This particular worksheet is based on a couple of articles. One by Jami Gold, How to Make the Most of a Scene; and another by Janice Hardy, Rule of Three: No, the Other One. Either of which you might find useful if you are writing a work of fiction or revising such a work.
It’s Bisexual Awareness Week! A time to remind you not to assume that every person you see in a same-sex relationship is gay, and not every person you see in an opposite-sex relationship is straight. It just so happens that I am gay, myself, but my husband isn’t. Gasp! And a significant number of my friends who are married to an opposite-sex partner are bi. And while I like to think of all of us as part of the big, fabulous Queer Rights movement, bi erasure and invisibility is something that isn’t perpetuated solely by uptight straight homophobes.
Anyway, I’ve been following Camille’s tumblr for a while, and it’s always cool, but her video this week is especially good:
BISEXUAL AWARENESS 101:
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Today is also the first day of Sea Otter Awareness Week!
Sea Otter Awareness Week falls on the last week in September and is an annual recognition of the vital role that sea otters play in the nearshore ecosystem. Each year, zoos, aquariums, natural history museums, marine institutions, filmmakers, researchers, academics, educators, and the public participate in various events and activities highlighting sea otters and their natural history and the various conservation issues sea otters are faced with.
Go, learn about Sea Otters and learn how you can help protect this adorable creatures!
And thank goodnees it’s FRIDAY!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily. This is not all of the links I meant to share, because there was a problem with the system I use to save them and I lost a couple days worth. But I probably collect too many most weeks, anyway, so enjoy:
Women Trying To Say “No” Politely In Western Art History.
Ahmed Mohamed swept up, ‘hoax bomb’ charges swept away as social media takes up teen’s cause.
Ahmed Mohamed Is Not the Only Student of Color to Get Handcuffed for a Science Project.
Sea otter learns to use inhaler at Seattle Aquarium.
Right-wingers are worse at swearing than left-wingers.
New Study Finds Link Between Homophobia And Psychoticism.
“Picture yourself as a stereotypical male.” Study shows spatial intelligence not as clear-cut as thought.
One Winning Move: 4000 Physicists Held a Convention in Vegas, Were Asked Never to Come Back.
Baltimore Sun publishes hack job letter on HPV vaccine. I dismantle it claim by claim.
Jupiter’s Moon Io is Even More Hellish Than We Thought.
Is there a Planet X, a ‘massive perturber,’ hidden beyond Pluto?
It will take a year for New Horizons to send all of its Pluto data back to Earth.
New Horizons space probe heading to Kuiper Belt object in post-Pluto mission.
Million-year-old monkey fossil found underwater in cave.
The world’s longest volcano chain discovered in Australia.
New Clues about the Evolution of Dogs.
Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin On Our Next Evolutionary Challenge: Moving Past Survival of the Fittest.
Are Some People Hard-Wired To Be Homophobic?
Earth’s record streak of record heat keeps on sizzling.
EXXON EXECUTIVES WARNED ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE IN 1970S.
Nasa releases new photos of Pluto that ‘make you feel you are there.’
AN OPEN LETTER TO DISNEY: PLEASE BRING BACK KIM POSSIBLE.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy at Emmy Awards: Who’s Won, Who’s Been Fracked.
Seek out new worlds of science fiction – there’s so much happening out there.
5 new ways Pope Francis is sticking it to the Christian right.
The ‘First Amendment Defense Act’ is the Vilest ‘Religious Freedom’ Bill of Our Time.
Gay couple gets marriage license as Kentucky clerk Kim Davis stays out of sight.
Texas’ Law-Breaking Attorney General Is Denying Gay People Equal Rights—Again.
Kim Davis is not the only public official refusing to hand out marriage licenses.
Gays Get Unalienable Rights Too.
What About All the People Jailed in America Just for Being Gay?
Homophobic histories of Nazism ignore Hitler’s war against gay men.
Can Game Theory Help to Prevent Rape?
Rick Perry megadonor wants his $5 million back.
What Republicans Ignored During the Second Debate: Gun Violence, Paid Leave, LGBT Discrimination….
(There were many, many more outrageous headlines regarding the clowns scrambling to out-bigot each over for the Republican nomination; but sometimes enough is enough.)
The big secret behind Bernie Sanders’ surge in the polls.
Poll: Majority of Americans say Kentucky clerk should have to issue licenses.
A Group of Texans Thinks It Can Get The State GOP To Endorse Secession.
Obama on debate: Nothing patriotic ‘about talking down America’ (with VIDEO).
