incident to the fifth chapter? Such questions reveal a crippling inexperience. Worse, they show a desire for rigid rules that simply don’t exist. A writer who wants rules may outgrow their desire, but it’s not a promising start.

What these practices have in common is a lack of effort – a decision not to put in the research and practice that is needed for an original work of fiction. They steer me away from reading because they suggest that the writer is looking for shortcuts, a way to make writing easy. A writer may outgrow one of these warning signs, but the more they display, the less likely they are to produce anything worth reading.

Unfortunately, what I am discovering in my own efforts is that there are no shortcuts. And maybe that’s the way it should be. If writing wasn’t hard, then anybody could do it.

Uncategorized

Writing and the Search for Authenticity

thelocaldialect

 

I often witnessed a phenomenon among travelers who would visit the city in China where I lived for fifteen years. Encounters which would inevitably result in some wide eyed visitor complaining to me about how they had not expected China to have Wal Marts or Starbucks, and then asking me where they could go to see the “real China.”

For those of us who lived in China, the idea that the China we called home might somehow be less authentic than say, a village in a mist shrouded mountain, was somewhat laughable. If that was the real China, then was the China where I made my home somehow a “fake” China?

Of course what these travelers meant was that they expected China to meet their own expectations, often steeped in Orientalism, for a more “exotic” China. They wanted a China that was decidedly “East” to their “West,” something different and other. While they could accept that Chinese people wore jeans and t-shirts rather than qipao and high collared shirts, the fact that there was a Wal-Mart smack dab in the middle of the city was a bridge too far. China, they would proclaim, was being ruined by the West.

While I could appreciate concerns over cultural imperialism, the travelers rarely were concerned about that. Afterall, the same people who decried Wal-Mart in the city center would raise holy hell if their hotel had a squat toilet. The concessions that China was allowed to make to Western culture were the ones that made their lives more convenient. Above all, China itself should not interfere with the foreign traveler’s idealized version of China. China was to exist perpetually as it existed in the travelers minds – the exotic fantasy of mist covered mountains, kung-fu masters, ancient temples, peaked roofs – regardless of what the Chinese themselves wanted. The Chinese actually find Wal-Mart convenient and want to shop there? They enjoy their lattes? Too bad. China exists for the foreign travelers consumption, not as a place in and of itself.

This is the problem with the idea of authenticity. Recently in the book community we’ve seen reviews which criticize books written by non-white authors for not being instructive enough. What these reviews say, in essence, is that the culture and people depicted in the book do not get to exist as they are, but instead exist for the edification of the white reader. If a Chinese-American book does not depict a generational struggle, or describe Chinese food in loving detail, it is not “Chinese” enough, even though Chinese-Americans have varied experiences and are not a monolith. Just as China itself has no obligation to exist to serve the orientalist expectations of the foreign traveler, the Chinese-American (or Indian-American, Arab-American) writer has no obligation to exoticize their own culture for the entertainment of white readers.

I grew up reading Amy Tan’s novels, and of course the influence she has had on American literature, and the doors she opened for Asian-American writers are undeniable. However, as I grew older, and especially after I lived in China, I started to become a bit uncomfortable with the way white Americans would discuss her books. Amy Tan writes, for the most part, about the China of old. Her stories are evocative of those mist covered mountains, and call forth a sense of the “mystical orient.” Critical analysis of Tan’s work has accused her of self-Orientalism, and while it is a heavy criticism, I think it is hard to deny that Tan’s work is certainly, on some level, influenced by the way China is viewed though the the Western gaze. Still, she was a trailblazer for Asian-American literature, and writing at a time when the West barely viewed China at all, and when it died, it was undeniably through our own orientalist gaze.

Nowadays, however, Chinese-American writers are much more widely published, from YA romcoms like Loveboat Taipei, to literary fiction such as The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, to fantasy such as The Poppy War. Chinese-American literature does not have a mold that it must fit, any more than China itself has a mold it must fit. Readers who would criticize a book for not being “cultural” enough are missing the point. Chinese culture in 2020 is  Starbucks and Burger King just as much as it is Didi and WeChat, just as much as it is also, still, mist shrouded mountains and 5000 years of history. And non-white literature too, can be everything that white literature is, as well as many things that it is not. If you find yourself questioning the “authenticity” of a book you are reading, remember, there is no such thing as authentic culture. The idea of “authentic” culture is based upon expectations heaped upon that culture by outsiders. Culture simply is, and it cares nothing for your expectations.

