Racism and the well-meaning white novelist

Recently I had a brief exchange on twitter with another writer about structural racism in novels – in particular stereotypes and tropes which are included, deliberately or not, in stories written by white people which include minority characters. The discussion was actually started about gender identities, but it encompassed racial identities also. 

One of the phrases used was Well Meaning White Women. I hadn’t come across that before, but I felt like it probably applied to me, because every book I’ve written includes characters who, at this point in time on Earth, would be considered minorities.

My Position: I am only oppressed or a minority in that I have been identifiable as a woman with all that entails in present-day England. I am white. I’m not sure about my gender TBH but I pass as straight and have always had partners who were men though…let’s just go with straight because it’s only significant here in terms of visual or social identification. I have various fantasy lives in which I’m always male, not always white, not always straight. I don’t put particular significance on that. Discussing imagined constructs is for another post entirely, not unrelated but not useful here. I’ve experienced what I would guess is a low to average amount of sexism. If I was structurally oppressed I can’t say for sure. I am a woman who writes SF and every interview has always highlighted that. I have often fallen into the trap of discussing that, thereby validating it. I have not been on all cylinders all the time when I had opportunities to be viciously critical of things that needed it although I’ve felt strongly about it. 

I’m writing here about my Well Meaning bit and how it played out in my work up to now. If it reveals me to be a part of the problem then I’m glad to know that, at least. I don’t know that it does, so I will have to wait and see if others convince me that I am. (FYI would being convinced stop me doing whatever I’m doing? Of course it would. I can’t think of anything much more depressing than trying to fight against something only to see that you’ve been making it worse.)

In my first published novel, Silver Screen, I chose to write about a protagonist who was half white Irish and half Indian (Bharat, not North America). I know not much about being Irish, and not much about being Punjabi. I figured Irish was relatively safe as I had friends who were Irish. I had cousins who were half white American and half Indian. I assumed that there is a common humanity everywhere which would allow me to realistically imagine the rest in the usual way for all fictioneers since ever. (We are always writing only ourselves, we try to stand in others’ shoes).

However, I decided I wasn’t going to write Anjuli, or any other character in the book, whatever minority they might signal in the present, as a minority, I was going to write everyone as if they were equals who saw each other as equals and who did not have biases. I wanted to set it in a future where none of this was a thing, because I wanted to create a future where none of this was a thing – some part of me, born in the 1980s, actually thought that in my lifetime we were going to move to a point where all this was not a thing and I wanted to be in the vanguard of making it not a thing. I did my best to remove that.

One of the first, and very disappointed, pieces of criticism I got on that was that the book did not reflect the reality of being a mixed-race woman. It absolutely doesn’t, because I knew I could never pull that off convincingly and because to do so would have been the opposite of what I had in mind. The story is about the absolute bigotry handed out to an AI in a world that considered itself past all that. Even the main character dithers about whether or not to think of machine minds as equivalent to living humans. She doesn’t once think about her own heredity or history because she doesn’t think people still do that. I thought that would actually send up a signal that this is really genuinely odd, that it would give the story verisimilitude because it’s just completely impossible for a present-day actual mixed race woman in a top job not to have spent every day noticing that she was noticed for all the wrong things. The most she does is wonder about her own fractured family – which fell apart for reasons which again, were not racially motivated.

The category this falls into is the ‘ignore it and it’ll go away’ category of not addressing racism and thereby letting it slip away, I suppose? Always supposing I had done it successfully (I can’t tell because I wrote it). I was trying to model my work on Star Trek, but better, without leaving Uhura on the flight deck all the time. That was where I was at. I think, then and now, that there is a great benefit in creating futures where current issues do not exist, even if you can’t explain how it happened, because you give people a chance to notice that it can not exist, that it is possible and, more importantly, that whoever you are it is fantastically desirable.

Moving on through a lot more examples e.g. in which the protagonist of Natural History is a black female history Professor who goes off with a cyborg transhuman into another dimension…we end up at a much more recent book of mine, The Switch.

