Category Archives: Stories and Writing

What is a blog, after all, but a lot of stories? So these are stories about stories.

Morality in Fictional Worlds–as the author wishes

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Does fiction help us understand morality?

Philosophy professors like to use thought experiments to get their students to look at their assumptions in a new way, or to bring out their intuitions about conflicting principles.

“Could I be a brain in a vat?”

“Should I reroute the trolley so it hits one person rather than five?”

“Should Heintz steal the medicine for his wife from the greedy pharmacist?”

And always, “Why?”

Sometimes philosophers use situations from familiar books and movies to serve the same purpose: Sophie’s choice, McCoy’s aversion to the transporter on Star Trek, Huck Finn’s decision to go against what he believes is “right.”

Focusing on a vividly described situation makes for interesting discussion, but it’s important to remember how fiction differs from reality. In fiction, the author determines which details are relevant, what consequences ensue, and how the world works.

One such relevant detail is where the story “ends.” End the story too soon, and all the hero’s efforts seem have resulted in disaster. End it just after he succeeds, and it seems that he made the right choices after all. End it too late… well, it’s up to the author whether he really lives happily ever after as a result of his decisions. That brings us to the author’s control over what consequences ensue.

For instance, suppose you have a film in which the good guy and the bad guy end up shooting at each other. Which shots hit their mark? Which injuries are fatal or incapacitating? In westerns and the Marvel Universe, the results tend to favor the hero, because the author controls the consequences.

You can also see this as a fact about how these worlds work, something else the author controls. In these worlds, the good guys are more adept at fighting than the bad guys. It isn’t very plausible, unless maybe God is on their side. After all, surely the bad guys attack people more often. Even if the good guys have self-discipline and practice devotedly, they will have less battle experience. So why would they win so consistently?

(In the long run, the good guys have the advantage of working together and trusting each other, but that isn’t going to make their aim more accurate.)

In the world of Dr. Who, guns are not the answer. Dr Who also faces bad guys who are armed with all sorts of weapons, but he (or she) relies on finding alternate ways of dealing with them. And he succeeds. There is always another way to solve the problem.

I would like to believe that this is true of our actual world–that there is always another solution– but I don’t know how we could tell. The writers of Dr. Who can ensure that the good Doctor does find that other way. We don’t have a Doctor to call on.

In some worlds, this other solution involves the Power of Love. Star Trek Discovery, season 3, seems to exist in such a world. The bad guys are not really bad after all, just misguided, unhappy, or perhaps even right about having been mistreated. And there is something to this, as anyone who has been caught between two feuding friends can agree. In these worlds, with the right approach, the two sides can be reconciled and be friends.

I would like to think that this is also true of our world, but it seems clear that there are some people who really don’t care about others. There are even people who actively enjoy hurting others, and not because they believe the others have wronged them. The Power of Love seems inadequate here, at least without some sort of psychiatric fix that we don’t currently have.

Even when the enmity is between two basically decent people or groups of people, reconciliation is much, much harder than it appears in fiction. People tend to see all the ways in which they have been wronged, but only a small percentage of the ways in which they have wronged others. (I don’t remember the name for this bias.) So people feel that they are being asked to accept more cost and forgive more injury than the other side. Even when it’s clear that the dispute is hurting everyone, it is very hard for people to accept less than they feel they are owed. And if resentment continues to burn, the dispute is likely to flare up again at a moment’s notice. One can only hope that the next generation doesn’t inherit all the resentment of the past.

Does fiction help us understand morality? As an author, I can show a world in which it is sometimes necessary to kill, or a world in which there is always a better way. My characters may need to do bad things in order to prevent worse ones, or my characters may need to stick to their principles and refuse to do wrong, no matter what, lest they become part of the problem themselves. The bad guys may be misunderstood, or they may truly be bad.

How does this help with the real world? When I’m addressing some real world situation, I may have the Dr. Who universe in mind, while someone else is thinking about the Marvel Universe. No wonder we disagree about what to do! Which of the many fictional worlds is most like our own? Tony Stark’s New York? Dr. Who’s London? The Federation of the far, far future? Something else?

Yes.

One thing fiction does help us do is see the different ways that other people–and ourselves, at different times–perceive the world. It can help us understand why we draw such vastly different conclusions about how to react. It cannot, however, tell us what is right.

Till next post.

P.S. Though I used science fiction for my examples, the same contrasts exist in novels and films set in strictly realistic settings.

Thoughts on “Bittersweet: how sorrow and longing make us whole” by Susan Cain

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I recently enjoyed reading Bittersweet by Susan Cain, author of Quiet (another book I liked.) She says the book started with her wondering why she likes sad songs so much. (And suddenly lyrics from Hadestown pop into my head–“It’s a sad song/ We’re gonna sing it anyway.” I really like Hadestown.)

Why we like sad songs seemed like an interesting question, but while her answers are worth reading, I’m not really going to discuss them here. Instead, there are two quotations from the book that I copied down into my “everything” notebook, and I want to offer them to you, with some thoughts.

Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you’d extend to a beloved child […] If this strikes you as hopelessly self-indulgent, remember that you’re not babying yourself, or letting yourself off the hook.