Diversity

Writing Other Cultures: A Musical Analogy

Bruce Byfield

Writers are often told to stay in their lane and to avoid writing from perspectives other than their own. Often, this advice is accompanied by the statement that no one should even attempt to write from another perspective, and could not possibly write well if they tried. It’s a claim that comes from past examples, and out of understandable frustration due to inequalities in the publishing industry. However, based on an analogy in the music industry, I wonder if it is incomplete.

The inequalities in publishing today are reminiscent of the situation in the recording industry seventy years ago. Then, even more so than today, Black musicians were shut out. Worse, at the same time, White performers were stealing Black music. Many, unsurprisingly, insisted that Whites could not credibly play Blues, Jazz, or R&B, because they had not lived the life that gave rise to the music.

Yet in practice, in the coming decade, that claim was partly discredited, as some up and coming White performers looked beyond the limitations of borrowed Black music to find the originals. By the 1970s, groups like the Rolling Stones were appearing on stage with older Black musicians like Muddy Waters, and looking like fanboys, obviously delighted to be performing with their cultural heroes. More recently, a collection of Robert Johnson’s recorded work included liner notes by Keith Richards.

Trying to map what happened, my critique partner Jessica cited a recording of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” by the Neville Brothers, an all-Black band. For both Jessica and I, this recording could be called the definitive version of this classic spiritual. Like the best spirituals, it is not a hymn, rejoicing in religious belief, although it assumes a religious background. Rather, it is existential, concerned with mourning and human suffering. Like a tragedy, it is cathartic, allowing the listeners release through their identification with the emotions surrounding a family funeral. Although recorded several decades after the 1950s, it still comes out of the Black experience in the truest sense.

Jessica rightly pointed out that White performers could hardly hope to equal the Neville Brothers. By contrast, she mentioned a version of “Will the Circle Be UnBroken?” performed by Johnny Cash, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Ricky Skagg – an all white ensemble. We both agreed that this version of the spiritual was nowhere near as powerful as the one by the Neville Brothers.

So far, this example supports the prevailing claims. However, while not reflecting Black experience, we agreed that the Johnny Cash version was skillfully done, especially in its use of Baptist call and response. In the end, we decided that the performers had borrowed the Black experience and produced something different. Although less effective, it still had some power to move listeners.

However, that analogy seemed incomplete. Neither of us believed that the average White musician could be as successful as Johnny Cash and company in using Black experience in a respectful way or in creating something different. Far too many attempts to do this were more like Pat Boone’s version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” which is built around a cheery, upbeat arrangement that showed little understanding of the song, and grated after only a few bars in its wrongness. A browse through YouTube showed that most White versions of the song were far closer to Pat Boone’s than Johnny Cash’s.

If this analogy has any validity, then it is mostly true to say that artists have to live the experience to depict it well. Without that experience, the results are apt to resemble Pat Boone’s. However, at the same time, a skilled artist, with a similar experience to draw upon in their own life, can do a credible rendition of the experience they depict, and perhaps turn it into something different, but interesting in its own right.

What this means is that while it may be an overstatement to say that writing outside your lane is impossible, it is unlikely to be done after no more than reading a few Wikipedia articles. It is a difficult undertaking, achievable even partially only by accomplished and conscientious writers. Unless you are prepared to work hard, and to listen to people who have lived what you borrowing, then it is better not to try at all. As John Le Carré said, “A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger” – but none of us are good writers in everything we try.

Uncategorized

Do Your Research … But How?

thelocaldialect

Writers, when asking about writing characters outside of their own backgrounds, often get told “do your research.” This answer is deceptively simple, and appealing in its simplicity. White writers, upon reading that all they need to do is “do their research” and “consult a sensitivity reader,” may feel like they have the necessary materials at their fingertips. After all, how hard could “research” be? Most of us who graduated university wrote a research paper or two in our day. Some of us have even done dissertations. However, white writers, if we approach the research that is necessary to write acceptable POC representation the same way we approach the research necessary to write a term paper, we are bound to fail.

