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I only wanted ostriches.
Mar. 6th, 2009 10:21 pmI'll be honest; all this "Writing the Other" controversy is making me hesitant to write at all! At least in my current WIP. I set it in an "Africanish" fantasy world because I wanted to have ostriches in it, so I needed a climate where they lived. Now I'm finding myself second-guessing everything for fear that someone with think I'm being racist/insensitive/ignorant/all of the above.
Of course I'm racist, and sexist, and whatever -ists apply, at least by one definition. My perceptions are all colored through the view of a white, female, Northeastern US living 40-something Special-Ed schooled bookish... Ok, this could go on until we run out of applicable adjectives. Anyway, the point is that we all have only one POV. We're obligated to realize that everyone else has a different POV. And if we don't want to hurt each other, we do our imperfect human best to understand where other people are coming from.
I write Fantasy and SF because I like the freedom to imagine worlds and populate them with all kinds of characters. I don't want to create a million paper suburbs filled with clones of me. I'm not that exciting, or that important. I want to create forests and deserts and cities and afterlives, castles and caves and homes of all kinds. I want to fill my worlds with men and women of all sizes, shapes and colors (plus imps, serpent-demons, mermaids...)
So how do I do this and say "Welcome to my made-up world. I've made it from what I am and what I know, what I've experienced and what I've learned, all reflected back in words. It's not the same as anybody else's world real or fictional, because no two people live the same life.
If my reflection of you, or your world, or parts of it is wrong because my mirror is too small or dusty with ignorance to show a true image, please don't assume I'm using a mocking funhouse mirror on purpose. Help me to clarify the image. We all know our own worlds the most intimately. But if we take "write what we know" literally, and only write about our own little corner of the universe, we defeat the whole purpose of speculative fiction.
A person's first steps into a new environment will usually be halting and imperfect. Writing is the same way. The more I think about this, the more I think that the best an author can do is to learn as much as they can about people and places similar to their made-up ones, treat their characters like real people, and remember that somebody else always has a bigger, clearer mirror and no one ever captures the whole true image.
What do you think? How can writers explore their imaginations without poking at real-world people?
Of course I'm racist, and sexist, and whatever -ists apply, at least by one definition. My perceptions are all colored through the view of a white, female, Northeastern US living 40-something Special-Ed schooled bookish... Ok, this could go on until we run out of applicable adjectives. Anyway, the point is that we all have only one POV. We're obligated to realize that everyone else has a different POV. And if we don't want to hurt each other, we do our imperfect human best to understand where other people are coming from.
I write Fantasy and SF because I like the freedom to imagine worlds and populate them with all kinds of characters. I don't want to create a million paper suburbs filled with clones of me. I'm not that exciting, or that important. I want to create forests and deserts and cities and afterlives, castles and caves and homes of all kinds. I want to fill my worlds with men and women of all sizes, shapes and colors (plus imps, serpent-demons, mermaids...)
So how do I do this and say "Welcome to my made-up world. I've made it from what I am and what I know, what I've experienced and what I've learned, all reflected back in words. It's not the same as anybody else's world real or fictional, because no two people live the same life.
If my reflection of you, or your world, or parts of it is wrong because my mirror is too small or dusty with ignorance to show a true image, please don't assume I'm using a mocking funhouse mirror on purpose. Help me to clarify the image. We all know our own worlds the most intimately. But if we take "write what we know" literally, and only write about our own little corner of the universe, we defeat the whole purpose of speculative fiction.
A person's first steps into a new environment will usually be halting and imperfect. Writing is the same way. The more I think about this, the more I think that the best an author can do is to learn as much as they can about people and places similar to their made-up ones, treat their characters like real people, and remember that somebody else always has a bigger, clearer mirror and no one ever captures the whole true image.
What do you think? How can writers explore their imaginations without poking at real-world people?
