Building characters

One thing I sometimes hear from writers is the idea that characters have minds of their own.  The author doesn't tell the characters what to do, the characters just do it because that's who they are, and then the author just tries to describe it.

I definitely do not feel the same way about my characters.

For me, the characters are not set in stone, and can be changed to conform to whatever actions I want them to perform.  I ask myself, what kind of person would do that?  And then that's who they are.

Perhaps I'm too early in the novel, and the characters' choices will become more constrained later on.  Or perhaps I'm just doing things wrong.  That's always a possibility.

There are disadvantages to building the characters as you go. It encourages flatter characters.  It may lead to facades that only make sense from the perspective of the particular boat ride created by the book.  If you were to step out of the boat and see the cardboard cutouts from the other side you'd see that there was no back story, no additional character details, nothing.

I would, however, defend my approach.  I believe it mirrors how real people behave.  First they act.  Then they come up with justifications for their actions.  And finally, they become who they think they are.  Choices and behaviors make up who a person is.  So-called "character traits" are only descriptions after the fact.

I also think that when some authors have a whole coherent character in mind from the beginning, maybe they're just thinking of an archetype.  We have all these ideas and prejudices about what kind of character traits go together, and I think it's an illusion.  People have a mostly random combination of traits, and we just have an illusion of a coherent whole.

Writing about writing about writing

One of the reasons I stopped writing so much about my attempt at a novel is that I hated all the encouragement I got.  It's not as if every bit of praise caused a jab of pain.  Rather, it was weeks or months later that the flattery slowly began to sour on me.

The first problem is that whenever I talk about my novel, it turns into an advertisement.  It gives me all the negative feelings I get from self-advertisement.  But unlike self-advertisement, I don't actually get any sales out of it.  It will be a long time before this novel is published, if at all.

Advertisement has never been my goal.  I just want to dabble a completely different kind of writing from what I'm used to, blather about all the junk that I learn, and vent about petty insecurities (see: this post).  I am not attempting to be deep or impressive.

The second problem is that I feel like people don't get excited about quite the same things I do.

For example, I feel burdened by the pervasive expectation that I am writing sci-fi, fantasy, or YA.  I want to write realistic (or surrealistic) literary fiction, but I can hardly tell what that means, or how it might be different from more popular genres.  I feel disconnected from most online conversations about writing, because I never know when the ideas that float around really pertain to what I'm trying to do.  I am used to living on the long tail of culture, but this is one instance when it really starts to grate, and I start ranting about geek cultural hegemony.

And people aren't sold on my novel, they're just sold on the premise.  In particular, readers of The Asexual Agenda were excited that I would have an asexual character.  This is understandable, since clear asexual characters are extremely rare in fiction, and indeed I wouldn't write asexual characters in if I didn't find the idea exciting myself.

But my mind already skips ahead to a future era.  Some day, there will be lots of ace characters in every conceivable medium and genre.  And 90% of everything will be crap.  I want judgmentalism, discernment.  I want stories that are different, even in the hypothetical world where there are lots of things to be different from.  I want to talk about what happens in the stories, not just the fact that the stories exist.

Deciding who dies in a story

If storytelling were itself a story, the main conflict would be between two beasts: Freedom and Constraints.

When it comes to action, battles, duels, and combat, they all grant a boon to Freedom.  Because, honestly, you can write a combat scene to come out almost any way that you want.  Who wins or loses, who lives or dies, often has little to do with who is more powerful or who has the greater numbers.  The Constraints are instead provided by what makes story-sense.

Sometimes, what makes story-sense also makes physical sense.  For instance, it makes sense for the greenhorn protagonist to lose at the beginning of the story, not just because they are inexperienced, but also because it sets up further conflict.

On other occasions, what makes story sense is the opposite of what makes physical sense.  One example is the law of conservation of ninjutsu (look it up on tvtropes), where the strength of an army is inversely proportional to its size.  In a story, the strength of a character is often proportional to how much we care about them, and we simply don't care about large numbers of faceless individuals.

Other examples left as exercise to the reader: Why are love interests so frequently captured or killed?  Why is the protagonist's mentor always fated to die?  Why are the first ones to die in a horror film always the hot girl, black guy, and gay guy?

