Knowing and Stories
Jun. 4th, 2005 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootSo, out of the latest go-rounds about writing sensitive issues and writing what one knows have come the following thoughts. In many ways, this little coda only brings a few high points back around, but, then, most good discussions run in spirals. And I did want to toss an extra point or two out for consideration.
Lest this be a circle, rather than a spiral, let me address the "write what you know" question in separate parts as a technical and a moral item of advice. For technical usefulness, "write what you know" is on a par with "cut the adverbs". It's a bad habit to use a lot of adverbs to shortcut descriptions out of laziness. Equally, it's a bad habit to write without enough knowledge of your subject to judge plausibility for your story's purposes. Taken this way, neither is any kind of moral imperative, simply technical guidelines or reminders to help write something that has some depth to it and will draw your audience in.
As far as the technical aspects go, it's worthwhile to remember that storytelling requires both passion and dispassion, in varying proportions depending on one's goals. Ironically enough, personal experience of the subject in question can be just as much of an impediment to writing it in fiction as having only third-hand sensational rumor to go by. The more intense the experience, the more difficult it's likely to be for the writer to look beyond her own individual variation and remember that her particular experience may not be common to either the majority of those who share the general experience or to the kind of character she's trying to write. Total universalizing of the personal is just as much of a dead end exercise as assuming that individual experiences have no commonality at all.
Come to think of it, I'm not surprised at all that trauma and sex are two major poles in this discussion, in any of its many incarnations. By its nature, trauma is both intense and difficult to consider with any kind of dispassion if one has experienced it, even if one coped by intellectualizing it. And even when the actual experience of sex is mediocre, US culture in particular adds so much symbolic baggage to the act that it becomes significant anyhow--a personality indicator the integrity of which must be defended at all costs.
As for the moral aspect of all this... two things come to mind.
One is the question of whether fiction writers carry a responsibility to make ethical/political statements with their work. This immediately subdivides in my mind into the questions of Is it even possible not to? and Is it ever possible to do both deliberately and well? My own inclination is to answer no to both. Any story we write carries the stamp of our worldview, whether overtly or between the lines; we are the ones choosing the words, and the choices are ours. The writer's subject position cannot be denied, occasional attempts at doing just that to the contrary. I think our greatest moral responsibility is to be aware of that position and to own it, in fiction as we should for any other kind of communication, lest we all be reduced to screaming reiterations of watertight personal opinions at each other. Which, besides being pointless, is really boring, no less in a story than in a debate. As for the second question, well, by and large, only talented satirists seem able to make deliberate political statements in fiction without the story becoming flat, dry and tasteless. Without that ironic self-awareness, well, then you have Chernyshevskii or Morris, and I'm sorry but the thing with the aluminum still makes me laugh. Actually, so does the thing with the manure--that was the only high point in the book. Dystopias seem slightly less prone to this than utopias, but even there 1984 and A Brave New World aren't a patch on The Handmaid's Tale for storytelling. Atwoods are few and far between, and notably more ambiguous than either Morris or Orwell.
The other thing that comes to my mind is the less abstract and more immediate question of whether a writer has any responsibility to guard her readers from discomfort. I find my own response divided, depending on what angle I'm looking at the question from. As a writer, I think not; the writer's duty is to the story, and if the shape of the story is a disturbing one then that's the way it is. (The writer might want to take a moment to consider why she feels it neccessary to write a disturbing story, but that's between the writer and herself. And, possibly, her therapist.) Considering the question as a member of a social community of readers and writers who know each other sometimes even as friends, however, I think it is... productive, let us say, to give the readers some indication of what they're getting into. Then, if all goes well, the readers will not be frightened or disgusted by stumbling unawares over evokation of emotions/thoughts they can't deal well with, and they may, in turn, not totally abandon all the works of the writer in question in order to guard themselves from another such experience. Because if they do that, then even the stamp of that writer's worldview will be abandoned, and there will be no chance for a more subtle negotiation between the reader's and writer's ideas. Fortunately, these two answers are not mutually contradictory and can both be served by writing the story however and dabbing on some meta-information upon publication--vague or explicit, as seems appropriate. Shades of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
avus's answer to the issue.
