[SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen the movie Avatar, you may want to skip this post.]

I went into Avatar knowing little about it, beyond a few accusations that it was “a ripoff of FernGully: The Last Rainforest” or “a ripoff of Dances With Wolves” or “a ripoff of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The World for World Is Forest,” and a lot of descriptions of Avatar as “so awesome, you should see it in 3D.”

Having seen Avatar, I would agree with Nisi Shawl’s take that Avatar is beautifully immersive. I haven’t been that stoned on a movie since 1982’s Blade Runner (although, when I was leaving the theatre in ’82, I didn’t trip over the stairs and reel into the walls. If someone re-releases Blade Runner in modern 3D, I suspect my head will literally burst).

I haven’t seen FernGully nor, unfortunately, have I read The World for World Is Forest, but I did see Dances with Wolves. And, yes, Avatar is an uncredited, SFX-drenched reissue of that old story (which we’ll get back to in a moment).

I also thought that writer/director James Cameron was borrowing heavily from other sources—palpably obvious inspirations I’ve rarely (if ever) heard others mention: the Dragonriders of Pern (clearly, Hollywood has finally developed the technology to bring Anne McCaffrey’s intelligent, human-bonding dragons convincingly to ‘life’) and the three major series created by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Carson of Venus, John Carter of Mars, and Tarzan of the Apes.

Burroughs’s Barsoom (Mars) series came to my mind initially because of all those multi-legged alien animals. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia description of Amtor (Burroughs’s imaginary version of Venus) might as well be a description of Cameron’s fictional planet, Pandora: “Amtorian vegetation, particularly on Vepaja, tends to be gigantic. Vepaja is notable for the enormous forests…with trees reaching into the inner cloud envelope.” If I recall correctly from my childhood reading, Amtorian forests are even the same color as Avatar’s.

However, the main reason Avatar reminded me of Burroughs’ most popular series, and the movie Dances with Wolves, was because of the way they made me feel.

Avatar, Dances with Wolves, and Burroughs’s series tap a very old human desire: the yearning for a better world. It’s a desire expressed in the myths of Eden, the Golden Age, and the Satya Yuga. It’s a desire that speaks to you whether you’re religious or agnostic or atheist; whether you’re black or white or brown; and whether you believe that the world was once a better place, or believe it never was. Who doesn’t at least occasionally want to live in a world where war is rare or nonexistent, and life is simple, and one is in complete harmony with the earth—a world where human nature hasn’t fucked everything up yet?

Avatar, Dances with Wolves, and Burroughs’s Mars and Tarzan series evoke and fulfill (or, at least, attempt to fulfill) that desire for a return to prelapsarian purity—in short, a desire for redemption. And, in itself, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to escape the bad things in life. Where these books and movies get into trouble is where they put an unfortunate racial spin on the universal desire for redemption.

In the worlds of Pandora and the imaginary Dances “Wild West” and Burroughs’ Mars and Tarzan, a white man doesn’t just find himself redeemed from his impure, inharmonious, and sinful state. He finds himself redeemed specifically from the evils of colonialism, slavery, and the other forms of oppression that whites have imposed upon people of color for centuries.

Even more unfortunately, the people of color don’t just redeem the white man from the sins of his race—they deem him their superior. John Carter is not only loved by slaves in the Old American South, he’s appointed the Warlord of the whole planet of Mars, which is inhabited largely by human analogs with red or green skin. Tarzan of the Apes is so much better than even the indigenous peoples at living in equatorial Africa, he gets to be chief of one tribe and viewed as a god or devil by others. Hell, he’s so much better than anyone else, he can single-handedly kill animals that would normally tear a lone, knife-armed human to pieces in moments. The white cavalryman of Dances with Wolves is not only fully accepted into the Lakota tribe, he gets to bugger off (with the girl, no less) before the U.S government overcomes the remaining free Sioux. On the planet Pandora, Avatar’s white male protagonist isn’t just accepted as one of their own by the non-white indigenous population. He isn’t just the unifier of their tribes. He is their savior/messiah, chosen by the goddess-consciousness of Pandora herself!

As a white person, I feel the appeal of that. I don’t like that this feeling is stirred in me, but I still feel it. I feel the desire to be forgiven for the sins of both my genetic and cultural ancestors and myself. I want to be forgiven for the evils of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. I’d love to escape responsibility for the bad things that have formed and benefited me.