The final cover

The Switch has a gay male protagonist struggling for survival in a world where the entire political, religious, social and scientific structure revolves around anti-gay bigotry. I think this fully captures pretty much every Do Not Never Ever EVER Do This recommendation of the original twitter thread on how to write minorities which started this entire topic. 

I felt all of those Never Evers for every bit of writing that story, even before having someone well-meaning say it on Twitter. Constructing that world became a bizarre game in how to save anything remotely plausible or sensible or hopeful from the massive fucking train-wreck that is Homophobia Through The Ages. It’s part and parcel of Hatred Management Through The Ages, which is why I wanted to write about it even though every sensible bit of me was screaming, “NOOoooo let’s go write about space aliens instead…” But I couldn’t because I’ve never come across a bunch of hateful justifications for shit behaviour and wanton stupidity that I could leave un-tilted-at. And I know I am not a great tilter. I’m more like a terrier that smells a rat and then goes into the Red Zone.

Anyway I did include some space aliens and a well-meaning interfering Social Justice Warrior from another galaxy who turned out to have well-meaning methods that involved all kinds of unpleasant murdery, rapey, emotionally violating collateral damage for our heroes as she helped them to dismantle their horrid world (horrid for them, mind you, not horrid for a good half the population). Like they were short of that stuff to start with. And then they discovered that the entire thing was…OK,  I’m not writing that spoiler here but trust me, it was the last thing you’d want to find out about Why You Suffered. 

But then I read that Twitter thread and I wondered – I did write about a non-existent reality but, because it features things which are trying, very obviously, to hit you over the head with the Look At This Thing Here and Now bat, have I been adding to the issue? I knew from the start my only way to write about it was in an SF structural way because it isn’t my personal experience directly. As with Anjuli in Silver Screen I didn’t want to write Nico as a victim, even though here his oppression is everywhere and unavoidable. Nico pretends he’s a hard case who can shrug it all off. He’s constantly failing magnificently to do this, but that’s his survival mode and it kind of works.

You would have to decide for yourself if my work falls into the category of Well Meaning White things. I feel that there is a discussion here I still haven’t reached yet which is the problem of trying to police/interpret/know other people’s thoughts but that has to wait for tomorrow’s post. 

Star Ratings

I used to spend ages pondering what star rating to give to various things, particularly books, particularly when I felt conspicuous by being a published writer whose platform was therefore a bit weightier to some people’s minds. I also thought about being on the receiving end of other people’s ratings and what that felt like. 

For ages I thought that the star rating represented my total value of the book – artistically. Not how much I personally enjoyed it and the experience it provided, but how good it was at what it was trying to be. That did suppose I can tell what it was trying to be. You can usually tell, but not always. I worried about getting it wrong. I worried that I wouldn’t be smart enough or kind enough or wise enough or whatever enough and that I might unwittingly slight some great work through my stupidity (this has happened).

Usually I just put up the stars that I feel like putting up though that varies by the mood I’m in. Horrid story but very true and revealing? Good mood: ah, yes, wisdom and human truth – 5 stars.  Bad mood: fuck you and the horse you rode in on, story, you’ve added some extra blight to my day I could have done without – 2 stars. But that felt so unfair. 

This sometimes left me in a situation where books were successful in their own right; well-made, nicely written, suited to their What It Says On The Tin cover, a good product, a job well done BUT I still didn’t like them. Usually when this happens it’s because the story says something indirectly through its premise and conclusion which I don’t agree with, or maybe find actively horrible. Sometimes it’s because even though I do agree I still found the experience of reading it fairly horrible for reasons of content and wish I hadn’t read it.

A horrible experience can still be valuable, perhaps very much so, but it’s not one that makes you leap for the joy of revelation. How can you set the value of something grim-but-great against something joyous-and-great?They are not similar experiences at all. Is it even ethical to count the grim and the joy? On the other hand how NOT to count them since they underpin the entire experience-thing in the first place? Given all these factors, I couldn’t figure out how to weight them to just a row of stars. It bothered me so much I gave up reviewing online, or even remarking, for ages.

