Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Revolution

Like many stories, my current WIP involves a revolution (two, actually). While I love many fictional stories that include revolutions, most of the time they fall flat for me for a variety of reasons. In most of the stories I can think of off the top of my head (Hunger Games, the Madd Addam trilogy) the thing that bugs me is the attitude people have toward human life. There never seems to be enough 'othering' of the subjugated or lower classes to justify the abuse that's allowed.

By othering I mean ascribing negative qualities to a group in order to differentiate the ruling or upper class and justify why the lower class deserves its lower status. You know, like poor people deserving to be poor because they're lazy.

In our society, where we don't literally cart off poor black or Hispanic kids into fights to the death, we still have so much more othering than exists in most of those worlds. I understand possessing negative attitudes toward others isn't socially acceptable, but I think it speaks to the privilege most white writers have that we don't recognize its absence. Recognizing, of course, that as a white woman I don't actually include such othering in my WIP at the moment (though in large part I'm going to claim that's a failure of world building and will fix it in revision. Yeah, revision...)

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to write this post about. This is more of an, I want to keep this link handy 'cause someday I'm going to want to think about these issues more. iO9 posted a fun article on what fictional dystopias ignore about revolution that I found just a teensy bit interesting. My favorite: the head honcho isn't always the problem. It's a lot harder to have a neat plot when you're fighting against an entire class rather than a single bad guy, but let's be honest, how often is the ruler the only source of the problem? Right, never.


Tuesday, September 9, 2014

I don't want to go to bed

I've done my writing (300 words! Wahoo!) and I'm so tired my eyes are sagging, but I don't want to go to bed yet. I don't want the evening to end and the morning to be that much closer. I've read everything on facebook, I've responded to important and not so important emails, I've read responses on my writing group's website. I can no longer write a useful response. Honestly, I haven't been able to write a useful response for the last hour or so. I should go to bed now, but I just want to read one more thing...