David B. Ramirez's Blog: David Ramirez SFFWriter
February 17, 2015
Does my taste run too lit?
I sometimes wonder if I've read a little too much of the odd stuff to make it easy to write something that can be a popular hit. I've been glancing at some of my Goodreads ratings, and some of the books I've enjoyed the most score relatively low for bestsellers.
--
--
Like Lev Grossman's The Magicians.
I quite enjoyed it. For me, it's a 5. It's an irreverent near--parody of Narnia and Harry Potter, but it's also almost satire, and it's also genuinely a coming of age YA story.
But on goodreads, it's just a 3.46.
--
--
And I actually really love the second Southern Reach book, Authority, but it just has a 3.68.
--
Have my tastes gotten too jaded to tap into mainstream desires? Am I liking the oddball parts that others find distasteful or boring?
Obviously, it's ok to be a niche writer if you can get a small subset of fans to really love your work, but you probably have a bigger chance of earning good money as a writer if you can tap into the things that more people like.
Still, even when I was a kid, the parts of stories that some of my friends found boring where parts I quite liked--like the party scene at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring or all those comfortable homey eating scenes in The Wind in the Willows.
--
One of the recurring themes of Bakuman (Bakuman: Complete Box Set) is that one has to tailor a work to the chosen audience, but balance it with what creators are good at and love to do. If your editors aren't letting you do the story you want to do, maybe you just aren't good enough to do it with that story yet.
Of course, the self-published writers who read Bakuman may rage at the gate-keeper function of the editors in the story and the implication that independents who hire editors on contracts produce inferior work, but that's a whole other thing .
--
Anyway, well. Whatever. In the end, I can only work on the kind of books I can do, and make them as good as I can.
I wonder though. If I were writing romance instead of SF--would it be easier because there are established formulas, or would it be harder because of having to work in the relatively tighter framework for it?
I guess I am what I am though.
--
--
Like Lev Grossman's The Magicians.
I quite enjoyed it. For me, it's a 5. It's an irreverent near--parody of Narnia and Harry Potter, but it's also almost satire, and it's also genuinely a coming of age YA story.
But on goodreads, it's just a 3.46.
--
--
And I actually really love the second Southern Reach book, Authority, but it just has a 3.68.
--
Have my tastes gotten too jaded to tap into mainstream desires? Am I liking the oddball parts that others find distasteful or boring?
Obviously, it's ok to be a niche writer if you can get a small subset of fans to really love your work, but you probably have a bigger chance of earning good money as a writer if you can tap into the things that more people like.
Still, even when I was a kid, the parts of stories that some of my friends found boring where parts I quite liked--like the party scene at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring or all those comfortable homey eating scenes in The Wind in the Willows.
--
One of the recurring themes of Bakuman (Bakuman: Complete Box Set) is that one has to tailor a work to the chosen audience, but balance it with what creators are good at and love to do. If your editors aren't letting you do the story you want to do, maybe you just aren't good enough to do it with that story yet.
Of course, the self-published writers who read Bakuman may rage at the gate-keeper function of the editors in the story and the implication that independents who hire editors on contracts produce inferior work, but that's a whole other thing .
--
Anyway, well. Whatever. In the end, I can only work on the kind of books I can do, and make them as good as I can.
I wonder though. If I were writing romance instead of SF--would it be easier because there are established formulas, or would it be harder because of having to work in the relatively tighter framework for it?
I guess I am what I am though.
December 25, 2014
Valkyria Chronicles review
http://store.steampowered.com/app/294...
So, I finally finished Valkyria Chronicles. 4/5. I'm a PC gamer--I don't play much on console unless one of my friends is over and brought or loaned a unit.
VC has great mechanics and a good story. But some of the battle scenarios are poorly designed and some of the plot and world design are problematic.
Why am I writing about a video game? Because some elements of game design overlap with writing fiction, of course.
---Battles
A few of the battles require failing in order to figure out what needs to be done. I hate this type of design--it breaks immersion, and it's annoying. If you don't know beforehand that units will pop up at location X or that you need to keep your lancers in certain areas turn by turn, you either die or get a low score.
If you have the wrong unit makeup at the start of the battle, you can get penalized as it will take a couple of turns to swap them out.
They should have removed the number of turns being a factor in scoring performance.
It encourages save-scumming and that's kind of lame.
There is one battle in particular that requires a glitch to be winnable. An invincible opponent shows up, and your guys have to be in exactly the right area. If they are in area A, they are safe and you can finish the mission. If they are outside it, they get wiped out. The only reason the mission is doable is that the invincible enemy stops at a specific place without any rational reason--if the enemy kept on fighting rationally, she would wipe out your party.
In book terms, this is almost deus-ex-machina-esque. Not quite though, as, rather than depending on a plot device from the heavens to save one's heroes (ie the Eagles somehow spotting two tiny hobbits on the side of an erupting volcano despite all the smoke), in VC's case, it's depending on a villain suddenly becoming inexplicably stupid, without even a macguffin of stupid-inducing.
---
Valkyria Chronicles' other writing issues are about discrepancy in the feel of the game experience and in the theme.
It's set in an alternate history Europe in which a sort of alternate World War II happens. There is racial persecution, there are concentration camps, people die, etc, it's a super-serious setting.
Which does not mesh smoothly with the characters' behaviors. The game basically starts with 3 civilians killing some enemy scouts... and they have zero trauma, shakiness, or anything.
Not like this guy from Band of Brothers:
And there is no blood. Everyone dies in sanitized pew-pew-oh-I-fell.
Not like this guy, who didn't even die:
They show no fear. Now, I get maybe having one or two being all tough like that, but everyone in the militia being so "This must be done, so I will do my duty like a robot" breaks the writing.
This brings to mind a comparison with the characters from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Younger watchers might find the protagonists irritating because they're whiny/troubled/traumatized, but they're actually depicted really carefully and with great depth, considering they're child soldiers burdened with the weight of saving the world and they all have screwed up relationships with their parents.
Shinji is the realest kind of hero you get out of anime, like the brother and sister out of Grave of the Fireflies, who are, above all, fallible, and young, and sincere. He screams in rage, he cries, he gets depressed.
Whereas in Valkyria Chronicles, all the characters, through months of intense combat and violence, seem to have zero trauma. There's a naive vibe to the characters which fits very poorly with what's going on. The deaths of close comrades are resolved with a single dramatic yell + a couple of tears.
One major plot element involves a new, game-changing weapon. OMG, the character behaviors around it are... really, really dumb. It's something that could change the course of the war and it's handled in a childish way.
It's not like in Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien carefully established that using the One Ring as a weapon will just result in Sauron winning or a new Sauron arising. In Valkyria Chronicles, the good guys don't use the weapon just because "it won't be our victory." Or whatever.
Maybe it was to spare the sacrifice of a certain person.... ignoring that the weapon's use would make her 10,000x safer than an average grunt with a gun. Or, hey, there's this part where the weapon is not used because the alternative to not using it is a suicidal kamikaze attack... an artificially binary choice, which is quite stupid, as it does not have to be that way.
The weapon could just be used intelligently giving you a superhuman infantry-person. But no. We won't use it because the game designers say the characters don't want to, but maybe it's more that it would have required them to think hard about incorporating a whole other dimension of combat if the player gets to control a Valkyria.
This is extremely jarring with the WWII-ish setting, in which every slight technological edge was important, and all sides engaged in total war.
Now, I like Diet Coke, but I got to say, the story and characters of Valkyria Chronicles feel like the Diet Coke of World War II, where all the fights are smaller scale, fewer people die, racism is solvable by the bond forged by killing side-by-side, dolls and singing, and people refrain from using the best weapon in the war just because.
The setting and themes are just so big and serious, but VC treated them with kid gloves, and in so doing, well, it doesn't trivialize WW2, but it does feel like the game writers were afraid of pushing anything (which sort of makes sense, given that there's some historical revisionism in Japan, but still).
