~~ the real gay, out of context.

[reenka]

Some things seem so obvious to me, I don't even bother talking about them. I mean-- it's just not something that occurs to me to really engage with, but finally I've cracked. You know how every now and them, someone will mention the level of gay culture or gay-male realism in slash, and whether or not one should aim for that or whether-- and here's the kicker-- it's colonising of the gay male experience for women to get too far into writing it as if they "knew" it.

I was just reading tinderblast's interesting challenge post urging people to write more non-penetrative sex 'cause it's not as popular as it could be among actual gay men, etc. And then I came across this word. "Colonising". And it just hurts my head, really. It really does. Who in the world thinks like that?

The very idea of segregating fiction into the "knows" and the "know-nots" just kind of blows my mind. I mean, this is fiction. Do I need to say more, really? How... how does this non-separation work in anyone's mind, and do I even want to know? I mean, I think when people say "fiction", they mean different things, though. Some people mean it to say "anything goes" because it's all lies, basically. That seems so lazy to me. I mean-- the very idea of writing something you're aware is a -lie- seems different from writing -fiction-. Fiction is based on the imagination of the writer, which admittedly isn't something that's true in the sense of "well, this happened exactly this way to these people". To some degree or another, all communication between people, all verbalization, involves fictionalization-- because the "truth", whatever -that- is, is just so -big-. How can you ever fully represent it?

What I don't usually see in terms of a position someone takes on the nature of fiction is somewhere in-between this quest for represenational realism & the celebration of utter frivolous fantasy. I think I would almost say that pure heedless fantasy isn't "fiction" any more than complete realism is. Projecting what you want directly into words & adding some extra decoration isn't writing a story, it's role-playing in the "sexual role-play" sense of what people do in the bedroom, to me. And yes, okay, the boundaries are v. fuzzy here & I -am- treading carefully, but I do see some sort of distinction regardless.

To me, storytelling has always clearly been about a wedding together of "reality" and "fantasy", truth and lies. You can't really shove it into either corner, and I don't really know why people try so hard. You can take both positions with ease, but it just hurts my head to think about it too much. One can say "all stories are true"-- and one can also say "every word out of anyone's mouth is automatically a lie". To some degree, I believe both positions are valid. The more interesting question-- to me-- is how is this particular story true, and -how- is it a fiction.

In terms of whether to include realistic gay-male behavior in fanfic written by non-gay-male writers:

The writer should probably ask themselves this question-- are they writing something they consider "real"? Are these characters actual people in their mind? Do they follow some sort of external logic? If so, then to some degree you owe it to them to have them behave like real people, whatever you think that entails-- it's the prerogative of the writer to decide. That said, as a reader, if I feel you're -not- talking about real people (even though it's not a "true story", whatever -that- means), I feel I have no incentive to actually -read-, because what actual relevance does it have to me, then? Or anyone who doesn't share the writer's exact context?

As far as the "colonisation" bit, that just gets my goat, right there. The very idea of "proprietary" material-- how offensive is that? Proprietary parts of the human experience? Say what??! We're so defensive about our identities we need to clutch them like teddy bears so they won't get taken away and abused without our consent?? Huh?


The only issue of colonisation I see being possible here is if the gay males were being silenced in their attempts to talk about the lives they know, while the straight females' accounts were being favored. You could say that that's what happened with black narrative in the US. So okay, that was something that needed fixing. This is clearly not going on with slash, so the whole dialogue here doesn't even make sense to me entirely. Why is this even an issue?

The women who say they're exploring their own sexuality issues through mock-up dummies they like to call "boys" just crack me up. I mean... okay, that's good, they're getting therapy for free. That's great. As far as whether that sounds like good writing... er... let me just yell a loud and resounding HELL NO. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Realism in fiction is a style, which isn't necessarily applicable to every story. But reality itself isn't a style-- it's reality. What else can one say about that? How can one colonise or exploit or avoid something like reality?? I don't (want to) get it. The way boys act in reality? Ain't no way of getting around that, baby. On top of that, most of the power that stories have in general is in their ability to comment on real people's feelings & thoughts & issues. If a story isn't doing a thing to comment on those things, then it's an empty, barren sort of story. And if a story's only reason for existence is to comment on the body issues of some confused straight female or something, then it's a story with a very limited scope and potential, which could've done a lot more-- but didn't.

