Writing for Justice

Las Meninas, Beverly Hills by Ramiro Gomez, Jr.

Make no mistake, being open minded and living in a state of empathy is not about accepting wrongdoing and the evil wrought in the world. Living in a state of empathy has not only opened my eyes to the experiences of others, it has helped to set my moral compass. Trying on someone else's troubles fosters a sense of fairness, and that's just the sensibility that can result in a passion for justice in the world.

Writers are in a unique position when it comes to writing and justice. There is mounting evidence that fiction has a way of getting inside us, and once there, of making us see the world in a different way. And once we see things differently we are forever changed.

I would argue that all good writing, from fairy tales to novels to poetry, has an aspect of wanting to change the world for the better. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is to make us into better human beings. Many people have thought a lot more about this topic than I have. Check out Naomi Benaron's excellent post about the place where fiction and social responsibility intersect for her.

Nobody wants to read a polemic (OK, most people don’t). This is the problem I have with Ayn Rand. Regardless of what you think of her ideas, her fiction barely manages to rise above her ideology. For this reason, I think her novels are just awful. The only people I've talked to who love her novels are already deeply invested in her ideas.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso

Even if you choose to create a work of art with an explicit message – if it's really going to work, really going to embody the message, then the art has to come first. Consider the formal brilliance of Picasso's "Guernica." Look at Ramiro Gomez Jr.'s warm and clever use of throw-away cardboard paintings to highlight how immigrants are perceived by the mainstream culture around them.

Beverly Hills Cutout by Ramiro Gomez, Jr.

No matter the medium, creating good art comes from a mastery of craft combined with an openness and fearless exploration of the world and the self. I believe that if you are truly expressing YOURSELF through your art – your sense of justice, your moral compass will be implicit in the art you create.

Personally, I believe that my job as a fiction writer isn't to convince, but to examine. I believe that storytelling is the best at dragging things out into the daylight. If I turn my gaze on something dark, or write a villain with empathy, then what I believe about right and wrong will be expressed in the negative space of the story.

Speculative fiction, in particular, has a long tradition of writing for social justice. It's suited to it, because of the way it can cross boundaries and explore future and imagined worlds. But don't take my word for it -- read around the genre to see how others write for justice.

Environmentalism among other things

• Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl, The Water Knife (This one's forthcoming and I can't wait!)
• Frank Herbert: Dune
  

Societies and dystopias in war and peace

• Robert Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Joe Haldeman: The Forever War 

Gender, theocracy, environmentalism, capitalism

• Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid's Tale

For more strong women who use speculative fiction to take on multiple themes race, gender, environmentalism, and the ills of society in general, check out:

• Octavia Butler - see also Levi Dugat's excellent post Science Fiction + Social Justice
• Ursula K. LeGuin
• Toni Morrison (who has never shied from using fabulist and speculative elements in her work, Beloved and Song of Solomon being two of my personal favorites)

  

  Octavia Butler

The Moment and the Memory of It

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Remember me? *

There is a lot written about living in the moment, why it’s good for you and how to do it. It’s all about paying attention, which is especially important advice for writers because paying attention is critical to building and honing the kind of deep insight we need to create meaningful characters and stories.

One uniquely modern dilemma is learning how to balance being in the moment with the urge to record it. There are so many nifty ways to record every moment of our lives, and so many cool devices that we carry around in our pockets to collect all these memories. There’s a kind of emotional logic to the idea that capturing these memories and uploading them to external memory containers like our computer’s hard drive, the cloud, or various social networks will be more stable then just trusting them to our own fickle wetware.

Our modern understanding of the brain in general, and memory in particular, is a vast and fascinating field. Currently, memory is understood to be largely a reconstruction of events built from experiences that are often melded with other information we’ve encountered. Check out "How Our Brains Make Memories" over at the Smithsonian.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Laurate who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, talks here about how experience, memory and happiness are connected and how they are not.

Toni Morrison supports this idea of reconstructed memory in her excellent essay “Memory, Creation, and Writing” (PDF), when she talks about deliberately using her memories’ fungible nature when writing.

