World in the Satin Bag

World in the Satin Bag

Writing Weaknesses: Do You Know Yours?

/

Nobody is perfect. That’s one of those golden rules when it comes to personalities and professions. Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes trivial and sometimes terrible. As a writer, it can be difficult to see where your weaknesses are. Anyone who writes is intimately connected to his or her work, and maintaining separation can sometimes be nearly impossible. Few, if any, writers get it right on the first draft, and those that do are flukes rather than logical exceptions. The rest of us–call us “normies,” if you will–have to learn from our mistakes and try to see where we are weak in order to improve our craft. But do you know your weaknesses? If so, how do you approach resolving them? Do you take care of it after the first draft, or do you try to fix the issue as it is happening? Personally, I have issues with characterization. Often I place too much focus on the ideas and not enough on establishing a connection to the character (for the reader). I know I do this every single time, and my problem seems to be that when I try to fix it as it occurs, my characterization feels forced or I simply lose interest. I’m working on resolving this, because I want my stories to have more impact for readers beyond the “gosh wow” effect. I have other weaknesses, but right now that seems to be the primary and most pressing one. I’m not sure how to fix it at this point. A lot of the exercises I’ve found for creating better characters seem to require you to think up useless facts about your characters. I prefer not to think of my characters as bundles of uselessness. They have purposes, desires, interests, etc., and I prefer fiction that highlights those things that are important to the story as a whole. Maybe that’s my problem. Knowing your weaknesses is important, though, because acknowledging where you need to work the most can help drive you forward as a writer, even if that movement is one plodding, sluggish step at a time. What are your weaknesses and how do you deal with them? Let me know in the comments!

World in the Satin Bag

Random, But Useful Advice For Writing Essays

/

Cite your sources correctly from the start. Having recently gone through the experience of digging up the correct sources and fixing all my slightly-off citations, I can tell you that doing it right the first time is a time saver, especially if you don’t return to the essay in question until some many months later, long after you’ve forgotten where the original source was located. It would seem like obvious advice, but if you’re a college student, this issue may come up later when you try to publish one of your essays. You see, college students often end up with these things called “readers,” which are essentially enormous printed tomes of information usually created by the college for a specific course. They are not books you buy on Amazon, or even books you can return. You’re stuck with them. And sometimes the readers don’t contain the proper citation information for the articles they contain. That means you have to go hunt that information down yourself. Doing so can take a bit of time, but at least during school you can ask your professor where he or she got a particularly article, in person, and get a response ASAP. Doing it later means having to spend hours surfing Google to find obscure information about equally obscure articles. It’s not fun, especially when you wanted to get that essay out the door the day before. Then you have the issue of proper citation practices. How do you format footnote citations? Well, you have to read, because if you follow the citation formats you see in articles, they are often incorrect or outdated. Maybe that’s not a problem for some publications, but the more academic ones, or even the exceptionally professional ones, want proper citations, not just for them, but for the peer review panels that govern what gets published. I spent close to ten hours fixing all my citations and reformatting two essays to submit to an online magazine. Only a few hours of that should have been spent formatting (since they had specific guidelines), and none to the citations. But, I didn’t foresee publishing things, or I didn’t think about the citations at the time, and subsequently had to go through every inch of my essays to get them in working order. Fun? No. Not at all. So, cite your sources correctly from the start. It’ll make your life easier.

World in the Satin Bag

A Collective Chillpill For RaceFail, GenderFail, et al.

