Reading to Write

[julieandrews]

I'm reading "The Wave in the Mind", a collection of talks and essays by Ursula K. Le Guin. In "The Question I Get Asked Most Often", she talks about ideas and the idea of 'idea' and influences or lack of influences and lots of stuff to chew on

Comments

[julieandrews]

I've still got a bee in my bonnet (if I wore bonnets) about something Cory Doctorow told our class at Clarion. That you need to let the reader know the gender of your first person narrator up front, because it's something all people know about themselves, so it's being unfair to the reader not to let them know.

I may not have stated that exactly right, but that was certainly the gist of what I understood him to mean.

There's a number of things wrong with that. But the upshot is, I don't believe that's true of all stories or all characters. Some stories are better served with ambiguity or obfuscation. And some characters are more comfortable that way. At least in the beginning, when they're still building a relationship with the reader.

Sometimes the default isn't the dominant though. Sometimes the default is what the reader knows the writer to be.

[anonymous]

I wonder if increasing web-based interaction will increase our acceptance of ambiguity of gender. I interact on the web with people whose genders I don't know, and I don't care about it until they want me to know.

The English language is gendered in the third person, but not so much in first person or in second person...

[dwesley]

"So it occurred to me, or at least it occurred to the conscious part of my brain, that the only way to write non-white, non-male, non-straight characters is to read more of them."

While this may be an option, I don't think it's the best option. If I(a white guy) want to write a black character, or a gay character, or a female character, then I need to be able to crawl into their head and understand what motivates them, what pisses them off, what makes them hurt. I think the best way to get that insight is to have discussions and interactions with real people, rather than rely on the characterizations of another author.

It's the difference between eating a freshly cooked meal and eating the same meal after it's been refrigerated for three days and reheated. It loses something.