So then I decided I had to revise my systems and regain some sanity. From here on in my star ratings would be some in-the-moment conglomeration of everything that had any bearing on the thing. To get over the unfairness aspect I would become even more subjectively discerning and only post four or five stars onto new book reviews – because being liked and appreciated never hurts. Three stars and under – I just don’t post those at all because I don’t think anyone benefits, unless I think that it’s warranted to actively warn someone off a book in the way I’d warn them off a dodgy toaster, known for randomly setting houses on fire. So far this has never happened. Well once, but that was so traumatic that I’ve not done it again. 

As people have noted, I do tend to overthink things. But since I started my new system I have not had any more anxiety or overthinking about star ratings and reviews in general. It also works well in the other direction. I don’t bother with three-star-and-under reviews of my work – they’re for other readers to consider anyway. I did what I could when I wrote my stories and if people didn’t like them there’s nothing I can do about it so why bother?

That’s two massive anxiety-attack-producing phenomena dealt with by one, big, star-shaped rock. Winning! I give that five stars.

Mere

Pedro Roldan Molina – artist

“Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false quietude of any oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being.

There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed.”

John Gray, The Silence of Animals

I was reading some John Gray today. This conclusion struck me as akin to my conclusion, for the time being. With one exception. Gray says ‘mere being’. Mere as in “that’s all, only that, no more”.

I would adjust that to – All it offers is being. Anyone who finds being insufficient will soon find otherwise when they are in transit to non-being. Being is everything. It is only insufficient if you haven’t noticed how absolutely immense it is. It’s everything. All. There can be nothing more.

Mere is also used in English to mean a lake or body of water. Hence the image above, which I found in my file and which Luisa identified for me as by Pedro Roldan Molina. I love his work!

Lost

The Beautiful Zone

Sometimes it’s good to be lost. It’s a bit less good when you lose things that are important. I’ve lost track of my non-fiction work and am presently working on collating its references and searching out its texts. Somewhere in the Shed Of All Things its possible I still have them in hard copy. Some of them exist on the internet. But some are gone.

I’ve always dashed from one thing to the next. If the deadline was hit, the copy accepted – then I was out of there and on to the next thing. I did have filing skills, but various hard drive deaths before the Cloud rendered them fairly useless for this present quest. I wish I had dutifully printed out, labelled and kept a copy of each item as a record to save myself a lot of bother later. I seem to remember having had this wish a few times. It has made stationers a lot of money from my wallet as I have splashed out on diaries, notebooks, desk calendars and organisers. None of them were effective  because they require that you actually look at them instead of daydreaming about flying cities and how to manage the geology of a constructed world from the point of view of a machine engineer.

It’s all the more galling because I used to do admin for a living and I was good at it. Of course, it was someone else’s admin. Anyhoo, somewhere on the edge of The Beautiful Zone (see picture) there needs to be an Admin Zone that is robust and the only way to achieve this is, I think, to play Admin Simulator and pretend it’s a game.

Level 1, Quest 1: You have seen Charlie Stross, who is the expert at these things, write a post about this once, somewhere.  Go forth to the internet and find that post. Implement its suggestions. A clue to the newsgroup you last saw it in is in the Massive Email Swamp. What are you waiting for?

Rewards: 1500XP, Work Saving Device Automation. Reputation With Self: Revered.

But first I must just write down this scene and notes for a Quantum Gravity novella I thought of while I was out walking the dog…

Covers

I am presently having all new covers made for the Quantum Gravity series and will be relaunching it in the USA in spring 2019. It will be available as e-books and, hopefully, print-on-demand for those who prefer paper.

As a run-up to this I will be shifting the focus of my blog from streamy-dreamy whatevs, to posts focused on these – not least because I will have to re-read them as a run-up to writing a few novellas in the same universe once my current project has been delivered.

