What We Talk About When We Talk About History

Only men sat here, doing important things.
The women were too busy making sure there was
a home for these guys to come home to, to make History.
Apparently.

This piece of amazingness came across the transom this morning Sexism in historical fantasy by Tansy Rayner Roberts, which is a response in support of this other piece of amazingness about writing historically accurate fantasy fiction that preserves the belief that what men do is important in history and what women do...not so much: The Mary Sue by Dan Wohl. 

Both of these articles are about issues that are very near and dear to my heart and one of the major themes in my novel, The Altar of Dead Pets. Who gets to write 'history?' What does that term mean? How do we create History out of the disparate threads of Women's history, African-American history, Native American history, Hispanic history, etc, etc etc? When do the footnotes stop being footnotes and get recognized as what they really are? The true story of how we have come to be who we are as individuals and families, as a culture, as a nation, as a species, as inhabitants of the planet Earth?

But I'll also add that the ideas expressed in those two articles aren't limited to works of historical fantasy. Even future fantasy is predicated on the same assumptions of who acts in a society and what acts matter.

When I was 13, I wrote a Star Wars novel called Children of the Force. It was 1978 (yes, I just told you how old I am, gasp), and the first movie had just come out, the second was being filmed, and I was in love with the series (fan fiction had yet to become a thing, and the Internet was still almost two decades away, unfortunately). I was in love with science fiction and fantasy. I wanted to be a SF/F writer (something that got beaten out of me when I got to college and became a creative writing major - but that's another blog post. If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you've already seen it both on Word Slut and on Neil Gaiman's blog).

The novel I wrote at 13 featured a female Jedi knight as the main character. Katarra, for that was her name, had been in charge of a rebel base on a planet the Empire had invaded. It was a mad race to the rebel base to wipe the computers because something had gone wrong and files that should have been destroyed hadn't been, leaving the location of all other rebel bases vulnerable to discovery by the Empire. In the climactic scene, Katarra battles Darth Vader in the obligatory light saber dual, even taking over for Luke when he tries to be the hero and gets himself severely injured.

I still have both the original draft and the revision that I finished when I was 16. It is one of the things that sustains me when I am deep in the depths of despair about being able to complete a draft or do the revision. I did this when I was a teenager. I spent an entire summer staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning so I could write when the house was silent (boy, is that a pattern that keeps repeating in my life). But it took until I was in my 40's to realize the truth about that novel, the truth I'd known without knowing I knew it as a teenager, as a young woman, and that I'd forgotten as an adult.

In order to make a place for myself in that fantasy world with the swashbuckling Han Solo and the masculine order of the Jedi Knights (which I just knew, KNEW, was a male-only order even though, in the original movie that isn't stated - Katarra was trained in private by her father who was a Jedi Knight (okay, I'll come totally clean - her father was Obi Wan) and came to grief because she killed her brother while they were sparring with light sabers - see, secret female training of a male-only order results in grief, banishment - I knew it even as a 13 year old), in order to make a place for myself in this world that seemed to allow space for only one woman of power (in college, in the mid-80s, I heard Susan Sontag speak and she referred to this as "the dark woman" phenomena - in male-dominated spheres, such as literature, there was space for only one or two women at a time - you still see this, though to a lessening degree as the years go on, in politics, haute couture, fine cooking, etc), in order to make a place for myself in this universe, I had to create a female Jedi Knight.

Anyone who knows me, knows I am not and never have been a Princess to be rescued. And while Princess Leia was totally bad ass in that original movie and turned many of the rescued princess tropes on their ears, she was the dark woman of the Star Wars franchise (also, as an aside, of which I seem to be making many today, please note what happened to her in the course of the original trilogy - she went from being bad ass (though asexual - Lucas made Carrie Fisher bind her chest because her breasts jiggled too much in that white nuns habit she was wearing - seriously, you never noticed how much she's dressed like a nun in that movie? Go take a look) and powerful and basically taking over her own "rescue" (love that scene in the movie, "I'm Luke Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you" "Really, what's your plan? Oh, you don't have one? Let me take that gun and get us the hell out of here.") to being a sex object. Nun to half-clad slave girl to earth mother in three movies.