There are of course other means to add Constraints.  For instance, if you really wanted to be realistic, you could have the winners determined at random.  I would call this "aleatoric storytelling", named after aleatoric music.

From XKCD

For obvious reasons, aleatoric storytelling isn't very popular, except in sports and D&D.  You'd end up with a lot of things that don't make story-sense at all, like having the protagonist die or having them achieve victory at a random point in time.

Another way is to establish a set of rules about how your universe works.  This is the path followed by Death Note and HPMOR, for instance.  On the other hand, this is usually something a writer will attempt only if they think themselves clever enough to get around the constraints.  It seems you really need that Freedom.

Novels are a strange medium

Regular readers may have noticed that I stopped posting monthly updates about the novel I am trying to write.  I'm still writing the novel, at such a crawl that I may never finish.  That's fine with me.  However, I decided I didn't want to do further regular updates.  The updates make me feel like I'm fulfilling an obligation.

I'd still like to talk about fiction, without focusing on my writing in particular.  Specifically, I've become more aware of how strange novels are, and stories more generally.

I used to think that writing a story was like wandering an open street.  You could go in any direction you please, and see whatever you want.  Instead, writing a story is more like wandering an open galaxy.  You can go in many directions, but you have to build a space ship first, and the vehicle proceeds to limit your perspective.

I'm talking about some really basic constraints:

-You can't have too many well-developed characters.  And if you do have lots of characters, you can't introduce them all at once.

-Stories need a conflict and resolution.  You can have a conflict without a resolution, but it feels much weirder than it does in real life.  If you don't have a conflict, it's not a story, it's an essay.

-Pacing is counterintuitive.  We want to tell the details of the story which are interesting, and skip the details which are uninteresting.  For most stories, this requires zooming in and out a lot, but if you zoom in and out too much it feels jerky.

-Many novels have the conceit of a narrator character.  But why would a sensible person talk like a novel, or even write about their experiences like a novel?

-Vivid descriptions are a strange concept.  Why do we like them?  Do we all in fact like them?  Do descriptions need have anything to do with the rest of the story?

-A story has a beginning, which is disorienting.  I find it telling that in video games, which are often in second person, so many stories begin with the protagonist waking up or having amnesia.

-Readers don't automatically care about characters.  If you have characters do something important before readers care about them, then the readers might miss its importance entirely.

-A story has an ending.  The sheer weirdness of having an ending is most obvious when we see sequels to stories where a sequel wasn't originally planned.  It especially screws with character development, because how do you have a character achieve enlightenment repeatedly?

-Fiction can have a message, but is severely limited in its ability to argue the message.  You can't really say "X is wrong because people in my story did X and it led to bad things."  Actually, lots of fiction makes that kind of argument anyway, but I'd personally rather not.



Can you think of any other constraints in the novel or story medium?

Writing a novel: Month 8

This month was a relatively successful one, for my novel.  I doubled my word count, and sent it out to some (not all) of my test readers.  Feedback was negative, which is a good thing because I can improve!

Today, I'd like to talk about the mixed messages I get as a writer.

At Thanksgiving, one of the questions my mother asks me is "Are you going to continue with your PhD?"

I can't believe I'm hearing this!  I try writing a novel, and suddenly people ask if I'm continuing with my PhD program?  Nobody ever asked that in relation to any of the other hobbies I pick up.  When I started blogging, no one ever asked if I would continue with university.  When I picked up guitar, no one ever asked me if I was planning to switch to being a rock star.  When I picked up origami (and even made a small profit from it), no one ever asked if this meant I was giving up physics.

Let's put this in perspective.  I wrote about 7k words of my novel, and there were about 10k words in the novel I scrapped.  This is less than 20k words over the course of 8 months.  How many words did I write for my blog in the same amount of time?  I estimate 50k words.  But somehow, writing a book signals a greater time commitment.

Another thing that happened this month was National Novel Writing Month.  Every November, hundreds of thousands of people attempt to write a complete novel with at least 50k words.  This is quite an undertaking, and most people don't succeed.  I've heard that the resulting novels are usually terrible and require a lot of editing.