If you like Return Of The Jedi but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism.
12 Women They Didn’t Tell You Were Queer In History Class.
How My Rights in This Country Will Change By the End of This Article.
Mason Darrow and Princeton football show how far we’ve come.
Matt Damon apologizes over ‘Project Greenlight’ and ‘whitesplaining.’ – except it isn’t an apology…
Judge David Bunning, The Anti Kim Davis?
A Look At The Promiscuity ‘Culture War’ In The Gay Community (VIDEO).
Righting a Stubborn Wrong: Anchorage Revisits Law Protecting LGBT Community.
Stonewall Featurette Focuses on Gender-Fluid Character “Ray/Ramona.”
Swiss font legend Adrian Frutiger dies.
Homemade Rockets and Invisible Moons: more of why I love sf/f.
Weekend Update 9/12/15: It’s about ethics….
Disclosure & Sam Smith cover Hotline Bling in the Live Lounge:
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Arguing About Kim Davis at the GOP Debate:
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Tim Cook On Speaking Up For Equality:
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BECA – METEOR:
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Atlas Genius – Molecules [Official Music Video]:
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Asthmatic sea otter learns to use inhaler – longer video than the one in the article:
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It was during one of those rotations that I first found a copy of Eleanor Cameron’s Mr. Bass’s Planetoid. Of course I had to check out right away because it had “planetoid” in the title! It was clear from nearly the first page that this was a sequel. Two best friends, Chuck and David, are friends with an eccentric scientist, Mr. Tyco Bass, who helped them with their homemade rocket previously. Another scientist, Prewytt Brumblydge, has stolen a sample of a mysterious metal Mr. Bass had discovered in a meteorite, and soon he is using this metal to power a machine with which he hopes to solve two of the world’s problems: the lack of safe drinking water in some parts of the world, and the need for electricity. Unfortunately, the machine has dangerous side effects that could destroy the entire planet. The boy’s learn this part from yet another scientist who happens to be Brumblydge’s former teacher, who is convinced the student is looking for the source of Mr. Bass’s mysterious metal.
The problem is that Mr. Bass is nowhere to be found… Continue reading Homemade Rockets and Invisible Moons: more of why I love sf/f
Florida: So, twitter and other places lit up with the news that a notorious GamerGate person has been arrested by the FBI for terrorism. The Florida Man twitter account had the best take: Florida Man Plots Fake Terrorist Attack Because, I Don’t Know, Ethics in Games Journalism…Or Something? Other sites have a few details to add: GamerGate supporter arrested by FBI over terror threats. I understand, and even share a teeny bit of, all the schadenfreude that’s happening on the internet over this. But I’m having trouble actually applauding.
The thing is, people have been calling for investigations into the swatting and doxing and death threats that shut down events for a long time. There have been rumors that the feds were looking into those things at least since last year: #Gamergate Is Reportedly Being Investigated by the FBI.
But this isn’t about any of that. An FBI informant contacted this 20-year-old douche, claimed he wanted to set off a bomb at a 9/11 memorial, and convinced the douche to send him bomb-making instructions. In other words, like every other domestic terrorism arrest in the last decade and a half in America, it’s a case of entrapment. No actual terrorist plot existed. No actual people were in danger. That’s why I’m having trouble applauding. There are actual terrorists active in America right now. But they’re not plotting to bomb 9/11 memorials. They’re burning down Planned Parenthood clinics, burning down mosques and churches, shooting people in temples and churches, murdering doctors who have performed abortions, or threaten to burn down an entire town in upstate New York because muslims live there… and they are never investigated as terrorists. Their support groups and organizations are never investigated as terrorist groups because they all share two convenient traits: their membership is predominantly white, and they claim to be Christian.
So, while I am happy that at least one douche who has threatened and harassed people is getting some legal punishment, I wish it wasn’t on these sort of trumped-up/entrapped terrorist charges instead of things he and others like him are actually doing on their own.
Michigan: I posted in Friday links a few weeks ago about the virulently anti-gay and emphatically “Christian” legislator in Michigan who attempted to frame himself for having a drug problem and having hired male prostitutes as part of a really ill-thought-out plan to cover up the fact that he and another anti-gay legislator had been having an old-fashioned opposite-sex affair (while they were both traditionally holy matrimonied to other people). This week an ethics committee voted to recommend that the two of them should be removed from office. One resigned, and the other refused, so a 14-hour series of votes ensued before she was officially removed from office: 1 Michigan legislator expelled; 1 resigns. It took so long and so many votes, by the way, because liberal democratic legislators kept voting no on the principal that conservative hypocrisy and adultery shouldn’t be reasons to remove someone from office (the only democrats on the ethics committee abstained on the vote to recommend removal).