It's a good game, but if they had kept the mechanics and then given writers like, say, Bioware's, a crack at it, Valkyria Chronicles could have been truly stupendous.
Or, hey, if it had had more of the feel of Saishuu Heiki Kanojo, that would have made it awesome too (and it is a natural fit in style).
November 16, 2014
Imagination, low-hanging fruit, and the limits of human empathy
Re-posting off of my FB public page.
---
Found this article via reddit and thought about it.
---
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/im...
---
1) The fear thing. That hasn't actually caused sf writers to be less imaginative.
The fear thing and a lack of understanding has affected much more significant things though. Non-science/tech people are much more likely these days to distrust scientists, engineers and doctors, which is why we get anti-science people in congress, various flavors of denialists, anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements.
Decades ago, scientists were usually the guys who came up with how to beat the alien invaders or cure the disease. Now, they're usually the cause of the disease, or it's "hubris" that causes the disaster.
In World War Z, who figured out the key to survival? Was it a scientist, or any of the many doctors who maybe should have noticed that zombies weren't going after super-sick patients? It was some UN inspector guy. Couldn't they have at least had Brad Pitt be a doctor from the WHO or Doctors Without Borders or something? That's probably not because the screenwriters didn't think of it, but because a lot of people tend to be underwhelmed by real experts.
[Picture linked off of the IMDB page for the movie]
2) Creativity/radical sf.
The low-hanging fruit has all been taken. By now, there have been millions of SF stories. Truly 'radical' and imaginative sf that hasn't already been covered by the past is difficult...
In the 1930s, almost 100 years ago, adventurers in space with ray guns coming across aliens drew in readers. The same sort of story *still* draws in readers, but they're not remotely new anymore, and there have been so many iterations, the newness happens in the plot and the characterization and the thoughts about civilization/humanity, rather than in science/tech concepts.
Truly original SF at this point is hard, and even when it happens, it usually ends up REALLY weird, far enough out there that it doesn't get traction with many readers and has little chance of propagating out to popular imagination.
In the end, people like to read about people, or if they read about aliens, the aliens are really just exotified humans. It would be a work of far greater creative and artistic power than most writers have to get readers into a story in which the main character isn't human, doesn't act human, has completely nonhuman cultural traits, and works with completely nonhuman tech. If any humans or human-like aliens show up, they end up being the protagonists to the story, because we're wired to be into ourselves.
Under The Skin could have been this far out story, except it still ended up a predator thing with shades of thought about society, sexuality and the objectification of women, rather than pondering how a truly alien creature stuck here might try to get by.
On the other hand, if the creature had been a sentient slime mold using those weird otherworldly person-dissolving sequences as an attempt to understand humans (because the alien species might communicate, say, by digesting samples of each others' nervous tissue) and there hadn't been a sexual component and it never looked like Scarlett Johansson, I don't think the movie would have been made at all!
[Picture linked off of the IMDB page for the movie]
For fiction about animals or aliens, we just can't bring ourselves to care about those characters much unless they're anthropomorphized. That's just being human. Even robots can't be heroes unless they're given human-like behaviors or certain recognizably human-like quirks, like Wall-E. Just look at the big eyes and how he moves! And he and Eva are even gendered, despite being robots, because we just wouldn't care as much if they weren't.
[Picture linked off of the IMDB page for the movie]
Having anthro characters is a major limiting element to the radicalness of sf. With human-ish characters, the imagined tech also has human-ish constraints, and at this point, I think most of the non-super-weird tech constraints for human-ish characters have been explored. And if it hasn't been done yet in SF, it's probably been done in fantasy with magic-equivalents to the technology. Alternate worlds, time travel, the creation of new life, the manipulation of existing life, new ways to kill, new ways to heal, new ways to communicate, new ways to share information, new ways to manipulate emotion, new ways to manipulate thought, new ways to end the world, new ways to save the world, new ways to survive past the end of the world--none of them are new anymore!
It's just harder now to break into something that hasn't been thought of before already in terms of human concerns. Humans have been writing in ways shaped by those concerns since we've had writing, and were telling stories affected by those same concerns since we've had complex speech. We have a few more fears now with the advent of our technologies and more knowledge, but they tend to be elaborate sub-flavors along the same lines of our discovery of fire and tools--that is, how they can be used and mis-used.
Then there are other constraints--those of taste, morality, etc. It's possible to write extremely interesting stories about the distant future of high tech drug culture and sexual profiteering, but... if the point is for sf to inspire future tech, I don't think people really want to be pushing these boundaries anyway (except for the ones who already do, and they tend to get stigmatized).
---
BTW, I haven't looked it up, but if nobody's written about sentient slime molds communicating by means of dissolving samples of each others' nerve tissues yet, I'm calling it as mine and using it in a story sometime!
---
---
Found this article via reddit and thought about it.
---
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/im...
---
1) The fear thing. That hasn't actually caused sf writers to be less imaginative.
The fear thing and a lack of understanding has affected much more significant things though. Non-science/tech people are much more likely these days to distrust scientists, engineers and doctors, which is why we get anti-science people in congress, various flavors of denialists, anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements.
Decades ago, scientists were usually the guys who came up with how to beat the alien invaders or cure the disease. Now, they're usually the cause of the disease, or it's "hubris" that causes the disaster.
In World War Z, who figured out the key to survival? Was it a scientist, or any of the many doctors who maybe should have noticed that zombies weren't going after super-sick patients? It was some UN inspector guy. Couldn't they have at least had Brad Pitt be a doctor from the WHO or Doctors Without Borders or something? That's probably not because the screenwriters didn't think of it, but because a lot of people tend to be underwhelmed by real experts.
[Picture linked off of the IMDB page for the movie]
2) Creativity/radical sf.
The low-hanging fruit has all been taken. By now, there have been millions of SF stories. Truly 'radical' and imaginative sf that hasn't already been covered by the past is difficult...
In the 1930s, almost 100 years ago, adventurers in space with ray guns coming across aliens drew in readers. The same sort of story *still* draws in readers, but they're not remotely new anymore, and there have been so many iterations, the newness happens in the plot and the characterization and the thoughts about civilization/humanity, rather than in science/tech concepts.
Truly original SF at this point is hard, and even when it happens, it usually ends up REALLY weird, far enough out there that it doesn't get traction with many readers and has little chance of propagating out to popular imagination.
In the end, people like to read about people, or if they read about aliens, the aliens are really just exotified humans. It would be a work of far greater creative and artistic power than most writers have to get readers into a story in which the main character isn't human, doesn't act human, has completely nonhuman cultural traits, and works with completely nonhuman tech. If any humans or human-like aliens show up, they end up being the protagonists to the story, because we're wired to be into ourselves.
Under The Skin could have been this far out story, except it still ended up a predator thing with shades of thought about society, sexuality and the objectification of women, rather than pondering how a truly alien creature stuck here might try to get by.
On the other hand, if the creature had been a sentient slime mold using those weird otherworldly person-dissolving sequences as an attempt to understand humans (because the alien species might communicate, say, by digesting samples of each others' nervous tissue) and there hadn't been a sexual component and it never looked like Scarlett Johansson, I don't think the movie would have been made at all!
[Picture linked off of the IMDB page for the movie]
For fiction about animals or aliens, we just can't bring ourselves to care about those characters much unless they're anthropomorphized. That's just being human. Even robots can't be heroes unless they're given human-like behaviors or certain recognizably human-like quirks, like Wall-E. Just look at the big eyes and how he moves! And he and Eva are even gendered, despite being robots, because we just wouldn't care as much if they weren't.
