I had lunch with a friend at a Chinese restaurant yesterday. We ate massive quantities of eggplant and pork and talked about the weird minutiae of our lives. She’s also a writer, so we talked about work. I am 25-30 pages away from being done with the first draft of the sequel, and I was complaining about how ugly the draft is and how much revision I’m going to have to do.

“Well it’s just like you told me once,” she said. “You have to get all your messy obsessions and passions out in the first draft. Then you have to go back and make it into a book that other people can read.”

“When did I say that?” I said.

“Back when you were talking to me about my draft. Remember? How you have to pull out all the raw, feral parts and refine them, and layer them back in? How you’ll worry that the book is losing its heart when it loses the naked histrionics, and yet once it’s done you’ll look and everything you love is still there, not lost, but better?”

“That’s all true,” I said, “and you make me sound like an intelligent person. So how come I’m not that smart right now? Why do I forget this stuff?”

“I think that’s just how it works when you’re all up inside it. You can’t see yourself. Other people always look clearer to us. But I know exactly how you work: you’ll get all frustrated and hate everything and be convinced it’s the worst book ever, but three days later your shower will talk to you, you’ll fix it, and then you’ll be like, ‘That? That was nothing. The solution was right there the whole time.'”

I laughed, and we finished lunch. When the fortune cookies came, she opened hers first. It said:

Half of being smart is recognizing the ways in which we’re dumb.

“Dude!” I said. “I think you got MY fortune.” But then I opened up my own and it hit me so hard that my voice got stuck and I couldn’t read it out loud. I had to pass it across the table so she could read it to herself:

It’s not the end yet. Let’s stay with it.

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “I’m pretty sure that fortune is yours.”

I’m not superstitious, but the cookies were spooking me. I stuck my fortune in my wallet, in hopes that it will jump out at me when I least expect it and scare me all over again.

(This post is a continuation of this and this and this.) (Also: sorry it’s taken me forever to put this up. It’s been a really rough week on the writing front, as other problems have brought themselves to my attention. But as I always say – and as my friend Arwen had to remind me that I always say – writing is never wasted.)

I have a head full of humans.

I feel I’ve known some of them forever. In rewriting Seraphina so many times over the course of eight years, it’s like I’m a director who’s been fortunate enough to keep working with the same actors. I know them all very well. I know what they’re capable of, and I know when they haven’t bothered showing up for work (looking at YOU in that section I just ripped out, Lucian Kiggs!).

They aren’t real people, of course. I understand that. But I think there is more to each of them than I’ve consciously put there. I think each one acts as a conduit for something my subconscious is working on – not always, but often, especially when I’m just getting to know them.

The subconscious is a slippery subject. I’m not a psychologist; I have no training in this area. All I have is my own experience and observations of my mind at work. I think of my subconscious as a deep-sea diver, plumbing my cold, unknowable unconscious and bringing up grotesque treasures in a bucket. The diver can’t talk, and the imagery she brings back doesn’t always make sense at first (although sometimes it makes shockingly clear sense). She’s always working, quietly and unseen. This is where strange connections and leaps of intuition happen. This is the part of my brain I’m talking about when I say, “Sometimes my brain is smarter than I am.”

It’s a hard-working part of my brain, but it doesn’t have much access to language in the usual sense. It has to make do with symbols. I make a study of my own symbols and try to work out what I mean. It sounds ridiculous, but I find it really fun.

So whenever one of these humans in my head starts acting up, I can usually be sure there’s something my non-verbal brain is trying to get across. This was the case with Abdo, who was mad at me for most of October.

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So. Last time I said I had been particularly moved by that post at Seeking Avalon. I’d already read Elizabeth Bear’s “Writing the Other” post, and I’d read meta-posts about the whole RaceFail scenario, so I thought I knew what to expect from Avalon’s Willow. I expected strong words and anger; I expected to see Bear taken to task for being smug and patronizing.

I didn’t expect to see Willow’s broken heart laid out so clearly.

Her list is just relentless. Time and again, a Character of Colour is set up and knocked down, is subordinate to a white character, is furniture to decorate a scene with, is an exotic sideshow. I’m not familiar with all the examples she gave – there are big gaps in my SF/F knowledge – but I am a diehard Trekkie, so I knew this one:

It’s about Geordi being blind. It’s about Worf being, time and time again, a tragic mulatto. It’s about holding on to Benjamin & Jake Sisko with finger nails and eye teeth.

This made me think. About The Worf Effect. About Worf Is Always Wrong (not a TV Trope, just something I’d noticed: any time there’s a brainstorming session, Worf’s suggested solution is rejected). About Geordi Never Gets Any (again, just something I noticed: as a fellow nerd, I felt for him). And I thought about the number of times Troi is nothing but Cleavage On the Bridge (love me, love my invented trope names), or The Empath (most ineffectual power evar!), and how much it sucks when all the characters who are ostensibly like you are set dressing or ineffectual noodle people.