The two of them had co-sponsored several anti-gay bills, so again there is a bit of schadenfreude going around. I have absolutely no problem applauding this outcome, because they are being expelled for things that they actually did, and I disagree with the liberal lawmakers precisely because these are public officials who used their office to attempt to pry into, criminalize, marginalize, and deny the basic civil rights of their fellow citizens based on sexual orientation—in the name of their religion—while they themselves engaged in sexual conduct that is at least just as wrong according to said religion. When people in authority use their official power to condemn and attempt to police other people’s sexual activities, their own sexual activities become germane to any discussion. Also, there is more going on than just the affair. As this story notes: Disgraced lawmakers, out of office, now face criminal probe, investigation is also underway as to violations of campaign finance laws, official misconduct, and a misuse of public resources.
I didn’t save the link to the most infuriating article I read, and now I can’t find it. But Cindy Gamrat, the one who wouldn’t resign, was trying to paint herself as a victim. She told the interviewer how humiliating it was to have people in public talk about her private shame, passing judgment on her private conduct, and voting on her future because of it. Right. And her bill to make it legal only for “minister of the Gospel, cleric, or religious practitioner” to issue marriage licenses and to revoke all the privileges of marriage from people who hadn’t been married by such a clergyman wasn’t at all invasive of citizen’s private lives. And none of the rest of her actions opposing civil rights protections for queer people had anything to do with passing judgment on citizen’s private conduct.
Kentucky: And you may have thought the Kim Davis issue was over, since she promised the judge she wouldn’t interfere in the issuing of marriage licenses to gay couples, but no: the Associate Press reports Kentucky clerk again asks for delay on gay-marriage licenses. Her attorneys argue that the only couples she denied licenses to before she was sent to jail all got licenses while she was in jail, and now she should be free to refuse any others who come along because those people got thiers. In other words, she’ll refuse licenses until the next couple sues and judges order her to give that couple the license.
Except she doesn’t think that will happen, not because she doesn’t think there aren’t any more queer people in her county, but because Oath Keepers offers Kentucky’s Kim Davis a ‘security detail’ and Oath Keepers Send Armed Guards To Protect Kim Davis From US Marshals – See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/oath-keepers-send-armed-guards-protect-kim-davis-us-marshals#sthash.p5Exjxbp.dpufThese gun-totin’ good ol’ boys have vowed to protect Davis from any federal marshals or judges who attempt to arrest her or otherwise punish her for denying queer people their legal rights.
It has been reported that Davis has declined the offer, and that the Oath Keepers leader has told his men to stand down… but apparently they aren’t leaving Rowan County. And given that Davis has clearly stated in her new filing to the appeals court that she has no intention of keeping the promise she made to the judge to get released from jail, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to contemplate that she may un-decline the offer from the Oath Keepers when things don’t go her way with the appeals court.
It’s the second Friday in September. September, ah, that most blessèd month!
And thank goodnees it’s FRIDAY!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily. This is not all of the links I meant to share, because there was a problem with the system I use to save them and I lost a couple days worth. But I probably collect too many most weeks, anyway, so enjoy:
Rallying to Help a Homeschooled Christian Kid Who Got Thrown Out After He Came Out.
There are lots of other kids who need our help. Here are a few places you can help:
BUILDING A MOVEMENT TO END HOMELESSNESS.
And the local one I give to regularly: Youth Care.
Why did the FBI show up at this Globalist youth reporter’s house?
Homo naledi, a new species of human, discovered in a cave in South Africa.
NASA Releases New Image of Mysterious ‘Bright Spots’ on Ceres.
BEHOLD PLUTO IN ALL ITS MAJESTY.
Earth’s magnetic mystery forces scientists to get creative.
People are talking about a Best Series Hugo proposal...
On the same topic: The format is political.
How gay rights got its start in science fiction.
NO MORE DIVERSITY PANELS, IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON.
Queer Sci-fi/Fantasy Anthology Beyond Goes Above and [Review].
2015 Hugo Analysis: Nominating Stats, Part 1.
SIZE MATTERS: THE EVOLUTION OF UNICORN HORNS.
The queer masculinity of stealth games. “In games, men’s bodies often represent brute strength. Stealth games are the focal point for an alternative masculinity: sleek, illusory, sensitive, and self-reflective.”