Meanwhile I hope you are all having a good run up to the festive season. I’ve got so many books to read in the holidays that I’m already into the third stack.

I’m currently reading “Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore” by Emma Southon. It’s terrifically enjoyable. If history books had been more like this I would have studied it a great deal more than I did.

Poem

I wish I were a poet. I think poetry is the most powerful of the written art forms. I’m so reverential about it I haven’t written any since I was at school.

I know I am not good at it but now I’m at the age where I realise I don’t have forever so I am going to write the odd poem out of various silly impulses because I also lack silliness in my life. If you’re waiting to do something for a similar reason, why wait? Might as well give it a go. Have heart, it’s OK to be bad at things (and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to turn off the extra line gaps in this editor) – viz

Poem #1

I don’t know this

And I don’t know that

I don’t know a cat or

Why is a dog or

How does a frog or

Where is that log?

Is a bog

Good or bad?

Is it coincidence sons is not

Suns?

Could there be an elephant made out of buns?

I can’t catch time as it runs.

As it runs

Runs

Runs

*

 

Scattered

I have a very scattered mind. My memory is loose. I don’t recall the stories I read two weeks ago, the films I’ve seen, the things I heard, the article details, the actual dates, that kind of thing. Even before phones I had to have notebooks but I forgot to update them.  My mind wanders, leaping about, making strange connections. It’s been fun but it’s also quite a handicap in a world rich with records and literature.

On the other hand I can re-live the experience of walking around with my house keys yesterday in sufficient clarity that I can go to the place I put them down first time. Even if it was somewhere really stupid, like on the bathroom window ledge.  I can do that for nearly any object if I was the last person to have it. Even if I last had it in my hand months ago.

I have periods of being very organised, life goes well. But then I slip up and go back to scattered. I used to feel bad, that one day I’d have it fixed and be organised all the time. But I really like my scattered days. They feel the best. So it will always be a bit of one, then a bit of the other.

Joy

A couple of people wrote me a note after reading Success to check if I was depressed. I was so happy that they checked up on me! I also assured them that I wasn’t, and I apologise if that post felt like it was particularly ‘down’. I was exploring my feelings on worldly success and it turns out that I don’t rate it much, although I often forget that and feel bad about it until I remember that you can’t win against something when you’re standing on its home turf – that is, if you don’t want to be in the Worldly Success grinder you don’t argue with it you step away from it.

When I wrote it in that free-form style it felt like I was engaged in quite a lively, ‘real’ (as in authentic) creative activity. That always makes me happy on one level, regardless of the subject. I also knew that I was treading old rope, as I think of it – walking over ground already covered, and recycling the ‘old rope’ that millions have thrown out before when contemplating the negativity that they perceive coming their way. I was interested and as I thought about what I was writing I felt that I understood clearly what was going on.

In short: it’s not you, it’s me.  Isn’t it always? It’s not what happens, it’s what you make of it.

But my friends were right in one thing. I was looking at things in a negative light. The exact same things can be the material for a big surge of happy too – so let me now cast them in the opposite light:

How wonderful to find so many people doing their best to promote positive attitudes, no matter what the format they are using! That stuff is everywhere, you don’t have to look hard to find all kinds of people from every walk of life on the internet making notes and comparing stories in which they talk about how their experiences have enriched them and helped them to become better people. The exhortations popping up in threads and in comments are there in such numbers purely so that one of them will catch your eye and remind you that while you’re alive you’ve still got things you can do to help the world.

The best of these are the ones which recognise that all it takes for the world to be ‘saved’ is for you to save yourself and see things in the joyful light – not because you don’t know what suffering is and not because you don’t have compassion for everything alive which is in a terrible predicament of some kind – but because by being joyful you are one more conduit of positive power in the world. When you are in a state of joy everything you touch turns to Fab. This is why I don’t mind even when I look and judge my successes and note my rejections – nobody can take away my joy, I can go into it at any time IF I remember to do that because a lifetime of being Eeyore isn’t that easy a habit to bust.