So, somewhat likemarinarusalka, what I come to is less "write what you know" than "know what you write".
At the simplest level, a little research to track down overviews and details is not particularly onerous for anyone with a modem. A very little research goes a remarkably long way. As for the really ambitious stories, wherein the author attempts to write about something fraught and complicated, well, she should expect to work harder for those.
Then, too, if you know what your goal is it should be a lot easier to figure out how to get there. And, if you know what you're doing and choose to go forward, then you have taken responsibility for it. It's your choice, and you can defend it as such if it seems neccessary to do so. If you choose to write realism, well and good; if you choose to write unrealistically, well and good. If you choose to write on sensitive subjects and either assert that your personal experience is the totality of what should be said on that subject, or use it for cheap angst without minding how it affects people who may be reading... well, as long as you know that the first is untrue and the second callous and shallow, go for it.
Caveat: It's very true that trauma, and rape in particular, has, for lack of a better term, a symbolic existence in the fantasy world of middle American culture (and quite likely others, but I can't speak for that by either meaningful academic or personal knowledge, so... ) that has only a tenuous connection to rape in the real world. This is, in fact, often put forward as a defense of stories that contain eroticized rape. I firmly believe both that this is an entirely valid exploration of existing sexual power dynamics, and that what it expresses is a deeply harmful cultural tendency. A discussion of how those two things interact, though, is another essay. For now, suffice it to say that, if you choose to write such a story, you should remember that reading it might really mess with the heads of some people who have dealt with the real world version.
In the manner proper to a spiral, let me end someplace different. When we write a story, we make a world, be it full-bodied or barely sketched. Sometimes it's only for ourselves; sometimes it goes further than that. Any story, good or bad by whatever measure, is a transformation. I do not think that responsibility to one's story, to oneself, and to one's readers are really seperate things, despite having dealt with them separately above. The meaning of the transformation is something we, writers and readers and history, make together. It serves nothing, even simple enjoyment, to forget or ignore that.
Lest this be a circle, rather than a spiral, let me address the "write what you know" question in separate parts as a technical and a moral item of advice. For technical usefulness, "write what you know" is on a par with "cut the adverbs". It's a bad habit to use a lot of adverbs to shortcut descriptions out of laziness. Equally, it's a bad habit to write without enough knowledge of your subject to judge plausibility for your story's purposes. Taken this way, neither is any kind of moral imperative, simply technical guidelines or reminders to help write something that has some depth to it and will draw your audience in.
As far as the technical aspects go, it's worthwhile to remember that storytelling requires both passion and dispassion, in varying proportions depending on one's goals. Ironically enough, personal experience of the subject in question can be just as much of an impediment to writing it in fiction as having only third-hand sensational rumor to go by. The more intense the experience, the more difficult it's likely to be for the writer to look beyond her own individual variation and remember that her particular experience may not be common to either the majority of those who share the general experience or to the kind of character she's trying to write. Total universalizing of the personal is just as much of a dead end exercise as assuming that individual experiences have no commonality at all.
Come to think of it, I'm not surprised at all that trauma and sex are two major poles in this discussion, in any of its many incarnations. By its nature, trauma is both intense and difficult to consider with any kind of dispassion if one has experienced it, even if one coped by intellectualizing it. And even when the actual experience of sex is mediocre, US culture in particular adds so much symbolic baggage to the act that it becomes significant anyhow--a personality indicator the integrity of which must be defended at all costs.
As for the moral aspect of all this... two things come to mind.