[Picture linked off of the IMDB page for the movie]
Having anthro characters is a major limiting element to the radicalness of sf. With human-ish characters, the imagined tech also has human-ish constraints, and at this point, I think most of the non-super-weird tech constraints for human-ish characters have been explored. And if it hasn't been done yet in SF, it's probably been done in fantasy with magic-equivalents to the technology. Alternate worlds, time travel, the creation of new life, the manipulation of existing life, new ways to kill, new ways to heal, new ways to communicate, new ways to share information, new ways to manipulate emotion, new ways to manipulate thought, new ways to end the world, new ways to save the world, new ways to survive past the end of the world--none of them are new anymore!
It's just harder now to break into something that hasn't been thought of before already in terms of human concerns. Humans have been writing in ways shaped by those concerns since we've had writing, and were telling stories affected by those same concerns since we've had complex speech. We have a few more fears now with the advent of our technologies and more knowledge, but they tend to be elaborate sub-flavors along the same lines of our discovery of fire and tools--that is, how they can be used and mis-used.
Then there are other constraints--those of taste, morality, etc. It's possible to write extremely interesting stories about the distant future of high tech drug culture and sexual profiteering, but... if the point is for sf to inspire future tech, I don't think people really want to be pushing these boundaries anyway (except for the ones who already do, and they tend to get stigmatized).
---
BTW, I haven't looked it up, but if nobody's written about sentient slime molds communicating by means of dissolving samples of each others' nerve tissues yet, I'm calling it as mine and using it in a story sometime!
---
November 4, 2014
Cover reveal on Hodderscape!
Cover reveal for Black Disc! Another awesome cover by Raid 71
That description may still change somewhat--the story changed a fair amount since that original pitch, and it will change more over editing.
http://www.hodderscape.co.uk/cover-re...
---
For those who follow my public FB page, it should be obvious that this is the book that's been driving me mad over the past year's writing.
Black Disc has gone through maybe 9 versions before I finally completed a draft. I was writing that draft up to the very limit of my revised deadline.
That's how much trouble this story's been giving me.
I am not certain why it was so difficult (beyond the sophomore curse). The Forever Watch draft took me 3 months, + 1 month lost to another version.
What happened exactly?
Well, I'm a plotter. I like having a formal process, I like knowing more or less 90% where things are going to go before I write them. AND THEY WEREN'T GOING THERE! I ended up seat-of-my-pants-ing through the damned thing despite myself. My outlines, my character plans, they were almost useless.
One of the discarded drafts was almost 70% complete or so.
The characters changed wildly over the different versions, going from 11 years old on the young end aged up to 20s on the opposite.
Some were 3rd person, some were 1st person.
Some were purely chronological, some were told in flashbacks.
My main consolation is that, like most writers, I am far better on rewrites. I have confidence that there is something special in there--it'll just take even more work to bring it out.
That description may still change somewhat--the story changed a fair amount since that original pitch, and it will change more over editing.
http://www.hodderscape.co.uk/cover-re...
---
For those who follow my public FB page, it should be obvious that this is the book that's been driving me mad over the past year's writing.
Black Disc has gone through maybe 9 versions before I finally completed a draft. I was writing that draft up to the very limit of my revised deadline.
That's how much trouble this story's been giving me.
I am not certain why it was so difficult (beyond the sophomore curse). The Forever Watch draft took me 3 months, + 1 month lost to another version.
What happened exactly?
Well, I'm a plotter. I like having a formal process, I like knowing more or less 90% where things are going to go before I write them. AND THEY WEREN'T GOING THERE! I ended up seat-of-my-pants-ing through the damned thing despite myself. My outlines, my character plans, they were almost useless.
One of the discarded drafts was almost 70% complete or so.
The characters changed wildly over the different versions, going from 11 years old on the young end aged up to 20s on the opposite.
Some were 3rd person, some were 1st person.
Some were purely chronological, some were told in flashbacks.
My main consolation is that, like most writers, I am far better on rewrites. I have confidence that there is something special in there--it'll just take even more work to bring it out.
October 5, 2014
Arakawa's strong female protagonists
http://www.themarysue.com/hiromu-arak...
It's been a while since I've seen FMA, so I may be a little off.
---
The article is mostly well-written, but I agree with one of the people in the comments section that this is interpreting a different culture through a Western lens of feminism and doesn't take into account some of the cultural differences.
Like the perception of cooking/housewifery as a fundamental feminine qualifier. It's not that Winry is a capable business person who is ALSO still a capable homemaker and nurturer, which is how she is seen from a Western perspective, but that if she could not cook anymore, if she could not nurture anymore, that would be a sign of femininity she had sacrificed from the Japanese perspective, as with how Tendo Akane is a horrific cook in Takahashi's Ranma 0.5.
Another example. The article author mentions Izumi Curtis' proud declaration that she's a housewife despite being super strong and capable... then glosses by her having a hyper-masculine caricature of a husband... and the very deep inner pain of Izumi being barren. She may be accomplished and strong, but it's still kind of portrayed as a major part of her sin and unhappiness that she cannot have children through her own crime. It's shown to be the greatest failure of her life, with ongoing consequences for her health. There is still some deep cultural and gendered stereotyping going on with that, a vibe of "if you can't have children, you aren't a real woman."
So FMA is progressive, but maybe not by as much as the article author believes... and simultaneously, some of the quibbles sound unrealistic.
Like on Silver Spoon (the guys not apologizing for having made fun of the overweight girl). Some people change some, some people change a lot, and some people don't change at all, so the complaint about the boys not apologizing is weird. A lot of people in real life will apologize as little as they can get away with, because acknowledging fault is stressful and often requires more self-reflection than is comfortable.
Not every creative work has to address everything and mentioning the lack of LGBT characters feels less like valid criticism and more like--well, does every single great creative have to address the entire range of humanity? That's an impossible standard, and it seems foolish to mention it as if it should be an expectation, an item on a list to tick off with a checkmark.
Also, the comments on Lust bug me. Why does the presentation of Lust have to be 'mollified' at all? Not every female character in a work needs to be complex/and/or positive portrayal of feminine attributes.
Anyway, yeah. Arakawa is great, and she has lots of strong and complex characters who happen to be women (and some who happen to be men). But feminism is a different thing in Japan, and some of the article (and commenter) commentary reveals cultural crossed wires.
It's been a while since I've seen FMA, so I may be a little off.
---
The article is mostly well-written, but I agree with one of the people in the comments section that this is interpreting a different culture through a Western lens of feminism and doesn't take into account some of the cultural differences.
Like the perception of cooking/housewifery as a fundamental feminine qualifier. It's not that Winry is a capable business person who is ALSO still a capable homemaker and nurturer, which is how she is seen from a Western perspective, but that if she could not cook anymore, if she could not nurture anymore, that would be a sign of femininity she had sacrificed from the Japanese perspective, as with how Tendo Akane is a horrific cook in Takahashi's Ranma 0.5.
Another example. The article author mentions Izumi Curtis' proud declaration that she's a housewife despite being super strong and capable... then glosses by her having a hyper-masculine caricature of a husband... and the very deep inner pain of Izumi being barren. She may be accomplished and strong, but it's still kind of portrayed as a major part of her sin and unhappiness that she cannot have children through her own crime. It's shown to be the greatest failure of her life, with ongoing consequences for her health. There is still some deep cultural and gendered stereotyping going on with that, a vibe of "if you can't have children, you aren't a real woman."
So FMA is progressive, but maybe not by as much as the article author believes... and simultaneously, some of the quibbles sound unrealistic.
Like on Silver Spoon (the guys not apologizing for having made fun of the overweight girl). Some people change some, some people change a lot, and some people don't change at all, so the complaint about the boys not apologizing is weird. A lot of people in real life will apologize as little as they can get away with, because acknowledging fault is stressful and often requires more self-reflection than is comfortable.
Not every creative work has to address everything and mentioning the lack of LGBT characters feels less like valid criticism and more like--well, does every single great creative have to address the entire range of humanity? That's an impossible standard, and it seems foolish to mention it as if it should be an expectation, an item on a list to tick off with a checkmark.
