Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I found a link to William Gibson’s blog on diveintomark; he talks about the allure of fan writing:

One of the reasons, I’m convinced, that I’ve been able to produce even the few novels I have is that, almost from the start, I largely swore off less formal avenues of literary expression. The culture of SF, particularly, seemed to me to be studded with truly scary examples of talented writers who had chosen to sublimate their energies in SF’s native (and relatively ancient) fanzine scene, the geniuses of which (and there arguably were a few) eventually (and perhaps inevitably?) evolved their own equivalents of blogging.

Of course, Gibson blogged that, so it’s not clear that he has sworn off this informal avenue of expression. Even if I swore off fandom, I don’t think I could give up the blog crack.

You see a character you like, whom everyone else hates, and you want to redeem them. You have a weakness for second-person fic, though you’ve never dared to write any of your own. Put the two together and you get fic in the second person, present tense.

You’re amazed at the immediacy of this new perspective. You hope that being addressed as the character will give your reader some sympathy for this misunderstood soul. No one hates themselves; people are quite forgiving of their own perversions. You’re hoping that they’ll forgive one little mutinous love affair, or better yet, understand it.

You become discouraged when every paragraph begins with “you,” and you wonder what the maximum tolerable length of a 2nd-person POV fic is. It can’t be much. You begin to chat in the second person, and that inspires a blog entry but it doesn’t solve your problems.

You decide to hope for the best.

Well, this is getting out of hand. If literary gender politics are your thing, check out the latest entries from RJ, Alara Rogers, and A. J. Hall (with two subsequent entries so far).

The biggest misunderstanding of my Gender Neutral entry and associated comments seems to be the assumption that I have difficulty writing original female characters. I don’t. The majority (though not an overwhelming one) of my lead characters are female. I don’t find them easier or harder to write than males; what I imagine would be hard to do is to write women as gender-neutral characters - that is, as though it didn’t matter in the story, plotwise or symbolically, that the character was a woman.

Of course, that’s just me, and it’s not an aspect of my writing that I’d thought about before writing the blog entry in question. My characters come to me full-grown, so I had to line them up and think about them to see why the women were women and the men were neuter. When I wrote about assigning gender according to the plot, I didn’t mean that the plot came before or after the gender. It’s difficult to talk about the muse, even without people jumping down your throat when you do so. Any analysis of my writing is going to be an after-the-fact reconstruction based on speculations about the realm of the unconscious muse. Looking back on my writing, the pattern is that neuter characters are male.

Alara said, I don’t quite get how any woman could think of the male gender as neutral. Part of it may be that I think of men as the weaker sex, with the broken chromosome and the poor social skills and no womb. For me, they don’t even have their statistical advantage of being more intelligent and more rational. Yes, they still have Tab A and the desire to climb to the top of any hierarchy in sight, and there’s nothing wrong with that - I’m just not impressed. If the story doesn’t involve sex or primate pecking orders, then Frodo is neuter in my book. Genocide, while masculine in that it’s a crime, has more to do with bureaucracy and totalitarianism when my characters do it. Fortunately I don’t need to distinguish very carefully between my many neuter and my few masculine characters, since they all end up male in the end.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I suppose if I don’t emphasize it, my point will go on being unclear. Literature, for me, does not represent reality, it symbolizes reality. A dialogue in a novel is not a real dialogue, it is the essence of such a dialogue. (This was noted in Worlds of Wonder; it’s a standard bit of writing advice.) A real life dialogue is meandering and dull; a dialogue in literature is pithy and artificial. In the same way, a character in literature is not a real person but a carefully constructed abstraction. The gender of that character should not be decided according to notions of fair gender representation or even of the writer’s preference for a particular gender (usually her own, and I’m no exception). The gender is symbolic, not representational, and contributes symbolically to the illusion of a real human being.

Of course if to me man means a neuter human, and to you he means the Other, you’ll create different characters and be more bothered by the gender imbalance in The Lord of the Rings than I will. I didn’t even notice. I didn’t notice it in Foundation or any of the other old sci-fi classics. Even if you point it out to me, I don’t see it as male dominance - I see it as a lack of female symbols and plots. Most sci-fi isn’t Shards of Honor and Barrayar, and I don’t expect it to be.

