Maddilyn Muse

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."

There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you

And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.

Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum

The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.

And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."

do you feel it too the heat of building desire going unfulfilled

There's this idea that it's Unfair and Unjust for the protagonists to have had to suffer, fight evil, etc., in a particular way because they're children. Because of this, the narrative or the authority figures or, heck, the entire genre is treated as corrupt, and as having betrayed and victimized the children.

And sometimes that's fair and true! Sometimes it's actually part of the text. Sometimes it wasn't intended as part of the text but it probably should have been. But these criticisms of child-hero stories end up dismissing a few very important facts:

It is in fact universally the case that, for good to prevail, suffering has to be endured and evil has to be fought by people who had nothing to do with the problems, no culpability in them, and no responsibility other than Being In The Right Place At The Right Time. That's a responsibility that has to be accepted regardless. That's what heroism is.

This is unfair no matter who the hero is, but accepting an unfair burden is different than having it thrust upon you. (See: Frodo Ring-Bearer.)

Children and teenagers ARE, in fact, in possession of enough agency to take on such responsibilities of their own free will. They can also be the only people in The Right Place to accomplish a particular good -- just like adults -- without this meaning they're forced into it.

Children have a DESIRE FOR and a RIGHT TO stories where people of their own age and state of life are heroic!

Data, who strongly admires and desires humanity, has his story centred around being as humanlike as possible. In Data stories, to be more like a human is viewed as improvement, to be called humanlike is a compliment; everything is framed around his ability to seem similar to humans and he's good because he strives to be more human. He's similar to the nineties and early millennium push of "we're just like you! Our differences are something we were born with and we can't help :( but we can be same as you! Trans people were just born in the wrong body; if we get the right one, we fit in! Gay people can form lifelong partnerships and raise kids! Love is love! <3" in order to appeal for basic rights, safety and autonomy. Data is safe. He asks you to listen to his plea to let him through the gates, not to tear the fences down.

Except during a tour of his he met who described as a young, nerdy Mexican kid who brought him a copy of the Phantom of the Paradise for him to sign. The kid wouldn't stop talking about how much he loved the soundtrack, and how much it inspired him. This kid was literally one of the few people in the world that loved the movie

It wasn't until Paul Williams ran into the kid all grown up did he realize it was Guillermo del Toro.

And it happened again, too! He also met a pair of young French men who wouldn't stop raving about how much they loved Phantom of the Paradise and how much it inspired them and their own band, Daft Punk. The three of them ended up doing an album together. An album that I would listen to on repeat while writing the early drafts of my book.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes the creative process seems cruel, unforgiving, and thankless. You can pour your heart and soul into something only to make zero waves. But even a so-called-failure can inspire and lift up someone that needs it. So you gotta keep creating, if only to be the next link in the chain of creativity and art.

"Your main character is... like... thinking too many thoughts. Could you have him think less and maybe just kick some random guy's ass?"

Intrigued by this, I asked for clarification. He responded with a statement that he doesn't like when fiction makes him "feel things" and he wants to see people who are "badass."

Fictional characters are objects.

Stop telling people to encourage the cop inside their head.

How you treat fictional characters, given they are entirely objects of fiction, does NOT necessarily speak to your own character, and you do not need to be "careful".

It is not dangerous to imagine dark things happening to fictional characters. It does not mean you are secretly a bad person. It does not mean you unconsciously want to hurt people in real life. It is not a "slippery slope" to doing bad things to people in real life. You cannot damage your brain or turn yourself into a bad person by consuming "dark" fanfic.

every hopper painting is about stillness. it is found in every brushstroke; at dusk in automat, at dawn in morning sun, at noon in office in a small city, at night in nighthawks.

i have a friend who orbits ideas of power, another who delights in the prosaic and the plain. one weaves around systems and structures, another returns always to wonder at the sea.

Finding your form is like finding a mate. You really have to search, and you can’t compromise—unless you can compromise, in which case your misery will be of a different variety. But just as there are probably only one or two people to whom you could commit yourself, there are probably only a few things you can write about, and only one genre, or maybe two, in which you might excel. It’s no coincidence that most authors’ bodies of work hover over two or three basic themes or take a single basic shape. Think of the novels of Trollope, Austen, Dickens, or Hardy; think of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. They each revisited the same themes, settings, and conflicts over the course of their writing lives. The James Joyces of the world, those who can move from short story to novel to epic, are rare, but then again, few writers master each form the first time out of the gate.

Even though most writers have a limited literary arsenal, readers find infinite pleasure in watching those gestures change and deepen over time. But if you aren’t yet sure what your themes are or what category you should be writing in, you need to take a full accounting of all the reading and all thewriting you have ever done or wanted to do. If you are one of the many people who dream of writing but have never successfully finished or, perhaps, even started a piece, I suggest you compile a list of everything you’ve read over the past six months or year and try to determine if there is a pattern or common denominator. If you read only literary novels, that should tell you something. If you’ve always kept a diary noting the natural world in all its variety, you might want to try writing nature essays.

It never fails to surprise me, in conversations with writers who seek my advice as to what they should write, how many fail to see before their very eyes the hay that might be gold. Instead of honoring the subjects and forms that invade their dreams and diaries, they concoct some ideas about what’s selling or what agents and editors are looking for as they try to fit their odd-shaped pegs into someone else’s hole. There is nothing more refreshing for an editor than to meet a writer or read a query letter that takes him completely by surprise, that brings him into a world he didn’t know existed or awakens him to a notion that had been there all along but that he had nevermuch noticed.

Some of the most striking and successful books in recent history were clearly born of a writer’s obsession and complete disregard for what, supposedly, sells. Few editors would have gone for a queer book about a little-known murder in Savannah that took its sweet time describing every other quirkof the city and its inhabitants before addressing the crime.Whatever John Berendt was thinking when he set out to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it couldn’t have been the bestseller list, because almost anyone in the publishing industry would have told him that nobody would care about the story of a gay antiques dealer who languished in jail after shooting a cheap hustler. The book does, however, draw on what most certainly are Berendt’s strengths as a reporter, as a travel writer, and as a southerner with a gothic sensibility and taste for the macabre. Clearly, he was born to write this book, and he worked through whatever ambivalence and uncertainty he might have felt within himself or encountered from others.