But still, this isn't something people quit their jobs for, not for just one month.  Writing fiction can be a career for some people, but for most people it isn't.  More often, it's just a weighty hobby.  For me, it's not even that, it's a light hobby.  There was no way I'd write 50k words in a month.  I wrote about ten times less than that, mostly while riding the bus to and from work.

Here's another kind of writing that people do: fanfiction.  Personally, I can't stand fanfiction.  The quality is just too low.  The only fanfic I ever really read was HPMOR, and even there I feel like I'm struggling with Yudkowski's awful prose and peculiar plot obsessions.

But I don't begrudge people writing for the pure love of writing and stories.  On the contrary, I admire it.  And who is to say my writing is any better?  Test reader feedback isn't positive enough to justify such a view.

And that's fine with me.  I would love to be a great author and get published, but that's not the real goal here.  If the small amount of time I commit isn't enough to get to the finish line, it's not a big loss.  The goal is to enjoy myself, and I am already accomplishing that.

Writing a novel: Month 7

This month I made modest progress on my book, finishing a few chapters.  I stalled for a bit while writing a chat log between the narrator and protagonist.  The narrator lies a lot, so the chat logs serve the purpose of being more reliably true.

Let me take this opportunity to talk about one of my major inspirations.  Let me tell you about Homestuck.  Explaining Homestuck to people is an exercise in absurdity and futility, so much so that "Let me tell you about Homestuck" has become a meme.  But it will help that I'm not actually trying to convince anyone to read Homestuck, I'm just trying to explain what it is.  (See the author's explanation for a more persuasive effort.)

Homestuck is a webcomic, and an epic satire of video games and the internet.  Unlike most webcomics, it makes full use of its online medium, including animations, music, hyperlink shenanigans, flash games, and more.  And Homestuck is really really long, longer than the entirety of Harry Potter, and more dense too.  Despite the high barrier to entry, it is extremely popular, with a very active fandom.  Most notably, Homestuck fans were able to raise 2.5 million dollars for a spinoff video game.

I've been reading Homestuck since the beginning in 2009, although I don't really participate in the fandom.  I honestly think Homestuck is one of the greatest works of my generation.  But I'm not trying to sell you on it, so I don't feel the need to explain all many great things about it.  I'm just going to pull out one aspect that I find inspirational.

Homestuck captures the modern communication age better than any other work of fiction I have ever read.  Homestuck is about a bunch of kids who live across the world, but who can nonetheless be close friends, through the medium of instant chat.  They are all excited to play a video game which promises, among other things, to provide a means for them to meet each other.  As someone who spends a lot of the time on the internet, that's touching.

Aside from that, all the characters, the humor, and the entire aesthetic of the comic has clearly been shaped by the internet age.  It's a world where people can have really obscure hobbies, where writing style blends into personal identity, and where ideas are often imported from the fandom.

The ways that other works of fiction deal with the communication age doesn't even come close.  Just think of all those movie plots that rely on no one having a cell phone.  If we can't handle cell phones, how will we ever handle smartphones?  And think of all those google-search and email montages.  Who thought those were a good idea?

Even cyberpunk.  I haven't read much cyberpunk, because it kind of makes me angry, but from what I can tell, it's based on a bunch of tropes that were attempts to predict what the computer age would look like in the future.  I read part of Snow Crash (and then stopped, because the hacker hero archetype really annoys me), which envisioned an internet a bit like Second Life.  That's nice, but I'd like to see more fiction with the benefit of hindsight.

I started talking about Homestuck because I mentioned that I was writing some chat logs.  Honestly, the idea of fictional chat logs is so closely associated with Homestuck for me, that it makes me feel like an imitator.  And a poor one at that, since I'm pretty sure I'll never be as good a writer as Andrew Hussie.  On the other hand, I would really like to see modern communication and its aesthetics to become more common in fiction, to the point where it no longer feels like an imitation of any particular work.

Writing a novel: month 6

Now that I scrapped my first novel idea, this month I started from scratch again.  What happened was comically similar to what happened when I started from scratch the first time.  That is, first I came up with a social sci-fi idea, and then settled on an anti-romance with an unusual narrative structure.  Well, now you know where my heart's at.