/

Disclaimer: Nothing in this post should be misunderstood to imply that I am inherently racist, anti-equality, or anything of that nature. I am not and never will be against any notion of quality, only against unrealistic expectations and demands. Neither am I against open and civil discussion of issues of discrimination, whether it be in literature or elsewhere. These issues should be openly discussed, and regularly, but with an understandable acknowledgement of the complexities of certain situations. Now that you’ve read this part, here’s the post: I’m about fed up with the science fiction and fantasy community. It seems like every week someone is throwing a fit about such-and-such anthology lacking content from such-and-such minorities (women, people of color, whatever). I wouldn’t have an issue with it if not for its constant, never-ending resurgence. Nothing is safe. Nothing can sit on its own merit. If an anthology is 50/50 male/female, then someone complains that there aren’t enough Asians, or African Americans, or whatever. If there are too many white people, never mind that it’s not exactly the editor’s job to screen who submits to them for what color someone is, someone throws a fit over that. If there are too many men, complaining resumes. Too many women? The same, somewhere. It’s like the SF/F community is in a constant state of bitching, because no matter how hard you try to explain away reality, nobody listens. Not enough women? Oh, well that’s all your fault, Mr. Editor, even if I don’t know the whole story, or have all the information I need to make that judgment; you’re a sexist bastard because there just ain’t enough women in that anthology. Not enough African Americans? Well, I don’t need to know how many African Americans submitted to you, or whether or not you knew that all the people you published were white, or yadda yadda; you’re just a racist asshole who hates African Americans and has a KKK sign above your desk. Do you see why these arguments are not only tiresome, but somewhat absurd? I’m not going to pretend for a moment that discrimination doesn’t exist. It does, even in the SF/F community. We’ve seen it with RaceFail and GenderFail, etc. It’s out there, and sometimes not in places you would expect. But it’s not everywhere, and assuming that racism or sexism is solely responsible for the lack of minority representation is skirting the issue. There are bound to be more reasons than we can fully comprehend. Maybe part of the problem is that African Americans or women are not big contributors to science fiction, and so the applicant pool is far smaller than that of white males. I don’t know, but before we throw fits over every anthology, maybe we should figure that out–maybe we should try to understand the broader picture and not resort to automatically assuming that editors are racist or sexist assholes who don’t give a shit. As an editor (for Survival By Storytelling Magazine), I can tell you firsthand that I have no idea how many people of color I have selected for the first issue. I didn’t ask. Why? Because it’s probably illegal, for one, and because I kind of don’t care. No, I don’t mean that I don’t care in a negative sense; I mean that I don’t care in the sense that skin color is meaningless in the face of quality writing. Whether you are white, black, blue, or red, if a story is good, it’s good. That’s it. No other criteria. If there is a disproportionate amount of whites in our first issue, then I certainly hope I won’t be called out for it. I didn’t ask, and won’t ask now. We chose good stories from whatever was sent to us, and if there happened to be a whole bunch of women or people of color who submitted, great. If not, I don’t know how exactly I am to fix that. I can’t force people of certain genders or skin colors to submit. Similar things are probably true of some of the bigger editors who collect original stories for anthologies. What are their reasons for selecting certain authors? I don’t know. Some of them are published authors that the editor approached, and others were snatched from the slush. Can we honestly say that these editors sat down and thought “this is a woman, and this story will suck”? Maybe some of them do, but how exactly are you to know? And when people in the SF/F community throw a fit over these anthologies, they potentially damage the reputation of editors who are not racist or sexist bastards. Turn it around; how would you feel if someone unjustly did the same to you? You wouldn’t like it very much, would you? The SF/F community needs to calm down. I get it; we’re in a sensationalist world, and what “sells” to the public are angry rants and controversial topics. But we need to start digging deeper than where RaceFail and GenderFail have taken us. We’ve avoided the deep end for reasons that seem to escape me, and instead of approaching the various “perpetrators” of racism or sexism with their concerns, the SF/F community has blasted them with insults and public ridicule. Sometimes such action is appropriate, but most of the time it’s not. If that’s the way you want to do things, then I don’t want to be a part of it. If RaceFail, and even GenderFail, have taught the SF/F community anything, it is that we need a greater deal of open discussion. Right now the bitching and fit throwing and angry attacks are only creating more tension. Tension we do not need. And no, I am not a racist or sexist bastard. I’m a human being.

