Insert Mr. Yuk Face Here.

[kiya]

Someone just expressed the preference that gay characters in stories need to be gay for "some story purpose". I managed to ask him if he also thought that straight characters needed to be straight for "some story purpose" to be acceptable to him rather than express my bogglement more ferociously.

What's wrong with people being people in stories? All sorts of things are true about people in stories that aren't true for "some story purpose", they're just true.

Sex. Is not. A special case.

Update: Getting a response of "I'm not playing that game" to an honest question that it took me some effort to produce in the absence of a diatribe does not ease my irritation; rather, it inspires contempt.

Comments

[redbird]

Well, then he doesn't have to read my novel, if I ever finish it. There are things I'm worrying about the story purpose of, and may change or take out if they turn out not to have one--a certain dragonfly, for example--but not my characters' (various) sexual orientations.

Going charging down a tangent. . .

[kiya]

I was terribly surprised when I realised the romance subplot between The Sidekick and the junior temple priestess was story-significant. (Not just as in "it happens in this story" but "it's a part of how the Real Story goes".)

Do you find that you discover things are relevant belatedly? I forget how much you've written in the past. . . .

Re: Going charging down a tangent. . .

[redbird]

This is my first attempt at a novel ever, and my first attempt at fiction in several years. So it's all an adventure (when it isn't a worry of 'why am I playing nethack when I should be writing?', that is). I wasn't planning this romance at all--my characters had other plans. They also undercut a subplot on about page 2, leaving me unsure of how/whether I can use another character. It's fascinating.

Re: Going charging down a tangent. . .

[kiya]

Does the character whose subplot was derailed have any opinions on the matter?

Ngrrrr. Almost forgot (dimly on-topic to my original post) that I had another "What's a tribade?" conversation that I need to write. But I don't think that's this conversation. It's probably the other one. (Now for scurrying around and making mental notes.)

Re: Going charging down a tangent. . .

[redbird]

He's still trying to pick up one of the main characters. But I offhandedly remarked at the very beginning that she hates wordplay and puns, so it wouldn't go anywhere even if she weren't high on NRE and trying to solve other problems.

[sstaten.livejournal.com]

:: peer... boggle ::

Well, I suppose it might be a specific special case in a hypothetical fictional society where it's EXTREMELY unusual (like 1 in 1,000,000 or so). But in a modern society (or a derivative thereof)? That's like saying people can't be blonde, or Asian or Libertarian or something without a specific story purpose.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i was at a panel once about disability in sf/f, and i was utterly utterly boggled to hear the panelists, one of whom i had greatly respected (i still respect zir, just not as much) explain that any disability in a story had to be there for story reasons.

this was right after one of the people on the panel explained that yes, really, lots of disabled people in zir's books; the eleventy million people who had mentioned to zir that there weren't any were all wrong. (psst; if your readers don't notice, you're screwing it up. thanks.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

That's funny, because I've seen you recently, and you still had all your hair. I would've expected it to all have been torn out, after sitting through a panel like that.

Argh!

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

the panel was a while ago, you see, and it's just grown back this much. ;)

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

All sorts of things are true about people in stories that aren't true for "some story purpose", they're just true.

I generally prefer the style of writing where the reader gets the feeling that every detail is there for a purpose, so I think I would have answered "yes, ideally" to your question. I can see that this could create problems in terms of visibility, and I'll ponder the disability example some more. I guess it's a question about the purposes of fiction.

[kiya]

I find that mimesis is enhanced by inclusion of things that do not further the plot; it gives me a sense that the world exists beyond the narrow edges of the confines of the story. Things happen that have no direct bearing on the characters I'm writing about save that they hear of them; things are true about my characters and the people surrounding them that have no direct bearing on the story; but including some section of these things serves the purpose of giving the world I write about concreteness, reality. I don't know if that would satisfy your desire to have the details there for a purpose, though.

I've seen a lot of arguments that basically spun around, "Why should I tell a story about a FITB when I don't have a specific reason for a FITB to be there?", where FITB has included ethnic groups, women, religious groups, and various queerstuff, among other things. I think that tends to make the choice to include a FITB inherently politically charged, which is counter to my personal prejudices about how the world ought to behave.