One is the question of whether fiction writers carry a responsibility to make ethical/political statements with their work. This immediately subdivides in my mind into the questions of Is it even possible not to? and Is it ever possible to do both deliberately and well? My own inclination is to answer no to both. Any story we write carries the stamp of our worldview, whether overtly or between the lines; we are the ones choosing the words, and the choices are ours. The writer's subject position cannot be denied, occasional attempts at doing just that to the contrary. I think our greatest moral responsibility is to be aware of that position and to own it, in fiction as we should for any other kind of communication, lest we all be reduced to screaming reiterations of watertight personal opinions at each other. Which, besides being pointless, is really boring, no less in a story than in a debate. As for the second question, well, by and large, only talented satirists seem able to make deliberate political statements in fiction without the story becoming flat, dry and tasteless. Without that ironic self-awareness, well, then you have Chernyshevskii or Morris, and I'm sorry but the thing with the aluminum still makes me laugh. Actually, so does the thing with the manure--that was the only high point in the book. Dystopias seem slightly less prone to this than utopias, but even there 1984 and A Brave New World aren't a patch on The Handmaid's Tale for storytelling. Atwoods are few and far between, and notably more ambiguous than either Morris or Orwell.
The other thing that comes to my mind is the less abstract and more immediate question of whether a writer has any responsibility to guard her readers from discomfort. I find my own response divided, depending on what angle I'm looking at the question from. As a writer, I think not; the writer's duty is to the story, and if the shape of the story is a disturbing one then that's the way it is. (The writer might want to take a moment to consider why she feels it neccessary to write a disturbing story, but that's between the writer and herself. And, possibly, her therapist.) Considering the question as a member of a social community of readers and writers who know each other sometimes even as friends, however, I think it is... productive, let us say, to give the readers some indication of what they're getting into. Then, if all goes well, the readers will not be frightened or disgusted by stumbling unawares over evokation of emotions/thoughts they can't deal well with, and they may, in turn, not totally abandon all the works of the writer in question in order to guard themselves from another such experience. Because if they do that, then even the stamp of that writer's worldview will be abandoned, and there will be no chance for a more subtle negotiation between the reader's and writer's ideas. Fortunately, these two answers are not mutually contradictory and can both be served by writing the story however and dabbing on some meta-information upon publication--vague or explicit, as seems appropriate. Shades of
avus's answer to the issue.So, somewhat like
marinarusalka, what I come to is less "write what you know" than "know what you write".At the simplest level, a little research to track down overviews and details is not particularly onerous for anyone with a modem. A very little research goes a remarkably long way. As for the really ambitious stories, wherein the author attempts to write about something fraught and complicated, well, she should expect to work harder for those.
Then, too, if you know what your goal is it should be a lot easier to figure out how to get there. And, if you know what you're doing and choose to go forward, then you have taken responsibility for it. It's your choice, and you can defend it as such if it seems neccessary to do so. If you choose to write realism, well and good; if you choose to write unrealistically, well and good. If you choose to write on sensitive subjects and either assert that your personal experience is the totality of what should be said on that subject, or use it for cheap angst without minding how it affects people who may be reading... well, as long as you know that the first is untrue and the second callous and shallow, go for it.
Caveat: It's very true that trauma, and rape in particular, has, for lack of a better term, a symbolic existence in the fantasy world of middle American culture (and quite likely others, but I can't speak for that by either meaningful academic or personal knowledge, so... ) that has only a tenuous connection to rape in the real world. This is, in fact, often put forward as a defense of stories that contain eroticized rape. I firmly believe both that this is an entirely valid exploration of existing sexual power dynamics, and that what it expresses is a deeply harmful cultural tendency. A discussion of how those two things interact, though, is another essay. For now, suffice it to say that, if you choose to write such a story, you should remember that reading it might really mess with the heads of some people who have dealt with the real world version.
In the manner proper to a spiral, let me end someplace different. When we write a story, we make a world, be it full-bodied or barely sketched. Sometimes it's only for ourselves; sometimes it goes further than that. Any story, good or bad by whatever measure, is a transformation. I do not think that responsibility to one's story, to oneself, and to one's readers are really seperate things, despite having dealt with them separately above. The meaning of the transformation is something we, writers and readers and history, make together. It serves nothing, even simple enjoyment, to forget or ignore that.