The other day, for the umpteenth time, I came across the writing truism that ideas are a dime a dozen and the real action is in slogging through the writing-up of said ideas. This last time I stopped and thought, no!

I have a closet full of ideas, just like the next writer, but they’re not all of equal merit. They’re not all waiting their turn through the text editor. Some ideas are so overwhelming that they write themselves (like “The Dance” did for me) or they hold up otherwise execrable prose (for example, Ringworld). Some have launched entire genres (Lord of the Rings) or given birth to new social phenomena (as Star Trek created media fandom).

So to be brief (because I have one more category of AAA to finish) the idea is the thing. The writing-up is just legwork. You may have a thousand ideas stuffed away in your closet, but when the right one hits you, it’s love at first sight.

I’m behind on the blogs; somehow I completely missed RJ on gender politics, or more specifically on the lack of strong female characters in Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

I was about twenty-four years old the first time this fiction gap was pointed out to me. I had just watched “Lawrence of Arabia” with a guy, and during the credits he pointed out that there were no women in the entire movie, except for one non-speaking figure seen from a distance.

I hadn’t noticed.

In the case of “Lawrence of Arabia,” there are historical reasons for the omission (about which, as far as I could recall, my friend was right). You could say the same of Tolkien because he’s depicting a medieval culture, but that’s not the source of my not noticing.

Male characters are the neuter pronoun of fiction. Frodo, Legolas and Gimli aren’t male in any way that alienates me as a female reader - they’re generic hobbit, elf and dwarf. Aragorn is an exception if you know about Arwen, but if you don’t (and Tolkien, unlike Peter Jackson, was kind enough to hide her in an appendix), even he’s relatively neuter.

Female characters can also be neuter, like Galadriel, or completely subsumed by their gender role, like Arwen, or struggling in-between the two, like Eowyn. It’s an easier thing to do with men, though - Everyman characters are always men like Tom Paris, despite B’Elanna Torres’ very similar background.

This is where the feminists chime in and say that I’m merely describing the dominance of men in society, not explaining it away in literature. I’m always interested in reading about new societies that differ on such basic points of human nature, but you have to make it believable. Show me the technobabble. Until you do, I’ll assume I’m reading about human society as it has been in all documented cases - patriarchal, with man as the neuter character.

In fanfiction I’m restricted to the genders as given, but in original stories I assign gender according to a specific and, until now, unconscious process. If the destiny of the character is to fall in love, reproduce, leave home for love like Ruth, or otherwise be noticably gendered, I make her female. If their destiny is to commit genocide, immolate themselves in a folding singularity, disappear over the horizon, discover a new world like an old-time Everyman pulp adventurer, or otherwise be gender-neutral, I make him male.

Yes, I could write neuter females, but I’m not a feminist writer. I am not revolted by the neuter pronoun he, even though I prefer they for clarity. I have no stake in balancing gender representation in my writing. Literature is not about literal representation, but about symbolism. Male and female have symbolic meanings, even for those who don’t believe they are biologically based. The male as neuter is only one of those symbols, and I see no point in criticizing or abandoning it.

Overall, I’d say Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by David Gerrold was good advice in the form of fortune cookies. For example: “Your first million words are for practice.” That was the theme of a one-page chapter (including the chapter heading). You should think of those first million words as throw-aways. You may as well write fanfic, for all their publishing potential.

I don’t know if word 1,000,001 is supposed to be special, but that’s when you can take yourself seriously. Just estimating in my head, I figured I wasn’t past 500,000 yet, so I used wc to count them all, fanfic and original fic, and came up with exactly 369,025 words. About 120,000 of those are original fiction, finished or not, 1000 words of which have been published in non-professional markets. Another 20,000 or so is unfinished fanfic, leaving about 230,000 words of fanfic and filk here on-site.

I’ve been writing since July of 2000, but most of the words are from 2001, before I started working for crazy people. Were I keeping to my New Year’s resolution to write 1,000 words a day, I could be done practicing two years from now. That’s not exactly an encouraging thought.