Also, the comments on Lust bug me. Why does the presentation of Lust have to be 'mollified' at all? Not every female character in a work needs to be complex/and/or positive portrayal of feminine attributes.
Anyway, yeah. Arakawa is great, and she has lots of strong and complex characters who happen to be women (and some who happen to be men). But feminism is a different thing in Japan, and some of the article (and commenter) commentary reveals cultural crossed wires.
August 26, 2014
Internet Rage and Being Human
I was interacting with a friend on Facebook about rage and misogyny in the gaming community while waiting for a call from a creative who often discusses transhumanism and the singularity with me.
Yeah, this is a little too long, and it's rambling. But I'm not getting paid for it, so there.
-- It's not just gaming
Rage, trolling, hate, etc, exist everywhere there is on the internet. Sports forums, political forums, even forums for art criticism or motherhood.
I have come to believe that this is one of the symptoms of the lag between our very old, slow-evolving human brains, and our very new, fast-evolving technologies.
I don't want to make light of rape threats, hacking and doxing. Those are serious acts that cause serious harm.
But I now think that the vast majority of the people engaging in these online behaviors are very, very different "in real life."
Doesn't that phrase, IRL, say it all? It's as if what is online isn't real, even though it can do real harm.
I mean, not to undercut the concepts of white/male/western privilege, but "in real life," face to face, most of the time, privilege results in microagressions and unconscious, unintentional offensiveness--a far cry from the massive outpouring of hostility and sheer hatred that can dominate any online community that does not have active moderators.
This suggests to me that there is an asymmetric response in the human brain to online interactions.
Most humans have a hard time thinking of the abstract as real. It's why steadily smaller proportions of the human population are comfortable with steadily more abstract fields of thought like quantum physics and number theory. 1+1, we can teach to kids with just our fingers. Calculus takes years of background before we can teach it. And so forth.
Abstract people? Our brains just aren't wired to treat people online as real people.
Our instinctive empathy has a biological component hardwired into our heads. It works with things we can see and touch and sympathize with (which is why, when we watch real war footage or victims of natural disasters, the better part of human nature rises to want to help others). Our empathy triggers at the sight of a starving dog, and that's not even the same species!
So why are we so quick to lash out at other, real people online?
When it's just text comments on reddit or status updates on facebook or tweets, human empathy does not auto-trigger in the same way.
While our rational minds "know" that there's a real person behind every online account and comment, our instinctive brains don't see them as real. They are abstractions, like npcs in an rpg.
However, while online interactions limit our empathic response, we as individuals still feel hurt when we are insulted with words or see something we strongly disagree with. So the part of the brain that handles aggression *does fire up* and trigger instinctively.
Remember the "Voight-Kampff" test from BladeRunner? On the internet, everybody's a Replicant.
---
Abstraction is also used as a tool in conflicts. In real life, people engaged in war are often encouraged not to see their opponents as real people, because empathy slows down and diminishes the aggressive response to kill. In that context, objectification is a deliberate tool.
This is also the danger of extremist media reporting and disinformation that promotes hate. Part of their strategy is to create an abstract 'enemy'--the opposite of the strategy that the LGBT movement has successfully used to shift US opinion on gay marriage (by humanizing the concept of a gay person--making what was a hazy fear into a concrete human being). To put it another way, gay marriage foes want to frame the debate as an attack on an easily hateable, abstract foe attacking the institution of marriage, while gay marriage supporters frame the debate in terms of, "we're the same as you."
It's easier to hate people when they're things.
We don't scream at random people on the street (unless maybe they almost hit your car), but in a sporting arena, watching a basketball or football game, we abstract away the harm and it's easy to call out for the blood of the other team. Until, of course, a serious injury happens, then most people wince and are sympathetic, especially if there's a close-up like someone's leg being folded the wrong way.
Then, suddenly, we're all human again. Mostly.
---
I believe this asymmetric response to abstraction is the cause of much of the disproportionate hate that happens online.
This is just one of those symptoms of technology outpacing biology. Our brains don't naturally extend positive emotion and empathy to the abstract--these are difficult, learned behaviors that don't come naturally. Negative emotion though, oy, it pops to life and burns with the fire of a million suns with just the tiniest spark.
I'm not trying to excuse misogyny and racism online. Those are very real, and in meatspace, result in situations like Ferguson, and rape and murder and war, etc. Definitely still too much of all of that happening, racism is real, racial profiling is the norm for traffic stops instead of the exception, sexism is real, women get harassed at cons, get belittled in games and comics stores, etc. A grocery pulls kosher goods off its shelves in fear of an anti-Israel rally happening outside.
Very real problems I'm not trying to diminish, both IRL and on the net.
What I'm saying is that the internet, by the very nature of human response to it, amplifies these tendencies and magnifies the proportion and severity of bad behaviors. The people that would already rape/kill IRL don't have any farther in severity to go on the net, but those who are mostly decent and are only the way they are because of ignorance sound way worse on the net. Small hatreds become big hatreds on the net, small resentments become intense anger, etc.
It's a process of distortion. The internet shifts anger upward, including the continuum of prejudice.
It's unfortunately part of human nature. Just as we need police and laws in the physical realm, we need policing and laws online. Possibly, we need *more* policing online.
And more than this, I think cultural outrage on media sites and blogs, while constructive and important, are not sufficient for changing human behavior online on a large scale.
I think we need to change the way we teach our youth. We teach kids to share toys when they play and not to be mean to each other on playgrounds and in school. This doesn't naturally extend to online interactions because humans just don't handle abstraction well, so we need to teach our kids and habituate them to being polite to others online and to have emotional response and empathy with others in an online context, as entirely separate activities from teaching them these things "in real life."
On a less conflict-oriented tangent--this would also be why humans want to meet face to face when discussing important matters. Our brains are wired for the visible and the tangible. We prefer face to face discussions to phone conversations and phone conversations to sms messages. Unless we're trying to avoid those people, of course.
---
This is also why many of the most successful writers are those who can make abstract collections of descriptions and dialogue perceived as real persons to their readers.
---
I've been saying for a while now that humans change the world and develop technology faster than our biology can evolve to adapt to it.
By no means am I suggesting a cap on tech, or pulling on the reins.
As time has gone on, violence, crime, etc, have trended down on long time scales. It's no coincidence that this has gone alongside our improving technologies.
While we should acknowledge that tech isn't an automatic solution for things and often creates problems as well as solves them, technology has steadily allowed us as a species to surpass our biology and better our own natures.
I write here that the internet itself interacts with our minds in a way that predisposes a large segment of the population to worse "virtual" (as opposed to "real") behaviors, but the internet and all forms of improvements in the dissemination of thought and communication have only led us to step beyond ourselves more and more, to use the abstract to change the concrete, to accomplish things our ancestors could not remotely imagine.
We're going to work this out, eventually.
Until then, well, while it doesn't reduce the harm internet hate causes, it's important to consider that it has other causes alongside personal biases. It's not about assholes on 4chan, it's about the full range of human hate and what happens when the internet happens to hate.
Yeah, this is a little too long, and it's rambling. But I'm not getting paid for it, so there.
-- It's not just gaming
Rage, trolling, hate, etc, exist everywhere there is on the internet. Sports forums, political forums, even forums for art criticism or motherhood.
I have come to believe that this is one of the symptoms of the lag between our very old, slow-evolving human brains, and our very new, fast-evolving technologies.
I don't want to make light of rape threats, hacking and doxing. Those are serious acts that cause serious harm.
But I now think that the vast majority of the people engaging in these online behaviors are very, very different "in real life."
Doesn't that phrase, IRL, say it all? It's as if what is online isn't real, even though it can do real harm.
I mean, not to undercut the concepts of white/male/western privilege, but "in real life," face to face, most of the time, privilege results in microagressions and unconscious, unintentional offensiveness--a far cry from the massive outpouring of hostility and sheer hatred that can dominate any online community that does not have active moderators.
