I picked up one of my older books last night and read it a bit before going to sleep.\u00a0 Gross Ego Inflation,\u00a0 you may be thinking, though the internal editor pointed out every single place where–years later–maybe another word would have been better?\u00a0 Huh?\u00a0 Are you listening?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not one of the really-old ones–it was written post Hurricane Katrina*, for instance.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But it ties in with something that affects all writers in all eras, even if they’re trying not to be tied to a particular time and place.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
We all are, of course, a product of our experience as well as of our genetics.\u00a0\u00a0 We are born into a circumstance–in a family or as an orphan, in this country or that, in a race that is acceptable or despised, in an economic level that is sufficient, or more than ample, or barely life-giving.\u00a0\u00a0 From the moment of our birth, we are shaped by history local and regional and global, and by current events, ditto.\u00a0 Even if we are deliberately trying to conceal some of that–to avoid writing about things that impinge on us–we cannot eliminate every influence because we have to write in words that people understand (OK, there are exceptions–but you’re not finding them easily on bookshelves, or understanding them when you find and try to read them.)\u00a0 We inherit values that we accept, or struggle against, or have mixed feelings about.\u00a0 We challenge (or do not challenge) what’s around us.\u00a0\u00a0 And those of us who are not trying to conceal what shaped us, but also trying to write into an unknown future (SF) or parallel universe different from our own (classic fantasy)\u00a0 leave a lot of bread crumbs on the trails of our imagination.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to think–media would like us to think–that we’re all in a box with others born at the same time in roughly the same place.\u00a0 Hence the “generation-this” and “generation-that” commentary.\u00a0\u00a0 Born between X and Y, in Country A, this is who you are.\u00a0\u00a0 Only…that’s a very blunt dissection of the population and it cuts right across the finer levels of difference.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Every detail of your experience–of my experience–impinged, not just the big broad strokes of history’s brush.\u00a0\u00a0 My experience was different from that of a friend who is only 5 years younger, but who grew up in a 2-parent family in a part of the country considered “heartland”…not a scruffy little corner of the south border, hundreds of miles from the nearest real city.<\/p>\n
Between my re-reading own book and an argument I’m having with an older SF writer on a venue very far away from here (closed venue),\u00a0 I’m seeing more clearly some things that I sortakinda knew about my past and myself, and that show up in my books without the backstory (my backstory) being on the page directly.\u00a0\u00a0 OtherWriter (OW, henceforth) is adamant that progress makes some people useless because they can’t become smart enough, educated enough, fast enough.\u00a0\u00a0 I have just argued (taking time that could have been spent on a story, yes…a waste of time, no doubt, since OW isn’t likely to change his mind)\u00a0 that “usefulness” cannot be measured by money–by whether or not someone has a paid job (and especially not by whether it’s a well-paying job.)\u00a0\u00a0 I was explicitly taught that by my mother (and some school-teachers of my childhood also insisted that low-paid workers were not useless at all–they themselves, at the time, were low-paid.)\u00a0\u00a0 But I also saw that in everyday life.<\/p>\n
The daily work that directly sustained life–growing and harvesting food, feeding people, making cloth, making clothing, transporting food and people and clothing and other goods, maintaining community infrastructure (streets, sewers, parks,\u00a0 buildings),\u00a0 caring for clothing and bedding, keeping places clean, caring for the sick and injured,\u00a0 and so on and so on–was done by both unpaid (housewives) and lower paid workers–our area had few jobs for skilled workers because skilled workers could make more somewhere else.\u00a0\u00a0 Real people built the houses, fixed the potholes, planted the crops, harvested the crops, made the clothes we wore (some in factories, some at home with their own sewing machine),\u00a0 cleaned the toilets, washed the dishes, on and on. \u00a0\u00a0 Some families had members who could not work\u00a0 outside the home (too old, infirm, whatever) but were not considered “useless” (any more than housewives were considered useless) because they had skills and knowledge that were still useful.<\/p>\n
As a young reader, the fiction books I read were more about “ordinary” people than the rich, the powerful, the gorgeous, the supertalented.\u00a0 Other than in fairy tales and mythology (loaded with kings, princes, etc.)\u00a0 the fiction I liked best (horse stories, dog stories)\u00a0 focused on people much like those I knew, in the same of being competent-but-fallible. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, it wasn’t until I was reading both science fiction and political novels for the first time (at about 14-15 years old) that I ran across writers whose focus was on those types of people–in the case of SF, there was a strong strain of “high IQ is what you need and low-IQ is the worst possible thing to be.”<\/p>\n
And so, without really thinking about it consciously, my stories have been, all the way back to the very bad, very Mary-Sueish stories I wrote in elementary and junior high school, about people other than Superman\/Superhero.\u00a0\u00a0 And yet…there I am, writing about spaceship commanders, some rich people, generals,\u00a0 paladins, kings, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 And yet…I conceive of them as human.\u00a0\u00a0 With warts that make them not contemptible, but really human.\u00a0\u00a0 People who eat (and the food comes from human labor in growing, harvesting, storing, cooking) and excrete, who need clothes to wear and shelter from bad weather.\u00a0\u00a0 People who may be scorned by their society as useless, but only because no one has bothered to find out what their use is.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They are too young, or too old, or too weak, or too arrogant, or some other faults and lacks…but in the right circumstance, it’s they who do what needs doing.\u00a0\u00a0 And I think it always is, if they and their society figure out what they can do.\u00a0\u00a0 If not…their uselessness is not innate, but acquired–forced on them by the ignorance and laziness of the society they’re stuck in, which dismisses them as useless because it’s easier than figuring out how to help that person find a way to contribute.<\/p>\n
And now another hour has disappeared into writing something on the computer.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 May it amuse you, in some way.<\/p>\n
*There’s a strong clue in the book about something that happened in that emergency and what I thought about it and the people responsible.\u00a0\u00a0 Another case in which anger almost overtook storytelling, but since no one’s commented on it that I know of, the storytelling wasn’t entirely swamped.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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I picked up one of my older books last night and read it a bit before going to sleep.\u00a0 Gross Ego Inflation,\u00a0 you may be thinking, though the internal editor pointed out every single place where–years later–maybe another word would have been better?\u00a0 Huh?\u00a0 Are you listening?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not one of the really-old ones–it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,53],"tags":[108,22,112],"class_list":["post-2229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-background","tag-characters","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2229"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2230,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2229\/revisions\/2230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}