Extrapolate from there how much more it sucks to see this around you in all media all the time.

But the thing that REALLY struck me was her mention of Ben and Jake Sisko. I have a deep fondness for those two (for all of DS9, really, which is head and shoulders above any other Trek, IMO). What a realistic and moving relationship they had! I confess that they made me cry more than once. Now that I’m a parent myself it strikes me as even more poignant: Ben’s transparent affection for (and occasional exasperation with) his son, Jake pushing him away and clinging to him by turns, the whole dance of learning to differentiate yourselves and yet still stay friends. They’re the best father-son pair I’ve ever seen depicted on TV. (I qualify this by saying I’ve watched less TV than most people, but STILL. They were just lovely.)

As I was thinking about Ben and Jake Sisko, my subconscious mind (which is sometimes smarter than I am) suddenly dredged up a story a friend had told me. When Canada first legalized same-sex marriage, my friend and her partner came up from Seattle to get married here. They approached the marriage licence clerk with a certain amount of trepidation, bracing themselves for the funny look or the intrusive question or the exaggerated show of support, but none of that materialized.

The clerk yawned; he thought they were boring. And my friend was struck by how wonderful it was to bore someone.

My subconscious is like a cat, leaving things like this on my doorstep without explaining why. In this case, I think I know why. Ben and Jake Sisko are, in many ways, a very ordinary father and son. The fact that such an ordinary pair should be so extraordinary among the characters in Willow’s list is… well, it’s heartbreaking. Not being exotic, not being stared at, not being an ambassador for “your people” all the time, being as boring as you want to be — these are luxuries.

Hold that thought a moment, because there’s one more strand I have to tease out before I braid everything back together. I turn back to Avalon’s Willow:

It’s about the fact that you and writers like you don’t have to think about this stuff. That you have the ready made excuse that it all‘serves the story’ and that said character was written intelligently and as a well rounded individual with wants and needs of his own; with plots even.

This got me thinking, too, and not just “about this stuff” (and my privileged ability to stop thinking about it, if I wanted to). It was the phrase “serves the story” that got my attention.

(I have written and rewritten this part about twenty times now, trying to counterbalance feeling with tact, and I’m having a devil of a time. I’m just going to have to say it as plainly as possible and ask everyone’s forgiveness after.)

I believe that there are as many ways to make art as there are artists, that there is no one right way to do it. As much as I may dislike certain books (I throw out Twilight as my standard example), I will defend them as art.

That said, I think the claim that something – anything – had to be present in a book because it “serves the story” is kind of a bullshit excuse. First of all, everything in a finished story serves the story; that’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying. What’s not obvious, however, is that until the story is finished – and by finished, I mean out in print, where it can no longer be tinkered with – anything can still be changed. Especially plot.

The unhealthy relationship in the published novel Twilight serves the story, sure. If it weren’t there, Twilight wouldn’t be Twilight. Twilight’ would be some other story. Maybe a better story, maybe not, but different.

To defend a problematic part of a novel by saying it “serves the story” is to imply that there was only one story that could have been told, and it’s this one, Twilight as-is, not Twilight’. It implies inevitability.

Nothing is inevitable. Plot is not some juggernaut, chugging along, running people over, unsteerable and unstoppable. That is a bossy, bullying plot, to my mind. It turns characters into pawns, civilizations into stage-dressing, emotions into devices. It says things can only happen one way. It is a knee-jerk reactive plot.

I say again: it can be reactive and still be art. Clearly (hi, Twilight!) it can sell well too. For my own part, I’m not a big fan of my own jerking knee. I’ve seen the harm it can do. I believe I can do better than that.

The key, I think, is to keep asking questions (I know I have the privilege to stop, but I like asking questions. If I’m not asking these specific questions, I’m asking other questions. It’s what I do). The inevitable will insist that it can’t be questioned; it’s going to happen whether you like it or not. Asking questions is the way to poke it in the eye.

Nothing is inevitable in fiction. Everything can be questioned, everything changed.

It’s all well and good to have imaginary fist-fights in my head where I hash out my own theories of art and inevitability, but theories are no good to me if I don’t put them to work. I’m an experimentalist at heart, not a theorist (which is why I’m worried that I’ve laid this all out inadequately). “Ask questions of your plots!” I announce, ex cathedra, but the point really is that I have begun asking questions of my work-in-progress. Different questions than usual, I mean. Questions pertaining to privilege and fairness and – because we’ve been in Porphyry for about 90 pages now – race.

The very first question was: who gets to be boring?

OK! *gasp!* That’s more than plenty for today! Tune in next time (or the time after; I think I have to catch my breath, here) when I actively apply all this thinking to what I’m doing! I’ll probably talk about art some more! Consider yourself warned.