The thing nobody tells you about discussion

[ritaxis]

In the last few dayus ther have been a number of really quite wonderful posts all around the web about the representation of women (and people of color, and etc) in fantasy and historical fiction. I know sometimes writiers feel oppressed by this kind of discussion, because it makes them feel like they have a to-do list on top of their plots and their lists of characters and their lsits of elements to keep track of and and and . . .

Well. All of my friends, online and off, have heard me whining for months about the difficulties of writing about war and wartime, the constant anxiety about getting things right, the frequent discovery of things I have gotten wrong that mean rewriting scenes and restructuring chapters and oh my dog do I have to do this over again now?

But. Reading a few offhand sentences about questioning the role of women in wartime has had the opposite effect from discovering that I had gotten shrapnel all wrong.  Well, not really. It had a similar but more exciting effect.  When I discovered I had shrapnel all wrong I had to read more about shrapnel and whine a lot and then go back to the very beginning of the war part and check over and over for mentions of shrapnel and also for times when I ought to have mentioned shrapnel or its effects and hadn't, and correct or add or subtract or whatever many tiny little things you might not even notice as a casual reader (but somebody who knows something about it would throw the book across the room, I am sure, if I had not changed it and I am sure I still have things like that so I am going to have to make some people who know things read this book).

But when I stopped to think about how women had comopletely dropped from the narrative four chapters earlier and how weird that was, it sent me back through these chapters in a different way. Because it made me realise that I had also missed a whole big chunk of the landscape. I knew already that they hadn't been solely fighting across ruined, bomb-scarred meadow and wilderness, but seizing and defending villages and towns (and cities, but not Yanek), but the scenes I had written were all in trenches and countryside (which is okay, however . .  .) and I realized that addressing these things actually solved some of the problems I was having in visualizing the war.

No, I didn't go back and write all the times they were in villages. I didn't introduce a new set of characters. But I just wrote bits of scenes, windows into the life of the countryside during war, women doing their regular jobs and their war jobs, soldiers relating to women who were doing war jobs.  There's so many little issues that are actually solved by including this aspect of  -- what? realism? (is it ridiculous to speak of realism at all in a story one of whose pivotal characters is a talking sow? and whose main character has green pictures growing on his skin?)  It's a matter of paragraphs here, sentences there, and the whole thing is much more grounded in its world.  And much easier to write from here on out.  I'm going to get into the post-war world! I can see it coming!

So, like many other times in my life, I have cause to be grateful for feminists.  This time it's feminist spec fic critics (and writers).

Oh, a couple of links if you happen to have missed this rolling discussion:
Women in History (Tansy Rauner Roberts at Tor.com)
PSA:Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical (Foiz Meadows at Shattersnipe)

be sure to follow the links in each article, and spare yourself some time for it.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm not an expert on shrapnel, but I still appreciate the effort, even (especially) if I couldn't spot the errors. Among many other things, I might think I had learned something about shrapnel when I had actually acquired misinformation. I try to keep quite clear the distinction between things I learned from actual sources, and things I picked up out of fiction, but it's not a perfect firewall. (Yeah, actual sources aren't perfect either.)

And glad for you that doing the right thing with not suppressing women is helping rather than making things harder.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Every time I get closer to truth it makes the fantasy better.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I love that sentence.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in Tolkien and the Great War-- (from memory) it's got some material about how WWI shifted writing about war from "war is an adventure" to "war is horrible". The author thought that war was both and Tolkien did a good job of balancing the points of view.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

One of the things I hjave noticed that I have missed is the sense of exhiliration a soldier necessarily gets at times. I saw it in the memoir I was reading (which was written by a reasonable man who had not apparently a drop of jingoism in him). I'll need to deal with that in revision -- but in other people, not my guy, whose particular experience makes it difficult for him to share that.

Oh, wait, I just solved another, tangential problem, in thinking about what you just said. Thank you.

(whenever a hike or a trip got grueling, I would try to cheer my kids up by telling them that this is what adventure is. It had variable success)