The first novel idea I had was based on the premise of mind-cloning.  We have a 1st person protagonist who participates in psychological research, and they copy her brain state.  A generation later, the copy is uploaded to a robot, and so begins our story.  A generation later, another copy (or copies) is uploaded, and another story is told in parallel.

The idea is not really about mind-cloning.  The point is to examine the way that culture recursively reacts against itself over generations (and to do so without changing protagonists!).  And the other point is to watch the protagonist piece together facts about her past lives, constructing self-serving narratives about them.

Then I got another idea, which is the one I'm currently working on.  The basic theme of this novel is the construction and deconstruction of romance.  It's the story of a couple, told through the eyes of a friend.  This friend constructs an elaborate narrative, with a rather loose relation to reality.

One of the major principles of writing fiction is "show, don't tell".  This is usually a pretty good rule.  In a few cases, it's actually better to tell than show, often because you're describing something of only marginal importance, and don't want to give it the whole rigamarole of vivid prose.  However, for writing an unreliable narrator, I take a third approach: show AND tell, but what I show and what I tell are perpetually in conflict with each other.

Here's why I think this novel idea will work better than the last one.  I have a strong "plotter" tendency, in that I tend to plan things out.  And then, in the writing, things don't turn out the way I expected, and getting things back on track involves large contortions.  But for this novel, I made a conscious decision to not plan things out.  I don't know exactly what will happen to the characters.  This seems to work well so far.

Writing a novel: month 5

This month, I nearly completed my second chapter, and then I decided to scrap the whole thing.  I mean, the whole book.  So now I feel more at liberty to say what was going on in my novel, and what I think was wrong with it.

The basic ideas behind the book were "switching perspectives" and "anti-romance".  So I conceived of a structured novel where the protagonist goes through a series of four relationships, each one failing, and rightly so.  The first relationship is a friendship, the rest are romantic relationships.  I wasn't really imagining outright abusive relationships (abuse does not strike me as an enjoyable topic).  Rather, the relationships are created and destroyed because of social expectations of what a relationship should be.

The protagonist is not me, but naturally I draw from personal experience.  I've had a couple relationships that failed in this way.  The protagonist is (aromantic) asexual, but doesn't identify as such until the end (I never worked out the details of the end).  It's not a book about asexuality, but I use the character to underscore the power of social expectations, even when the desire is absent.

The "switching perspectives" part was also very structured.  For each relationship, I'd switch to the other person's perspective.  It would go in sequence A B A C A D A E A.  So nine chapters (or "mega-chapters").  I think, now, this structure was way too rigid, and possibly unworkable, and this became especially clear in the second chapter.  I spent a lot of time focusing on character B and their problems, but afterwards that character just drops from view.  It becomes a loose plot thread.

More generally, I had difficulty directing attention towards the most important conflicts, themes, and characters, and directing attention away from the more marginal aspects.  Stories are not much like real life.  In real life, everyone, including minor characters, have extensive back stories, and there's always more in every direction you look.  In a story, there's a lot of misdirection to get all readers to look at one thing, and look away from the boundaries of the story.  I was not very good at this misdirection.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that I have a very modernist aesthetic.  I like stories that are disjointed.  I like stories that do something clever with the narrative structure.  For example, in The Book of the New Sun, one of my favorite aspects is the way the narrator would omit certain incidents, and then later forget that he had omitted them.  One of my favorite aspects in The Unconsoled was the way that the protagonist sometimes looks at someone's face, and learns the entire backstory behind that expression, as if it were the most ordinary thing.  If I can't imitate at least a little of that cleverness, well, what am I writing a novel for?  It's a difficult thing to imitate, but it's worth the hard time I give myself.

Anyway, what should I do with this novel?  I still like the anti-romance concept, and I did sketch out a restructured novel with the same characters and same basic point.  But maybe it would be better to scrap everything and start with another idea.  Now I'm imagining some social sci-fi where a small group of astronauts travel to the future and have cultural clashes.  I haven't decided yet.