"Write what you know" is all well and good as a rule of thumb for beginning writers who are too lazy to do research and really -think- about things, but as a precept to rigorously follow it utterly baffles me. Mostly because then you're prescribing knowledge of what writers can know, and once you start in with that, where are you left? In the end, how does anyone know anything? How can one be sure that as a member of some "group" like lesbians or geeks or New Yorkers or college students, I know anything worth knowing about them? Does knowledge just automatically accumulate based on experience? Don't you need a-- well-- brain for these sorts of things? I'm confused.

Anyway, I think the whole idea of trying to legislate the degree of realism that "should" be included in slash fanfic is ridiculous, not to mention hopelessly doomed in execution. If one is talking about personal-level realism, it can only be a good thing, 'cause that means you're writing about someone who's recognizably a human being, which makes the story relevant to other human beings, that's all. Human beings with certain traits-- say, homosexuality-- in certain circumstances-- say, school-age in Britain-- tend to behave in certain observable ways. Keeping this in mind can only be a good thing-- something to broaden a writer's scope. Something to deepen a writer's understanding of what they're writing about. Something that makes the characters being used feel more -real-. More vivid. More alive.

More alive = more fun, I think.

Comments

[mark356.livejournal.com]

My thought on "write what you know" is "write what you care about". If you don't know how to play baseball, sure you can look up which order to run around the bases in, etc, but you will not have a baseball story. On the other hand, if you really love enchanted forests, even if you haven't walked through anything denser than a grove, if you've read lots of books that include them and have thought about them for a long time and would love to be there, then you really do know what it's like to be in or work with an enchanted forest, even if you've never been anywhere near one.

Ursula K. LeGuin has a fabulous rant on experience that I'll track down if you like.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah, I agree with you there, and I think I know exactly which essay you mean, too. :D!
It's one of my favorite essays ever, right up there with Tolkien's `On Fairy-tales'~:)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I've never understood the whole colonizing issue either. I especially don't understand writing about realistic gay life because you should. I mean, of course writing a story set in a realistic gay world can be a great story but I can't imagine it's the driving concern in somebody writing slash. Sometimes I even get impatient with stories that feel like they're making Harry go through the Coming Out steps just because this is what happens to a boy going through that. People write slash for themselves and then for slashers, so why write to another audience?

Anytime you've got a story about an intense relationship between two characters I don't think you can define it by any social conventions. Slash is usually about the relationship between these two characters rather than their own individual identities within society. You might as well, imo, demand stories set in seventh year focus on career tracks or how the students study for NEWTs.

I do think, also, that there should be no rules in fiction for how things have to be handled and that means types or groups absolutely can stand for things other than their real-life counterparts. If Jon Le Carre can write female characters that come across as ridiculous to me as a woman looking for certain things in them, surely a slasher can write a gay Harry that comes across as ridiculous to anyone looking for certain things from a gay male character. That doesn't make whatever the author is saying in the story untrue.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Well, for me, it's not about audience-- 'cause I myself just don't tend to think about audience one way or the other, see. I just -write-, and I have a sort of distaste for writing things that feel false to me on any level, 'cause it sort of feels worthless. If you -feel- it deeply, then it's -real- to you, and on some level, okay, it's -real-. And that's all I really want-- a sense of vitality, of reality. And I do think that one of the things that lends a vividness to the behavior of your characters is if they act like who they purport to be-- whatever that is, and however that particular situation plays out.

