So, the progress on The Skybound Sea is…solid. It’s moving, in any event, and moving in a forward direction. That’s not a bad thing. It is, however, not moving as fast as I would like it to and as a result, blogging and general forms of communication are taking a hit for it, which is also not a bad thing. Presumably, you enjoy my writing as much as my blog or you probably wouldn’t be here and, as a result, you might not take offense if the latter bleeds a little for the former. Hopefully, that’s not a bad thing.
But since this is my blog and we are here to talk about bad things, I would like to expose you all a little to Scott Adams’ latest insanity.
I’m not linking directly to his site because I don’t at all mind denying him some traffic and I’m not going to list the previous episodes of the great saga of Mr. Adams’ douchebaggery which, at this point, is becoming something that can only be described as mythical, as in so fantastic it can hardly be believed. Mr. Jeff Fecke of the blog I just linked does a fine job of it, anyway, which was lovely of him to write. But, in the interests of not being completely useless, let me summarize things for you.
Inceptum: Scott Adams draws Dilbert, a cartoon that hasn’t been relevant in a format that hasn’t been relevant for years now. And given that everyone now knows what a memo is and isn’t really stirred to laughter by the observation that managers can sometimes be incompetent, our boy Scott is desperately looking for a new way to keep from fading out of notice.
Medius: Scott Adams discovers that people who say stupid shit online often get a lot of attention.
Terminus: Scott Adams puts his certified genius to work for him by making sweeping revelations to astound the minds of mere mortals by likening women to angry children, the womens’ rights movement to a weary joke, men to slavering rape-machines incapable of controlling themselves and people who don’t agree with him to simpering chimps at keyboards. Any contradiction or question angled toward him is met with the rolling of eyes and the gentle reminder that this is just fact and if you have a problem with it, you’re living in denial.
It’s that last part we should pay attention to because it’s that last part that actually has some relevance on what we should talk about as writers. Because frankly, we’ve probably all been guilty of it at some point.
The thing is, you’ve probably heard that before in a few ways and with good reason. The blatant acceptance of fact tends to be rather closely linked with some common complaints of SF/F in general: that it’s conservative, that it doesn’t do a lot of pushing of social mores, that it’s insensitive and underutilizes characters of different orientations. And likewise, we tend to accept it all with our various reasons: “a woman couldn’t beat up a man, that’s just impossible,” “women didn’t have equal rights in a medieval society,” “a gay person couldn’t function normally in this kind of society so we can’t use it here” and variations on “that wouldn’t happen.”
Which baffles me.
I mean, presumably we’re writing in this particular genre because of the freedom it allows, because of the worlds we can create and because of the characters we throw into it. Why some people are so eager to slap down rules, constraints and the same sort of legalities that govern our every day life is, to me, more than a little baffling. I mean, why invent a vast, sprawling world if you want it to act, look, feel and work exactly like medieval England except with one or two twists (“yes, well, my peasants shovel their own feces instead of animals'”). Why not do whatever the hell you want?
By that, of course, I’m not suggesting that you do just throw things around willy-nilly with violent whimsy and fuck whoever takes exception to that. I’m merely suggesting you think carefully about the discrepancies between rules and logic.
Logic suggests that the wilting flower of a woman wouldn’t be able to fight off a big man, logic suggests that a homosexual character probably wouldn’t find acceptance very readily in a society that is theoretically more regressive than our own modern one in which this is still a challenge, logic suggests that a society based on patriarchy wouldn’t value womens’ rights very much.
But logic doesn’t say that a woman couldn’t find a way to fight a big man through one way or another, logic doesn’t say that a homosexual character couldn’t exist, persevere and even find some measure of happiness in the face of adversity, logic doesn’t say that women wouldn’t think of rights as being all that important even if not a lot of people do, logic doesn’t say “that can’t happen.”
Rules do.
