10 Things about My Stories

[alanajoli]

nalini_singh guest blogged today over at Silk and Shadows, listing ten things that were always true about her books. I thought it would be a fun experiment to try this on my own, so I did in the comments over there. It's hard! It's particularly hard since the space western story, "Rodeo in Area 51" took out a lot of the short-cut kind of things I could use if all of my stories were fantasy. But most of these even apply to the contemporary fiction pieces I wrote in my thesis.

Of course, when I look at this list, I imagine I see things that only I see when the writing's done.

1. There’s always an element of faith or belief, even if it’s the person fighting against their faith.
2. Borrowed mythology shows up, sometimes recognizably, sometimes disguised. I couldn’t use real-world myths for the Redemption trilogy, so I had to clothe them differently. (I'm not sure that "Rodeo in Area 51" fulfills this qualification.)
3. There’s often an unstated reference to a philosopher’s ideas (I’ve drawn on Owen Barfield and Jon Kabat Zinn for various tales).
4. There are strong women.
5. Often times, the people playing the role of nurturer or poet/romantic are male.
6. Relationships are a core focus, but often, the relationships between people who aren’t romantically involved are as important (or more important) than the ones that are. Sisters, friends, strangers who accidentally become important to each other, and even the relationship between my rodeo rider and an experimental motor-bike in the space western — they’re all over the place.
7. The cast is almost always multi-cultural, even if that just means elves or split generations. ("Nomi's Wish" is the hardest to fit into this category, but the age difference between the modern girls and Nomi, and the difference in her culture as a child from their own, is about as close to qualifying as I can bring it. I'm actually working harder on this, particularly given that rantsplosion that happened last year on various SF blogs, and I think it's important to have characters of different cultural backgrounds. In Blackstone Academy, the main characters are still predominantly white--one is learning about her Quinnipiac heritage over the course of the story, and one grew up with eccentric, mixed-religion parents, but I'm not kidding myself into thinking that they're not closest to my own culture and world-view than--but I want the school to feel diverse. Right now, I've just made a point of diversifying the names of the secondary characters, but I'm trying to be incredibly conscious of multi-cultural awareness as I'm writing, so I don't get to the end and feel like the setting is white-washed.)
8. Often the characters start out having failed at something, and part of the story is their having to overcome the emotions of having failed.
9. The emotional core of the story is almost always a moment that happens in a character’s head, rather than in a direct action climax.
10. Um… they all have my name in the byline?

As you can see, I ran out of steam for number ten -- but try this with your own writing and see if it's as challenging for you as it was for me!

--

Quick link: YA writer Albert Borris had a stroke in December, so he's been unable to promote his novel, Crash into Me, which releases this month, as he's still trying to get his words back. I wish him healing and recovery, and hope that a positive book release will help spur both forward!

Comments

[lyster.livejournal.com]

That's a really interesting idea, and very cool to think about! I might steal, I mean borrow, it for my own blog. :) Maybe we could throw these up on the Substrate site? It'd be interesting to compare!

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a great idea! I'd love to post these over at substrate.

[lyster.livejournal.com]

Representing other cultures etc. in fiction is tricky -- "whitewashing" can be dangerous, but so can cultural essentialism. I try to be relatively random in my assignment of genders, ethnicities, etc. to story roles before I start writing, and it's worked decently well so far.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I started thinking about it a lot when there was the huge kafuffle back in January. (Rose Fox's Genreville (http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/400000640/post/300039630.html) blog still has some good coverage up.) Down in Rose's comments, she addressed me in what I think is one of the best summations about multiculturalism in fiction:

The best response I've seen to that dilemma (and I don't recall now where I saw it, but it was in the most recent go-'round) is that when a white writer says "I'm stuck between getting criticism for writing only white people and criticism for writing imperfect people of color", it really means "I'm stuck between getting criticism for doing the wrong thing and getting criticism for doing the right thing imperfectly". The criticism is a red herring; the fear of criticism is a red herring. None of it excuses white writers from needing to do the best job we can of doing the right thing. If we fail--if our multi-culti casts end up full of tokens who speak in wretched eye dialect, if an ostensibly diverse group is full of people who all sound like they grew up in WASPy white enclaves and never talk about cultural history or experiencing discrimination, if we daringly put a black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise and then make her a telephone operator--then yes, we will get criticism, and we need to learn from it and then keep doing the right thing as well as we can.The best response I've seen to that dilemma (and I don't recall now where I saw it, but it was in the most recent go-'round) is that when a white writer says "I'm stuck between getting criticism for writing only white people and criticism for writing imperfect people of color", it really means "I'm stuck between getting criticism for doing the wrong thing and getting criticism for doing the right thing imperfectly". The criticism is a red herring; the fear of criticism is a red herring. None of it excuses white writers from needing to do the best job we can of doing the right thing. If we fail--if our multi-culti casts end up full of tokens who speak in wretched eye dialect, if an ostensibly diverse group is full of people who all sound like they grew up in WASPy white enclaves and never talk about cultural history or experiencing discrimination, if we daringly put a black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise and then make her a telephone operator--then yes, we will get criticism, and we need to learn from it and then keep doing the right thing as well as we can.

[lyster.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. The tension I was talking about isn't actually the not doing it-doing it wrong tension; it's more the problem of being too essentialist, e.g., at one point in the Anita Blake series, when Anita, part-Mexican and VERY assimilated into European-mainstream US culture, is presented as the good guy, while (apparently - I read this on tvtropes a while back, having only read 1 Hamilton book) a much less-assimilated Mexican woman serves as the bad guy. Or in Twilight: of course Native Americans are werewolves, because "they" are in touch with their, um, what, wild side? Inclusion success, cultural sensitivity FAIL.

That make more sense?

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I see what you're saying. Although I'm a little more sympathetic to the Twilight situation, if only because the only characters who are at all compelling are the Native American characters. And maybe Dr. Cullen, who has an interesting faith journey. But the rest of the cast doesn't really have any unique personality (in my opinion); Jacob (the main Native American character) does, and has a brilliant struggle and character development arc in the second book, and is way, way too good for Bella. But then, you've heard my thoughts on her.

Of course, they're still werewolves with all the tropes that entails, so despite the reasoning, there's still that element of savage that makes it easy to question.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff!