What is a writer’s job?

by Yonmei

Reality is fractal. Art is communication. (Yes, there is the LeGuin Theory that the art of minerals and plants is non-communicative, but as we’re all animals on this bus, we understand and we create communicative art.)

Elizabeth Bear wrote a blog post recently on What my job is not in which she outlined some ideas about how she sees her job as an artist. I responded to this at a more personal level on my journal, but then I started to think about what I do as an artist, which is writing stories. (And sometimes taking photographs. But I could stop taking photographs. I am unable to stop writing stories.) I do not usually think of myself as an artist (as one always says), but:

My job as an artist is to communicate to you what I perceive: or, turned round, the role of an artist is to create something that can be communicated out of their perceptions of reality. Art is selectively fractal.

Where this fits into the Great Discussion of 2009 – the original RaceFail, the new MammothFail, and who knows where by 2010? – is this:

A writer, creating a story, is not attempting to replicate reality: all sorts of decisions get made, consciously and unconsciously, about where the story will be fractal and where it will not and to what degree each part of the story will be fractal:

- “The office opened at nine. The first meeting started at nine-fifteen. There was usually tea, coffee, and an assortment of breakfast pastries available, but not that morning. After a gruelling stint of three external meetings back-to-back, everyone was more than ready for lunch.”

- “The ceiling of my room is stained with damp in one corner: it’s right over my bed. My cat was purring by my ear. I could hear the rain against the window. I knew I had to get up and get dressed, but I didn’t want to go to work, though I knew I had to.”

- “The morning was cold, and the air filled with a delicate low-lying mist: the stone paving underfoot was wet. On this kind of day, the stones, the air, even the struggling box hedges around the narrow sour-dirt gardens, seemed to glow with light: she walked through a luminous city. Not even the damp and steaming bus could sour her mood.”

- “The number 42 bus was late. The rain wasn’t heavy, but unceasing: Bahiyaa’s khimār was wet by the time she got on the bus, and dripped unpleasantly. She sat down in the nearest empty seat, and a white man promptly sat down next to her, breathing hard through his mouth. She pulled out her notes for the UWT meeting: she wouldn’t have time to review them in the office at this rate.”

- “That morning the office had run out of coffee, so I went into my first meeting of the day without it, praying that despite the rain, Susan would make time go out and buy at least a jar of instant before the second meeting was due to start. Gracie drank tea, so she didn’t care.”

Every writer knows how to do this: it’s pretty much the definition of being a writer, that you are able to take your perception of a set of events: a person goes to work on a rainy morning, and communicate that perception in multiple different ways – that you are consciously aware that there are selections to be made in communicating the infinite fractality of reality to your readers. That’s my job as an artist, as a writer, to make those decisions.

Sometimes these decisions are politically neutral. Sometimes they’re not. I cannot make a decision politically neutral by declaring I have no interest in politics or that I am not a political writer: that statement just means a writer who is prepared to think about the politics of their fractal selection – or at least that they’re not prepared to acknowledge any political thought. The only political decisions/political thought that appears neutral is the politics of the dominant majority. If, without thinking about it, a writer strives to appear politically neutral, the kind of political writing they will do is the promotion of the dominant narrative.

Sometimes these decisions are made thoughtfully. Sometimes they’re not. (I did not think about my decisions to make the person going to work female, living in a UK city, going to work on the bus, having a cat; I thought a bit about the decision to make her a coffee drinker, to give her an office job that involved meeting with external organisations, the names of her co-workers; I thought a lot (relatively speaking – I wrote all of the above in the space of 15 minutes) about my decisions to make her a Muslim, what her name is, what she calls her head-covering, and that she is the kind of person who notices the light on rainy mornings.) Telling a story involves making so many of these decisions I don’t see how anyone could claim that they really think consciously about all of them – indeed, part of finding my “voice” was the ability to have the selection of fractal reality that I need to do with each paragraph – each sentence – each word of the story, become a natural and instinctive part of the process of telling the story.

Each time a person appears in the story, you have to decide how much of that person’s potentially-infinite fractal reality you intend to present to the reader. We’re all familiar with the kind of male writer for whom women have no fractal reality – we exist in their fiction as stock figures used for specific plot purposes. As a lesbian, I’m aware of the kind of straight writer for whom lesbians (or LGBT people in general) do not have fractal reality – where a lesbian (or a gay man, or a bisexual person) will never be a fully-realised character. And I say in all honesty: it remains the easiest thing to do, to let my default conception of a fictional character be a cisgendered able-bodied white person. Because that default is not one that has ever caused me the kind of personal discomfort which the lack of fractally-detailed women – and LGB people – has caused me.

When I was fourteen and first decided I was going to Be A Writer, the first novel – the first two novels – I set out to write, had a male protagonist. I was a well-read teenager, I knew that novels could have female protagonists, but it was easier to go along with the dominant narrative: the default is male.

The third novel I set out to write, I decided to have my protagonist be a woman. I ran into a difficulty at the outset. I had envisaged my central character – blond, golden-eyed, pale-skinned, standing out in any crowd (following Asimov, I’d decided the default racial make-up on this world would be brown skin, dark hair, dark eyes – I handwaved my central character’s blondness by deciding she had a spacer parent who had abandoned her). And I knew her partner was another woman, her opposite and her spiritual twin, as dark as my hero was fair. (I had no particular racial awareness; I just saw the logic of Asimov’s presumption that given a normal Terran racial mix for any colony, by the time it got to four or five generations, there just wouldn’t be separate races any more.) I didn’t examine how my protagonist’s parents had lost track of their child, because I didn’t want to – in none of my early writings are parent-child relationships given any fractal reality. I didn’t examine how, given I had accepted Asimov’s presumption, and was writing about an era millennia after colonies and spaceships had left Earth, there could still be blond-haired white-skinned people giving birth to fictional characters. What I did examine, in the course of writing that novel, very painfully, was a presumption I’d had when I started and had lost by the time I’d finished: that there could not be such a thing as a story in which two women met, fell in love, became lovers, got married (well, the equivalent: I invented a special ritual by which they could pledge each other) – and that would be just the start of the story: the story would be about how they, as a couple, went on to have adventures together across two worlds. So I changed my hero’s partner to a man when I set out to write the story, and had to go back with a lot of Tippex and retyping to convert the pronouns back when I found that yes, actually, you could have a lesbian couple at the centre of the story. (In the months during which I was writing this novel, I also came out and found the gay bookshop.)

Even when a writer perceives some things differently from the dominant narrative, it is still easier to communicate what the dominant narrative says we all ought to perceive. And when I as a writer become conscious that my perceptions appear to be merely those of the dominant narrative, that should be a source of disturbance to me – perhaps I am communicating, but what am I perceiving? Am I paying attention to what’s actually there, or am I just looking at what the dominant narrative says I ought to be seeing?

My job as a writer is to communicate what I perceive to you. To do that, I must think about how I can communicate: but I must also think about how I perceive.

- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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