We’re getting Kim Davis all wrong: What she reveals about the right’s true motivations.
That’s Me in the Corner, Losing My Religion.
Boss Who Asked Transgender Woman ‘What Are You?’ Agrees To Significant Settlement.
Kim Davis Is Just the Beginning.
Ben Carson’s theocratic lie: The pernicious myth of America the “Christian nation.”
Emasculated white men love Donald Trump: The real reason a billionaire bozo rules the GOP.
The secret hidden inside Bush’s tax plan.
Cruz’s second shutdown play rankles fellow Republicans.
Huckabee: Dred Scott Decision “Remains To This Day The Law Of The Land.” The Dred Scott decision was overturned by the 14th Amendment.
Bernie Sanders stood up for gay soldiers — 16 years before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ended.
RUSSIA SAID TO GET IRAN’S CLEARANCE FOR SYRIA-BOUND FLIGHTS.
The Biggest And Boldest Ideas For How To Stop Rising Inequality.
Reporter Says He Was Fired For Asking If Sen. Vitter Still Hires Prostitutes.
Her Name Was Natasha McKenna & No One Will Be Held Responsible For Her Death.
How Religious Liberty has been used to justify racism, sexism, and slavery throughout history.
The Problem With Religious Exemptions to Gay Rights.
Readers React: Issuing marriage licenses isn’t God’s work.
Does the Tech Industry Even Deserve Women?
Are GOP Donors the Key to Passing a Nondiscrimination Bill?
Gay Marriage Is Legal, but We’re Still Not Equal.
Inside the Seattle Clinic That Survived the Darkest Days of AIDS. Being an out gay man in Seattle in the ‘90s myself, I know more than a few of those names in Dr. Shalit’s card file…
Semi-Precious Stone, Helical or Otherwise: more of why I love sf/f.
We’ve always been here, even in a galaxy far, far away….
Things I wish I could post to Facebook without causing relatives to go bananas….
Storytelling should not be preaching, part 2.
Tiger plays with bamboo like a kitten with string:
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[Official Video] Can’t Sleep Love – Pentatonix:
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HELL’S CLUB. NEW MASHUP AMDSFILMS (watch it all the way to the end of the credits…):
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Gareth Thomas: Never Alone tells the story of how the former Wales captain’s greatest fear wasn’t the opposition he faced on the pitch, but the fear of rejection from everything he had known, because of his sexuality:
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Troye Sivan – WILD (Blue Neighbourhood Part 1/3):
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My Heart Will Go On – Vintage ’50s Jackie Wilson – Style Celine / Titanic Cover ft. Mykal Kilgore:
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Once I got the book home, I read through the titles in the table of contents again, and one jumped out at me: “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” It was just an interesting image: a helix of gemstones and the like as some sort of analogy or metaphor for time. And the author’s name, Samuel R. Delaney, seemed familiar, though I couldn’t think of any stories I had read by him.
So I jumped right to that story… Continue reading Semi-Precious Stone, Helical or Otherwise: more of why I love sf/f
Jim C. Hines has a post more thoroughly discussing the various negative comments, if you want to read it. But I think his best comment is:
Oh, dear. A galaxy that includes countless species and droids and races acknowledged the existence of homosexuality? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Can we PLEASE get back to giant slugs with a fetish for other species, green muppets, blue elephant people, and giant walking carpets? You know, characters who are normal.
Conservative pundit Earl Hall (here’s a DoNotLink link if you want to subject yourself to it) weighed in (including a really bad attempt to write some Yoda dialog), asking why there are suddenly so many gay characters everywhere: “Is there all of a sudden way more LGBT people in our population than we once thought? Is this really about diversity, or is it more about forcing a story line and lifestyle down our throats?”
First of all, yes, Mr Hall and all the bigoted one-star reviewers: there are more queer people in the population than you thought. But it isn’t suddenly. I’ve quoted before the CDC study in the 1990s about sexual activity that found that while Americans would rather admit to being heroin addicts than bisexual, if you just went by their sexual activity rather than asking them to identify their sexual orientation, about 45% of the population regularly engaged in sexual activity with both men and women. That and other studies indicate that only about 6% of the population engages primarily in sexual activity with members of the same gender. But that means that just (45% + 6 % = 51%) a bit over half the population of the planet is non-heterosexual.
That means that in the U.S. about 19,800,000 (that’s more than nineteen million) people are exclusively gay, while about another 148,500,000 (that’s over 148 million) people are bisexual/pansexual/whatever you want to call it.
