Writing the Other

by Nisi Shawl

  You are not a Mainer unless you were born in Maine and your family has lived there for generations. Cynthia, born of Mainers whose ancestry stretches back to the Revolutionary War, made the grave mistake of being born out of state. She is “from away.” She is not, and never will be, a Mainer.

  Maine is a state no less homophobic, racist, or otherwise bigoted than any other state. But these categories are secondary to whether you’re a Mainer or from away. In Maine, being from away puts you in a marked state. And for Mainers, being from away trumps any other ROAARS difference.

  Perhaps the author didn’t know this. Perhaps he did, and was trying to break stereotype by having this umpteenth-generation Maine lobsterman have a gay, New-Yorker best friend.

  Was Cynthia right? Is it impossible for a Maine lobsterman to ever have a best friend from away?

  Of course a Maine lobsterman can have a best friend from away. He can even have a gay best friend from away.

  Cynthia’s disbelief in the depiction of this friendship wasn’t provoked by its mere existence in the story.

  Her disbelief arose from the story’s incorrect ­parallax.

  The author never showed that the Maine lobsterman character was conscious of doing anything unusual. Though conducting a friendship extremely remarkable by his own standards, the Maine lobsterman never noticed this, even in his own thoughts. And all his Mainer friends also failed to notice. The author made his Mainers act according to the parallax of a sophisticated Manhattanite who is entirely comfortable with, or indifferent to, “alternative” sexuality.

  This rings false.

  The Liberal Perception Fallacy

  Perhaps the author just didn’t realize that a friendship between a Maine lobsterman and a gay New ­Yorker was unusual. If so, he made a major research mistake by missing the native Maine feeling against people from away, a state-based bigotry so uniquely strong and well-known that it’s the subject of Down East Magazine’s 2004 Annual and shows up in Reader’s Digest.

  More likely, the author committed the liberal perception fallacy. This fallacy originates in the tenet that we shouldn’t judge people by their membership in a category, which is what we do when we assume, for example, that a person must be a bad dancer or good computer programmer because he belongs to the Euro-American group. The fallacy arises when a person (often but not always a liberal) decides that, because it is bad to judge people in this way, it must therefore be bad to notice there are any differences between different groups or categories of people, or between people who are members of different groups. (Please note that we’re talking here of groups and group membership more in a mathematical sense than in a sociological one. These are not groups in the sense of clubs, and membership is not always voluntary, or even ­conscious.)

  Of course, it’s perfectly fine to notice that there are differences between groups of people; there are, after all, innumerable different categories of people with indisputable differences marking them from one another. Gay men and lesbians generally do not feel sexual attraction to members of the opposite sex, and Maine has significant sociocultural differences from New York City. (If you don’t believe us, try telling the Maine joke above with all the Mainers changed to New Yorkers. Meaningless, isn’t it.)

  So, what can we do? Clearly, it wouldn’t work to have the Maine lobsterman worrying about whether the gay New Yorker was attracted to him; such a worry, whether reasonable or ridiculous, is no soil for growing a best friendship. It also wouldn’t work to have the Maine lobsterman constantly speaking and thinking of his best friend as “my gay, New-Yorker best friend.” No character makes a convincing best friend himself if he spends all his time noticing his supposed best friend’s marked-state differences, because he seems too bigoted to be capable of the friendship, and because readers know that close relationships are generally formed by the behaviors and interests that the friends or lovers have in common.

  However, it clearly also doesn’t work to shoehorn a girlfriend or boyfriend into a short story just so the writer can show the heterosexual character saying “Yuck!” over the homosexual friend’s lover, or vice-versa. This is obvious. Too, it pads the story. It’s also dumb.

  So, how might a non-Maine writer have grounded his straight Maine lobsterman in an authentic parallax?

  It wouldn’t have taken much. The writer could have effectively established the lobsterman character’s parallax with a moment’s teasing. The lobsterman’s Mainer friends could have briefly kidded him about his friendship in the well-known manner of male bonding:

  “So, Bert, are you the woman, or that queer from New York?”

  “I ain’t the type, Marsh, but I hear you are. Your wife tells me she can’t keep you out of her dresses or make-up.”

  The Maine lobsterman’s parallax could have been established even more precisely with a single sentence. Cynthia’s incredulity as a reader would have been eliminated if the Maine lobsterman character had just once thought that it was strange that he got along better with a New York queer than with the guys he grew up with.

  Different Differences

  Karen Joy Fowler’s wonderful 1991 novel Sarah Canary piles parallax upon parallax in a whirlwind tour of variously combined ROAARS characteristics. The book follows the adventures of an enigmatic figure, Sarah Canary as she’s sometimes called, through the American West of the late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries.

  Skillfully skipping from one viewpoint character to the next, Fowler gives us passages that illuminate their narrators, using the light of their reflections upon this strange traveler to do so. The first to encounter her is Chin Ah Kin, a Chinese immigrant and railway worker. She seems ugly to him, so he deduces that she must be a prostitute, though it does strike him as odd that she’s white. But in his classification of her, the category of “ugly woman” is more important than that of “white.” He makes another telling distinction with regard to her skin when he compares it not just to porcelain, which any bad poet of his era might have done, but to “Four Flowers,” a particular kind of porcelain. And the tonal inflections of her speech, which cause another character to name her after a songbird, remind Chin of Cantonese.

  When Chin encounters Indians, his reaction isn’t to clasp them to his bosom in swelling camaraderie, welcoming the presence of others oppressed by European colonialism. Difference is not monolithic, and based on past encounters between the two groups, Chin fears and hates them:

  Some years back the Indians along the Columbia River had murdered the first Chinese they saw simply because they did not recognize them as a viable natural category. They were not Indian. They were not white. They were like one-winged birds; they were wrong. They were dead. (25)

  Sarah Canary abounds with excellent examples of how parallax adds depth to major and minor characters. It’s also a showcase for another technique helpful in writing the other, so we’ll return to it again later.

  Exercise 2

  You’ll need a partner to do this exercise, which calls for a bit of role-playing. It can be done in person or over the Internet.

  First, both you and your partner should mentally pick two numbers between one and twelve. Write these down, or remember them, but don’t reveal them to each other.

  The two of you will be having a written conversation, writing from the viewpoints of two complete strangers. If you’re doing this in person, you’ll use pen and paper, swapping your pad or notebook back and forth as you respond to one another. If you’re online, you’ll simply type your dialogue as you IM or email one another. The context for the dialogue is this: One of you (decide which one before starting the exercise) has found the other’s checkbook and would like to return it.

  As for what the character you assume will be like, that’s up to you—except for two important traits.

  On the next two pages are four lists, labeled “A, B, C, and D.” Using the numbers you’ve picked, read what it says next to the first number on list A and the second on list B. Your partner will do the sa
me thing, using lists C and D. Again, do not reveal to your partner the numbers you’ve picked or the traits assigned to those numbers. Simply assume those traits as your own, and begin writing.

  Eight minutes is a good time to allow for this exercise in person. You’ll need to add two minutes when doing it through IMs, and if you and your partner are using regular email, give yourselves up to sixteen minutes.

  A

  1. Practitioner of polyamory (in an intentionally non-monogamous sexual and/or romantic relationship)

  2. Multiple sclerosis patient

  3. Atheist

  4. Octogenarian

  5. Buddhist

  6. Muslim

  7. Afro-Caribbean

  8. Near-sighted person

  9. Lesbian

  10. Indian/Native American

  (you may have a specific tribe in mind)

  11. Filipino

  12. Tourette’s patient

  B

  1. Blues guitarist

  2. Technical rock-climber

  3. Floridian

  4. Erotica reader

  5. Disc jockey

  6. Child-support payment evader

  7. Attorney

  8. Well-groomed person

  9. Good cook

  10. Professional manicurist

  11. Someone who dwells in a rural area

  12. Person who frequently changes hair color

  C

  1. Hermaphrodite

  2. Spina bifida patient

  3. Non-native-English speaker

  4. Catholic

  5. Anorexic

  6. French-Canadian (if you’re not living in Canada, you’ll be an immigrant)

  7. Person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s

  8. Mixed race person (you pick the mix)

  9. WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)

  10. Korean-American

  11. Someone allergic to peanuts (if you eat peanuts, you may die of shock)

  12. Eighteen years old

  D

  1. Tarot reader

  2. Executive Vice President (of whatever you choose)

  3. Part-time student

  4. Wine collector

  5. Gardener

  6. Insomniac

  7. Pregnant woman

  8. Misanthrope (hates everybody)

  9. Nail biter

  10. Biker (as in Harley rather than Schwinn)

  11. Pet rabbit owner

  12. Blogger (keeps an online journal)

  Now that you’ve completed the exercise, here are some things to consider about it:

  Did you find yourself trying to guess which characteristics your partner had assumed? Trying to keep yours secret, or to reveal them through your part of the dialogue? Did some of them come into the conversation naturally?

  Lists A and C, in case you hadn’t noticed, are primarily ROAARS traits, and B and D are primarily non-ROAARS ones.

  Past students have found that what they’re able to communicate about their character to their partners, and the effort needed to make that communication, can vary quite a bit. Though most short stories and novels are less restrictive than the dialogue you’ve created for this exercise, it’s worth remembering that even ROAARS traits are not always in the foreground and that they interact with each other and with non-ROAARS traits to form complex portraits. Keeping those portraits in mind even when you’re not pointing out their details to your readers can make your work stronger. It can make it more authentic and lend it greater depth.

  5

  Categorical Thinking

  Learning logic can be of enormous assistance in catching the reptile brain at work. Logic is a subject for an entirely different book. But we will discuss one logical fallacy here because this categorical error is central to writing the other.

