“This soap box is not big enough for the both of us.”
I asked readers for topics they would like to see me address in this blog, and I got a slew of great responses, something that will keep me in columns for a few months to come.
Here’s the question that got top billing for November:
“How you can address an issue you want to discuss without beating a drum for it or being too subtle to be realized – and CAN you make it too subtle? What is your target: conscious or subconscious?”
There are three different people involved in any given story at any given time.
There is the writer, who brings to it all of their own pre-conceived notions, ideological dogmas, clutural prejudices, and all that goes into the baggage that any average living human being carts around with them all their lives.
There is the reader, who brings a different set of baggage to the interpretation of the story.
And there is the character through whose agency the story is being told.
Let’s leave the reader out of it for a moment, because the things that the readers bring to the work are not remotely in the writer’s bailiwick – that is between the reader, and the story. But the other two people involved – the character and his or her creator – can sometimes square off in epic battles which the reader will often never know anything about at all.
Before I get into that, let me tell you what Patrick Stewart once said in an interview. He had just given a performance in a role which required him to portray a gay character, and the interviewer, ineptly enough, brought it up couched in awkward inquiries as to how the heterosexual actor could play a gay role, and how it affected his approach to that role. Stewart said, somewhat testily, that he had also played a starship captain at some point in his career, and nobody had ever asked him how he had approached THAT role.
By implication, you know, anyone at all can know exactly what it takes to play a starship captain, and what a starship captain feels, in an era of human developments where each and every beloved starship that ever existed only lived in our minds and our hearts and our imaginations. But being gay… that was something that really did exist out there, in the real world, in a way very much unlike those starships. Starships could be dismissed as being non-threatening, because they were impossible. Being gay could conceivably be interpreted as threatening, because it was POSSIBLE. And as a real-life issue, as perceived by that interviewer and many like him, apparently an artist is supposed to approach it somehow differently from the things rooted purely in the imaginary realm. As in, the artist was supposed, even expected, to have a personal opinion about something like this, about being gay, in a manner that would never have been expected when it came to playing imaginary captains of non-existent starships. Real-life issues have real-life agendas, and are thus subject to heated polemics.
And it is entirely possible that a character will have strong opinions about such matters. A character who may (unlike the writer who created him or her) actually BE gay. Or fat. Or black. Or Muslim. Or a Communist. Or simply a foreigner who comes from a place that someone else, reacting to him, may not understand or fears because it is seen as unfamiliar, odd, or strange. Worship a different god, and you’re suspect. Have a relationship with your body and your sexuality which is at odds with what is considered by society to be “the norm”, and you are suspect. Follow a different ideology than your neighbour, and you are suspect. Is it surprising that characters labouring under these burens would have strong opinions about them, and about the society that created them?
The strongest, the best, characters will not be mealy-mouthed about these things, either. They will, or should, be outspoken. Someone fighting in the Russian Red Army may believe heart and soul in the Soviet, and is willing to die for those beliefs in a place like Stalingrad of apocalyptic reputation. A Muslim girl from an immigrant family may be reviled for wearing the hijab to a secular school. The Big Girl in the corner, who gets catcalls along the lines of “hey, Thunder Thighs!” every time she walks into her college cafeteria, might have exttremely strong opinions about the people who are doing this, and about the body that she is wearing. That attitude towards her body can be an abysmally low self-esteem, a defiant acceptance of her shape, or a complex psychological elixir
which contains both of these things mixed together in explosive proportions.
For that matter, a Starfleet officer who screws up chain-of-command or standard protocol because it clashes in some impossible way with that officer’s own alien culture and mores will have a certain amount of defensiveness, a certain amount of triumph, a certain amount of anguish or mortification or… or… fill in your own feeling, as you think fits…
The point is, these characters will have thoughts and feelings about the circumstances in which they find themselves and the way they present themselves to and interact with their worlds. They will have opinions. These opinions – and pay attention now, this is important – MAY BE COMPLETELY AND DIAMETRICALLY AT ODDS WITH THOSE OF THEIR CREATOR AUTHOR.