Not all gay men/boys are the same, but they -are- different, generally, than straight 14-year-old girls from Arkansas in significant ways, I guess. So there's a difference between writing about "the gay experience" (whatever the hell that is), and just realizing you're writing about someone whom you consider to have a life of their own (fictional as it may be), and that life includes certain facts. Just as you'd consider the fact that they hate heights in your further characterization, you'd want to consider that they're a 16-year-old British (gay) boy or whatever. It's just-- part of being emotionally valid. To some degree.

Not to the degree of, "well, let's research contemporary gay life in London and transcribe it onto wizarding boarding schools", 'cause that's somewhat silly. But still. Awareness can only make for better fiction, is all I'm saying. Not that I'm about to force anyone or pronounce how it "should" be done or whatever :>

I mean... acting like who you are and all it encompasses-- it entails influences from a lot of things. A lot of times they're not -obvious- things, just subtle things that inform one's behavior. It doesn't need to be focused on at all-- it's just that all aspects of one's identity inform all other aspects of one's behavior to some degree. It's a gestalt rather than any "aspect" of someone's ego. Y'know? I take it all together, generally, like a soup. Or something.

As usual, I'm not sure if I was clear. I was saying that realism, if you take it to mean, considering how this character, if they were to "really exist" would really act, is preferable to outright make-believe-- it's more complex, more vivid, more interesting-- to me as a reader. Realism in the sense of the reflection of contemporary gay culture isn't all that realism is cracked up to be. Or something. Y'know? Maybe. I dunno.

There's a universal truth to people & the way they interact. One can also sense a certain freshness sometimes, a certain sincerity of voice, which is usually what I like to see as a reader. Like-- there's just more detail there, more complexity of inner world, by having the outer world be more defined, maybe? I'm not sure. I'm not looking for anything from a "gay male"-- that's such a general category. But one's age/orientation/situation/gender/color preferences/introversion level-- all those things influence the whole of who one -is-, and that's important to a story. I think.

I dislike characters (or people, I guess) who can be easily and simply labeled. But all one's labels do shape one's identity, and it's just that writing about individual identity in a believable and rigorous manner is something I feel passionately about.~:)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, now I see. And ITA. It's like...a person being gay is of course part of their personality, just as their being male is so if you're a female you'd better be trying to write them as a male. But this seems to be more about letting the research be the character instead of just letting the research inform the character. The character does X because this is what gay men do instead of thinking of the character as a gay man and wondering what seems right to him. It's like, you wouldn't write a character as drinking tea just because they were English. You might have a character drink tea knowing that they've always drunk it while growing up in England, but it would still have to be part of their personality.

-m

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Yes. *is content in our returned state of mutual grokking*

If you grok, then all is right with the world~:))
Also, I'm coming to NYC this weekend for most/some/part of the break & I haven't seen RoTK yet & was hoping I could somehow see it with you even though it's not the opening night or anything :>

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

This weekend? When? I'd love to see it with you!

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

well, um. heh. I was going to be in town today but I got bogged down with um. H/D reading so I was going to be there tomorrow, taking a morning bus so I'll be around at um...early afternoon? But I'll be in town for at least a week though :>!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Cool! We should definitely see it sometime then. I'm not going to be here...Xmas eve and Xmas probably? But that's probably it. Should I e-mail a phone number?

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

*nodnod!!* :D :D!
heeeee! *beams*

[thamiris.livejournal.com]

This was a wonderful post, and I agree with your main point about the dangers of attempting to regulate reality. At the same time, I'm not sure if I'm with you on the point about reality as a non-style. Surely 'reality' is as much a style as 'realism' since reality isn't any more stable or easily definable than fiction, is it? We can't depic "real" gay men's experiences because those experiences are varied and complex: what's "real" to one gay man might be a scary fantasy to another. Besides, I'm not sure if "reality" is something I *do* want to talk about as a writer; I'm more interested in a self-constructed internal reality than an external one in many ways, but that might be in part because I tend to write in fantasy-fandoms where the characters aren't ones I encounter in my limited reality, gods and heroes and crazy billionaires. I don't think that an epic character will behave like a normal guy, with his emotions and situations blown up like fictive balloons. Reality for me is best left at psychological validity, pushing the limits of normal behavior, even dispensing with them, while still creating for such characters a coherent psychic profile for fantastic figures, kind of a uber-meta-reality, if you will. *g*

I think that reality could be "colonized" if you presented your version of it as the single reality, although I'm not quite sure how you could do that in fiction except through copious notes.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Was that my main point? Hee. I thought my main point was something like, "realism is good, but not the way most people think of realism". :> :> Which was probably way too confusing of a point to make without further explication, maybe.