This suggests to me that there is an asymmetric response in the human brain to online interactions.
Most humans have a hard time thinking of the abstract as real. It's why steadily smaller proportions of the human population are comfortable with steadily more abstract fields of thought like quantum physics and number theory. 1+1, we can teach to kids with just our fingers. Calculus takes years of background before we can teach it. And so forth.
Abstract people? Our brains just aren't wired to treat people online as real people.
Our instinctive empathy has a biological component hardwired into our heads. It works with things we can see and touch and sympathize with (which is why, when we watch real war footage or victims of natural disasters, the better part of human nature rises to want to help others). Our empathy triggers at the sight of a starving dog, and that's not even the same species!
So why are we so quick to lash out at other, real people online?
When it's just text comments on reddit or status updates on facebook or tweets, human empathy does not auto-trigger in the same way.
While our rational minds "know" that there's a real person behind every online account and comment, our instinctive brains don't see them as real. They are abstractions, like npcs in an rpg.
However, while online interactions limit our empathic response, we as individuals still feel hurt when we are insulted with words or see something we strongly disagree with. So the part of the brain that handles aggression *does fire up* and trigger instinctively.
Remember the "Voight-Kampff" test from BladeRunner? On the internet, everybody's a Replicant.
---
Abstraction is also used as a tool in conflicts. In real life, people engaged in war are often encouraged not to see their opponents as real people, because empathy slows down and diminishes the aggressive response to kill. In that context, objectification is a deliberate tool.
This is also the danger of extremist media reporting and disinformation that promotes hate. Part of their strategy is to create an abstract 'enemy'--the opposite of the strategy that the LGBT movement has successfully used to shift US opinion on gay marriage (by humanizing the concept of a gay person--making what was a hazy fear into a concrete human being). To put it another way, gay marriage foes want to frame the debate as an attack on an easily hateable, abstract foe attacking the institution of marriage, while gay marriage supporters frame the debate in terms of, "we're the same as you."
It's easier to hate people when they're things.
We don't scream at random people on the street (unless maybe they almost hit your car), but in a sporting arena, watching a basketball or football game, we abstract away the harm and it's easy to call out for the blood of the other team. Until, of course, a serious injury happens, then most people wince and are sympathetic, especially if there's a close-up like someone's leg being folded the wrong way.
Then, suddenly, we're all human again. Mostly.
---
I believe this asymmetric response to abstraction is the cause of much of the disproportionate hate that happens online.
This is just one of those symptoms of technology outpacing biology. Our brains don't naturally extend positive emotion and empathy to the abstract--these are difficult, learned behaviors that don't come naturally. Negative emotion though, oy, it pops to life and burns with the fire of a million suns with just the tiniest spark.
I'm not trying to excuse misogyny and racism online. Those are very real, and in meatspace, result in situations like Ferguson, and rape and murder and war, etc. Definitely still too much of all of that happening, racism is real, racial profiling is the norm for traffic stops instead of the exception, sexism is real, women get harassed at cons, get belittled in games and comics stores, etc. A grocery pulls kosher goods off its shelves in fear of an anti-Israel rally happening outside.
Very real problems I'm not trying to diminish, both IRL and on the net.
What I'm saying is that the internet, by the very nature of human response to it, amplifies these tendencies and magnifies the proportion and severity of bad behaviors. The people that would already rape/kill IRL don't have any farther in severity to go on the net, but those who are mostly decent and are only the way they are because of ignorance sound way worse on the net. Small hatreds become big hatreds on the net, small resentments become intense anger, etc.
It's a process of distortion. The internet shifts anger upward, including the continuum of prejudice.
It's unfortunately part of human nature. Just as we need police and laws in the physical realm, we need policing and laws online. Possibly, we need *more* policing online.
And more than this, I think cultural outrage on media sites and blogs, while constructive and important, are not sufficient for changing human behavior online on a large scale.
I think we need to change the way we teach our youth. We teach kids to share toys when they play and not to be mean to each other on playgrounds and in school. This doesn't naturally extend to online interactions because humans just don't handle abstraction well, so we need to teach our kids and habituate them to being polite to others online and to have emotional response and empathy with others in an online context, as entirely separate activities from teaching them these things "in real life."
On a less conflict-oriented tangent--this would also be why humans want to meet face to face when discussing important matters. Our brains are wired for the visible and the tangible. We prefer face to face discussions to phone conversations and phone conversations to sms messages. Unless we're trying to avoid those people, of course.
---
This is also why many of the most successful writers are those who can make abstract collections of descriptions and dialogue perceived as real persons to their readers.
---
I've been saying for a while now that humans change the world and develop technology faster than our biology can evolve to adapt to it.
By no means am I suggesting a cap on tech, or pulling on the reins.
As time has gone on, violence, crime, etc, have trended down on long time scales. It's no coincidence that this has gone alongside our improving technologies.
While we should acknowledge that tech isn't an automatic solution for things and often creates problems as well as solves them, technology has steadily allowed us as a species to surpass our biology and better our own natures.
I write here that the internet itself interacts with our minds in a way that predisposes a large segment of the population to worse "virtual" (as opposed to "real") behaviors, but the internet and all forms of improvements in the dissemination of thought and communication have only led us to step beyond ourselves more and more, to use the abstract to change the concrete, to accomplish things our ancestors could not remotely imagine.
We're going to work this out, eventually.
Until then, well, while it doesn't reduce the harm internet hate causes, it's important to consider that it has other causes alongside personal biases. It's not about assholes on 4chan, it's about the full range of human hate and what happens when the internet happens to hate.
August 15, 2014
Why SF&F writers should read mma blogs
---
http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2014/8/15/...
---
Technical analysis of strikes, transitions, grappling, tactics, with gifs.
This is the sort of nonfiction reading that's useful to writers who want to include hand-to-hand fight scenes in their stuff. If you write sword-fighting scenes, you should go to thearma.org, and so forth.
There are a fair number of fantasy authors I'd read (and loved) who wrote exciting fight scenes... And now that I'm older and have actually taken more of an interest in combat sports and scholarly works on swordsmanship, it's obvious they really didn't know what they were writing about.
This was not really much of a problem; only a small fraction of geeks cared about the authenticity of fantasy novels (unlike in SF, in which people regularly got into serious deep thinking about FTL, advanced weaponry, computers, etc long before). But in this age of MMA as a major sport, with esoteric combat sports like longsword competitions or spectacular karate knockouts with leaping, tumbling do mawashi kicks on youtube, and all kinds of historical research on real life fighting technique and weaponry on the net, I'd like to think that the fantasy audience is gradually becoming more sophisticated about what it reads. There are growing subforums on reddit for enthusiasts of historical combat and so forth.
These resources were much harder to find when I was a kid, pre-internet. So writers would have trouble finding them too!
But now, the resources are out there. Use them!
There is a real interest in realistic blood-and-guts fantasy fiction, I think, which has not yet been fully tapped (other than G.R.R. Martin's giant epic of course... and Vikings). Fantasy is reaching its vampire, fairy, steampunk, etc saturation point... maybe it's time for a grittier sword-and-sorcery revival? Orrr maybe it's already happened with a wave of GRR Martin imitators I've just not heard about? Hmm.
There's been an explosion of books getting published, so I've actually not been the best at keeping track of new trends--I mostly notice them when they're almost over and the aisles in the brick-and-mortars are saturated. Yeah, I still shop in physical stores.
Even for writers in other categories though, it's good to read these things if your characters ever do engage in physical combat. If you've got razor girls cybered out in heavy chrome who can leap across twenty feet, you can still think about how real hand-to-hand combat, with feints and timing and footwork, gets altered by superhuman capability.
Speaking of which: Neal Stephenson is probably the most hardcore sword enthusiast among writers who've sold a lot of books. I'm sad that his video game didn't work out (though not surprised: I've tried to do a video game before with friends and it is REALLY hard to collaborate with a large interdisciplinary team, it's a totally different skill set).
