Tag: rules

Writing for Change

Full disclosure here: I am female, cis/het, white (mostly), married, 53, educated, neurodiverse, middle class, and not beautiful according to Western standards. I tell you this not to present you with a set of labels to call me, but to hint at which social injustices I have faced in this society and which I have not.

I also am a member of the Religious Society of Friends (otherwise known as Quakers), and nowadays we’ve thrown off plain dress and plain speech (thee didn’t know that?) but have retained our sense of social justice as something important to work toward.

I carry this sense of social justice into my writing. I carry it imperfectly, given that I have not experienced life as a lesbian, as a black person, as a Moslem, a transgendered person, or a person with visible disabilities. Why would that matter? Because I am an outsider to others’ experiences. I do not experience the small insults others do every day — nobody suggests rape as a solution to my gender preference, nobody calls store security on me while I’m shopping, nobody tells me my religion is satanic, nobody calls me a cripple. Most of us miss these aggressions; others experience these and worse daily.

I want a socially just world. I imagine the world as a banquet, and I want to see everyone at the banquet. I want to feast on gravlax and fufu with palaver sauce, and oh-my-G-d Middle Eastern desserts. I want everyone to feast and to talk to each other and to share. And those who are uncomfortable with the other, I want there to be counselors nearby who will talk to their wounded inner child and their not-okayness and prepare them to sit at our table instead of taking it all away from us.

Full disclosure: I was harassed as a child because I was “different” (i.e. neurodiverse), and female, and fat, and gifted. The harassment accelerated into violence. This could by why I want a socially just world. I don’t want anyone else to suffer. It bothers me that I might not have noticed all the injustice if I had not experienced it.

I have to try the best I can to bring in the topic of social justice into my writing, hoping that I am doing so constructively rather than destructively. Here is what I have pledged myself to do:

1) Don’t be timid about putting people who are not necessarily “dominant culture” in my writing. Admittedly one of my favorite characters is Gideon, an avant-garde Jewish architect who designed exquisite bridges when manic but could not hold down a job when depressed. Less like me, however, is Arminder Kaur, a fourteen-year-old Sikh who dreams of being a “saint-soldier” defending the oppressed.

2) Avoid stereotypes, but thoughtfully include cultural norms for other cultures. One of the sensitive places in writing in this regard are accents. If the only people who have accents are foreigners and African-Americans, you’ve written stereotypes. I can point out that the downstate New York accents I ran into when I taught out there had many interesting pronounciations — “cawd”, “SHU-ah”, “Ant – AUCK – tica”. Remember these if you’re going to put in other accents.

3) Do not make white characters the “saviors” for people of other groups. People who are not white, straight, etc. will be allowed self-determination. Movies from Avatar to The Blind Side feature the “white savior” trope, and it’s really insulting.

4) Dominant culture will not be the standard by which other cultures are judged.  An overweight person will not be harassed into losing weight (as if that worked!),  Guardsmen will be allowed in a pacifist ecocollective if they lock up their guns while on site.

I will offend someone. I will fall short, because I’m human and because I walk around with privilege others don’t have. We all will offend each other at the banquet table because we’re different. But my responsibility is to write for the world I’d like to see.

Never Say Always

I read a lot of articles about the “rules of writing” (this despite the fact that I proficiencied out of all my composition classes in college because of my ACT scores). I figure I could always improve.

The issue is, though, that I don’t always follow the rules. For example, Anton Chekov said (paraphrased, because I don’t speak Russian) that you should never get into the main character’s mind, but should always describe his actions. Note those words “always” and “never” because you’re going to hear them a lot. However, heroes don’t always act. Sometimes they wait. Sometimes, even if they’re the hero (Jamie Curtis’ character in Halloween for example) they huddle in a closet with slats in the door second-guessing themselves. If I wrote this in a book, I believe that I should write what this character is thinking as they’re standing in that closet waiting on Michael Myers to go at them with a knife. (Note — I’m talking about a classic American horror movie. Technically, the musical score would take care of her tension and waiting. In a book, the orchestra is not handy.)

Another rule is “Always use active language” — think “I made a mistake” vs “mistakes were made”. I think always using active language works until I write dialogue for a very passive character, one with an external locus of control (psychology term!), one who attributes everything to fate, God, or luck. That character should use language that expresses his worldview: “I got to the pier and — something just happened.” Passive tense — nothing did anything; it just happened.

Action verbs — I always tell my students that “‘did'” is not a verb when they write resumes. Writings full of passive verbs like “did”, “was” (although as a helper verb it’s okay), “were”, “is” and the like create boredom. But some characters who speak what linguists call casual register will use many more passive verbs. Let them — otherwise your client with the eighth grade education will sound like his GED instructor.

Description — I believe there’s a point where one can write too much description. For example, JRR Tolkien rhapsodized for days about a landmark, including its name in Sindarin, Quenya, Mordor-speech, and the language of Rohan. That worked for Tolkien, because it sounded epic and rolled off the tongue and reminded us that several races lived in the time of Middle Earth. However, my writing focuses on the conversations, interactions, and actions of its characters — people don’t tend to do a lot of looking around and describing when they’re with others and talking, and many times people get only impressionistic ideas of their surroundings — Grace, one of the protagonists in the book I’m writing, rushes to a meeting and has little time to make much of an impression of the Donimirski Palac Pugetow. She notes that it reminds her of French Renaissance Revival from the lecture in the European History class she took, and it looks like a big rectangular wedding cake to her.

To end, someone in my high school creative writing class asked the teacher why we had to learn the rules if ee cummings could use no capital letters, run his words across the page, and throw in parentheses randomly. The teacher responded that you had to learn the rules in order to break them. So those articles aimed at writers may be a good idea to read — and then choose whether it’s the right time to use those rules.

*****************
Tomorrow I’ll start Camp NaNo, where I will keep wrestling the beast I’ve called “The Ones who Toppled the World”. I’ll check in, even if they’re short entries. Feel free to chat!