And worldwide, the combined number would be 3,570,000,000 (that’s more than three-and-a-half billion) non-heterosexual people.
So, yes, a lot more than you think. And we’ve always been here. There was a wonderful scholarly article I read once that was dissecting clues in various documents and diaries and so forth from the 1890s that put forward a really good argument that men were having sex with other men more often in the U.S. in the 1890s for at least part of their adult lives than was happening in the 1990s. Just as an example.
Wendig has a couple of great responses:
If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids.
And a bit later in the post:
And if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire.
Wendig also points out all the women and people of color appearing prominently in the trailers for the new movie, in case that kind of inclusion also upsets the one-star reviewers.
Finally, one last note about all those one-star reviews. Amazon’s algorithms push books to the top of recommendation queues based in part on the number of reviews, total. It does not take into account whether the reviews are good or bad. The algorithm cares only that lots of people feel strongly enough about a book to review it. And sales statistics seem to bear that out: readers are more willing to take a chance on a book that has lots of reviews, negative or positive.
I suspect a lot of those people read the negative reviews, see what the reasons a person dislikes a book are, and say, “Well, they may not like books like that, but I do!”
Regardless of that phenomenon, there’s an actual campaign on some conservative fan sites asking people who haven’t even read the book to go give it a one-star review. I don’t think the understand that just means that more people who haven’t heard of the book will have it recommended to them by Amazon.
But then, bigots have seldom been known for the brilliance.
I get so tired of reading the melodramatic laments for the good old days. You know what? It was only peaceful and happy if you lived in the right neighborhoods, had the right skin color, went to socially approved churches, hid away your true self for fear of being beaten to death for being gay (for instance). And also, if you weren’t a man, it was only peaceful and happy so long as you had the protection of a man who wasn’t a wife-beater, et cetera.
The funny thing is, despite what these people have been led to believe, crime rates of all kinds in the U.S. are lower than they have been for more than 150 years. So, maybe these folks need to stop watching Fox News and reading and believing every email from their friends about the latest outrage against “real americans.”
Also, if god didn’t “withdraw his protection” from the U.S. over incidents like intentionally infecting Native American women and children with small pox (which was not the most horrible thing we did to Native Americans), then he sure as heck isn’t going to do so now simply because we’re going to give a few more people equal rights.
I love my country. I literally get tears in my eyes when I play songs such as the old Kate Smith recording of “God Bless America.” I will go on and on about why Thomas Jefferson is my favorite Founding Father (with very specific examples), or why James Madison is my second favorite. I support liberal politicians because I am patriotic and I want my country to live up to the ideals expressed in those founding documents about liberty and justice. We aren’t there yet, by a long shot. But we keep getting closer. We keep getting better.
And at every step along the way, we have gotten better over the objections of people who claimed that the Bible forbids women to have equal rights; or the bible says slaves should be happy to be owned, used, and abused like cattle; or the bible says that the races should be kept separate; or the bible says that gay people are abominations. The bible doesn’t quite say most of those things, but it most definitely says that left-handed people are abominations (mentioned 25 separate times, as opposed to the 3 mentions of same sex activities, and the 4 other mentions of things we aren’t quite sure what the original writer meant but in very modern translations have been twisted to be about homosexuality). Funny, no one is calling for us to pray for god’s forgiveness that we don’t criminalize the left-handed.
I’m not saying you don’t have a right to your beliefs. I am also well aware that there are many christians who don’t feel that invoking the bible should give them a free pass to oppress, discriminate against, and vilify whole swaths of the population.
I am saying that, if you feel the need to constantly decry and lament the fact that I now have the legal right to marry my husband, or campaign against my legal right not to get fired just for being gay, or my legal right to buy things at stores open to the public without being refused just because I’m gay, then you are not my friend. This isn’t about me rejecting you, it is a statement of fact. You are actively engaged in trying to take away my rights. You are actively engaged in trying to hurt me.
Friends don’t do that.
And if you feel the need to consistently insist that god is going to punish this land for no other reason than the civil laws have finally started to recognize gay people as actual people who have the same rights as everyone else, you are also not my friend. Again, this isn’t about me rejecting you. You are saying that me living my life as a productive member of society—not hurting anyone else, just refusing to hide who I love—is somehow so terrible that it justifies the creator of the entire universe ignoring everything else happening on trillions of planets circling billions of stars in the millions and millions of galaxies in the known universe and wipe out a country? My existence is so awful, that the creator of the entire universe is going to punish everyone (including babies and animals and other living things that have done nothing wrong) by wiping us out? If you think my existence is that terrible, that is neither love or respect. And again, friends don’t think that way about people they actually love and respect.
