Author Archives: mary

When I’m waiting at the bus stop, I see all kinds of people. People with skin colours from cocoa to olive, from toffee to porcelain. People in turbans, in hijabs, in saffron robes. People wearing crosses, pentacles, Stars of David. People of all ages, of all income levels, speaking a variety of languages.

When I’m writing, I want to reflect that kind of diversity in my stories. Unless there’s a specific story-based reason for everyone to look the same, believe the same, and exhibit the same behaviours, I like my fiction to encompass the wide variety of human experience.

Growing up, I read a lot of stories based on Greek and Roman myth, Biblical personages, fairy tales, Norse legends, King Arthur. The prevalence of these tales made sense in a historical context; these mythologies form the bedrock of modern Western culture. I also found a few precious collections of different mythologies, containing very different personages: Nanebozho, the Ojibwe trickster. Rama, the hero from India. Fox spirits from China. I loved these stories. I’d memorized Cinderella and Snow White. These anthologies provided me with something new, something different. As I grew older, I found that readers, and publishers, are increasingly open to stories featuring a wider diversity of characters, based on legends and mythologies from all over the globe.

Full disclosure time. I’m white, female, of predominantly German ancestry, in a relationship with a man. But I write about all kinds of people. People whose life experiences I cannot base on my own; people whose cultures I was not raised in.

I have to be very careful when I write about these people.

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking something from another culture and using it to suit your needs. To an extent, all cultures in contact mix and borrow from each other. Suburban youth listen to rap songs about life in the hood; Canadian teenagers read Japanese manga; people all over the world go to movies based on American comic book characters. There is, however, a tension in these relationships, particularly when a group with power plunders groups with less power, taking their symbols and distorting them, commodifying them, stripping them of their cultural context and selling them. There is also a tension when people “try to be something they’re not,” particularly when this means they act out of fantasy and idealization rather than a true understanding, or forget their own heritage in the attempt to ape someone else’s. Appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes (think of how Vodun, aka “voodoo,” struggles to be recognized as a religion), water down symbols (it’s hard to take a powerful symbol seriously when you can buy it as a T-shirt or fridge magnet), and confuse with partial understandings and half-truths. Borrowing mythology from cultures not my own is tricky.

And yet, to write only about white, heterosexual people of European ancestry is both dishonest (in that it doesn’t reflect the totality of human experience) and dangerous (in that it insinuates these are the only people worth writing about).

The beauty of fiction is that it demands that I, as a writer, develop the ability to see through my characters’ eyes. I need to know what motivates them, what their dreams are, what their fears are, what their goals are. Their point of view makes sense to them and I need to understand it in order to figure out what they will do next. I need to see them both in the context of their cultures, and as individuals, whose behaviours and beliefs may vary a little-or a lot-from their cultures’ norms.

And so I imagine what it would be like to be a man. Or a lesbian. Or a Hindu. Or an Asian woman. Or someone who lives in the 18th century. I learn about issues these groups face that I do not, in the hopes that my portrayals are based on reality and not on stereotypes. I do my best to portray the myths of other cultures with respect for the context in which those myths were created, and with the reverence I would give to the figures of my own childhood. And I aim to honour, rather than use; to share in, rather than take.

It’s a balancing act, and I can’t please everyone, but when the alternative is to write about a world where everyone is White and European and middle-class and straight, I’ll take some risks, and do some research, to build a world that’s an honest portrayal of the human experience.

More Than Meets the Eye: Roleplaying, Fanfiction, and Giant Robots

May 28, 2013

mary

Mary Pletsch The Writing Life 1 Comment

I’ve always loved the name White Wolf gave to their role-playing system: the Storytelling System. The manuals remind both game-masters and players that the goal of the game is not to defeat a monster or accumulate treasure, but rather, to tell a great story.

I began roleplaying when I was in university. One of my biggest frustrations in growing up was the increasing difficulty in finding someone to play with. As I got older, the games I played with my toys became increasingly more complex. Unfortunately, my playmates kept getting younger, as kids my age gave up play entirely and I had to turn to my younger neighbours, who complained when the stories I came up with were too complicated for them to understand.

Then I went away to university, in the dawning age of the internet.

I wasn’t fortunate enough to find a role-playing group at my university, but I did find a number of online, text-based roleplaying games. These are not the “RPGs” of Nintendo or Playstation fame; these are groups of fans who used words alone to describe environments, objects, and characters. Fans from all over the world met up online, took on personas, and acted out events. Simple code introduced elements of random chance into the game, and described the level of damage if two characters got into a fight.

Some players occasionally acted as game masters to lead characters through organized events: an alien visitor, the investigation of a mysterious disappearance, a quest for a treasure, a battle between two factions. Other times, players just got together on their own and explored the relationships between their characters, talking about the characters’ histories or dreams.

I didn’t find a My Little Pony roleplaying game, but I did find a few based on everyone’s favourite Robots in Disguise: the Transformers.

Excited by the logs I read-the interesting, well-developed characters and complex plots-I created a character and signed up. Finally, at long last, I was able to play Transformers with people who could keep up with me, who could challenge me and surprise me, and together, we acted out our own epics. I had daily practice writing my character’s dialogue, describing her surroundings and tools, and scripting action in a manner that was clear, detailed, and fast-moving. Soon, I began writing some fan fiction stories about my character, providing glimpses into her past and possible future.

I’d written stories before, mostly for school projects, a few simply to entertain myself. These stories, though, were intended to be shared. I posted them on the internet and published a few in a paper fan-zine.

Looking back, I’m surprised how long it took for me to realize that this was something I wanted to do: not only create worlds, but share those worlds with others. I did undergo a learning period, a time when my writing was focused on fandom (roleplaying, fan fiction, etc.) and I also underwent a growth period when I struggled to balance the time I spent on fan activities with the time I needed to create my own original, marketable fiction. I eventually left my Transformers role-plays, though I do still role-play occasionally.

Roleplaying gave me a chance to share my stories with others, to use words alone to describe settings and action, to refine my skills at dialogue with the help of my fellow players, and most of all, to keep me inspired and writing during the long years of learning my craft.

Toy Story: Little Ponies and the Birth of a Writer

May 3, 2013

mary

Mary Pletsch The Writing Life No Comments

In the early eighties when I was six, I was obsessed with My Little Pony. The colourful plastic horses had just appeared on toy store shelves and I had made it my life’s mission to collect them all.

One day I found a big cardboard box and incorporated it into my pony games. Sunbeam, the unicorn, thought that as the only unicorn in Ponyland (translation: the only unicorn I owned so far), she should be the queen of the ponies. When the other ponies disagreed, Sunbeam hatched a plot. She asked Snuzzle if she would like to be a rock star, and set up a concert (with the cardboard box as the stage). All the ponies came out to see the show.

Surprise! The show was a trap. The cardboard box flipped ninety degrees and trapped the other ponies inside. Sunbeam proclaimed herself queen, with Snuzzle as her assistant.

Snuzzle was sad. She had wanted to be famous, not to hurt anyone. Sunbeam got angry and threw her into the pit (box) as well.

So Sunbeam was queen. But she was queen all alone, with no friends. Worse, with all the other ponies in captivity, their special powers (indicated by their symbols) stopped working. Soon, Sunbeam’s sun power had turned Ponyland into a desert.

Desperate, Sunbeam freed the other ponies, and stepped down from her position as queen. The other ponies’ powers caused the flowers and clover to grow again, the stars to shine again, the rain to fall again. And, in time, the ponies would learn to forgive Sunbeam for her mistake.

(Not bad for a six year old, hm?)

The next day in school, my class was given an assignment to write and illustrate our own books for a project called Young Authors. I knew right away what I wanted to do. I was so happy with the plot I had made up for my pony game that I decided to write down the story. Entitled “Sunbeam’s Sad Show,” it was chosen as one of the best three in the class, and I was able to attend a special writing conference with children from other schools.

It took me ten years to discover that what I had created was something called “fan fiction” and that I was far from the only one using characters from toys, cartoons and books to make my own stories. It took me another ten years to learn that those people who were lucky enough to be paid to create the official tales of licensed characters were called “tie in authors.” But it took very little time at all for me to recognize that telling stories in writing was not that different from acting out stories with my plastic figures.

Writing, at its best, is still play to me. I create a world and populate it with characters. I set up scenarios and let them play out, watching to see what my characters will do, how they will interact with one another, how they will face the challenges ahead of them, whether or not they will succeed, and what will happen to them then. My goal is to create a tale as compelling to my readers as the world of the little ponies was to me, long ago.*

(*Full disclosure time: Anyone with a collection of 300+ little ponies is still pretty darn compelled by that world.)

Feeling Tense: 2 of a 2-part series

April 8, 2013

mary

Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch Writing Tools 3 Comments

Feeling Tense: 2 of a 2-part series

Part 2: Third person

Third person omniscient

“Cora felt uneasy as she stepped into the cave’s gaping maw. Tina, on the other hand, was thrilled at the opportunity to explore.”

The narrator is God, looking down on Her characters. Since the narrator is omniscient, the writer has the freedom to reveal what any character is feeling, thinking, or doing, at any time. If characters are keeping secrets from one another, the omniscient narrator knows, and can share those secrets with the readers. If a storyline is complex, an omniscient narrator can make sure the readers find out what they need to know to follow the story.

This technique has its drawbacks. Third person makes it easy for the writer to preach: to tell the readers how they should feel about the characters, or whether a character’s decision was “right” or “good,” instead of letting the readers draw their own conclusions about the characters’ thoughts and actions. It is also somewhat impersonal in that the characters are held at a certain remove from the reader (we’re watching them, rather than seeing through their eyes); a novelist wants to avoid the dry tone of a history book.

One of my English professors once suggested to me that the narrator was also a “character” of sorts. The narrator affects the reader’s interpretation of the story’s events by the use of judgmental language–descriptions can include value judgments about characters or actions–and by describing certain events in detail while glossing over others. The omniscient narrator may not be a neutral one. When writing this tense, be aware that how you describe things, and what you choose to dwell on or leave out, may skew the way your readers look at your characters and plot.

Tight third person

“Cora looked around the inside of the cave, shivering in the disgusting dampness, wishing she was anywhere but here. She shot a glance at Tina, hoping to ask if they could leave, but Tina was too busy gawking at the cave’s ceiling.”

If first person is a view from behind the narrator’s eyes, and standard third person is the God’s-eye view, tight third person can be described as a view over the narrator’s shoulder. In the above example, although it is third person, since it is seen from Cora’s viewpoint, she does not know that Tina likes the cave. All she knows is that Tina seems to want to look around, while all she cares about is getting out as soon as she can. Similarly, while the omniscient point of view allows the narrator to outright tell the reader that Tina’s excited to do some exploring, the tight third person viewpoint requires the narrator to drop hints which will allow the readers to guess at Tina’s mindset, whether or not Cora ever figures it out.

From Tina’s point of view, this same scene might look like this:

“Tina looked around the inside of the cave, fascinated by the beautiful limestone stalactites tumbling from the ceiling. Unfortunately, Cora didn’t seem as entranced. Tina couldn’t imagine why not, but she wasn’t going to let her friend’s reluctance get in her way.”

Is the cave disgusting, or beautiful? In this case, it very much depends on which character is doing the looking.

In real life, different people might have different interpretations of the same event. Tight third person also allows for the narrator to get right inside the thoughts and feelings of his characters, but also provides the possibility of showing multiple points of view. This viewpoint is tricky, since the “narrator as character” is muted, and it is imperative that the writer describe events in a manner consistent with the beliefs of the character, as opposed to colouring them with her own experiences. It can be uncomfortable to see through the eyes of a villainous character-a bigot, a thug or a self-serving sleazeball-and present their point of view as rational, even natural. However, it allows for a fascinating insight into the way different characters think.