But back to my original point. I was not a princes (no matter how bad ass) to be rescued. And so, I created my alter-ego as a powerful woman in her own right, someone who not only doesn't need to be rescued, but goes and rescues others and battles Darth Vader into submission. And doesn't end up as the trophy prize for some macho guy at the end. She ends up getting the forgiveness of her father and his recognition that she was every bit as worthy of the title of Jedi Knight as her brother. But, and here's the thing that really blows my mind about how smart my 13-year old self was, she doesn't need it. She knows what she is, and she knows  her value, and she knows that what she's accomplished is important and necessary for the Rebellion to continue. Katarra doesn't yell "F*CK YOU, you old white guy!" at Obi Wan's spectral figure, but neither does she fall into a mushy pile of goo now that she's gotten validation from him (For the entire novel, she pretty much thinks her father was wrong for not recognizing her own gifts and bucking the convention of a male-only Jedi order), she simply acknowledges what he's said and continues doing what she's been doing all along. Pretty much like most women do.

And back to my original original point - what those articles I linked to are talking about is not limited to just historical fantasy. Nor are they limited to fantasy either. Those of us who write what I call "legitimate" fiction (with the scare quotes) need to be careful of the same traps and conceits - reflecting the cultural conventions without questioning their legitimacy or their perpetuation is just as bad, in my humble opinion, as turning dynamic, self-assured women into half-clad slave girls chained to giant phallic slugs (or turds, I go back and forth on what I think Jabba the Hut looks like - talking penis or talking pile of sh*t).

How to Survive the End of Your Novel

I'm guest blogging over at my friend's Writing About Writing blog about how to survive the end of your novel (or any long writing project). Go check it out if you want some advice on what to do when you fall into that post-novel Void (and go check it out if you think that will never happen to you).

The past couple of weeks have been pretty amazing. Not because of anything extraordinary that has happened, but because of something very ordinary. I started writing again. Which is what prompted me to ask Chris if I could do a guest blog for him. 

I've been hanging out inside The Void for quite some time now. I'm not sure what happened, but it really got bad over the summer in the post-Squaw Valley craziness. The novel just went away. I mean, like I couldn't even remember what I'd written, couldn't even read the novel I'd been so thrilled with when I finished it at the end of March. I tried being disciplined about setting up a writing time. Tried starting a new project. Nothing. And the timing couldn't have been worse. I met an agent at Squaw. Someone I truly wanted to work with and with whom I had a good connection. He passed on the novel, but said he'd look at a revision if I wanted to do one. Of course, I said yes. He'd put his finger on some of the things that had (honestly) begun to bother me about the novel - places I was hoping would pass for serious and literary rather than places where nothing was happening. (As an aside: if, as you're reading your work, you come across places where, in the back of your head, you hear whispered mutterings of "well, no one will notice" or are justifying anything, I mean anything, in your work, take a deep breath and go back to work - you aren't done). And the agent came back and started helping me refine the premise of my novel so I'd have a better idea of what I wanted to do with my revision. 

The only problem was I still couldn't get inside the novel. I could barely remember what I'd written. And I mean that completely and 100% honestly. I had developed a serious block. The Void had me firmly in its grip.

In truth, I hadn't given myself enough time. The novel wasn't ready to go out into the world. And I hadn't let myself mourn and separate from what I'd created in that draft enough to be able to evaluate whether it was truly done. And I got depressed.

To put it bluntly, The Void is awful. It doesn't announce itself. It just kind of arrives, like fog. Although, where I live, fog thunders over the mountains. Fog has a body. Forget creeping in on little cat feet, the fog I see from my back window pours over the mountain top like Niagara Falls. I've spent the past couple of months thinking about giving up writing. I know. Crazy, right? 

The most worrisome aspect of The Void for me was how all my ideas just stopped. It was like my brain froze. I'm used to being inundated with ideas while I write. I keep a white board over my desk so I can write  these ideas down because, when I'm writing as deeply as I was on Altar, I am a one-trick pony. Plus, I've learned, some ideas seem really amazing when they first hatch, but aren't quite the shiny object I thought they were a couple of days later. So now I wait. But, caught in The Void, all the ideas just stopped coming. Even the ones I'd had before were uninteresting. And the novel I originally went to grad school to write, the one everyone loves, the one that has the easy premise to explain, that one wasn't budging. Which should have been my biggest indication that I wasn't done with Altar.

The Void is sticky and tricky. And it tries to make you think it's real. It isn't. I finally just relaxed, stop fighting, told myself "It is what it is" and stopped worrying about it. 

And this crazy thing happened. The Void went away.