It's not a visibility thing for me, quite, so much as an irritation with marked and unmarked cases. The initial post that set me off struck me very much as a display of het privilege, rather than anything else -- because heterosexuality is the unmarked case, the characters are presumed straight, and including a queer character therefore requires the queerness to Have A Reason To Exist. I don't think that demanding that people provide me justifications of their orientations is reasonable behaviour; I don't make an exception for fictional people.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

including some section of these things serves the purpose of giving the world I write about concreteness, reality. I don't know if that would satisfy your desire to have the details there for a purpose, though.

Yes, but I'd prefer it to be a small section, carefully selected so as to use the minimum possible number of words to achieve the purpose.

I think that tends to make the choice to include a FITB inherently politically charged, which is counter to my personal prejudices about how the world ought to behave.

Huh. I perceive that differently - I'm more likely to perceive a political charge if the FITB characters don't have a plot function. If they do, I'm going to assume they're there to serve that purpose. But that's linked to my response to this:

I don't think that demanding that people provide me justifications of their orientations is reasonable behaviour; I don't make an exception for fictional people.

I see fictional people as very different from RL people - otherwise the whole concept of having them serve a plot purpose at all would be offensive to me.

It's not a visibility thing for me, quite, so much as an irritation with marked and unmarked cases. The initial post that set me off struck me very much as a display of het privilege, rather than anything else -- because heterosexuality is the unmarked case, the characters are presumed straight,

*nod* That would have irritated me, too. I thought your idea of writing a novel without giving away the gender of the principal character was a great one (is this the same novel, btw?)

[kiya]

Yes, but I'd prefer it to be a small section, carefully selected so as to use the minimum possible number of words to achieve the purpose.

I don't know how to think of this sort of thing as a section; it's all through the writing, everywhere. Not something that comes in discrete chunks. If that makes any sense at all. If it's fat, it's hamburger fat and thus really mindboggling to remove all of; not fat like on some cuts of steak that can be hacked off the edge leaving almost entirely meat.

I see fictional people as very different from RL people - otherwise the whole concept of having them serve a plot purpose at all would be offensive to me.

A lot of how I write is based on an internal sense that I'm not making it up; I'm just writing down what's already there. Like a window into another world, these things are how things happen and these people are the ones who participated. I very often don't figure out what the plot purpose of various events is until ten or twenty thousand words later, when the bit that might be taken as clever foreshadowing or meticulous planning to suddenly bears fruit and reveals itself to be intrinsically interlinked.

Given this, it's hard for me to process things as having plot purposes at all; plot is something that appears in my work almost entirely in retrospect. I find this very similar to my life, actually; I have a plot, but it's entirely in retrospect. :}

I thought your idea of writing a novel without giving away the gender of the principal character was a great one (is this the same novel, btw?)

I'm not sure I could pull that off for the length of a novel; that's a short story set in the same world as the first novel I finished. Though if the first novel ever becomes publishable and I write the sequel (I know at this point that I am not a good enough writer to handle the sequel; the narrator is . . . tricky, and it doesn't help that he's significantly smarter than I am), the androgynous character from the short does appear, at least briefly (and is, actually, recognised by the narrator-of-sequel, despite a seven or so year timegap between meetings).

At this point I'm working on something in another world entirely. I'm not sure if I'm doing anything clever with it aside from interlinked foreshadowing and a lot of parallel plotlines and a peripheral association with The Canterbury Tales, but at least I can write it, unlike the aforementioned sequel and the other project I'm not working on at the moment.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I don't know how to think of this sort of thing as a section; it's all through the writing, everywhere.

I meant a small section of the world the author describing, not a section of the novel. I was taking up your comment about describing a section of the fictional world to give it solidity.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

I'm more likely to perceive a political charge if the FITB characters don't have a plot function.

I think lilairen refers not to the presence of people who are FITB but to their FITBness. That is, she's saying that characters should be allowed to have adjectives that don't affect the plot, not that peppering a story with adjectival characters who have no plot function is a good idea. For my part, I (agree with her, and) find the latter creepy -- usually it smacks of 'I had better placate group X by tossing in a few characters of their type, otherwise no one will buy my book!', which is icky on a number of levels.

[redbird]

I agree with you, oneironaut. The other thing (which you're probably aware of) is that the characters all have sets of adjectives--it's just that many of us are trained to ignore certain adjectives and make a big deal about others. Being able to walk four miles without pain is as much an attribute as its absence; male is a gender, white is a race, and tall is a height.