Some authors find it impossible to keep their own ideological opinions in check, and will use stories – and characters – as mouthpieces for their own beliefs, be they faith or ideology. The temptation is there to simply assign villain roles to those characters who happen to disagree with the author. The trouble with this scenario is that it is painfully obvious that the author is the one on the soapbox, NOT the character, and that the character is either a limp ventriloquist’s dummy or is fighting valiantly against the muzzle bound on him by the author.
The soapbox is not big enough for both of them.
And in the best stories, told in the best manner, it is the AUTHOR who steps back, and leaves the characters to live their lives according to what the characters themselves believe.
This is a hard thing to do, because it requires, literally, carrying somebody else inside your head while you are writing the character who is not-you. The onus is on you to make that character live and breathe and not merely serve as a convenient place to hang the blackest villainy of your world. The best villains are not those who are mindlessly evil, but rather those whose thoughts and feelings you, the reader, can see and feel and understand and even empathise with – without EVER being asked or required to sympathise with them.
In the Changer of Days books, “The Hidden Queen” and “Changer of Days”, I had to portray a bastard prince who took a kingdom into his hand when it was offered to him on a plate – and who nearly destroys it because of what he perceives to be the slight given to his mother (whom the King bedded but did not marry) because she was not, as was valued in that land at the time, gifted with certain kinds of powers – which the legitimately wedded Queen was. And that, of course, would have been the only reason, COULD have been the only reason, that the King had spurned the mother of his son… who then grew up with a chip on his shoulder, and turned on the bearers of the gift possessed by the Queen but not by his own mother. He swore to destroy them all before they blighted any more lives in the manner in which his own had been blighted. He was a black villain indeed, and did some deeply, desperately, terrible things. And yet, in the end, I aimed not for implacable hatred in the reader… but for pity. Because they would have understood, in the end, what had driven him. And it would have been very much a reaction along the lines, of, “Well, but what would I have done different if I had been in his shoes…? There but for the Grace of God…”
In a different book, “Embers of Heaven”, I portrayed a pair of star-crossed lovers who had violently opposed ideological and moral values. I gave them both EQUAL STAGE TIME. I took no sides. It was up to the reader, eventually, to figure it out. That’s because neither of those characters was purely right or purely wrong – but acted according to their own lights and their own faith, in the best way they knew how. Again, no black villains. Only real people with real pain.
And I let them ALL speak for themselves. Not an opinion amongst them was something that I had climbed up on the soapbox to expound.
The soapbox was not big enough for the both of us, my character and myself, and I was just the amanuensis, the hand that wrote down the words of the story – but the story did not belong to me. It belonged to its protagonist. The opinions therein are the protagonist’s, not the author’s. It is not the author’s place to reveal their own withint the auspices of that story.
I, as the author, have had to learn to listen, have had to learn the art of silence. I have had to learn how to raise a character well, like a mother would raise a well-behaved child, and teach that character all that needs to be known in order for the story to happen. But after that… I step back, and off the soapbox. If I have opinions on something, you will find them on my blog, not here. The story I am telling does not belong to me; it is the starship captain (whether or not he is in fact gay) who decides in which direction to take the ship, and which stars to aim for.
All I do is provide the ship. As for the rest… it’s over to you, captain. If the story, if the faith, if the beliefs, if the ideas are strong enough to shine through… they will. I have never in my life written a tale which was meant to “educate” the reader in any kind of overt way, or to be obvious propaganda aimed at changing that reader’s own set of ideas and beliefs. The basic concept is this: what I do when I write a story is that I create a character to carry it, and then allow that character to develop a personality (which consists of ideas, and thoughts, and feelings, and faith) which is the best possible fit to the story in question. What that character then tells the reader who reads that story… is between the character and the reader. By the time it gets to this point the writer is – or should be – back in the crowd of listeners, listening to the character speak his mind, and if that writer has done the job properly the writer’s voice and opinions and ideas (whether or not they match that character’s) will never intrude on what the character has to say.
This soapbox is not big enough for the both of us.