“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”

~ Toni Morrison

“Memory, Creation, and Writing” Thought Vol. 59, No. 235 (December 1984)

 I haven’t seen any studies about how our devices affect our memories yet, but I believe that when I’m involved with recording an event, it interferes with experiencing it. It turns whatever’s happening into a different experience, and therefore a different kind of memory. When we become too busy recording our existence for upload, we have less internalized material available to us when we need to create. This is important, because it’s our internalized experiences that are the raw material for good writing.

How hard is it to reconstruct some event if you didn’t fully experience it? How can you draw from it emotionally if you were reigning in your full emotional experience so that you could hold your device steady? When you take a picture or video of an event you have a different kind of record, a completely legitimate one – I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m writing this post from some moral high ground. I love my electronic devices and enjoy hanging around Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. I too am guilty of “curating” my life.

But, as a writer, what I draw on when I create is my bank of experiential memories. On the times when I was entirely there in the moment. We don’t need to throw our devices into the bonfire, or cancel all our social accounts, just remember to balance your time with them. Remember that while our human memories may not be good at collecting the kind of photographic, factual data that a camera can, they are the best at collecting a different kind of truth. You are the most complex and mysterious recording device. The truth you tell from your remembered experiences is the truth of you, and it’s what readers want. 

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

* I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. If I were to make one this year, it would be to have a couple blog posts in the can for busy family times like the holidays. For the past two weeks, I kept trying to get in front of a screen to write a post, but with Christmas gifts like Pandemic and Star Trek Catan as well as a family trip, it obviously didn’t happen. Fun was had by all and the break, I think, was a good thing. Now, back to work.

No Literary Value

"I didn't find any literary value." So said one member of the Randolf County's (North Carolina) Board of Education about Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's masterpiece, when the board handed down their decision to ban the book. This is the end of the official Banned Books Week, but every week books are challenged, suppressed, censored, bowdlerized, banned, and yes, still burned. 

No literary value. It's one of the more common arguments put forth when some person or group wants to challenge a book. That got me to wondering as I perused the list of the most challenged and banned books, because there are so many works of clearly great literary value that have earned a permanent spot on this list.* Here's just a few of my personal favorites:

• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
• Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
• To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• Brave New World, by Aldus Huxley
• Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
• The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle
• and everything Toni Morrison's ever written as far as I can tell

I believe the "no literary value" offensive works on a couple levels. First, it's a convenient cover for the real complaint, which has to do with the theme or topic of the book. Taken as a whole, any list of banned books is a short course in the flashpoints that we struggle with as a society. Regardless of the literary value of the books on the list there's no arguing the evergreen topics: race, religion, sexuality and sexual preference, gender, and class. Second, there is a popular perception that establishing a work of art's value is impossible. The idea that beauty is solely in the eye of the beholder is a tautology that serves to scuttle any reasoned argument. True, there is no mathematical formula, yet we have always recognized creative genius, e.g. Beethoven, Milton, da Vinci. There are giants in every field, and by their examples we set the bar, by critical agreement, and by the test of time.

All art is subversive and therefore vulnerable to censure. Good art  strips away our preconceived notions, and pursues the truth, no matter how painful or damning. Good art also reveals the transcendent beauty all around us. But it just might be the narrative arts that are the most subversive of all. A recent study about about reading fiction confirms that it influences our ability to empathize. It also found that that the higher the reader's "transportation" into the story, the greater our empathy. One of the joys of reading a great book is the feeling that the world around us has fallen away, and we have been truly transported into the world of the story. We see that world through the eyes of the protagonist and empathize with his or her point of view. 

I believe that seeing the world through new eyes, irrevocably changes the way we see our own world once we put the book down. A book can change your mind. It can change your heart. Is there anything more dangerous than something that can change your heart? 

We need these books for the same reason we need free speech, because we simply cannot be trusted to limit it fairly. The opening lines of Invisible Man express perfectly why it is one of the most ironic books to ban.

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

But maybe there's hope yet. ** So, go forth and be daring, be subversive. Read a banned book.

Artwork courtesy of the ALA

* Don't even get me started on the kids books on this list. That'll have to wait for another post.

** North Carolina Students Will Get Free Copies of Banned Invisible Man.