---on the article itself
Oh Maynard.
I think the same thing happened to Brock Lesnar. More so than than his serious intestinal issues, I think that the fight with Shane Carwin demolished Brock Lesnar's mental state for handling punches.
While Brock did weather Carwin's heavy assault and come back to win, he took ENORMOUS damage from a really powerful puncher.
After that, Brock became afraid of getting hit. Before, he could still think while getting hit and fight, but after the Carwin fight, he'd freeze up and instinctively try to run instead of defending himself.
Certainly, recovering from the diverticulosis sapped his athleticism, but the Brock I saw post-Carwin had more problems with the head game than with his strength or endurance. And it didn't help that he only trained in his own gym instead of going out to the really great MMA gyms that could have given him technique to go with his incredible physical talents.
http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2014/8/15/...
---
Technical analysis of strikes, transitions, grappling, tactics, with gifs.
This is the sort of nonfiction reading that's useful to writers who want to include hand-to-hand fight scenes in their stuff. If you write sword-fighting scenes, you should go to thearma.org, and so forth.
There are a fair number of fantasy authors I'd read (and loved) who wrote exciting fight scenes... And now that I'm older and have actually taken more of an interest in combat sports and scholarly works on swordsmanship, it's obvious they really didn't know what they were writing about.
This was not really much of a problem; only a small fraction of geeks cared about the authenticity of fantasy novels (unlike in SF, in which people regularly got into serious deep thinking about FTL, advanced weaponry, computers, etc long before). But in this age of MMA as a major sport, with esoteric combat sports like longsword competitions or spectacular karate knockouts with leaping, tumbling do mawashi kicks on youtube, and all kinds of historical research on real life fighting technique and weaponry on the net, I'd like to think that the fantasy audience is gradually becoming more sophisticated about what it reads. There are growing subforums on reddit for enthusiasts of historical combat and so forth.
These resources were much harder to find when I was a kid, pre-internet. So writers would have trouble finding them too!
But now, the resources are out there. Use them!
There is a real interest in realistic blood-and-guts fantasy fiction, I think, which has not yet been fully tapped (other than G.R.R. Martin's giant epic of course... and Vikings). Fantasy is reaching its vampire, fairy, steampunk, etc saturation point... maybe it's time for a grittier sword-and-sorcery revival? Orrr maybe it's already happened with a wave of GRR Martin imitators I've just not heard about? Hmm.
There's been an explosion of books getting published, so I've actually not been the best at keeping track of new trends--I mostly notice them when they're almost over and the aisles in the brick-and-mortars are saturated. Yeah, I still shop in physical stores.
Even for writers in other categories though, it's good to read these things if your characters ever do engage in physical combat. If you've got razor girls cybered out in heavy chrome who can leap across twenty feet, you can still think about how real hand-to-hand combat, with feints and timing and footwork, gets altered by superhuman capability.
Speaking of which: Neal Stephenson is probably the most hardcore sword enthusiast among writers who've sold a lot of books. I'm sad that his video game didn't work out (though not surprised: I've tried to do a video game before with friends and it is REALLY hard to collaborate with a large interdisciplinary team, it's a totally different skill set).
---on the article itself
Oh Maynard.
I think the same thing happened to Brock Lesnar. More so than than his serious intestinal issues, I think that the fight with Shane Carwin demolished Brock Lesnar's mental state for handling punches.
While Brock did weather Carwin's heavy assault and come back to win, he took ENORMOUS damage from a really powerful puncher.
After that, Brock became afraid of getting hit. Before, he could still think while getting hit and fight, but after the Carwin fight, he'd freeze up and instinctively try to run instead of defending himself.
Certainly, recovering from the diverticulosis sapped his athleticism, but the Brock I saw post-Carwin had more problems with the head game than with his strength or endurance. And it didn't help that he only trained in his own gym instead of going out to the really great MMA gyms that could have given him technique to go with his incredible physical talents.
July 30, 2014
Future Fears, again
Spotify and Pandora are disrupting the heck out of the music business model.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/d...
That's what I'm worried about happening for publishing. With Amazon's foray into subscription e-book services, I can't help thinking that it's inevitable that such services will come to dominate.
Consider this.
Casual readers (1 or 2 books a year) will not switch over to a subscription service. But what books do such readers buy? For the most part, they *already* only buy bestselling titles that their friends tell them they have to buy.
Moderate readers are on the borderline--it might be worth it to them to subscribe, it might be worth it to them to only buy the specific titles they want. This is the segment of the market that subscription services can win over as their catalogs get bigger and bigger--there's a point at which moderate readers (1+ books per month) won't have a reason to *not* subscribe.
The voracious readers get immediate and incomparable value for subscribing. This is a big problem, because it's the voracious readers who do the most discovery of new authors. Outside of the bestseller lists, books will tend to be read *only* by the voracious readers, and once they sign up for a subscription service, sales for everything except bestselling titles will drop.
I was chatting about this on Facebook with Charles Tan and he sent me a link to the Smashwords/Scribd terms, which seem very generous... If subscription service terms could stick to that, I would have no worries, in fact, that could probably increase income.
http://blog.smashwords.com/2013/12/sm...
The problem is, I don't think it's sustainable. The company would take a loss on any "power-user" who makes multiple qualifying reads per month, and can only profit off of those borderline moderate users.
If the ratio of borderline/power user stays high, is this a problem? Maybe not...
Except that moderate users will tend to read the high volume titles too--there's not going to be much motivation to explore too far down the bestseller lists when there are going to be so many more titles than they can read per month.
What I'm saying is, it's not just sales of individual titles that will drop. The *pool of money* itself will drop. The subscription fees won't make up for the loss in sales. Just like how Spotify and Pandora are making music sales drop and aren't making back that money in fees.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/perma...
And more than that, it's possible that there will be the double-whammy of sales dropping, plus each read on a subscription service being worth less to everyone other than the bestselling writers. I suspect it's the power users that are going to drive the money--and the money is going to go disproportionately to the high volume authors who can generate 100s of thousands of reads, while authors who generate some thousands of reads per title only will probably get a significantly smaller slice.
In order to sustain an equitable royalty per read regardless of reader volume, a service is going to need a really high ratio of moderate readers to power readers, or a huge amount of ad revenue.
It's possible, but I just don't know.
Only "power" readers, the voracious readers that go through multiple titles a month, are going to explore beyond the tops of the rankings. This situation already existed before subscription services, but each exploration before *was an income-generating sale* whereas now it is a read-through... which turns power-readers into an income loss for the service if they read more titles than is equivalent to their subscription fee. They can drive down the royalty rate for lower-volume audience titles, so that the service can still pay fair value to the big guns who bring in lots of reads.
So, yeah. I could be wrong, and I'm hoping I'm wrong. The problem is, we've already seen what happened with Spotify and Pandora. Are e-books different enough from music to result in a different consumer pattern that can sustain rewarding midlist and niche writers? I guess, with Scribd steadily gaining customers and Amazon throwing its muscles into the mix, we're going to find out.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/d...
That's what I'm worried about happening for publishing. With Amazon's foray into subscription e-book services, I can't help thinking that it's inevitable that such services will come to dominate.
Consider this.
Casual readers (1 or 2 books a year) will not switch over to a subscription service. But what books do such readers buy? For the most part, they *already* only buy bestselling titles that their friends tell them they have to buy.
Moderate readers are on the borderline--it might be worth it to them to subscribe, it might be worth it to them to only buy the specific titles they want. This is the segment of the market that subscription services can win over as their catalogs get bigger and bigger--there's a point at which moderate readers (1+ books per month) won't have a reason to *not* subscribe.
The voracious readers get immediate and incomparable value for subscribing. This is a big problem, because it's the voracious readers who do the most discovery of new authors. Outside of the bestseller lists, books will tend to be read *only* by the voracious readers, and once they sign up for a subscription service, sales for everything except bestselling titles will drop.
