I was just explaining to a friend on Twitter that my TV watching is related to my reading. It\u2019s all part of my research. I have this driving need to understand story and to explain it. Right now, it looks (on the outside) as if I\u2019m doing a complete rewatch of Doctor Who. There is purpose in my rewatch.<\/p>\n
I reached a bit of an intellectual impasse in my research on how worlds are created by writers. The impasse isn\u2019t a big one, but it\u2019s an important one. My analysis was restricted because there was a factor in my own development that I was skipping over. An uncomfortable one.<\/p>\n
The love of a TV show means we accept things in it that we possibly should not. As we learn more, we start to question. I\u2019d already questioned the roles women play and gender plays on Doctor Who, but the English centrality means that I wince, for example, when rewatching The Talons of Wen<\/i>g<\/i>-Chiang<\/i>. It\u2019s offensive and I\u2019ve known this for years and it\u2019s far easier to wince than to learn what decisions were made that created that offence. The Talons of Wen<\/i>g<\/i>-Chiang<\/i> is one of the pivotal sequences for this understanding, because when I first saw it I had close friends who were Malaysian Chinese. My friends were handling the fallout from the representation and I learned about that alongside them\u2026 but I still winced and didn\u2019t face what it did to world building in science fiction (or in any story, to be honest). It affected how I build my novels, but there was always a blind spot because I winced rather than pushing myself to understand.<\/p>\n
In the late seventies, I was delighted that I had friends who spoke the dialects the Doctor spoke (I remember saying this to one of them) but was at that point where I thought that the theatrical nature of the story justified the cultural outsiderness and errors (\u201cIt\u2019s not your culture \u2013 it\u2019s a stage thing.\u201d That was my explanation, but it was far more an excuse than an explanation.). I was slow to learn, I think, how far my own life was affected by being an outsider, and this affected my capacity to look into what hurt others.<\/p>\n
My work right now is on own voices for cultures that are invisible and in plain sight, both at once. The balance between the shape of specific cultures we put into our stories and the reasons we change them from their origins or ignore origins entirely and use prefabricated culture (the stage version, for example) is that place where invisible meets plain sight. Where were have these blind spots.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll talk about that in my research write-up, when I\u2019m further along. In order to do the research, however, I need to shine the light of day on things that I didn\u2019t like to question. I need to ask myself why it was fine for me to watch this and enjoy it with only mild wincing and talk to my friends about it, even as they faced everyday bigotry based on the same notions and we talked about that, too.<\/p>\n
There are several sequences in the late 1970s Doctor Who that are critical to this, for me. The rest of the watching is because taking them out of context doesn\u2019t actually help me understand which aspects of the built world are invisible and which are in plain sight. This is not a one-off analysis, either. We don\u2019t get a simple insight and become perfect people thereafter. We need to learn, continually. The robot sequence just before The Talons of Weng-Chiang<\/i> reminded me, for example, me see how status and class and relative humanity are important in all of Doctor Who.<\/p>\n
The presentation of different aspects of humanity changes over time, just as all our narratives do. Within the world of the Doctor, culture changes and what is safe to talk about and how people are introduced changes, too. A TV series that has been shown on and off for decades is a rather good tool for checking my own blindspots. It\u2019s doubly useful because it\u2019s not local to me. I will have to revisit Australian stories from the same times, soon. I need to bring more of the invisible into my clear day.<\/p>\n
Some of it I watch with awareness. Other bits I focus on very, very closely. One of the bits I\u2019ll focus on especially closely is what I like to think of as vampires in space. It was written by Douglas Adams. Enclosing a mind as vagrant as Adams\u2019 then comparing this to one of his novels then checking how the radio play and the television versions are different again, illustrates rather well how narrative rules push us into this bias or that.<\/p>\n
\u2018Bias\u2019 is too simple a word, really. What I\u2019m working on now is about what world we see as a suitable environment for stories and what stories can be safely told in them.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Monday and I should give you a book to read and all I can talk about is TV and my research. There are other writers who do and have done research and the novel I\u2019m going to give you to for your \u201cWhy does Gillian give me so much reading!\u201d list is by one of them. Suzette Haden Elgin was the writer who taught me (without ever knowing who I was) that it\u2019s possibly to ask the big questions and to do serious research and to translate that research into totally captivating fiction. I haven\u2019t read much of her work, because every time I read something I want to think for a while before reading more. Native Tongue<\/i> is a very fine place to start.<\/a> My warning is, however, that most languages in fiction read as half-baked once you are in the Suzette Haden Elgin rabbit hole. Most writers invent language without considering what it does in society and culture. It\u2019s very hard to unsee the gaping holes once you understand what languages are and how they can work.<\/p>\n It\u2019s that clear sunshine on the hidden\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was just explaining to a friend on Twitter that my TV watching is related to my reading. It\u2019s all part of my research. I have this driving need to understand story and to explain it. Right now, it looks (on the outside) as if I\u2019m doing a complete rewatch of Doctor Who. There is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,56,20,18],"tags":[534,171,533,70,532,86,531,535],"class_list":["post-2123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-life-experiences","category-process","category-writing","tag-bias","tag-books","tag-cutlure","tag-history","tag-lagnuage","tag-research","tag-suzette-haden-elgin","tag-world-building"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2123"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2126,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions\/2126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}