Logic is something you can twist, bend, mold and adapt, like clay. You can use it to change a character, to change society, to change reality and readers will love it because you’re offering that by changing the world around them instead of pulling stuff out of your anus to fit the plot. Rules are just constraints. They do not change. They do not alter. Your reader will be bored because, once they figure out the rules, they know what’s going to happen. You need logic. You don’t need rules.
But the reason we bring Scott Adams into all of this is because he represents a very real danger from following the rules, from accepting fact too easily, from twisting yourself until your logic becomes as immutable as rules: you can start thinking that people on an individual level have rules, that people act a certain way, that black people do this, that white people do this.
That’s not just insane. That’s not just unsatisfying for a reader. That’s the antithesis of writing, regardless of genre. You are not there to tell people how everyone in the world is. At least, not directly. You’re there to tell them how these people are and how these people relate to the world around them, which is not something that anyone else would do, because you’re writing them and you aren’t anyone else and people will read you because of that.
And if you’re playing by rules, then you simply aren’t being yourself.
Doubt fact.
Forget rules.
Challenge everything.
Fantastic. As an aside something I always note is that writers will be criticised if they do not show diversity in their cast, but they will also be criticised if they do show diversity in their cast because the reviewer believes it was a token effort designed to pander to the masses.
Is this sort of critical reception something worth considering in depth when you are writing a book? I would like to think that it doesnt matter if my hero is a white male, what matters is that my hero is a flawed individual who is forced to confront his flaws in order to save himself and the people he cares about.
To a certain extent (and at the risk of offending every blogger ever), no criticism is worth considering.
That doesn’t mean that you should turn up your nose at every critique and go “well, you just don’t get it.” But rather that there is criticism you can use and criticism you can’t and a lot of that depends on your own intent and motivation. If you did add a minority character to your cast in an attempt to have a token and your critics call you on it, that’s something you can use, since it didn’t work. But if you do it because the minority aspect is important to the character and he had to genuinely be that race/orientation/whatever and the critics still say you’re pandering, then…what can you honestly do for them?
It’s the same with critics who didn’t like the fact that the characters of Tome of the Undergates were squabbling, angry individuals. That was pretty much their conflict, so I couldn’t really change that. The people who thought the fighting was a bit much? There might be a point there.
After reading through the link, I came back very curious where this was going… really like the conclusion. Characters should be individuals, not examples of a set of rules. Well said!
Re logic: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I didn’t even consider there might be any “rules” when I wrote my novel. Since I’m writing historical fantasy, I’m more constrained by fact than someone creating a secondary world, but either way I think you need to make that balance between what’s just too anachronistic to be believable, and what’s innovative and entertaining.
Some people will probably complain that my gay Elizabethans don’t spend all their time angsting about how they’re going to burn in Hell, but that’s not what I enjoy writing – or reading. There’s some conflict, obviously – it’s not all rainbows and unicorns – but mostly they just get on with their lives. In any case, popular assumption (homosexuality was illegal in England therefore all gay people must have been miserable) doesn’t even hold up to scrutiny when you start researching it in detail.
Really, though, I’m just happy to have found a publisher (Angry Robot) who are not only open to boundary-pushing but seem to be thriving on it 🙂
It helps to be aware of history and how and why things worked in the real world. In medieval society, men were bigger and stronger than women, and on the battlefield, that really really mattered. But if you fight with magic, or on the backs of dragons, who gives a shit about strength? That discriminator no longer applies. The other significant difference (to make more people is a committments of at least a couple of years for a woman but only needs five minutes of a man) makes men much more disposable than women, and if their greater strength is negated by something else, logically you could easily construct a male underclass!
So indeed, in fantasy, history is no excuse at all; and when it comes to sexuality, why the fuck model your society of medieval northern Europe? The Greeks, Romans, Arabs and (I think) Indian and Chinese ancient and medieval civilisations were all much more tolerant of sexuality. Why pick the intolerant one? Fear of being different? Too much effort to research other cultures?