Writing a novel: month 4

I'm going to go ahead and admit that I did not write anything for my novel for most of this month.  But let's not phrase it as "admitting".  Writing is a hobby.  It's not my job.  Writing is more fun than my job.  I can do whatever I want with my hobby, including ignoring it for a month.

This month, I was instead engrossed with another book, The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro.  I tend to write on the bus, and also read on the bus, so the time I spend reading and writing negatively correlate with each other.

I may or may not have said before, that Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my inspirations.  He zooms in really close on ordinary social interactions, and reveals the unnameable emotions within.  For example, in one chapter of The Unconsoled, a man explains at great length why he doesn't speak to his (adult) daughter.  When she was a child, she did something to anger him, and it was only meant to be a few days. But there never seemed an appropriate moment to break the silence.  An appropriate moment finally arose when she was grieving her hamster, which she accidentally killed, but he hesitated, and now it seems like speaking to her would disrespect the memory of her hamster.

So good!  Although I would have hated this book in high school.  And it's basically impossible to imitate.

Uh, yeah, so my novel... I will not apologize for taking a break, because my alternate activity was wonderful.  But it was not a permanent break.  I'm getting back into it now, and the fresh perspective is already helping.

My approach with many of these posts about writing has been to discuss an idea I have that I find exciting.  But I'm reconsidering whether this is a good idea, because I worry about building up expectations.  These are cool ideas and all, but it really all comes down to execution.

Some thoughts on writing asexual characters

This was cross-posted on The Asexual Agenda.  I know I've talked a whole lot about writing my novel here, but I haven't said anything at all over there, so please allow for some repetition.

As a few people know, a few months ago I finally started on my long-time ambition to write a novel.  It would be premature to get excited about it, since no one knows if I write decent fiction, or if I’ll ever publish.  But I might as well say that one of the characters is asexual.  So I’m starting to get more of a first-person perspective on writing asexual characters, and I’d like to share a few of my thoughts.

First I should note that I am not writing genre fiction.  No tentacle aliens or space wizards here, just Characters and Relationships.  And so instead of having tentacle-alien-fighting space wizards who just happen to be asexual, I have relationship-having literary characters who just happen to be asexual.  But it’s pretty hard to pretend that asexuality isn’t relevant to relationships so hey I guess asexuality is sorta central to the plot, huh.

I’ve already told you a lie about my book.  I said one of the characters is asexual, but there are two.  This is one of my ideas about how to do representation right, is to have at least two characters.  For someone like me, who worries too much about what particular groups and traits are represented in media, this is great for peace of mind.  One is white and male, which could be a representation problem.  But the other is non-white and female, so that makes me feel better.  I also get to represent multiple points in the spectrum.  One is openly asexual, while the other believes they’re straight.  One is romantic, the other is unknown.

This is easy to do if you have a large cast of characters, which I do.  But even so, I can’t make two characters representing every group.  I don’t have two major bi characters, for instance.  Oh well.

Another nice thing about having two asexual characters is that they can date each other.  It doesn’t work out though, because I like destroying relationships.

Actually, that’s sort of the book’s theme.  There are many breakups, and the breakups are Good because those relationships were Bad.  I am trying to subvert the idea that happy endings = successful relationships.  I think this is an uncommon idea: I couldn’t find it on TV Tropes.  Although I keep on wondering if it’s uncommon because it doesn’t work…

My last wacky idea comes from someone I met at an ace meetup.  He noted that fiction has the power to throw all this made-up stuff at us, and have us simply accept it, and it could do that for asexuality too.  So I decided to make a lot of things in my story from whole cloth.  I invented a city, which will raise no eyebrows.  I invented a religion, which is also normal novel material.  I invented an ethnic group, and as a reader you just deal.  I invented a sexual orientation, and you have to accept that too.  Wait no that last one’s real.  Tricked ya!

I’m hoping this will make less awkward the obligatory exposition on asexuality.  I really hate having to embed a lecture on asexuality within a story.  I don’t like reading it, and I don’t like writing it.  But I understand why people do it, because how else will you make sure your readers are up to speed?  How can we make the exposition more subtle?  I hope to do it by placing it alongside an exposition of Invented Ethnic Group, and its invented history with colonialism.  Do you think that will work?