Now, I doubt every other white viewer/reader of these works feels this particular desire. But, given both the perennial popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the boffo box office for Avatar and Dances with Wolves, I know at least some other whites do, even if not many of us are likely to say so in a public forum.

My point is not that white people shouldn’t have these desires. Nobody has control over the feelings that come to them, after all.

My point is that we (all of us, regardless of race, gender, etc.) can and should control what we do with our feelings and desires.

And, as writers, we can and should control what we write.

If it sounds like I’m urging self-censorship, that is not what I intend.

The point I want to make is that writing is considered speech. We should consider the effect our words will have.

Does anyone really want the effect of their writing to be “patronizing unearned-redemption fantasy for whites”?

I believe this effect is not the one that James Cameron intended in Avatar. But it’s the one he did convey, to numerous viewers of every race.

I’m being naïve about Hollywood again, I suppose. But, when I was watching Avatar, I wondered what the effect would have been if the human occupying force had been more ethnically diverse, instead of mostly white. I wondered what the effect would have been if the protagonist had been a person of color. And I wondered what the movie would have been like if the whiteguy protagonist had turned out to be not very important at all to Pandora or its people, who organize a successful overthrow of the invaders on their own.

I know that, as a writer, I don’t want my readers thinking “shouldn’t she have written this differently?” I want them thinking that what I wrote is perfect and wonderful and inevitable—“it couldn’t have been done better any other way, it couldn’t have been done any other way at all!”

I know, of course, that I’m not going to achieve this goal.

But when I consider what I write, when I rewrite to eliminate the messages I don’t intend to convey, I get a lot closer to my goal.

This is writer Nisi Shawl’s last post for Booklifenow, and I hope you’ll join me in thanking her for her great posts, this one included. Nisi is the co-author of Writing the Other, with Cynthia Ward, who will be contributing a last post later this week. I’m very grateful to both of them for such thoughtful and useful words. – Jeff

A subscriber to the Carl Brandon Society list serve asked for specific criticisms of the Spinrave recently published in Asimov’s SF Magazine. That is work. Just reading it is an effort, let alone trying to translate into something resembling sense. Hence my response below to the request for “specific criticism”:

“Okay, I would take the time to analyze the article if someone paid me for it. My rate is $50/hour.

“As a sort of free sample, I’ll say I agree essentially with (another poster to the list serve): consider the source. The source being Norman Spinrad, who not only doesn’t know anything about the subject upon which he bloviates for page upon page, but who seems to be inordinately proud of his ignorance. Norman is like this. My short response: tldr.

“I will also add that his positioning of Mike Resnick, a very good writer, as an African writer, is so insanely disorienting as to induce vomiting. And comparing him to Octavia E. Butler, who never, as far as I am aware, ever claimed to be an African writer, is an action on a par with opening a chest full of tokens and rummaging around blindfolded in it, and pulling one out at random to toss onto the hearth of rhetoric.”

The subscriber requesting explication declined my help. He thought my fee was too high—though another poster advised me to double it—and made do with the numerous other posts available on the subject.

Among them we find N.K. Jemisin, who deals with one specific point. It takes her 500 words, not counting her contributions to the post’s comment threads. Imagine if she had attempted to render the entire Spinrave comprehensible. How many short stories and/or novels of hers would we be doing without while she whacked her way through his thorny densenesses?

My offer stands.

Ante Spinrave, I expected to devote the whole of this final guest post for Booklife to analyzing a panel I recently pulled off at Radcon, an SF convention held in Eastern Washington. The panel was titled “Writing and Racial Identity.” Besides myself the participants were Eileen Gunn, Alma Alexander, and Bobbie Benton-Hull. Here’s the description I gave programming:

“What does your race have to do with what you write? Depending on your race, are certain topics forbidden to you? Obligatory? None of the above? If your race matters, how do you know what it is? By what people see when they look at you, or by what you know of your genetic background? By your cultural upbringing? By what you write?”

We had a grandly civil hour-long discussion about how our racial identities did and did not contribute to what we wrote, did and did not determine what we wrote, about how we dealt with others’ expectations of us as writers based on what they knew and/or assumed about our racial identities, how we constructed those identities for ourselves with our writing and in other ways. I loved that we spoke as equals, according each other and the subject all due and appropriate respect.

Because it is a complex subject, one that deserves careful thought.

One white panelist related a classroom encounter with Faulkner in which her instructor held up this famous white male’s avoidance of a black female character’s interior life as an ideal to emulate; to write some things she has written, the panelist has had to unlearn what she’d been taught. Another spoke movingly of the ethnic and religious distinctions that formed the core of her upbringing in Central Europe. I wondered aloud if my difficulty placing stories with white protagonists was due to editors wanting “more black for their buck;” that felt risky to me, since one of the field’s top editors sat in the audience’s front row, not five feet from my face.

Our fourth panelist had been raised as an American Indian and spent her life knowing absolutely that this was who and what she was. Then she discovered through genetic testing that her biological heritage is a mix European and Sub-Saharan African. No American Indian. She still struggled with integrating this knowledge at the time of the panel, framing her thoughts on her identity as a question, referencing a female character in the movie “Dances with Wolves.”

It was all most interesting to me. Way more interesting than the Spinrave. In my description and in my moderation I had aimed to show that race is an issue that affects writers of all backgrounds, all races, that racial identity is labile, is inflected by more than one sort of information, and in turn has complex and complicating effects on what we say, how we say it, who we say it to….We touched on each of these subjects with a sure touch, though in some instances only a brief one. There’s so much to talk about.

There are so many smart people to include in the discussion. I want to hold this panel again someday soon. Maybe at WisCon? The panel will give its participants and our audience much to think about. And they will think, and do research, and speak carefully. And it will make sense.

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward are guestblogging here on Booklifenow all this week. Their book Writing the Other is a remarkable exploration of character, situation, and perception. It’s a recommended text in Booklife – JeffV

Cynthia and I want to begin our joint stint as guest bloggers here by sharing an excerpt from Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, the book we wrote together based on the workshop we co-teach. The excerpt will help you get into the spirit of our upcoming posts, which are going to riff on related topics

First, we’ll define a couple of the terms we use:

The unmarked state—Possessing demographic characteristics considered “unremarkable” by the dominant culture.

ROAARS—This is an acronym we created to talk about a group of differences from the unmarked state that are, in this culture, considered to be deeply significant differences. These differences are: Race, (sexual) Orientation, Age, Ability, Religion, Sex.

Keep those concepts in mind as you read the book excerpt below. – Nisi Shawl

Parallax: Who is Looking at Whom?

Parallax is an astronomical concept that we’ve adapted to literary usage. The original idea can best be illustrated by performing a short, easy experiment.

Gaze at an object some distance away. If you’re indoors, look for something across the room from where you sit or stand: a picture on a wall, or a book on a shelf, perhaps. If you’re outside, choose an object in the middle distance: a tree, or a building not too far off, rather than a mountain, for instance. Hold one finger up so that it covers whatever it is you’re looking at. Now close your left eye. Open it again and close your right. Does your finger seem to shift in relation to the object you picked? That’s because of a shift in parallax. The slight change in the perspective from your left to your right eye results in an apparent change in the position of what you’re looking at. And the perceptual change is larger when you’re looking at something closer to your eyes—your finger—than something more distant—the picture or book in the background.

In terms of “Writing the Other,” slight shifts in your viewpoint characters’ positions vis-à-vis the unmarked state will change how they look at the world, at themselves, and at the concept of the unmarked state.

In fact, in addition to the dominant culture’s version of the unmarked state, each of us carries around our private take on what is “normal.” This definition adheres much more closely to our own specific characteristics.

Sometimes people apply this definition so inappropriately it’s almost funny. When Nisi first came to Seattle, she hired a cab driver to take her around to all the places she was considering renting. The driver was a white male with long, slicked back hair. He looked like he weighed 80 to 100 pounds more than she did. A crucifix dangled from his rearview mirror. Over the course of the afternoon they spent together, he advised Nisi as to what parts of town she should avoid: the Central District, for instance, an historically black neighborhood. As for Capitol Hill, known for its unconventionally clothed and behaved inhabitants—“You don’t even want to know what they get up to around there,” the driver claimed, referring, probably, to the prevalence of same-sex couples.

Remember, Nisi is black, and has slept with other women. So why would this man expect her to be uncomfortable in these neighborhoods? Well, because he was uncomfortable there. Obviously Nisi was just like him, because she was a good person: she’d been polite to him, laughed at his jokes, and conformed in plenty of other ways to his expectations of how a good person acts. He had, in the words of linguist MJ Hardman, conferred “honorary whiteness” on Nisi (personal communication).

Depending on their immediate context, your characters may perform similar mental acrobatics when thinking of those they come in contact with—or when thinking of themselves. They may identify with the dominant unmarked state though lacking its characteristics, or they may reject it—conditionally and partially, or without reserve. They may be conscious of privileges they lack or possess due to their ROAARS traits.

In the 1980s, Cynthia read a story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The title of it escapes her, but she will never forget the actual story. It may be the most astonishing work of fiction she’s ever read—although not for a good reason. The flaw she finds so memorable is a flaw that illuminates parallax.

The story was set in Maine. The protagonist was a straight Maine lobsterman. His best friend was a gay male bed-and-breakfast owner who’d moved up to Maine from New York. As she read, Cynthia spluttered with ever-increasing incredulity. Finally, she shouted aloud: “A Maine lobsterman would never be best friends with a New Yorker!”

***

That’s all for now. If you’d like to find out why Cynthia, who identifies as a Mainer, felt so affronted by the idea of a lobsterman from her home state befriending a New Yorker, you’ll want to read the rest of the book. It came out from Aqueduct Press in 2005 and is still available online from the publisher and other online booksellers.

Here’s more about both writers…

Nisi Shawl’s story collection Filter House won the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for a 2009 World Fantasy Award. She received a second 2009 World Fantasy Award nomination for her novella “Good Boy.” Shawl is the coeditor, with Dr. Rebecca Holden, of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (forthcoming). Her reviews and essays appear in the Seattle Times and Ms. Magazine, and she has contributed to Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Encyclopedia of Themes in Science Fiction. A former speaker at Duke University, Stanford University, Smith College, and the University of Washington, Shawl is a founding member of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended in 1992.

Cynthia Ward was born in Oklahoma and lived in Maine, Spain, Germany, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Tucson before moving to the Los Angeles area. She has sold stories to Asimov’s SF Magazine, Sword & Sorceress XXIV, and other anthologies and magazines. Her reviews appear regularly in Fantasy Magazine and SciFiWire.com and irregularly in other websites and publications. She is completing her first novel, a futuristic mystery tentatively titled The Stone Rain. Ward will be participating in the Tucson Festival of Books at the University of Arizona next weekend (March 13-14).

Writing the Other is based on Shawl and Ward’s critically acclaimed diversity writing workshop Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction .

In Booklife I have a section on relinquishing all fetishes, which is another way of saying don’t let having to use a fancy pen or special desk get in the way of writing. As I mention in the book I’ve learned to write anywhere at any time, and to never stifle my imagination just because I’m not in the ideal writing situation.

I give this advice in the book because we most commonly procrastinate and find reasons not to write. But the fact is some “fetishes” actually aid our creativity.

Case in point—the photograph above. On the left is a leather-bound, hand-made writing pad I bought in Victoria on Vancouver Island while on my honeymoon. I’d had it in the closet in my office ever since then, more than seven years. Every time I pulled it out, I put it back in the closet again. The thing just seemed so nice, so opulent, that I couldn’t imagine writing in it. And yet I’d bought it because it was tantalizing–it suggested adventures I’d never write about in any other journal.

Well, this past week I finally found the perfect use for it. The paper inside is perfect for writing, but also perfect for art. I’ve started a rather odd story that includes extensive illustrations, and no other writing pad I have gives me the same sensation of effortless motion while both writing and drawing. Even the odd size of it helps, because it better accommodates the art and the words. Suddenly, everything about this impulse purchase that turned me off is helping me get into the groove of writing, energizing me, and recharging my imagination.

Meanwhile, next to it in the photograph is a plain black Moleskine notebook. In it, I’ve written several book reviews and a new short story–a very conventional, Southern Gothic-style story. The utilitarian look and feel of the notebook seems to help me keep focused and on task. I could no more write the reviews and the Southern Gothic story in the opulent oversized writing journal as I could create the illustrated strange story in the Moleskine. Each is perfect for its particular purpose.

So my question to you, because I’m curious, is: Have you had similar experiences with your writing tools, your writing surfaces, your writing life?

• Curiosity
• Receptivity
• Passion
• Imagination
• Discipline
• Endurance

Try to encourage these qualities in yourself and others. Draw them out into the open if necessary, and at times allow yourself to indulge in them. In all ways be generous to yourself so that you can be generous in your work.

Although several of these qualities are useful to your Public Booklife, nowhere are they more necessary than in your Private Booklife. Let’s explore them further…

(What does this photo spark in your imagination? How does it make you curious? Image by the highly recommended Jeremy Tolbert.)

***

Curiosity. Nothing is more essential to a writer than an inquisitive nature—being curious about the world and the people in it. Curiosity reflects a willingness to be disappointed and an urge to understand the world. It sends out a series of queries that exist for their own sake, and gathers back into itself anything it finds, transforming it in the process. The truly curious reject received ideas and try to see everything as freshly as a child with an adult’s mind. This “gathering” of information and texture through your senses, through your questioning nature, should be non-judgmental, finding pleasure in seemingly disparate, often contradictory elements. From the fusion of these elements comes an essential aspect of creativity. Curiosity is in a sense allied with qualities such as cleverness, and thus can be impersonal–like a pack rat that accumulates buttons and bottle caps and scraps of paper without caring about the provenance of such items.

Receptivity. Openness and empathy spring from being receptive to the world and the people in it, not just being curious about them. Receptivity means allowing more than just information to come in over the transom. Eliminating barriers to other people’s emotions, predicaments, tragedies, and other aspects of the human condition is crucial to a writer, even when it hurts. You must allow yourself to be a raw nerve end that internalizes whatever it experiences in life. When you do this, you not only create a well-spring for stories, novels, and nonfiction, you also retain a sense of empathy for your fellow human beings. Putting up walls to avoid being hurt may temporarily solve problems in your life, but it may also shut you off from the source of your creativity. (The only caveat, in this age of acute connectivity? An excess of “open channels” can result in you becoming too wrapped up in the issues of other people, the weight of this overload damaging to your creativity and your sense of self.)

Passion. Cynics find it hard to be passionate about anything, and therefore passion is linked to retaining your idealism, which is in turn linked to retaining your receptivity. First you lose your curiosity, which turns off your receptivity, and then you lose your passion. If you are not passionate about what you write, no amount of effort can revive your work. It will remain inert, waiting for an infusion of new life. Passion is the blood that fills the veins of your creative self; it provides the circulatory system that allows your imagination to breathe.

Imagination. The imagination moves beyond passion: it is a lifelong relationship with the world that transforms both the world and the writer. All of the best fiction hums and purrs and sighs with the imagination, and in this way fiction mirrors the best of life. But no imagination can long survive without recourse to curiosity and receptivity as well. It needs all of this as fuel for both its serious and deeply unserious aspects. On the one hand, it is the most visible manifestation of a “soul” and on the other a quality that allows us to express the most absurd and silly aspects of play. During Medieval times, the imagination was often associated with the senses and thus thought to be one of the links between human beings and the animals. Only with the Renaissance was the imagination firmly linked to creativity and thus the intellect. The imagination defies easy measurement, even though we “know it when we see it.” It brings yet another level of uncertainty to an endeavor already supersaturated with the subjective–and yet that uncertainty is a kind of blessing. (Is it true that imagination cannot be taught? Yes. It is a brutal truth, too. But one with an escape clause. A latent imagination can be drawn out of its shell. A change of topic, focus, or even setting can also reveal in a writer an imagination not previously in evidence.)

Discipline. Without discipline, the imagination would float off, untethered, into the sky. While imagination is the ultimate expression of idealism—curious, receptive, and passionate—discipline grounds the imagination in pragmatism and structure. At the center of the essential tension between these two qualities exists the perfect writer.

Endurance. Endurance is toughness projected over time, and the perfect writer in motion rather than inert: the potential for work expressed through work. Imagination and discipline create endurance by continually replenishing creativity and giving it form.

Taken together, these pillars allow you to reach toward the perfect Private Booklife. Think of them often. They ghost through and infiltrate almost every part of that life.

>>Test this section of Booklife: Do you think receptivity is an important part of being creative? What elements not mentioned in this post do you feel also play a factor?