Why I write American
Some months ago, a German editor asked for one of my stories to use in a teaching anthology for high-school students. He was interested in an international range, and selected "Lepers" from Big Pulp. That story is set in Bombay in the 1970s.
Bernd asked me to update the story; he thought his readers would be more interested in something contemporary. Since I haven't actually spent any serious time in Mumbai since the 1990s, I was a little circumspect, but courtesy Google images, I managed enough research to make it current. It's a very short story, anyway.
Then he had another question. The story uses some Hindi for color, but it's written, of course, in English. With American spellings.
Why? Bernd wanted to know. Isn't Indian English written the British way, with rigour instead of rigor, and pavements instead of sidewalks? Would I consider changing it back?
I explained that the story was written in an American style. Had I written the same piece as an Indian story, it would likely have been different in many ways, not just spelling and nomenclature. So I made a few other tweaks to the story to improve its pedagogic value, and we left it at that.
But a recent post on American tropes from aliettedb (Alliette de Bodard) made me think again about my own writing. Why do I write American?
The main reason, I think, is that I'm writing for a largely American audience, both readers and editors.
Years ago, my day-job involved writing business reports. In my first transition from an Indian/UK style of writing to a US one, the company-provided rules were quite specific, and also challenging.
1. No passive sentences. If it started with "There is..." the long-suffering editor rephrased it.
2. No weasel words. Since we were making economic forecasts, we were tempted to use "probably" and "it seems likely" and "somewhat." The Long-Suffering Editor nuked them all.
3. Simpler is better. If a short word could say it, why use a long one?
4. Shorter is better. One of our products was a newsletter. It was exactly 8 pages, no more, no less. Space was at a premium, and the Editor was constantly saying things like, "This is a great story, but I need 60 lines, not 65..." Sometimes we'd dicker among ourselves for extra lines ("Hey, John, can you cut your piece by one line so I can get 61?") but no one had time for self-indulgent writing. If it could be written in 2 words, using 5 was ... anti-social.
I quickly learned, for the sake of the LSE, to follow this style. My stories became less nuanced, more direct, more hard-hitting, easier to read. They spelled out the conclusion, then provided the supporting information.
My fiction writing, meanwhile, was isolated from this. It was a casual hobby. Submitting to US magazines (and I didn't even know if any others existed) was too difficult when I lived in Asia. I sent in very little, and published less, meaning nothing. I wrote as I pleased, initially for no audience but myself, later for my critiquers at Critters.
Then I moved back to the US. Soon I was dealing with a whole new set of constraints -- in addition to the writing style stuff I'd learned on my day job.
1. The Omniscient viewpoint is antique and generally unsaleable. (This was usually phrased as "difficult to pull off.") The best viewpoints were first-person or close third. This came as a surprise, actually; I always thought of the Omni viewpoint as the natural viewpoint of the author-as-narrator.
2. The protagonist must 'protag.' I often wrote stories from an observer's viewpoint with protagonists who had things happen to them, rather than acting. This wasn't enough; it made a story wishy washy.
3. The protagonist must change by the end of the story. Without a character arc, the protagonist's story lacks meaning. This one, too, took me time to figure out. In my world, a story was about events, and if those were inherently interesting, so was the story. I didn't expect my protagonists to change in the course of the story any more than I expected my friends to have character arcs. (They probably do, of course; but it's what doesn't change that's the foundation of a friendship.)
4. The protagonist has to be strong. Since it's his or her actions that drive the story, they have to Do Things that make a difference.
5. Class structures and what commenters on Aliette's blog have called power differentials must be downplayed, except in very broad strokes. Certainly, the characters cannot take them for granted unless they're meant to have a great revelation by the story's end.
Furthermore: If I write, say, an Indian story as I would write it for readers in Mumbai, it would contain cultural assumptions and allusions that my target readers would find alien.
My challenge is to write those stories in ways that are accessible to the people I expect will read them -- who aren't mostly Mumbaikars. Some of the little cultural details are grace-notes that only someone familiar with the culture will get. It's like literary allusions buried in a story. To someone who sees them, they add depth, but the story must stand without them.