Wikipedia, scholarly articles, websites, even entire academic books, are simply not enough. The kind of research that is generally necessary in order to write another culture convincingly is the sort of research that would have you living and experiencing that culture, or getting as close as you possibly can, as a white person, to living and experiencing that culture. If the old adage “write what you know” holds true, then the white writer must know the culture that they choose to write about, and that knowledge cannot come from books, but from lived experience. The sort of knowledge that can be gleaned from a website, consuming media from the culture, or even reading academic journals may be fine for writing a research paper, which, after all, does not need to resonate emotionally with the audience, but a novel requires more.

Does this mean you have to spend decades living in a culture before you can write it? Not necessarily (although it would certainly be helpful), but it does mean, in my opinion, you have to be granted some degree of insider access to the culture, rather than using purely secondhand research. Painter Emily Carr, who was inspired by indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest and often included scenes from their villages in her landcape paintings, spent extended periods of time living in First Nation villages, living among the people and getting to know them personally.  S.A. Chakraborty, who wrote the Daevabad trilogy, is a white woman who converted to Islam long before she wrote her trilogy featuring a Muslim hero. While Chakraborty did not live in Egypt, the country where her story begins, as a Muslim woman as well as an Islamic scholar, she has first hand as well as academic knowledge of the religion and culture.

Consider, before writing outside of your own experience, that there are many writers out there who do have those experience and who are eager to tell their own stories. What makes you, someone whose knowledge is purely secondhand, a better person to write that story than a person whose knowledge comes from lived experience? Can you write it better, or if not better, can you do as good a job as someone who has firsthand knowledge of that culture? If not, are you willing to put in the work necessary to gain the firsthand knowledge needed?

Many of us do not like being told we cannot do something or cannot have something. When we are told “do research” we interpret “research” in terms that are most charitable towards ourselves. What is left unsaid is that often it may impossible for you to do the “research” necessary for you to do a culture justice. Personally, I would not attempt to write a book about the experience of being a Black person in the USA. I have not even lived in the United States for the majority of my adult life, and my experiences are so far removed from the reality of most Black Americans that any attempt on my behalf would be cobbled together from popular media, the internet, and consultations with sensitivity readers. I am a decent writer and I could possibly piece together something that was at the very least blandly inoffensive, but my account would be at best a pale imitation. Am I really the best person to be writing about what it is to be Black in America? Absolutely not. I will never be that person, because that experience is completely beyond my scope.

On the other hand, I have written copiously about the region of China, Yunnan, where I lived and made my home for fifteen years, as well as the Yunnanese people who live there. I have firsthand knowledge of the culture, I speak the language, and I have family members and friends who are from Yunnan. If I have a question about the region or the culture, I have multiple resources who are simply a text message away. I lived in villages and cities, and worked in environments where I was completely immersed in the culture. I was married in Yunnan and had my children there. I navigated the public school system when my kids started primary school, and had playdates with local moms. I was in every way immersed in Yunnanese life. While my family and friends cannot give me “permission” to write about their culture (an aside about permission: anyone seeking permission is inherently misguided. There is no counsel that grants such things, and if you are uncertain enough about your ability or suitability to write a culture that you go seeking permission, then you probably shouldn’t be writing that culture), they are excited that I am doing so, and are eager to help me get it right. There aren’t many Yunnanese people writing in English out there, and even fewer represent my family’s particular ethnic group, and they are happy to see their region on the page. And still, even with all of my experiences, all of my resources, I still might make mistakes and get things wrong. Now imagine if I only had the internet and books at my disposal?

Writing characters from cultures other than our own is something that not every writer can do, and we need to accept our own limitations. Yes, do your research, yes consult your sensitivity readers, but most of all, know your limits. The sort of research that must be done in order to write a culture outside of your own is not the kind of research that can be done without dedicating years of your life to the endeavor. If you’re not up to the task, then there is no disgrace in sticking to what you know.