Bittersweet by Susan cain

What I like about this advice is that it makes clear that you are not supposed to simply go easy on yourself in the sense of not holding yourself accountable. You don’t get to let yourself off the hook. Rather, you are supposed to be gentle with yourself. You wouldn’t tell your beloved child that they were a hopeless failure and doomed just because they made a mistake or did something wrong. At least, I hope you wouldn’t. But neither would you tell them everything was fine. They still need to learn from their experience. And so do you.

There’s actually one further sentence to this quotation, which I left out.

You’re taking care of yourself, so that your self can go forth and care for others.

bittersweet by susan cain

While I can see how this provides a nice justification for taking care of yourself, it also seems to suggest that you are valuable only insofar as you take care of other people. That’s wrong. Other people matter, but so do you. And that’s a reason to take care of yourself right there.

The second quotation concerns how we relate to the past.

But there’s one more thing we can all do, even as we seek out and honor our parents’ stories, our ancestors’ stories. We can set ourselves free from the pain. […] It’s easier to see this when we look forward. Our stories will inevitably become our children’s stories, but our children will have their own stories to tell; we want our children to tell their own stories; we wish them that freedom. We can wish the same for ourselves.

bittersweet by susan cain

Here she clearly reminds us that we too are people. The way we want other people to be treated, the freedom we want for other people, is something we should offer ourselves as well. We often remind people to treat others as they would want to be treated themselves, but occasionally we need to remember the reverse–to treat ourselves as we think we should treat others.

(On a slightly different note, there are people who seem to think that how they were actually treated in the past, as children, is how others should be treated. “It was good enough for me,” they say, even when “it” was actually pretty terrible. But that’s a topic for a different post.)

There are lots of other interesting things in this book: thoughts about art, about longing, about immortalists (I didn’t know there was a group of people seriously seeking immortality), about “Self-Transcendent Experiences”, and about facing our own mortality. If these are topics you find interesting, then you should read this book.

And to return to the idea of bittersweetness, it’s back to Hadestown again,

Some birds sing when the sun is bright/ Our praise is not for them/ But the ones who sing in the dead of night/ We raise our cups to them.

Hadestown

Till next post.

P.S. I can’t italicize within italics, so I’ve turned italicized text into bold text in the quotations. Also I used […] to indicate some sentences were left out.

#CarolinasKidLit2022 —lessons in marketing

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I’m delighted to be at the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conference in Charlotte, after two years of attending only virtual writing events. I was worried for a while that the weather might intervene, and decided to take the train down rather than chance driving in a lot of rain. I hate driving in heavy rain.

The first session I found myself in was about building an online kidlit platform. Thank you, Micki Bare, for a thorough look at the various forms on online presence and the ways in which they differ. Also, I didn’t know you could make a Facebook page that was accessed separately from your personal FB stuff. I’ll have to look into that.

But if you’ve read my earlier blog post Too Many Books, Too Little Time—writers want to write, not do marketing, you know that marketing is not my forte. In fact, I have complained loudly that I want to write, not spend time coming up with interesting tid-bits for strangers online. Yet I do recognize the difficulty of just relying on writing a good book to get people’s attention when we live in a world that is FULL of very good books already. And yes, people do spend a lot of time looking at what other people say online, so there’s an opportunity there.

I’m usually good about doing whatever exercise the speaker assigns—write something about a past experience, list five children’s books that you wish you’d written, that kind of thing. But “Take a silly selfie and post it using the following hashtags”? I started to take out my phone, then thought—wait, I don’t do Twitter. I don’t even want to do Twitter. Where else can you post with hashtags? (Answer—Instagram, apparently, but I don’t have that either.)

As you notice, I’m now experimenting with using a hashtag in the title of a blog post. Will it actually be recognized as a hashtag? I kind of doubt it, but it makes a good title.

All of the above is actually a preamble to some thoughts I had while waiting (and waiting and waiting) for my restaurant check. (I think the weather meant they had more diners than they are used to—either that or the weather left them very understaffed.)

Why can’t writers just hire someone else to do all the marketing stuff without any involvement from them? The answer, presumably, is that people want to read something personal, something that is actually about the author or has some connection to the author’s life. But why? The author is not the book character. The author may or may not be a terribly interesting person. (Everyone is interesting to some degree, but why should an author be any more interesting than your next-door neighbor?)

It’s unfair, I thought. Authors didn’t always have to put themselves out in public to this extent. One used to be able to write and still be a private person.

Then I thought—what about actors?

An actor isn’t the character he plays in the movie, but actors have always known that publicity was a crucial part of being an actor. People expect at least some engagement from them, or that they will at least tolerate a lot of gossip about themselves—maybe even go out of their way to create some interesting rumors. The crucial difference seems to be that actors are SEEN. They tell their stories with their faces and their bodies. And that has always made them very interesting to the people watching their films, unlike authors, who are unseen creators. The actor’s appearance in a film creates interest in the actor—something which doesn’t happen nearly as much with books.

Studios know that interest in a particular actor creates interest in that actor’s films. So I guess managing and encouraging that publicity becomes part of the job. Publishers want authors to generate interest in themselves, but they want them to do so even before the book creates any interest in them.

I’m not sure what to conclude from this. That authors need a new conception of their role? That they should hire publicity people to do all the tweeting for them? That the whole system seems really unsustainable in a world of seven billion people connected by internet?

I don’t know. I do know that I need to get some sleep, because tomorrow starts early and there are still many exciting sessions to attend at #CarolinasKidLit2022.

Till next post.