: Saturday, March 14, 2009
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naomikritzer: WritingtheOtherFail circa 1860 - So, to recap: Dickens was, at times, defensive. (It's not anti-Semitism! My fence character is Jewish because all fences are Jewish! It's pure coincidence that there has never been another Jewish character in any of my books!) But when taken to task by someone who said, in so many words, that this character had wronged her and her people, he took the criticism to heart and took steps to try to do better.//I stumbled across this story a few weeks after RaceFail started and was frankly kind of boggled to find a discussion of controversy surrounding cultural appropriation and Writing The Other from well over a hundred years ago. Damn, these discussions have been going on for a long time. -- yuki_onna: Let Me Tell You a Story - Stories are important. Stories, in fact, are life. They are what is left of our unique experience in this world. They speak--no. They scream. And when an author sits down and constructs a completely imaginary world in their heads, if people like me, people like us, do not exist in it, or exist only to be ridden like animals or raped or murdered or humilated or destroyed so that an audience can acheive catharsis via symbolic annihilation of our lives, bodies, and souls, well, certainly, we can sit down and look at the floor and say: yes, you're right, that is what we deserve.//Or we can stand up. We can scream back. -
- inklesspen: Writing the Other; or, what's a white guy to do? - So how do you write the fictional Other? With the anime universes, I can immerse myself in Japanese culture to an extent. I frequently worry that I'm like WALL-E, collecting shiny things without regard for what they are and, sometimes, tossing out the diamond ring in favor of the nifty jewelry box. I have to be careful not to substitute verisimilitude for getting the culture right. -
- norah: Losing (or, more to the point, never having) the plot - So, those of you who write plot...how do you make it go? I am just feeling totally stupid. Like, I've read so much amazing worldbuilding in fiction. I constantly boggle at the crazy worlds that you all seem to make up like breathing. But I get stuck on shit, on little details. And I just can't seem to move it past them. Perhaps I'm too linear and I'm trying to go point A --> Point B --> Point C when really I need to work from the top down, or from the back front, or inside out, or I don't even KNOW. -