I started getting up at four in the morning. Even waking up before my alarm goes off. I know. Crazy, right? But it works for me. I've done this before and it's almost like my inner writer needs me to make that kind of crazy, over-the-top gesture to know I'm serious. Every morning, I get two delicious hours of silence in which to work. And then I go for a bike ride. Because I also started riding my bike again. At the moment, I'm getting in about 50 miles a week when it isn't raining. Writing and then zooming along the bay on my bike and everything is wonderful. The other day, I passed right beneath a red-tailed hawk who was eating breakfast (a squirrel or something I think - I wasn't getting that close - that photo was taken with telephoto) on the bridge railing. How can a day that starts with writing and a red-tailed hawk be anything less than awesome?

It feels good right now. The words are flowing even though I'm taking it slowly. At the moment, I'm reminding myself to take it in stride. No matter if it's The Void or The Work, it is what it is, and each will take it's own time (but I'll still take The Work over The Void any day of the week).

Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper

I am teaching home-schooled teen American Fiction this year and our next reading adventure is The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper. While perusing the Internet in search of background material, I found this gem of literary analysis by Mark Twain. My favorite criticism is that characters should be alive, except when they're corpses, and, when they are corpses, the reader should be able to tell that they are.

Mark Twain on The Deerslayer

Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in "Deerslayer," and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "Deerslayer" tale to the end of it.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the "Deerslayer" tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.

7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the "Deerslayer" tale.

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the "Deerslayer" tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the "Deerslayer" tale.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the "Deerslayer" tale, this rule is vacated.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

An image round-up

Submitted for you amusement, here are a few things I've been looking at recently.

In honor of Banned Book Week:

A common feeling among writers:

Braille version of The Little Prince:

Fantastic real estate:

Fitzgerald's signature through his ages:

There really is an old book smell:

No surprise, the answer is always "yes."

If you find a stray book, please give it a good home:

Schools should replace their snack machines with these vending machines:

My next art project:

When the Universe Speaks, it Speaks in Symbols

Fogbow: finding the unexpected in unexpected places.

I had not intended to take such a long break from writing anything on this blog, but, short story, I've been going through some stuff. Family stuff, novel stuff, life stuff, health stuff. Those kind of things.

For the most part, things have been going well, and I don't want to say too much right now, but I will say I have found myself confronted with some roadblocks as far as the novel is concerned (note to writer self: when you hear that voice telling you something is not-quite-right, LISTEN. Yeah, that kind of roadblock. The kind that happens when that thing in the novel you've been kind-of-sort-of-hoping-no-one-would-notice-and-you're-not-really-letting-yourself-know-you're-noticing-because-you're-really-hoping-you're-wrong-about-it-and-that-you're-actually-brilliant turns out to be yeah, that thing you should have fixed before the agent looked at it).

So I've been working to overcome the roadblocks, which has got to be one of the most frustrating things to do because it was all about thinking my way out of a writing problem. I don't know about you, but this doesn't usually work for me, but there didn't seem to be any other way to get done what I needed to get done. It wasn't about the writing. It was about what the writing was about and trying to come up with a succinct and snappy way to say it - which, of course, exposed a deeper problem that needed to be dealt with. Someday I hope to explain it all, but I'm saving it for when I actually master the problem so I can seem all brilliant. That day is not today.

Today is about process.

I am a kinesthetic person. Which means thinking my way into a problem from the outside is really difficult. When I'm confronted with a new thing to do, like trying to rewrite a novel, I usually know the first couple of things I need to do, but beyond that, it gets murky and I get confused and trying to think my way through the process makes me want to take a nap. But...once I get started, the path becomes clear. I am within the problem at that point and all the dots line up very nicely. Until that magic moment, when my brain kicks over into that space, though, I'm lost. (with my novel, seriously, I was having trouble even remembering what I'd written. I have no trouble talking about my novel, but when I need to manipulate the words, rearrange them or figure out the patterns of the novel - forget it. If I'm not in the creative space, it is just static going on inside my brain). Having gotten to the end of my third draft, my brain had pretty much shut down on the working through the problems of the novel and was being very reluctant to start the machinery moving again. It was like the whole manufacturing plant had gone dark. I was out of the story-telling space and not finding the entrance again.

So, I did the next best thing. I started a new project. I'm now about 20 pages into a fantasy novel I've been kicking around in my head for the past year or so. A fun little project. But it got the story-telling space going in my head again, and the wheels started to turn easier on Altar. But I was still having issues resolving the problem in the text itself.