World in the Satin Bag

Reader Question: The Alien Exit

/

Mercy from Young Writers Online had this interesting question to ask: Why does everyone resort to aliens in recent sci-fi/gov/end of the world movies? Because aliens are easy. People do not question aliens as the villains, because, despite all our efforts to acknowledge our difficulty in understanding and dealing with the human/Other dichotomy, we are still as xenophobic as ever, regardless of race or gender. Aliens represent the ultimate Other, the figure that is so clearly not human, that any human argument cannot figure them into a human version of the human/Other dichotomy. Similar logic allows for the continued discrimination against animals—because they are not “human,” and, thus, do not, under any circumstance, deserve the same rights as you or me. We are human, they are not, and no matter how hard you might want to argue for their humanness, we will always refute it with DNA evidence, a factor we can no longer use to apply to people of color (no logical genetic variations exist in the various “races” to adequately provide evidence for the argument that we are different). The alien, thus, is the easiest target to choose, especially in harder times. Hollywood is remarkable at knowing viewer trends. They have people somewhere who watch viewer habits to determine how they will react to movies under different situations. It seems that they have determined that we really don’t need any more instances of human error in our end of the world stories, or even in a lot of our science fiction (w/ exception to certain movies). Aliens offer a way out, a way of saying “now you have a bad guy who doesn’t exist, who, as far as we, cannot actually harm any of you or do any of the things in our movie.” After all, why worry about the rights of imaginary creatures? Why indeed. They’re aliens. Fictional aliens. There’s no need for us to ponder the possibility of their existence, nor how we might treat them if, by a stroke of luck, we meet one of these strange creatures. But, to be fair to Hollywood, they are on a remake kick, and much of the films that fit into this category of “the aliens did it” are re-imagined tellings of old movies, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and even Knowing, which was not a direct remake, but certainly a rehash of a story that has been told numerous times before (heck, even Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke has an ending which reflects very much the bizarre final moments of that Nicholas Cage flick). These are my arguments, though, and certainly not absolutes. Anyone reading this is welcome to chime in if you have a different opinion (or the same opinion). Just be thankful that we’re not resorting to old giant monster clichés…oh, nevermind, there was Cloverfield, a bastardization of the genre by the evil and craptastic J. J. Abrams. Seems like science fiction movies are in full rehash mode. ————————————————- If you have a question about science fiction, fantasy, writing, or anything related you’d like answered here, whether silly or serious, feel free to send it via email to arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com, tweet it via Twitter to @shaunduke, or leave it in the comments here. Questions are always welcome! If you liked this post, consider stumbling, digging, or linking to it!

World in the Satin Bag

Fantasy is Colonial, Modern Science Fiction is Postcolonial?

/

Examining trends in genre fiction is an impossible task. Fantasy and science fiction are constantly moving, the latter more so than the former, and yet I have been noticing something within both genres (a shifting theme for the latter, and a staple for the former) that I want to examine and understand. Readers are welcome to challenge me on this, and in fact I hope you do, because I have not been reading in these genres as long as some of you have, and you may, as a result, see trends and themes differently. One tendency I have seen in fantasy is that of the building or collapsing of empires/nations/peoples via a colonialist or imperialist method. Recent examples include The House of the Stag by Kage Baker and even Karen Miller’s The Innocent Mage/The Awakened Mage duology, along with a great many epic fantasy series, in which invasions of empires play a prominent role. Villians, thus, tend to be imperialist in nature, interested in one of two things: 1) the subjugation or destruction of a people, and 2) the acquirement of new properties (i.e. land) for an existing or emerging empire. Looking back brings us to The Lord of the Rings, which contains an example of a colonialist extermination/enslavement that ultimately fails, except insomuch as the Hobbits are concerned, since they are not only colonized by the forces of Mordor (or, more specifically, Saruman’s forces, if memory serves me), but also subjugated as a people. Science fiction, however, has a shifting agenda. Its early and middle-aged works focused heavily, as I have described before, on imperialist or colonial issues, particularly in relation to galactic empires. Some newer works have done much the same, such as Old Man’s War by John Scalzi and a handful of other authors doing what might be called “tribute” works, though no offense is meant by that term. But recent developments seem to point to a more postcolonial approach. By that, I mean that the story deals more with the after effects of a cultural rupture in which the colonist, whoever that might be, has either ceded control to the indigenous body, or collapsed its colonialist structure and turned into something less concerned with matters of empire and more concerned with what you might call “traditional governing.” So, the colonized may not longer be colonized because the colonizer is no longer there, or because power has shifted, for whatever reason, so that the colonialist structure no longer exists (though the latter is, for all intensive purposes, a rarity even in our world). The best example I can think of this occurring is in Tobias S. Buckell’s novel Sly Mongoose, which, while not always directly focused on the fallen empire, manages to offer a science fiction view of the end of empires and what the colonized goes through to survive or re-establish control. There’s a certain brutality to it, because Buckell’s novel is not set in a world that is distant from its colonial past. Other novels, I’m sure, exist, though I have to admit that I am blanking on them at this time. The point of this is that there seems to be a far more likelihood of postcolonialism existing within science fiction as a theme than there is for fantasy. Fantasy seems to be occupied with the act of colonizing, in some for of another, while science fiction seems to want to dismantle the colonial structure. It seems fitting that fantasy cannot imagine its postcolonial future, and that its cousin genre must do so. One reflects an imagined past, a medieval fantasy (outside of urban fantasy), while the other is almost always looking forward. The genres compliment one another, even if it was never meant for them to do so.