Is my writing better, are my stories stronger? I find that difficult to answer; for me-the-reader, they're just different. But to the extent I write for readers not myself, I'd say they are.
Bernd asked me to update the story; he thought his readers would be more interested in something contemporary. Since I haven't actually spent any serious time in Mumbai since the 1990s, I was a little circumspect, but courtesy Google images, I managed enough research to make it current. It's a very short story, anyway.
Then he had another question. The story uses some Hindi for color, but it's written, of course, in English. With American spellings.
Why? Bernd wanted to know. Isn't Indian English written the British way, with rigour instead of rigor, and pavements instead of sidewalks? Would I consider changing it back?
I explained that the story was written in an American style. Had I written the same piece as an Indian story, it would likely have been different in many ways, not just spelling and nomenclature. So I made a few other tweaks to the story to improve its pedagogic value, and we left it at that.
But a recent post on American tropes from aliettedb (Alliette de Bodard) made me think again about my own writing. Why do I write American?
The main reason, I think, is that I'm writing for a largely American audience, both readers and editors.
Years ago, my day-job involved writing business reports. In my first transition from an Indian/UK style of writing to a US one, the company-provided rules were quite specific, and also challenging.
1. No passive sentences. If it started with "There is..." the long-suffering editor rephrased it.
2. No weasel words. Since we were making economic forecasts, we were tempted to use "probably" and "it seems likely" and "somewhat." The Long-Suffering Editor nuked them all.
3. Simpler is better. If a short word could say it, why use a long one?
4. Shorter is better. One of our products was a newsletter. It was exactly 8 pages, no more, no less. Space was at a premium, and the Editor was constantly saying things like, "This is a great story, but I need 60 lines, not 65..." Sometimes we'd dicker among ourselves for extra lines ("Hey, John, can you cut your piece by one line so I can get 61?") but no one had time for self-indulgent writing. If it could be written in 2 words, using 5 was ... anti-social.
I quickly learned, for the sake of the LSE, to follow this style. My stories became less nuanced, more direct, more hard-hitting, easier to read. They spelled out the conclusion, then provided the supporting information.
My fiction writing, meanwhile, was isolated from this. It was a casual hobby. Submitting to US magazines (and I didn't even know if any others existed) was too difficult when I lived in Asia. I sent in very little, and published less, meaning nothing. I wrote as I pleased, initially for no audience but myself, later for my critiquers at Critters.
Then I moved back to the US. Soon I was dealing with a whole new set of constraints -- in addition to the writing style stuff I'd learned on my day job.
1. The Omniscient viewpoint is antique and generally unsaleable. (This was usually phrased as "difficult to pull off.") The best viewpoints were first-person or close third. This came as a surprise, actually; I always thought of the Omni viewpoint as the natural viewpoint of the author-as-narrator.
2. The protagonist must 'protag.' I often wrote stories from an observer's viewpoint with protagonists who had things happen to them, rather than acting. This wasn't enough; it made a story wishy washy.
3. The protagonist must change by the end of the story. Without a character arc, the protagonist's story lacks meaning. This one, too, took me time to figure out. In my world, a story was about events, and if those were inherently interesting, so was the story. I didn't expect my protagonists to change in the course of the story any more than I expected my friends to have character arcs. (They probably do, of course; but it's what doesn't change that's the foundation of a friendship.)
4. The protagonist has to be strong. Since it's his or her actions that drive the story, they have to Do Things that make a difference.
5. Class structures and what commenters on Aliette's blog have called power differentials must be downplayed, except in very broad strokes. Certainly, the characters cannot take them for granted unless they're meant to have a great revelation by the story's end.
Furthermore: If I write, say, an Indian story as I would write it for readers in Mumbai, it would contain cultural assumptions and allusions that my target readers would find alien.
My challenge is to write those stories in ways that are accessible to the people I expect will read them -- who aren't mostly Mumbaikars. Some of the little cultural details are grace-notes that only someone familiar with the culture will get. It's like literary allusions buried in a story. To someone who sees them, they add depth, but the story must stand without them.
Is my writing better, are my stories stronger? I find that difficult to answer; for me-the-reader, they're just different. But to the extent I write for readers not myself, I'd say they are.