Then came the day of the Metaphorical Bike Ride.

I've discovered that I like bike riding (again, I used to do it a lot when I was younger). It doesn't suck for the first 30 minutes as so many other forms of exercise do. Most days I ride at least 10 miles on the Bay Trail, which is a beautiful path that runs along the entirety of the SF Bay, and I do longer rides once or twice a week. I've been hoping to get to at least 25 miles, but I keep losing the trail at this one point and have to turn around, which puts me at about 22 miles. I'm not the only one who loses the trail at this place. I've seen other bikers riding around aimlessly in this area. The problem is that the trail is well-marked, especially when you're riding on the straight-aways with the bay or the marshland on one side and a residential neighborhood or street on the other. Not much you can do except keep going straight. Thanks, guys, those trail signs are very helpful. Then you get to this one spot where the trail suddenly divides in like five different directions and THERE ARE NO TRAIL MARKERS (just like where I was with my novel after Squaw - the trail suddenly branched and there were no markers to tell me which was the correct option).

On the trail, continuing straight took me either to a playing field complex (and there were two options here, one led me to some hotels and the other put me up on a surface road) OR over the 101 freeway and a total dead end a block later. If I went over the bridge, instead of going straight, I was on the campus of a high-tech company. If I turned right after the bridge, I went into a park and a dead-end or ended up on another street. For some reason, the "turn left" option never occurred to me. Either I didn't see the path to the left (I didn't the first couple of times I did this) OR it didn't feel right because it essentially made me back-track in the direction I'd just come.

In any event, I didn't turn left and I kept not turning left because it never occurred to me to turn left.

At least it didn't until I was thinking about it and playing it back in my head and realized turning left was the only option I hadn't tried yet and I should probably do it.

The day of the metaphorical ride started out with me getting caught in a rush hour traffic jam and getting to my starting point later than I wanted to. Which was a big deal because I had an appointment and thought I was going to have to cut my ride short to make it. Then, for some reason, once I got on the bike, I felt like I wasn't going anywhere. I have a phone app that tracks mileage for me and tells me when I hit each mile, how long I've been riding, and how fast my lap time was. A good mile time for me right now is about five and a half minutes. I was listening, but not really listening, to the app tell me I was clocking miles in at under five minutes, but it felt SLOW and like I wasn't getting anywhere. I'd also underestimated how far from where I'd started the bridge was. So here I am, feeling like I'm moving slow and not being able to get to the bridge to test out my theory, but I got close enough to see people running on the other side of the inlet, which told me that, yes, there was a trail there, and feel pretty confident that I was right. But I couldn't get there myself just yet. At the end of the ride, it turned out I'd done 13 miles in just over an hour, which was a pretty good pace for me, and much, much faster than I thought I'd been going (the converse of that is the ride I did yesterday that felt nowhere near as slow as the metaphorical ride and yet I barely covered 10 miles - I was doing 6 minute miles! Subjective experience is not a good way of gauging progress was the lesson I took from yesterday's ride.)

Here's where the metaphors come in:
1) I was actually moving much faster than I thought I was - probably the same way that, even though it feels like I'm not getting anywhere with the novel right now, I'm making more progress than I know.
2) I didn't reach the goal, but got close enough to confirm my suspicions - I wasn't quite close enough to the solution in my novel to actually see it, but I could have confidence that I was on the right track.
3) In order to find the trail, I had to do something that was 100% counter-intuitive and that looked like back-tracking - in order to figure out what I needed to do, I was going to have to do something that looked like going backwards and that seemed completely opposite to what I thought I was going to have to do.

Whether you think I'm reading too much into it or not, it worked. Two days ago, I confirmed my theory about the trail, and, that night, the piece that I needed to figure out popped into my head in a flash of inspiration. Everything fell into place and finally, finally, the idea felt right, felt organic to the novel and as if it was already a part of the novel, I just hadn't written it yet because I just hadn't seen it. I hadn't turned left because I didn't know left even existed.

At Squaw, even the dogs listen to the faculty readings.

I am back from the Squaw Valley Writers' Workshop, and all I can say is WOW! I had a fabulous time, learned a lot, met some amazingly great people, and, basically, spent a week reaffirming my commitment to my writing and reconnecting with why I actually write.