I was chatting about this on Facebook with Charles Tan and he sent me a link to the Smashwords/Scribd terms, which seem very generous... If subscription service terms could stick to that, I would have no worries, in fact, that could probably increase income.
http://blog.smashwords.com/2013/12/sm...
The problem is, I don't think it's sustainable. The company would take a loss on any "power-user" who makes multiple qualifying reads per month, and can only profit off of those borderline moderate users.
If the ratio of borderline/power user stays high, is this a problem? Maybe not...
Except that moderate users will tend to read the high volume titles too--there's not going to be much motivation to explore too far down the bestseller lists when there are going to be so many more titles than they can read per month.
What I'm saying is, it's not just sales of individual titles that will drop. The *pool of money* itself will drop. The subscription fees won't make up for the loss in sales. Just like how Spotify and Pandora are making music sales drop and aren't making back that money in fees.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/perma...
And more than that, it's possible that there will be the double-whammy of sales dropping, plus each read on a subscription service being worth less to everyone other than the bestselling writers. I suspect it's the power users that are going to drive the money--and the money is going to go disproportionately to the high volume authors who can generate 100s of thousands of reads, while authors who generate some thousands of reads per title only will probably get a significantly smaller slice.
In order to sustain an equitable royalty per read regardless of reader volume, a service is going to need a really high ratio of moderate readers to power readers, or a huge amount of ad revenue.
It's possible, but I just don't know.
Only "power" readers, the voracious readers that go through multiple titles a month, are going to explore beyond the tops of the rankings. This situation already existed before subscription services, but each exploration before *was an income-generating sale* whereas now it is a read-through... which turns power-readers into an income loss for the service if they read more titles than is equivalent to their subscription fee. They can drive down the royalty rate for lower-volume audience titles, so that the service can still pay fair value to the big guns who bring in lots of reads.
So, yeah. I could be wrong, and I'm hoping I'm wrong. The problem is, we've already seen what happened with Spotify and Pandora. Are e-books different enough from music to result in a different consumer pattern that can sustain rewarding midlist and niche writers? I guess, with Scribd steadily gaining customers and Amazon throwing its muscles into the mix, we're going to find out.
June 30, 2014
Character Context
While I was working on the next book, I got some feedback that one of the characters seemed like a jerk.
I tried a minor fix to explain his motivations, but it's over-explained and needs tweaking.
---
This is about the knowledge of the characters and their relative happiness/unhappiness, which I did not show enough of for context.
Character A is unhappy with his circumstances. He sees the larger world beyond the little Island he lives on and envies others the material wealth they have. He hides the considerable fortune he's made from his family while he is still young enough that his parent can just take control of it.
My reader got the impression that this added an unpleasant tinge to the character, because the family lives in very crowded circumstances, sharing an old, crumbling house with their aunts, uncles and cousins, more than a dozen people packed into the house.
---
This is definitely a cultural thing too--not that I grew up poor (I didn't), but I did grow up here in the Philippines, and even being driven back and forth from home to school in one of the family's cars, one can't avoid seeing all these less well-to-do families living in squatter towns. Or even just going around the University of the Philippines checking out rooms for rent in private homes. There are families here in the Philippines where 4 or 5 or more kids + parents all sleep in one room.
In a bit of total class disjunction, I once went to a collection of historical homes now owned by a very wealthy family that buys and restores them.
They've turned these houses (some of them from the slums--gotta love urban decay) into a tourist attraction, moving them to a resort hotel at the beach. During the tour, the guide explained that prior to the purchase and restoration of that particular house, there were tons of squatters that had contributed to its decay, and in the very room we were standing in, 14 people shared it as living space.
And now, for the price of many thousands of pesos, one can rent that house for a few nights to relax in, with its beautiful hardwood floors, all these antique furnishings, and a very unhistorically modern bathroom.
Talk about a microcosm of the Philippines--an intimate connection between extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
---
So, my perspective on character A's life is not the same as the average American's and I didn't really think about that. Given that I'm writing for western publishers and thus a western audience, I really need to!
Thus, character A. He chases material satisfaction because he wants a life his family can't give him. However, his family is not unhappy, and they don't think of themselves as poor--they know there is a larger world out there, but it does not matter to them as much, it almost isn't real.... because most of the other Tribal families they know on this fictional Island live in humble circumstances too, and in many ways, they live better than a fair number of them.
The happiness and unhappiness of a character is not just about a desire that is met or not met, but also whether or not the character regularly contacts others who have those same desires fulfilled.
Character A wants to go to an expensive college on the US mainland. He wants his own car, he wants expensive clothes, he wants the lives of the many people he reads about online he wants to be like--successful tech entrepreneurs and celebrities. He immerses himself in the knowledge of these things his family does not have, and so his unhappiness, the motivation that drives him, is intensified in a feedback cycle.
Character A's sisters and cousins mostly won't be able to go to the local university, nevermind a top 10 school in the USA. Their existence is rooted in the family fishing boat, in taking the fish to market, in their local community. The same circumstances, but while one character feeds his unhappiness, the others around him negate it and can't understand his desires.
Character A does not think he is depriving his family by not sharing his hidden money. To him, they are happy as they are, and he feels that he is the one who doesn't belong.
And yes, before he turned 18, he was terrified that his mother would just take his money from him, for the sake of the rest of the family.
Now all this stuff is material I have to have in the chapter where that character is introduced, but in a way that is not just an info-dump or lazy introspection.
Sigh, editing.
I tried a minor fix to explain his motivations, but it's over-explained and needs tweaking.
---
This is about the knowledge of the characters and their relative happiness/unhappiness, which I did not show enough of for context.
Character A is unhappy with his circumstances. He sees the larger world beyond the little Island he lives on and envies others the material wealth they have. He hides the considerable fortune he's made from his family while he is still young enough that his parent can just take control of it.
My reader got the impression that this added an unpleasant tinge to the character, because the family lives in very crowded circumstances, sharing an old, crumbling house with their aunts, uncles and cousins, more than a dozen people packed into the house.
---
This is definitely a cultural thing too--not that I grew up poor (I didn't), but I did grow up here in the Philippines, and even being driven back and forth from home to school in one of the family's cars, one can't avoid seeing all these less well-to-do families living in squatter towns. Or even just going around the University of the Philippines checking out rooms for rent in private homes. There are families here in the Philippines where 4 or 5 or more kids + parents all sleep in one room.
In a bit of total class disjunction, I once went to a collection of historical homes now owned by a very wealthy family that buys and restores them.
They've turned these houses (some of them from the slums--gotta love urban decay) into a tourist attraction, moving them to a resort hotel at the beach. During the tour, the guide explained that prior to the purchase and restoration of that particular house, there were tons of squatters that had contributed to its decay, and in the very room we were standing in, 14 people shared it as living space.
And now, for the price of many thousands of pesos, one can rent that house for a few nights to relax in, with its beautiful hardwood floors, all these antique furnishings, and a very unhistorically modern bathroom.
Talk about a microcosm of the Philippines--an intimate connection between extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
---
So, my perspective on character A's life is not the same as the average American's and I didn't really think about that. Given that I'm writing for western publishers and thus a western audience, I really need to!
Thus, character A. He chases material satisfaction because he wants a life his family can't give him. However, his family is not unhappy, and they don't think of themselves as poor--they know there is a larger world out there, but it does not matter to them as much, it almost isn't real.... because most of the other Tribal families they know on this fictional Island live in humble circumstances too, and in many ways, they live better than a fair number of them.
The happiness and unhappiness of a character is not just about a desire that is met or not met, but also whether or not the character regularly contacts others who have those same desires fulfilled.
Character A wants to go to an expensive college on the US mainland. He wants his own car, he wants expensive clothes, he wants the lives of the many people he reads about online he wants to be like--successful tech entrepreneurs and celebrities. He immerses himself in the knowledge of these things his family does not have, and so his unhappiness, the motivation that drives him, is intensified in a feedback cycle.