Also, Eeyore wasn’t ever disappointed. Life met his expectations. So he had that. And he was the only person who was as happy with a burst balloon as a whole one.

I’m sorry if my Success post felt like a burst balloon. At the end the post said I was sad for people who were on the Exhortation Trail because they are always rushing forwards and never arriving. I felt they were on the trail to Tired and Crazy whereas I have my life and time in which to exist without stress – people, I have already got everything a being could possibly want. If I’m doing miserable that’s just the tourist version. I have been miserable. I do go there sometimes to check it out. But deep down underneath all the various layers of self I was one of the lucky few in this existence and I am not happy, I am joyful.

Note though that I am not the world’s greatest motivational writer and I do get stuck in my head’s various eddies.

Mystic Moment: with this in mind I went over to Inspirobot and cranked the handle of fortune. Machines love me. I always know when they’re going to come up with something good.  It created the following saying for me, “When you have nothing left to say, inspire someone.”

See – the universe DOES hit you over the head with a bat and everything is in tune.

Success

Goals goals goals.

Achieve achieve achieve.

Win win win.

Do more stuff. Go further. Out of your comfort zone. Make a lot of money. Dare. Drive this car. Eat that food. Do this exercise. Be seen here. Wear this. Look like that. Read this. Watch that. Talk about this. Know that. Go here. Don’t go there. Study at this place. Study harder, more. Listen to these. Don’t listen to those. Think this way. Dial up your effort. Bootstraps. Skyhooks. The Secret. The other Secret. Go go go. Faster.

I have felt chivvied by these things all my life. Earningaliving. The moral grasp of social conformity. The hope of becoming special, standout, why are you not yet J K Rowling? Surely only that would justify the way you have

wasted

your

time

writing these books about silly things, not even adult things and if they are adult things then they are too raunchy nobody wants that in their

nice

clean

sciencefictionfantasystory

which is anyway an extension of foolish childhood desires and hopes and dreams

you can’t live responsibly on that. And now, as your publication star fades bit by bit thanks to various factors you don’t really see or understand but it’s on EPOS and the accountant says No and you have not and you can’t and you won’t and no thank you

and I close my eyes and think back to the very first time I ever wanted to write and what for and all of the things I could have done with my life and how I could have done even what I have done differently

to fit with that Go The Secret More Win model and make everyone happy that the story they have sold me has finally worked out for someone, see someone has done it all checked every box yes to this and that and do and more and they have won by their hard work and it was luck yes but it was mostly skill and time and dedication you see this model works it does it will if only you

and I feel sad

for them

 

Habits

Habits are automatic you. They’re actions that you’ve done so often, know so well, that your brain has relegated them to the same place that it keeps the walking, talking, breathing, bicycle-riding and driving. They’re not the same as compulsions, they’re just things that have taken on a life of their own because you’ve stopped paying attention.

It’s great that we can create habits to keep us doing things that are essential. It’s not so great when non-essentials form into habits. They take on a stone-like, flinty quality which can spark anxiety if they are not executed when cued so that fulfilling the habit in itself becomes an action that must be performed to stop unpleasant feelings.

Wherever you have a habit you’ve become unconscious. It’s not only actions, but assumptions, thoughts, entire suites of theories, that become habitual. At some point in your life this was useful to have them automated. But if you never disassemble them you’ll never grow and move on and you won’t even notice.

It takes about nine conscious efforts to even become aware that you are entering an automated routine and about nine times nine sincere, focused attempts to overwrite the sequence. This can feel nerve wracking to some. If you feel that way remember that you will never really forget your habit and if you want to you can go back to it at some later date, no problem. It’s not like somebody’s going to run off with it.

Like Dave Lee Roth said, “We’ve all got our self-destructive bad habits. The trick is to find four or five you personally like the best and just do those all the time.”

Writing – is one of my habits. I’ve slowed right down lately. Maybe I need to bump it back up the list.