About 150 screenwriters, fiction and nonfiction writers attend the workshop each year. Agents, editors, and published authors make up the faculty. Attendance is based on a submission of your work that will be used not only for acceptance, but also to pair you up with a workshop leader and a one-on-one consultation with a faculty member. Workshop groups meet from nine to noon with a different faculty member serving as group leader each day. The afternoon and evening are given over to panel discussions and readings. Attendees live in various vacation homes located within Squaw Valley or condos at the Tyrolian Village.

I was pretty happy with both my workshop leader, Ron Carlson, and my one-on-one consult, Diana Coglianese, an editor at Knopf who specializes in literary fiction. I was even happier with both my workshop-mates who were, to a person, generous and insightful readers and terrific writers in their own right, and my five housemates. My housemates were incredibly compatible and spent a lot of time together at  dinner and the afternoon sessions and readings. We got along so well, it was sometimes difficult to get the reading done for the next day because we all congregated in the living room to read and ended up talking. The week was a complete immersion in writing and reading, surrounded by people who love books and writing. Even the near-90 degree weather didn't stop me from having a fabulous time (though I did pick up a cold, so I'm going to sign off now and go take a nap. More about Squaw later this week, I promise).

Rejection

I'm not going to mince words. Rejection sucks.

In the writing business, rejection happens far, far more often than acceptance. It's probably something like a 1000:1 ratio. Although maybe it just feels that way. Most writers accept that rejection is part of the terrain, and learn to make peace with it by realizing that rejection doesn't always equate with lack of quality. We console ourselves by looking up the rejection letters of famous people (like here) and citing statistics like C.S. Lewis' 800 rejections before selling anything (like here). No matter what type of writing you do, rejection is going to happen when you're trying to get other people to spend their money to support you.

If you can't come to terms with that, you've got no business calling yourself a writer. 

At a certain point, you find yourself opening those envelopes and emails, reading the "sorry to disappoint you" message, shrugging your shoulders and going back to what you were doing before, which is, most likely, working on a new writing project (because, seriously, if you are sitting around waiting for your masterpiece to be accepted for publication before you start working on the next project, you've also got no business calling yourself a writer).

As I've been sending Altar of Dead Pets out to agents, I've gotten rejections. It's part of the business. I fully realize that, even if Altar were the most amazing, extraordinary novel EVER written, not every agent is going to like it or, even, if they do like it, be able to sell it. And I've gotten rejections from agents who definitely fall into the latter category. They like it, think it's well written, but don't feel as if they could be successful with it. (in the writing biz, that's called a good rejection - we actually have different categories of rejection because, hey, when you're dealing with a 1000:1 ratio, not all rejections are created equal and you've GOT to find some way to make yourself feel better - maybe I'll do a post about the 50 Shades of Rejection for next week). Most of the rejections are fine - a couple of lines that tell me the agent read my query and pages but doesn't think it's the right project for him or her. No problem

However, sometimes, there's a rejection letter that is just...well...insulting.

I got one of those this week. And it wasn't for the novel. It was for a piece I submitted to a literary journal. 

It wasn't that the letter was rude (a friend of mine has gotten those - the ones that basically tell you you should give up. NOW) or led me to believe my writing hadn't been given courteous consideration (again, gotten those - the insta-rejections that hit your email inbox less than 24 hours after you sent something. Another friend just got one of those TWO hours after she sent the query on a Sunday evening - that's REALLY telling the writer you don't care because it seems like it was an automated rejection letter).

This rejection letter was none of those things. Instead, it bent over backward to be...nice. And it bent over backward to take my feelings into consideration. And it bent over backward to assure me that I should, in no way be discouraged by this rejection. And it bent over backward to let me know how many really good writers this publication has rejected over the years and how much work - work that they really, really like - they've had to reject because they simply can't publish everything nor do they have the time to give me a critique of my work. And they really, really hope this won't make me stop writing.

And there it is. The thing I find insulting.

This was a literary journal with a very good reputation. It has a professional editor. They publish professional writers. Many of whom have international reputations. And yet, the letter treats me as if I am some fragile flower who's feelings will be so damaged by this rejection that I will stop writing. 

As I said above, if rejection is going to make you stop writing, you're not a writer. 

My real point in this is not to be snarky about the rejection, it's to say that rejection happens and it's, essentially, meaningless to the writing process. Part of being a professional, an adult, is to know and have faith in the work I'm doing and recognize that one person's opinion is not the world's.

And my other point is to ask editors and agents to please, please, have respect for the writers with whom you come in contact. If we are truly professionals, rejection, even yours, will not kill us. Treat us like the professionals we are. Please.