Writing a novel: Month 3

Well it's more like month 2.5, but whatever.  I completed the first chapter of my book, out of nine planned chapters.  I am maybe a third of the way through the second chapter.  Progress is fairly slow because there are some weeks where I just don't work on it at all.  I'm hoping that writing about writing will help me to not stall.

Often, when I stall, I worry where the story is going.  It doesn't seem to be going anywhere.  There isn't much at stake.

In genre fiction, the hero saves the world, and in the process learns something about themselves.  In my novel, the protagonist is not a hero, does nothing noteworthy, and in the process learns something about himself.

In a romance, the protagonist finds a potential partner, and despite many obstacles forms a relationship.  In my novel, the protagonist forms several relationships in sequence, and the relationships all end.

This actually follows the standard conflict-resolution structure.  The conflict is dysfunctional relationships.  The resolution is separation.  Still, it feels unsatisfying, if only because the end-state is the same as the initial state.  The difference between the initial and final states is that the protagonist learns something.  Given that I'm writing about breakups as positive things, you can take a stab at what you think the protagonist will learn.

But is that really compelling on its own?  And what about when the lesson learned is spread out across several breakups?  What sub-lesson will he learn at each stage?  Ugh...

Sometimes it's better to just focus on the chapter I'm currently writing.  Even when I have things plotted out, I end up writing in lots of things that were not in the plan.  For example, while writing the first chapter, I spontaneously decided that the protagonist once had a crush on his best friend (but didn't realize it).  This sets up some good material for chapter 6, when I get to it.

Perhaps when I've finished with chapter 2, I'll have all the seeds to create chapter 4.  And when I've finished chapter 4, maybe the events of chapter 8 will become clear.  And perhaps by the time I finish chapter 5, the whole story will fall into place.  One can hope.

-------------------------------------------

I've only read a little writing advice, but one thing I've learned is that (supposedly) there are "plotters" and "pantsers".  Plotters plot out what they will write, while pantsers write by the seat of their pants.

I am clearly taking a plotter's approach, given that I know how many chapters there are, and roughly what's happening in each of them.  But it's good to moderate it with a little spontaneity.  Pants onward!

"Realistic" characters

I've seen loads of media criticism where we talk about fictional representation of certain groups, or lack thereof. Women in video games. People of color in movies. Queer people in books. Atheists on TV. It's an issue that affects all minority groups in all fictional media. People within those groups would like to see more representation, as well as better representation.

"Better" does not necessarily mean more positive. For instance, east Asians are often stereotyped as very intelligent and studious, which is a problem when Asian Americans can't live up to that. Such stereotypical characters are also often one-dimensional and lopsided. No, "better" does not mean more positive, it usually means more realistic. Realistic, meaning that they have a mix of good and bad qualities, and don't easily fit into standard types.

This is what I think about when I set about writing a novel. Realistic fiction no less, meaning that there are no fantastical or futuristic elements. So far my initial impression is that something is askew with this attitude towards representation, and that rigidly asking for realisticness* doesn't quite work. Realistic characters in realistic settings don't make for the most interesting stories.

*I'm avoiding the word "realism" because "realism" doesn't mean true to reality, it means dark and gritty.

Here's the basic problem. I imagine some realistic characters, and have them interact with each other. To determine the outcome, I think about what these people would do if they were really in that situation. 90% of the time, they don't have any conflict, or if they have a conflict they immediately resolve it, because they are mature and reasonable people. They also waste lots of time on boring things like introducing themselves and arranging times to meet. You can make that sort of thing interesting, but it's a major constraint.

This probably seems like a stupid problem that only I would ever have, but as a baby fiction writer I am allowed to have stupid problems, and write about them.

It seems to me that many other writers have this problem as well, whether they think about it or not. One of the reasons I don't like comedy shows is that they're generally filled with complete jerks, complete idiots, or complete liars, because that's the only way writers can think to generate conflict and comedy. But then, the ubiquity of unrealistic characters in popular TV probably reflects the fact that most viewers just don't care. Maybe it's just a problem with me, that I have these pet peeves which severely constrain storytelling.