Keep posting those hurtful, hateful things. I’m not going to stop you or call you names. But I’m also not going to sit here and keep reading rants that say these horrible things about me and people like me. I’m not going to silently let you salve your conscience with the occasional assurance that you still love me, sandwiched between your posts about what an abomination I am. Or what heroes people who discriminate against people like me are.
That isn’t love.
And you don’t get to say those kinds of things and still call yourself my friend.
Over dinner last night, my husband pointed out2 that C.S. Lewis, even when writing stories that were meant to be Biblical allegory, remembered that the stories had to be stories first: fully-rounded characters that you care about facing obstacles that seem insurmountable which they overcome through their own actions. And that made me realize that even Lewis’s Christian apologetic novel, The Screwtape Letters was less preachy than some of the other stories we were discussing—because even while discoursing on the nature of human imperfection in the form of letters from a senior demon to his nephew (who is a Junior Tempter), Lewis created a demon who was, as a character, sympathetic and relatable.
I’ve written about this before, during which I quoted (and disagreed with) a Christian filmmaker’s argument that all fiction has a message. The same argument has been being repeated by a lot of people in the discussions specifically about sci fi/fantasy writing, with a new variant: maybe none of us (of any political opinion) notice the messages we agree with because we are so passionate about the things we believe.
I think this is just as wrong as the earlier version. All fiction tells stories, yes, and those stories will embody the values of the author in many ways. I’ve given the example that part of my fundamental temperament is a refusal to accept a no-win situation4, and therefore even when I write grim stories with unhappy endings5, there winds up being at least some hint of a glimmer of hope somewhere in the tone of the story.
But the C.S. Lewis example belies that notion that all fiction is message fic. Yes, some people find the allegory of the Narnia books not to their liking, but I haven’t met anyone who’s read them who can’t explain the plot. Yet, I read scores of reviews of “Parliament of Beast and Birds” earlier this summer (by some very smart people) who couldn’t find a plot6.
So I remain firm in believing that if your story is a message, you’re dong it wrong. That isn’t how you make good art.
I agree that messages are to be found in stories. But they ought to be more like that one alluded to in the Neal Gaiman quote, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” They are meanings that can be inferred by the reader. They are meanings that different readers will interpret in different ways. The interpretations of some readers can contradict the interpretations of other readers and can contradict the interpretation of the author.
Some readers will come away from the story knowing that dragons can be beaten. Others will come away convinced that wizards always find loopholes. Others will say that kings always find ways to take credit for other people’s work. Others may say the message is never to underestimate the damsel. And some, of course, will say the message is humans would rather kill an endangered species than learn how to live with them.
If the story is art, if the storyteller has done their job, the world of the story should be vivid enough and rich enough for readers to find and see all of those sorts of things in the tale. Which is what you want. You want the reader to be transported into a world that they will experience and interpret themselves. You want the reader to share your vision, yes, but you want that vision to take on a life of its own and for the reader to find visions of their own.
That is the opposite of a sermon, whose goal is to bring a person around to thinking the “right” way. To adhere to the truth as defined by the speaker.
I want my readers to run through the imaginary world and find new things that I never dreamed of.
Footnotes:
1. Which is why many of us reviewing those stories commented along these lines: “Oh, Puppies, just because you agree with the message, it does not make the work any less message fiction.”
2. We were on the subject because he had been reading one of his favorite sci fi zine sites and had gotten pulled into the comments section of a book review, if I recall correctly3.
3. I was into my second glass of my favorite wine at my favorite restaurant, so I am probably getting the details wrong.
4. Intellectually, I know that lots of situations are no-win, but there’s always that one voice in the back of my head arguing that we should just spend a little more time and try something else…
5. And despite the fact that more than one reader has accused me of being a hopeless optimist who writes everything through rose-colored glasses, I actually have written more than a few tragedies.
6. Or figure out what the story was supposed to be about7.
7. Quick sum-up: imagine an idiot savant has read some Aesop’s Fables and then binge-read the entire Christian apocalyptic snuff-porn series, Left Behind8, and then attempts to write fanfic of it.
8. To be fair, much of the New Testament’s Book of Revelations is treated as snuff-porn by a lot of Xtians I knew growing up. One of them was me. It was my grandfather who pointed out to me that I was spending all my time and energy focusing on the end of the word, when god put us here to build each other up and make the world a better place.
Font Folly 