Character A's sisters and cousins mostly won't be able to go to the local university, nevermind a top 10 school in the USA. Their existence is rooted in the family fishing boat, in taking the fish to market, in their local community. The same circumstances, but while one character feeds his unhappiness, the others around him negate it and can't understand his desires.
Character A does not think he is depriving his family by not sharing his hidden money. To him, they are happy as they are, and he feels that he is the one who doesn't belong.
And yes, before he turned 18, he was terrified that his mother would just take his money from him, for the sake of the rest of the family.
Now all this stuff is material I have to have in the chapter where that character is introduced, but in a way that is not just an info-dump or lazy introspection.
Sigh, editing.
May 27, 2014
Writing vs Being a Writer
Just thoughts.
Writing is, of course, the primary skill required for being a writer.
But the profession of being a writer of any kind requires rather a lot more.
Especially for writing fiction.
---
I. Editing
Aside from the writing itself, there's editing. All fiction writers need someone else to do the editing and look at it with an eye from the outside, but even before someone else gets a look at it, one needs to be able to edit one's own work and get it polished up. This is especially crucial if you're just starting out and:
a) You're going trad publishing and need to sell an agent/editor on the work you can produce alone;
b) You're self-publishing and can't yet afford the thousands of dollars it takes to hire a good free-lance editor.
--
II. Social
This covers the part of the business of writing that is reaching out.
Unless you've got:
a) a giant advance from a publisher, meaning that their marketing department is going to invest a ton in trying to boost your sales, or
b) enough money to hire your own publicist,
you have to do a lot of reaching out.
Opportunities will arise to ask for help from people and a writer's got to take them. Whether reconnecting with friends and seeing if they know anyone who can, say, make you some bookmarks to use as giveaways, or do a reading from your book at your book launch, or who know people in the news who review books....
Unless a writer is some ridiculous genius or has tapped into a perfectly timed phenomenon, one has to just cold-approach people on blogs to ask if they're willing to receive a copy for review, to ask old acquaintances if they're willing to come to one's book launch, to ask anybody and everybody who could possibly help to help.
Personally, I am very lucky that my high school class is unusually close and supportive of each other. People I haven't spoken to in almost twenty years attended my book launch, took pictures, helped put me in touch with other helpful people, and slowly, steadily, are helping build the platform.
I like to write stories about fictional people! I don't practice writing articles with clickbait headlines or flash stories that can go viral (though I probably should), so the steady propagation of people who know people is a lot of what I rely on (as well as, of course, the organic fans who have no ties to me but liked the book and are also slowly growing my visibility).
Both Thomas Dunne and Hodder & Stoughton also helped of course, putting me in touch with publications willing to do interviews and reviews and features, and giving away books to people who can also propagate support. In the Philippines, National Book Store got me TV and radio interviews.
But I'm quite realistic about not being the superstar with a six-figure advance, 50 foot banners at the big cons, and elaborate book trailers. The publishers have tons of other writers to support, and that's just business.
Personally reaching out is quite vital. You never know who people you know also know! And every little bit of help is needed. Talking to strangers who walk-in during the book launch, genuinely thanking them for their support, etc.
I feel that a writer's success these days is very much reliant on the kindness of others--of people one knows, of strangers, of professional acquaintances, of people from the same high school, the same college, the same background, on the way to actually growing a fan-base that can only discover your story if they *see* it.
---
Writing is, at least for me, a totally solitary, lonely activity. But being a writer requires other people and word of mouth just as much as any other creative field (and perhaps more so--while a band can put out a performance on youtube for publicity, mostly using equipment they already possess, most writers aren't good enough voice actors to do a decent reading of their own work, and producing a real book trailer costs money).
If your natural inclination is to be snide or a jerk or to close up and hide away, you're going to have a tough time in this business (and in most jobs, really).
Being a hermit is a hefty handicap for a writer. There's just no getting around that. Even if one does have incredible stories and style and timely work and success happens, that success is magnified by being sociable and diminished by isolation.
---
So if you're an aspiring writer, aside from all the stuff having to do with the craft of writing: make friends, and practice being a good friend. Public speaking is a plus.
Writing is, of course, the primary skill required for being a writer.
But the profession of being a writer of any kind requires rather a lot more.
Especially for writing fiction.
---
I. Editing
Aside from the writing itself, there's editing. All fiction writers need someone else to do the editing and look at it with an eye from the outside, but even before someone else gets a look at it, one needs to be able to edit one's own work and get it polished up. This is especially crucial if you're just starting out and:
a) You're going trad publishing and need to sell an agent/editor on the work you can produce alone;
b) You're self-publishing and can't yet afford the thousands of dollars it takes to hire a good free-lance editor.
--
II. Social
This covers the part of the business of writing that is reaching out.
Unless you've got:
a) a giant advance from a publisher, meaning that their marketing department is going to invest a ton in trying to boost your sales, or
b) enough money to hire your own publicist,
you have to do a lot of reaching out.
Opportunities will arise to ask for help from people and a writer's got to take them. Whether reconnecting with friends and seeing if they know anyone who can, say, make you some bookmarks to use as giveaways, or do a reading from your book at your book launch, or who know people in the news who review books....
Unless a writer is some ridiculous genius or has tapped into a perfectly timed phenomenon, one has to just cold-approach people on blogs to ask if they're willing to receive a copy for review, to ask old acquaintances if they're willing to come to one's book launch, to ask anybody and everybody who could possibly help to help.
Personally, I am very lucky that my high school class is unusually close and supportive of each other. People I haven't spoken to in almost twenty years attended my book launch, took pictures, helped put me in touch with other helpful people, and slowly, steadily, are helping build the platform.
I like to write stories about fictional people! I don't practice writing articles with clickbait headlines or flash stories that can go viral (though I probably should), so the steady propagation of people who know people is a lot of what I rely on (as well as, of course, the organic fans who have no ties to me but liked the book and are also slowly growing my visibility).
Both Thomas Dunne and Hodder & Stoughton also helped of course, putting me in touch with publications willing to do interviews and reviews and features, and giving away books to people who can also propagate support. In the Philippines, National Book Store got me TV and radio interviews.
But I'm quite realistic about not being the superstar with a six-figure advance, 50 foot banners at the big cons, and elaborate book trailers. The publishers have tons of other writers to support, and that's just business.
Personally reaching out is quite vital. You never know who people you know also know! And every little bit of help is needed. Talking to strangers who walk-in during the book launch, genuinely thanking them for their support, etc.
I feel that a writer's success these days is very much reliant on the kindness of others--of people one knows, of strangers, of professional acquaintances, of people from the same high school, the same college, the same background, on the way to actually growing a fan-base that can only discover your story if they *see* it.
---
Writing is, at least for me, a totally solitary, lonely activity. But being a writer requires other people and word of mouth just as much as any other creative field (and perhaps more so--while a band can put out a performance on youtube for publicity, mostly using equipment they already possess, most writers aren't good enough voice actors to do a decent reading of their own work, and producing a real book trailer costs money).
If your natural inclination is to be snide or a jerk or to close up and hide away, you're going to have a tough time in this business (and in most jobs, really).
Being a hermit is a hefty handicap for a writer. There's just no getting around that. Even if one does have incredible stories and style and timely work and success happens, that success is magnified by being sociable and diminished by isolation.
---
So if you're an aspiring writer, aside from all the stuff having to do with the craft of writing: make friends, and practice being a good friend. Public speaking is a plus.
David Ramirez SFFWriter
As Facebook winds down its free organic reach, I'm exploring other places to begin posting regularly.
I've thought about messing with blogspot and tumblr, but I'd prefer something with a more naturall ...more
I've thought about messing with blogspot and tumblr, but I'd prefer something with a more naturall ...more
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