Still, I think the media critics are correct, and that it's important to represent groups of people in non-stereotyped ways. But maybe the characters don't need to be realistic at all, they just need to avoid stereotypes. For instance, it's okay for a bisexual character to be a complete caricature, just as long as it isn't the standard caricature of someone who is fickle, infidelitous, and hypersexual. Mix it up by assigning the bisexual person the caricature that we typically assign to a scientist character! Or something like that. Not sure if this actually works.

My other idea is that representations should come in pairs or more. For instance, instead of having one token black character, have two. Make them foils to each other. That way, they can't both conform to the same stereotype.

Writing a fictional ethnic minority

Dealing with race is scary for a lot of people, because of what I'm calling the "vacuous critics" problem.  There are so many people saying terrible things about race, that people are afraid of opening the doors to those people, or worse, being that person.  But I'm not sure that this fear serves us well in "post-racial" US, where most people of my generation refuse to acknowledge that racial issues still exist.  In particular, it doesn't serve people well when they try to write fiction.

There's the easy way of including ethnic minorities in fiction, which is to mention or imply a character's ethnicity, and not make anything out of it.  And then there's the hard way: dealing with a character's ethnicity with the nuance that the issue deserves.

In my novel, I take the easy way with several characters.  But then I also take the hard way, inventing an entire ethnic minority, which includes two main characters.  It's a way of talking about race, without talking about any race in particular.

Now, I'm not exactly coming from experience here, since it's my first novel and I've written like 10% of it.  But it seems to me the first step to creating a nuanced ethnic group is to write out their history.  I decided that there were maybe three qualitatively different ethnic histories (in the US--there might be even more outside the US).

1. There are Native Americans, who lived here before Europeans moved in.
2. There are African Americans, who were imported as part of the slave trade.
3. There are immigrant groups.  Some of these groups (eg Irish, Italian) eventually got conglomerated into "white", while others groups probably never will, because they're not light-skinned, or otherwise look different.

I thought it would be easiest to write an immigrant group, since the others might require more radical alternate histories, and I'm not feeling quite so adventurous.  Furthermore, the first two histories would read as thinly veiled metaphors for Native Americans and African Americans, so it almost seems like you should just be writing about the real deal.  Lastly, I'm more familiar with immigrant issues, being half Asian.

I guess I just inadvertently invented an Asian American subgroup based on my own experiences!  Oh well.  It's basically impossible to write something that would generalize to all ethnic groups, even just to groups within the US.

The issues of the ethnic group don't have to be complicated.  Here's a really basic and ubiquitous issue for immigrants: First generation vs later generations.  Bam.  Here's another one: stereotypes.  Another: feeling distant from, and inferior to white people.  Easy.  At least in theory.

And then there are more difficult issues.  For instance, I'm inventing a religion.  But most of the characters are not part of this religion, they're Catholic because they were converted by colonists.  Colonialism is super complicated.  Luckily, in a work of fiction I don't need to deal with it explicitly, I just want it in the background to the story's events and dialogue.

Post-labor sci-fi

In my writing update, I mentioned an idea for a speculative sci-fi novel which I scrapped.  The underlying concept was that I wanted a post-labor economy, where robots and unlimited energy have taken most of the jobs.  Since jobs are the main way money is distributed, the abundance of free labor impoverishes people.

Incidentally, there was a recent article on 3 Quarks Daily which covered this same idea (via The Barefoot Bum).  So there are people who speculate about this in real life.  And sure, I speculate about it in real life too.  I agree with the idea that there are a lot of bullshit jobs in our society, and I would prefer if instead we had fewer work hours.

In my invented world, when all the jobs disappear, it's primarily the service workers who remain.  Robots can't replace the human touch, or the gracious smile.  Everyone else survives on what little welfare that the upper class begrudgingly grants them.  Presumably there's lots of propaganda to persuade the public that welfare is a moral hazard.

But if I were to speculate for the real world rather than for a story, I'd think that service workers would lose their jobs along with everyone else.  I mean, if robots can replace engineers and business managers, of course they could also replace service workers, smiles or not.

But leaving service workers allows me to create a society where politeness and etiquette form a sort of cultural currency, valued above and beyond their real worth.  A thousand rules of etiquette bloom, and a college education is the only way to understand them.  Personality defects would practically become disabilities.