What I mean is-- regulating reality is unfruitful, yet trying to stay true to it is a Good Thing, if by "reality" you mean treating your characters in a psychologically extrapolative manner. For me, one's outer reality influences one's inner reality, so my ideal would be a psychologically "real" characterization which implies a sociologically arguable characterization. That is to say, it doesn't have to be actually -true-, but it'd be good if it was potentially true based on the things that are already true and saying "what if".

The science-fiction model of characterization, if you will~:)

I don't know if I find reality definable, so much as... I dunno... there's that "I know it when I see it" feeling of -recognizability- about it. Maybe "reality" is too big of a word to use. Okay, I know it is. It's just-- people's reality (heh)-- and people in general, are predictable. Their actions and reactions are plottable and recognizable even if everything else about their circumstances and random factual aspects are fictional. Reality implies too much stuff, and I should've known better than to use such a sweeping word. Eek.

I think I was talking about the ways in which one's self-constructed reality reflects the outside reality in weird twisted ways, y'know? So that it doesn't have to be a direct translation by any means, but no man is an island, and so on. There are echoes, tastes, ways to identify a person as -this- or -that-. A sort of totality of identity which -includes- social identity and love-relationship identity and work-identity and such. All these aspects make up one's gestal "I", and so to write about anyone's personality in an in-depth and truly believable way, you'd probably need to reflect this gestalt reality somehow. Not necessarily directly-- it could be completely oblique-- but there's that echo of universality, I guess, still there. Maybe. Do I even know what I'm talking about anymore? :>

"A normal guy", yes. That's what I'm talking about. A character will behave "as". Take that as and define it. What is he/she behaving -as-? That's what I was talking about, the process of answering that question being important~:) You can extrapolate, and invent, and change-- as long as you start with some center of "this is who they are" and include that in your portrait of them.

It could be meta-reality, but it's still, you know, outside the writer, which is what I really was going after. More than mere projection of self! Extrapolation! Yes, this is a Good Thing! It doesn't have to be Joe-Shmoe's version of things, but as long as it's attempting to portray something "other" on its own terms, it's all good to me~:)

Hehehe, well. I don't think one can say anything intelligent about the colonization thing, 'cause it's such a stupid idea. On the other hand, I think it muddled my main point, mentioning it. 'Cause I meant that while it's silly to think slash writers are moving in on gay male turf, it's also a Good Thing to actually be aware of `the turf' to some extent, as far as it informs this other, extrapolated turf~:) Or something ^_^;

[tanacawyr.livejournal.com]

I'm torn about this whole issue ...

The women who say they're exploring their own sexuality issues through mock-up dummies they like to call "boys" just crack me up. I mean... okay, that's good, they're getting therapy for free. That's great. As far as whether that sounds like good writing... er... let me just yell a loud and resounding HELL NO.

I'd debate this. I don't want to read a gratuitous, self-indulgent whine session, but it's also true that there are no stories so powerful and so brilliant as the ones that come raw from a writer's unconscious and are turned into brilliant art. The power that comes from that is inescapable, and in the hands of a competent writer, it will pull the reader in and grab them by the windpipe, not letting go until the last page. Every damned story I've ever read, from "Ransom" to "Dr. Jackson's Diaries" that's done that to me has been to some extent taken from an author's direct personal experience. Without exception, the lines and scenes that have left me squirming and gasping were the same ones that the author squirmed over while writing.