I’ve been blogging since September, 2001, and the word count here, for comparison, is 180,326 - but then there’s no question that I’ve written a million words of non-fiction in my life. Maybe I can pro-rate them and count them, too.

It’s gorgeous out again today. Yesterday it was around 80 degrees, though it got windy in the afternoon. I’m having trouble adjusting, since I’m still in sudden snow mode from last week.

I’m blogging some exercises from Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold because this is my most convenient scratch paper at the moment. The first two exercises in the book are to list your favorite sf/f movies and books, with a particular emphasis on being drawn into the fantasy world:

Favorite sci-fi/fantasy movies:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
• GalaxyQuest
• Planet of the Apes
• Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Metropolis
• Soylent Green
• Young Frankenstein

Favorite sci-fi/fantasy books:

• The Lord of the Rings
• Watership Down
• Metropolitan (Walter Jon Williams)
• Memory (LMB)
• Ringworld
• The Dispossessed
• The Chronicles of Narnia
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (G. K. Chesterton)
• Atlas Shrugged
• Distress (Greg Egan)

If I think of more books, I’ll add them. I had much more trouble coming up with the movies, and most of them don’t really fit the “new engrossing world” idea.

Despite my misgivings about Scientology, I’m really going to enter the Writers of the Future contest this time. The quarterly deadline is tomorrow, so I’m busily dusting off a novelette for the purpose. Short stories over 7,500 words are difficult to sell in the magazine market, but the WotF entry limit is 17,000 and still I’m well below that.

This story has been sitting around the hard drive too long and has gone through too many minor revisions, partly because of the size issue and partly because of the curse of perfectionism that dooms so many fine stories to the bit-bin of history. I have a new plan to replace my neglected New Year’s resolutions: I’ll submit one story a month for publication. That gives me a week to do research, a week for a rough draft, a week for a final draft, and a week to goof off. I think it’s a plan.

And yes, for anyone who’s keeping score, I’ve completely neglected NaNoEdMo and won’t be finishing in time for midnight tomorrow. Maybe next month…

I’m not taking NaNoEdMo as seriously as I took NaNoWriMo. There’s some debate over in the NaNoEdMo forums, about what exactly counts towards your fifty hours of editing. The strict interpretation says you should have pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, during your whole fifty hours. My interpretation includes random daydreaming about my story, or rereading it in the tub. (That’s how I consumed today’s 2 hours of editing.)

If I were being serious about it, I would have planned ahead according to the tips. I would be writing 50,000 more words to add to the current 50,000 and make my novel commercially viable, besides brushing up the scenes that are there. Instead I’m doing things vaguely related to the novel, like converting the encyclopedia I keep for my universe into XML.

I’m enjoying the rereading more than I expected. The novel gets a little rough at the end, when the deadline was pressing, but overall it’s better than I expected. It needs some subplot filler (as opposed to padding, which is bad filler) - not just to fill out the word count but to flesh out the main character, who’s really growing on me. He may be a homicidal maniac, but he’s my homicidal maniac.

During the other 22 hours of the day, I’ve been working on my encyclopedia. I wrote an XML DTD for it, as well as a CSS stylesheet for the XML. It’s gorgeous, if I do say so myself. I looked around for some cool fonts - the only one I downloaded was KelmscottRoman, but the sites were fun just to look through: Nick’s Fonts and apostrophic laboratories.

I used to keep all my info for my original stories in a TWiki running on my mac’s local webserver, but I found that too cumbersome to use. I prefer editing in emacs instead of browser windows, for one thing, and I wanted more control over the display of my encyclopedia. XML and CSS did enough for me, though it’s clunky in some ways.

The Encyclopedia DTD and stylesheet are available upon request. My email address is around here somewhere…

NaNoEdMo begins in just a few short hours, and their registration is finally working, more or less. Ignore the error message after you submit your registration, if you get one, and just try to log in with the account you were making and you should be fine. For more details on National Novel Editing Month, see
my previous NaNoEdMo post, which has the link to the one-pass manuscript editing essay.