It's sort of a commentary on the way that anything produced by upper classes are seen as the Highest Art, while anything enjoyed by lower classes is unfashionable.  Like the way that classical concerts are seen as the highest forms of music, above modern rock or even classical music recordings.  Or the way that baby names tend to start among upper classes and migrate down to lower classes (and also from male to female!).

Anyway, it was a cool idea, but I'm really not keen on speculative fiction.  I write so much nonfiction that I'm used to striving for accuracy.  So if my story were speculative, I'd spend too much time on little details that don't make the story any better.  And then I'd feel bad about not being a good enough fortune teller.

Writing a novel: Month 1

My first month of seriously attempting to write fiction was a success in the most important respect.  Whenever I sat down to write, I really enjoyed it!  The rest hardly matters at this point.

My first writing session, I just wrote a bunch of random thoughts, which coalesced into an alternate history story.  Around the end of WWII, aliens settle on the moon and proceed to ignore us.  This kickstarts the space race, where both the US and the USSR try to be Earth's first representatives to the aliens.  In the 1950s, the US makes it to the moon, and of course the first thing they do is steal alien technology.  In the next decades, the US reverse-engineers fusion power, which wins them the Cold War prematurely.

With a limitless supply of energy, this makes the US a utopia, except that economic disparity means it's only a utopia for some.  There is a three-tiered class system, with aristocrats, service workers, and the unemployed plebeians.  Service workers use their smiles and good manners to provide the one thing that free energy cannot.  The plebeians of course are stereotyped as ugly and rude.  As for the aliens, they don't figure into the present story for... um... reasons.

Wait, didn't I want to write a slice-of-life instead of speculative sci-fi?  Also I couldn't think of a front-story to go with the back-story.  Well, let's scrap that one then.

It's okay, I got another, which I'm sticking to.  My new story follows a main character, and a sequence of relationships (not all romantic) with four different people.  I guess the main character is ace--I mean, of course--but that's not really the point of the story.  It's a story primarily about friendships, especially friendships gone wrong.

For some reason, I'm really attached to the idea of describing characters, not directly, but through the limitations in their perspectives.  Thus the story is told in 3rd person limited, occasionally alternating points of view.

This is the kind of story with lots of characters.  Each major character is also associated with a different group of friends.  For example, the first relationship is a childhood friend, who happens to be part of an ethnic minority (to be invented).  Their transethnic friendship is strained by the fact that they both now have ethnically homogenous groups of friends.  yada yada I'm not giving it all away, anyway I haven't written it yet.

Um, would anyone be willing to be a test reader?  Not right away of course. So far I've just written a rough outline, and part of the first chapter.

I will share more updates in the future.

I want to write a novel

Once before, I jokingly wrote a list of my "life goals", one of which was to write a novel.  I am actually serious about that particular goal, but I've been taking my time about it.  I figured I'd start after this blog died, but for some reason that's not happening.  So I'll do it while the blog's still alive.

Here's where I'm at.  I have not written anything.  I do not have any plot ideas.  I do not know what genre I want--either sci-fi or "literary" fiction.  I have some character ideas and structure ideas, but they're pretty vague and haven't been written down.

I do not have any particular end in mind.  Traditional publishing?  Self-publishing?  Keep it all to myself?  I have no idea.  Maybe I'll only make it part way through and decide that writing books is unenjoyable.  I'm not terribly optimistic, because I figure most people who set out to write books have higher hopes than outcomes.

It's hard to tell how good my writing is.  I've had this blog for many years, but being well-practiced doesn't necessarily make me any good.  To really improve my writing I'd need some sort of feedback, but all the feedback I get as a blogger is thoroughly biased.  Furthermore, it's far from clear that writing skill in short-form nonfiction transfers over to long-form fiction.  Basically the only thing I do know is that I am not afraid of a keyboard or a blank page, for whatever that's worth.

Step one: Write this post as a pre-commitment strategy.

Step two: Start collecting any character ideas I have, and try to think of plot ideas.

Step three: Report back in a month
Step four: ???

Any thoughts?