The stories that I've written that are the best received (by people whose opinions I trust) are without exception the ones that I wrote and posted with a little queasy twist in my stomach, thinking that I'd exposed myself way the hell too much in them.

We're too quick to sneer at women who write their "issues" (I hate that word) into their writing, as if one must be an emotionless automaton in order to be a good writer. It's when you ride the razor and let your ass flap in the breeze and expose yourself -- provided you're good -- that you really burst into flame. Total detachment makes one a hard scientist, not an artist. Picasso wasn't painting anything he didn't FEEL when he made "Guernica."

Sure, I always include that proviso that a writer needs to be good to do this well, but since when does a sucky writer do ANYTHING well?

I'm also torn about the whole realism thing. I do think that it pays to be realistic, especially about characterization. I'm not going to take an SF story seriously if the author didn't even bother to look up the fact that a spaceship can't make a damned U-turn.

However.

Slash for me is about what WOMEN want. I write it for myself and for other women. If gay men get off on it as well, I'm perfectly pleased about that, but this is MY writing, written for myself and my female friends. If we have to vet our writing for a group of people who are a distinct minority, then where the hell does that leave us?

And often, that "we must accurately portray the desires of gay men as opposed to our own desires" is presented in a very ... guilt-inducing way. The interlocutor will say it as if to say that there mere act of getting a bunch of women off isn't enough to justify writing slash. Sort of, "Aren't you being selfish, little girl, wanting some for yourself? What about everyone else?" Fuck that. Girls and women are constantly browbeaten to worry about satisfying everyone else first -- screw it. Slash is about OUR wants. The rest of the world can damned well pay attention to their own needs, even gay men, who are hardly living in some pornless existence needing our doting and maternal attention to rescue them. They generate oceans of porn that plays on their wants just fine; they don't need our help.

Also, perhaps we may want to remember that, as well as gay men, women are also an oppressed people, goddamn it. There's no justification needed for getting a woman off. We don't need to apologize for thinking of our own desires first for once in our lives.

[tanacawyr.livejournal.com]

BTW, when I sid "distinct minority," I meant "distinct minority in the slash community." I certainly don't feel that people who are minorities in general should be dismissed, being both queer and disabled as well as an unapologetic slasher. I meant only that there is nothing wrong with concentrating on meeting WOMEN'S desires in a community that is overwhelmingly composed of women.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I actually agree with you about the writing-from-the-gut thing. Clearly one's emotions informing one's work can only be a good thing-- and I definitely know what you mean about the queasy-inducing fics being the best received. That happens to me too. The sheer emotional power behind a fic doesn't have to contradict the other level believability on a more logical, outside-observer level, though. I think? Like, you could believably channel emotions and color them with the character's perceptions, maybe? It's all fuzzy in my mind now, and also it's late. But I believe it's -possible- to have raw emotion & retain some sort of fusion with the "otherness" of the character, too. Er. Maybe.

And well... I guess I was thinking about storytelling in general rather than slash in specific, and wasn't separating it out as a particular "type" of storytelling. I was kind of thinking of what's good for stories rather than what the nature of slash is, y'know? Like... I feel like I'm just telling a story most times, one that's important to me but not necessarily one that only exists to satisfy me directly-- or maybe playing with these ideas of characterization and otherness satisfies me indirectly or something. People have different goals in writing slash & fanfic & writing in general, I know that. I was just stating my biases in reading, if anything, heh.

As far as needing to apologize-- of course no one does. On the other hand, there's that ideal of good writing, which is separate from the emotional life of the writer even as it's an extension of it, y'know? It's a duality, a balance. Successful writing, to me, is as much about the story as it is about the storyteller. At least, that's my own ideal~:)

~reena

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I like what you say about honesty in writing, though I wonder how you feel about the limitations imposed by challenges, for example, or specific writing exercises. I was somewhat taken aback, however, by some of the other things you discussed. Since my response got too long, it ended up http://www.livejournal.com/users/cathexys/65616.html (http://www.livejournal.com/users/cathexys/65616.html)