World in the Satin Bag

Reader Question: English, the Ultimate Tongue

/

Bowie from Young Writers Online recently asked the following: Why do all aliens speak some form of English? Well, the truth is that aliens exist within a strange temporal distortion in which they are exposed to English before human beings even exist, so when they come knocking, they are not only fluent in the language, but technologically far more advanced than us apes. As strange as that sounds, that’s exactly what has happened. You see, scientists propose that Bubble Theory may be the next big thing in physics. It proposes that all sentient beings live in little temporal bubbles that are designed to make sure certain species are younger than others when such species figure out how to enter other bubbles. As you know, there’s a quasi temporal node that exists between the subspace platinum barrier of quantum erasure, and other confusing technojargon. But of course all of the above is a load of horse manure. The reason aliens almost always speak some form of English is due to a need by the writer to engage the reader or viewer. English has, for good and for bad, become the dominant language on this planet, and is the language of the more dominant pop-culture nations (U.S., U.K., and even India). Throw into the mix the fact that most of the world’s T.V. and book consumers (and the world’s largest markets for such products) happen to communicate almost exclusively in English and you really have no way around the reality that English is a human identifier. Writers know this, either on a simplistic or complex level, and often use this knowledge to create certain literary or film conditions–namely sympathy. Aliens who speak unknown or even harsh sounding languages have a tendency to be viewed as the enemy and unlikable by most viewing audiences. This stems from early science fiction movies and stories that dealt less with the complex inner workings of alien species and more with the monstrous and evil nature of the inhuman (see Patricia Kerslake’s Science Fiction and Empire for more information on that, if memory serves me correctly). Battlestar Galactica is a show that is fully aware of this, hence why it does not deal with aliens or creatures that are incapable of communicating with the humans in the show (and the audience). And there is even a dichotomy within BSG. Take, for example, the centurians, who are somewhat humanoid, but quite clearly not human, and also are incapable of speaking in human language. As such, they must relay all information through their humanoid “superiors” (the flesh-and-blood clones). The result? The centurians are not, until the very end of the movie, given any serious consideration beyond declaring them “the villains.” Viewers, however, do feel sympathy for the cloned models, because they are not only human-looking, but emotionally complex. Language plays a big role in that, because while it is true that they are, at times, seemingly monstrous, they still can relay to the characters and to us their deeper emotions. We can feel for them because they can express something to us that doesn’t immediately translate to “evil.” The same is true of other instances of English-injected alien encounters. Language plays a remarkable role in creating the conditions of sympathy/empathy/etc. But I could go on for much longer than I think is appropriate for one post on this subject. If you have a different opinion on this matter, feel free to let me know in the comments. This subject is really one that could do with some serious, critical attention, and I bet my readers could get a ————————————————- If you have a question about science fiction, fantasy, writing, or anything related you’d like answered here, whether silly or serious, feel free to send it via email to arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com, tweet it via Twitter to @shaunduke, or leave it in the comments here. Questions are always welcome! If you liked this post, consider stumbling, digging, or linking to it!

Scroll to Top