  This fallacy is the “universal generalization fallacy,” which is sometimes called the “generalization fallacy.” Most people know it by the term “generalization.”

  In Think to Win: The Power of Logic in Everyday Life, author S. Cannavo offers the following definition of generalization:

  When we generalize, we reason from a set of particular instances to some general (universal) claim:

  All metals are electrical conductors.

  All humans are mortal. (232)

  Dr. Cannavo warns:

  It is, of course, critically important that generalizations not be made on evidence that is too scanty to begin with. Yet, despite the obviousness of this caveat, we are all inveterate generalizers, and easily fall into the error of doing so too hastily. (234)

  The consequences of generalization range from mild (for example, falsely assuming that all lemons are sour because every lemon you’ve tasted is sour, thus leading you always to avoid them), to amusing (Cynthia was once told that all the women working in her building were lesbians, which clashed humorously with her own self-knowledge), to tragic (falsely assuming that all Muslims must be terrorists or supporters of terrorism, with the result that many citizens of the US backed the invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation that had no connection with Al Qaeda terrorism).

  The generalization fallacy occurs when you mistake the traits of an individual for the traits of a group, or when you assign all the traits belonging to most members of a group to an individual who shares that group’s primary identifying traits.

  Consider cats. Cats are fur-bearing animals. Most cats have fur, but not all. A cat can lose its fur through disease. A cat can be shaved (Cynthia’s Maine coon cat Hopey was recently shaved by a groomer impatient to eliminate tangles). A cat may belong to the genetically hairless sphinx breed.

  You cannot determine whether an unseen cat will be furred by depending solely on its membership in the species felis domesticus.

  The same logic, of course, is true for humans.

  You can always find something to divide even the most homogeneous group of people. Remember the “blue-eyed vs. brown-eyed experiment”? In the late 1960s or early 1970s, a teacher in an all-white school wanted to teach her students about discrimination. She divided her grade-school class into two groups according to eye color: blue eyes or brown eyes. The students with blue eyes immediately began discriminating against the brown-eyed students merely because of their brown eyes (Peters 1987).

  As a group, African-Americans have darker skin than do those of the European-American group. But this tells you nothing about any individual in either group. Both Nisi and Cynthia have seen people with African-American features and blond hair, blue eyes, and very white skin. The darkest person Cynthia has ever seen was a Caucasian (from south India).

  Group membership does not inherently determine, predict, or predestine anything about any individual—or any character.

  Various group memberships can influence behavior. But none of these categories’ traits need have a constant, overriding influence on your character.

  Do you spend every waking moment thinking about your ROAARS traits? About your high blood pressure? About being a science fiction writer? About the town you grew up in?

  No. And neither should your characters.

  For a glimpse at the diversity of viewpoints among members of a particular group, we’d like to recommend the anthologies Dark Matter and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by Sheree R. Thomas. These volumes collect short sf/f by black American and Caribbean writers. Some of the stories are about race. The stories vary in the degree to which they express consciousness of race. Some of the stories make no reference to race, overt or covert. And some of the characters (including main characters) aren’t black. But all the stories reflect African-American and Afro-Caribbean perspectives. And, as you’ve probably guessed, the stories are quite different from one another.

  Stories and Categories

  It’s especially important for writers to make the distinction between the traits assigned to a group or category and the traits belonging to an individual. This is because, generally speaking, stories depict change and are often (though not always) about changing
category.

  Like you, your character can lose her innocence. Get a sex-change operation. Fall in love. Marry into a different socioeconomic class. Dye his hair. Discover she’s gay. Move to a different country—or different planet. Get in a crippling car accident. Or discover, like Carol Channing, that she belongs to a different race than she thought.

  And the categories themselves can change. For authors working in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, and horror, coming up with new categories is often a big part of the fun of writing. In Greg Egan’s novella “Wang’s Carpet,” there are no more humans, only posthumans. Even in this strange future, the tendency to classify is alive and very, very well. To us these posthumans would all be “other,” but they manage to differentiate themselves. The new categories they do this with are:

  ♦ the biological-emulation online people, intelligent and self-aware computer programs modeled after us extinct biological human beings

  ♦ the anti-bioform online people, intelligent and self-aware computer programs who see no need to limit themselves by copying lifeforms from the past

  ♦ the people in robot bodies, programs who have downloaded themselves into mechanical forms.

  These newly invented types of categories comment on the characters and their physical environment as well as on their social structures. For another great ­example of how to use categorization to illustrate important points about a future society, see the “Filing System” used by the inhabitants of Little Belaire in John Crowley’s novel Engine Summer.

  Categorization: Always False?

  Before we conclude this section, we want to emphasize that categorical thinking is not inherently wrong. It is not automatically fallacious. If scientifically valid studies demonstrate that 52% of American households have a cat, that isn’t a fallacy. It’s a fact.

  The generalization fallacy occurs when you make a deduction on insufficient evidence, as in the following two examples: