Trunk Novel
That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class was never a trunk novel. It's true that version 1.0 of it was written poorly enough that I rewrote from scratch instead of trying to edit the original, but I always knew the underlying story was worth telling, and that I could tell it, and I always intended to brush the dust off the project and get back to it when I could.
I did, however, once write a genuine trunk novel. One where I knew even as I was finishing it that it had no business ever seeing the light of day.
I called it Czilan and I wrote it in the latter part of 1981, the year after I came out. Like everything else I wrote in those years, it was definitely an attempt to explain the gender identity stuff and make it accessible to people. Czilan was an attempt to do so using science fiction.
The idea was to portray a parallel world that was like ours in most ways but where the gender expectations and assumptions for male and female people were mirror-image reversed from how they are in our world. I set out to develop the stories of four main characters, Kath, Bill, Amy, and Amaten (Martin). Kath was a rather butch female; Bill, a conventionally butch masculine male; Amy, a stereotypically feminine female; and Amaten a sissy femme male. They weren't four characters in the same story; rather, I set out to tell four different stories in parallel, with each of them on their own separate plot line, hopping from one person's tale to the next in consecutive order. In the story, all four of them have magically been plucked up from earth and tossed into a corresponding world called Czilan, the place where the gender roles are mirror-image. And my intent was to show how the people that in our world would be regarded as normative and gender-typical -- Bill and Amy -- would experience profound difficulties, facing hostile attitudes and constantly running into expectations that didn't mesh with who they were. Meanwhile, the folks who'd be considered gender-atypical in this world -- Kath and Amaten -- would sail through comfortably.
Overall, it wasn't a strategy unworthy of consideration. If it had worked, if it had been vivid and realistic-feeling and compelling, it could have illustrated what gender nonconforming individuals go through. Indeed, I've reviewed a very well-crafted movie, "I Am Not an Easy Man", which makes use of the same vehicle of a mirror-image gender-reversed world. So it can be done. I just didn't do it very well.
The first problem was that it was very difficult for me to conjure up the scenes and dialogues necessary to demonstrate these tensions and still have any room at all for subtlety. When I was a hundred pages in or thereabouts, it felt like I was beating my reading audience over the head with the main point in every social interaction. The characterizations of the four characters was heavy-handed and klunky and blocky in its embrace of stereotypes. There was too much repetition -- different dialog, same dynamics; different personnel, same results.
But when I tried to back away from painting the people and the situations in such primary colors, I began to realize that the alternative was to write something akin to oceans of good existing literature that already makes a good "Exhibit A" for what happens to people who run afoul of gendered expectations. Literature that already shows this...or shows it if there happens to be a reviewer or a literature teacher to point it out. But where most of the reading audience probably won't see that as the main point that the book was making, if they see it at all.
I had already noticed that phenomenon with regards to Pink Floyd's The Wall -- a narrative record album that tells the story from the vantage point of a sensitive male person who isn't compatible with the expectations of manliness and masculinity. But although that's what I saw as the takeaway from the album, most other people tended to describe it as being about the isolation of being a rock star, or as simply "the story of this guy Pink, and what happened to him in his life".
So if I'd written a viscerally gripping science fiction novel with good three-dimensional characters in it, and had crafted a vivid portrayal of folks who'd be considered normative in this world being marginalized and isolated on Czilan, and our world's gender nonconformists fitting right in, reciprocally, that doesn't necessarily mean people by and large would have gotten it. They might have, but it's a nontrivial challenge, to make the point plainly enough yet to render the characters as real-feeling and complex instead of oversimplified caricatures.
So a big lesson learned: it is hard to define, or illustrate, gender and gender expectations and the dysphoria of being subjected to expectations that don't fit who one is.
My next book, The Amazon's Brother, switched to first person narrative, and although I never got it published, I felt like it was the right formula, and it's the one I returned to for GenderQueer and Guy in Women's Studies.
When one is writing from one's own firsthand experiences, you can say "The events actually unfolded like this", as opposed to running the risk in a fictional depiction of being tagged as having asserted that, gee, it always unfolds like this.
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My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
I did, however, once write a genuine trunk novel. One where I knew even as I was finishing it that it had no business ever seeing the light of day.
I called it Czilan and I wrote it in the latter part of 1981, the year after I came out. Like everything else I wrote in those years, it was definitely an attempt to explain the gender identity stuff and make it accessible to people. Czilan was an attempt to do so using science fiction.
The idea was to portray a parallel world that was like ours in most ways but where the gender expectations and assumptions for male and female people were mirror-image reversed from how they are in our world. I set out to develop the stories of four main characters, Kath, Bill, Amy, and Amaten (Martin). Kath was a rather butch female; Bill, a conventionally butch masculine male; Amy, a stereotypically feminine female; and Amaten a sissy femme male. They weren't four characters in the same story; rather, I set out to tell four different stories in parallel, with each of them on their own separate plot line, hopping from one person's tale to the next in consecutive order. In the story, all four of them have magically been plucked up from earth and tossed into a corresponding world called Czilan, the place where the gender roles are mirror-image. And my intent was to show how the people that in our world would be regarded as normative and gender-typical -- Bill and Amy -- would experience profound difficulties, facing hostile attitudes and constantly running into expectations that didn't mesh with who they were. Meanwhile, the folks who'd be considered gender-atypical in this world -- Kath and Amaten -- would sail through comfortably.
Overall, it wasn't a strategy unworthy of consideration. If it had worked, if it had been vivid and realistic-feeling and compelling, it could have illustrated what gender nonconforming individuals go through. Indeed, I've reviewed a very well-crafted movie, "I Am Not an Easy Man", which makes use of the same vehicle of a mirror-image gender-reversed world. So it can be done. I just didn't do it very well.
The first problem was that it was very difficult for me to conjure up the scenes and dialogues necessary to demonstrate these tensions and still have any room at all for subtlety. When I was a hundred pages in or thereabouts, it felt like I was beating my reading audience over the head with the main point in every social interaction. The characterizations of the four characters was heavy-handed and klunky and blocky in its embrace of stereotypes. There was too much repetition -- different dialog, same dynamics; different personnel, same results.
But when I tried to back away from painting the people and the situations in such primary colors, I began to realize that the alternative was to write something akin to oceans of good existing literature that already makes a good "Exhibit A" for what happens to people who run afoul of gendered expectations. Literature that already shows this...or shows it if there happens to be a reviewer or a literature teacher to point it out. But where most of the reading audience probably won't see that as the main point that the book was making, if they see it at all.
I had already noticed that phenomenon with regards to Pink Floyd's The Wall -- a narrative record album that tells the story from the vantage point of a sensitive male person who isn't compatible with the expectations of manliness and masculinity. But although that's what I saw as the takeaway from the album, most other people tended to describe it as being about the isolation of being a rock star, or as simply "the story of this guy Pink, and what happened to him in his life".
So if I'd written a viscerally gripping science fiction novel with good three-dimensional characters in it, and had crafted a vivid portrayal of folks who'd be considered normative in this world being marginalized and isolated on Czilan, and our world's gender nonconformists fitting right in, reciprocally, that doesn't necessarily mean people by and large would have gotten it. They might have, but it's a nontrivial challenge, to make the point plainly enough yet to render the characters as real-feeling and complex instead of oversimplified caricatures.
So a big lesson learned: it is hard to define, or illustrate, gender and gender expectations and the dysphoria of being subjected to expectations that don't fit who one is.
My next book, The Amazon's Brother, switched to first person narrative, and although I never got it published, I felt like it was the right formula, and it's the one I returned to for GenderQueer and Guy in Women's Studies.
When one is writing from one's own firsthand experiences, you can say "The events actually unfolded like this", as opposed to running the risk in a fictional depiction of being tagged as having asserted that, gee, it always unfolds like this.
-----
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts