Dancing In the Dark
March 7th, 2007 by 
Maureen McHugh
I sometimes feel like I should write for the people who raised me, write to be accessible. But I went to a prestigious liberal arts college and the world opened up to me and I’m not sure I can even relate to them anymore. I want to. I sometimes wish I could be that writer who brings the thing I have seen back home and puts them on display for those who haven’t had the luck that I have. And then sometimes I want to be the person who takes that simple beauty of _their_ life and shows its value to the sophisticates. I guess ultimately, I want to be a bridge that goes both ways.
Jeremy T.
This feels like a moral obligation to some of us, I guess. I want, in some way, to bear witness. I want people to write me and say, ‘that’s my life!’ which when you get right down to it, is a pretty strange thing for an sf writer to want. But not so strange when I think that when I was growing up I would lie in bed every night and imagine myself in science fiction adventures. I found a Andre Norton book when I was in 6th grade (before that it was horse books and lives of saints, which pretty much tells you what I was like, doesn’t it.) After that my nights were filled with mutant powers and alien landscapes and strange animals only I could connect with. (Needless to say, when I found Anne McCaffrey, I was hooked. Science fiction horse books! Only they’re dragons! And they’re smart and they fly and they love you more than life itself!)
It sounds really romantic and writerly, doesn’t it, lying there in my bed thinking about other worlds. It really wasn’t. I didn’t tell myself complicated stories or anything, I just thought about the stuff waiting to go to sleep. But when I imagined myself in those landscapes, I had no gender. I think that I could imagine those landscapes because even though a lot Andre Norton’s early science fiction stories were about boys, they were boys that could have easily have been girls. (Later, they would be girls—Witchworld girls, Moon of Three Rings girls, but when I started reading her the protagonists were male—Daybreak 2020 and Star Rangers.)
I wanted to write science fiction that I could be part of. I wanted to be the bridge, I guess, to quote you again, Jeremy.
Like Rory, though, I felt like an alien growing up. I didn’t know that almost every adolescent feels like an alien, I just knew I did. Peter Gabriel’s “Salisbury Hill” could make me cry because I wanted something to come out of the night and take me home. It wasn’t until I was 29 and moved to China that I realized how American I am and how really NOT alien I am. Nothing like being surrounded by people who can’t understand you and who you can’t understand to make you reexamine your prejudices. And I’m not talking just about language. We couldn’t get each others jokes, we couldn’t get each others food. It was pretty basic.
In the end, I guess I think writing is hard enough that the only way to write well is to be selfishly personal. I write like an oyster makes pearls. Some piece of grit bothers me and I keep coating it in nacre and coating it in nacre until it’s smooth and it doesn’t anymore.
That’s the other half of how accessible should I make my writing. How accessible can I make it and how much is just dancing in the dark? I think I have to keep worrying a a little about what the dancing looks like to other people, but I also have to worry about whether or not I simply keep from falling down.
Posted in Fantasy, Fiction, Maureen, Science Fiction, Writing | 
March 7th, 2007 at 10:34 am
It’s surprising how many of our experiences are similar. The first science fiction I read was also Anne McCaffrey, and what I particularly remember is wanting a fire lizard more than I’ve ever wanted any pet. The Dragonsinger books were absolutely formative in my life and are some of the only books I have ever read multiple times.
And feeling like an alien–I don’t think I would have felt like one if people hadn’t spent so much time telling me I was one. My mother still jokes that she was abducted while pregnant with me. Even my own parents found me strange and alien. And for me, the experience that made me realize how Kansan (and American) I am was when I studied for a semester in Africa. But for me, it wasn’t the Africans that were alien. It was my fellow students, almost all from the east coast. I had more in common with people who lived half a world away than those that lived a few states away. I guess they were glass differences, but the experience combined in a way that made me discover how much of who I am is a product of where I come from.
I just love those analogies, of pearl-making and dancing in the dark. It makes me picture writers as some kind of deep sea life, an oyster with fronds that wave gently in the current, thousands of meters below the surface. Waiting for sustenance to drift down from above, I guess. Science fiction writers in particular are aware and rely on the heavens above them.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:02 am
The words are the lens, and the story is the object. I think we usually see each other through hasty and flawed lenses - conversation. We see forms and not detail, though we even get some of the detail as we talk for a long time.
Some have (and some develop) the gift of being able to grind great lenses - clear and perfect, giving us just that living glimpse of the truth they want to get across lightning bug vs. lightning. At that point, if they have nothing useful to show with the lens, it’s a waste.
Some have powerful things to say, and struggle mightily to do so - but it’s hard to see through their blurred lens.
Some less common writers grind a clear lens and with it show truth in its starkness, and it is overwhelming and sweet.
Some grind lenses that correct our astigmatisms, allowing us to transfor our understanding in foreign and unfamiliar places and cultures (including, sometimes, our families) - what a blessing.
I think the nacre is this gift of expression, and the dancing is the truth revealed. Part of the reason I can never end my posts is that the grit really does bother me until I think I’ve made things clear.
It reminds me of a poignant passage in Cryptonomicon (Stephenson) - it may be less poignant if you haven’t read the book, but I still love it:
“Doug Shaftoe is the last guy to take the floor. He removes his mesh-back cap, puts it over his heart, and with tears streaming down his face says something about his father, whom he just barely remembers. He speaks of the Battle of Manila and of how he saw his father for the first time in the wreckage of the Church of San Agustin, and how his father carried him up and down the stairway there before going off to bring hellfire down upon the Nipponese. He speaks about forgiveness and certain other abstractions, and the words are all chopped up and blurred by the helicopters overhead, which only makes it more powerful as far as Randy’s concerned, since it’s basically all about a bunch of memories that are all chopped up and blurred in Doug’s memory to begin with. Finally Doug works his way around to some kind of resolution that is very clear in his heart and mind but poorly articulated, and hits the switch.”
Accessibility is really nice, and the kind of access you provide determines who gets to look in, but the dancing is the point.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:31 am
I was from Mars as a kid. Repeatedly. I went to the same school from Nursery School through eighth grade, and had no clue how to get along with my peers there; that’s ten years as an alien. When I discovered reading (an event that followed actual functional ability to read by about three years) I read everything I could, especially science fiction. Then, when we moved to Massachusetts when I was 13, I was the weird hippie chick from Greenwich Village (in truth I was weird by local standards, but hippie is stretching it). I was from Mars. Years later I wrote The Stone War in part because I had tried for years to be the bridge, to make people who didn’t know or love the city of my birth understand my passion for New York. If I’d written a harangue, or a heartfelt essay, or even used the city as a backdrop as Woody Allen and Nora Ephron do, it might have worked as well, but I doubt it. Fiction lets you issue a backstage pass, not only into any venue imaginable, but also into the emotional impact that venue has.
March 7th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
I didn’t even have to read the words. I knew that book when I saw the illustration.
Moon of Three Rings and other Norton were much more influences to me than McCaffrey, though I read a lot. I was already in college when I encountered McCaffrey but younger when I read Norton and Heinlein. My third novel (which I began first) was one of those throw the book across the room moments as I came back to Norton as an adult.
The book was one of the many Witch World novels,, and the main character had done something at the very beginning that caused his father, a baron or lord of some sort, to banish him forever.
Now, this is interesting stuff. You’ve got this big Father/Son thing to deal with, right? It’s got to effect his subsequent actions and motives and emotional landscape, right?
Wrong. It was simply an excuse to get the protagonist off into the dark, green forest where the story takes place.
Better, to my mind, to have skipped the entire first chapter.
Now, to be fair, when I read this I was certainly dealing (and more specifically suppressing some father/son issues) so it probably hit me a lot harder than others, but it sure annoyed me. And it got me to sit down and write my own treatment of a father punishing a son for a transgression.
Norton did several things that both annoyed me and, now that I looked back on it, made her work more accessible.
She had a definite tendency to use what I think of as “stock” settings. She liked wilderness, she liked underground passages, she liked ancient ruins. Her characters were always outsiders.
They were either outsiders because they’d left their own culture behind or because they were alienated from their own culture for some reason or another, most often having to do with gifts–abilities that were either magical or paranormal.
And this is what being an adolescent is all about. (”He picked me up and shook me with his MIND powers!) Okay, I mean, feeling alienated in your own culture.
I really liked what Maureen said about coming to terms with how much she really did belong to this culture, by stepping outside it. Laura had a similar experience because of her two years teaching in Kenya in the peace corp, though it was alienating, too.
On her way back, she had a hotel room (Chicago, I believe) for about six hours between flights and she was going to take a bath.
But she couldn’t figure out the bath tub controls. She’d been outside of modern America for two years and a simple tap was the most she’d had to deal with, as far as fancy plumbing controls went.
It was like technological aphasia.
She’ll have to say whether she came back feeling more or less a part of mainstream American culture.
Me, my childhood was uprooted constantly and a lot of it was foreign–Taiwan, Thailand, Germany, Hawaii. You may not think of Hawaii as foreign, but its almost more Asian than not.
I’ve always felt like an outsider to mainstream culture, but I’ve come to be very comfortable here.
When I write, I write for me. I write to see what will happen next. I write at a level that is comfortable. I don’t mind obscuring something that will become important later, but obscuring the point?
I don’t want to work that hard as a reader or a writer.
March 7th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I can’t read Andre Norton now. Her first move in her novels always seemed to be to separate her gifted young characters from a family and society that didn’t understand them, so she could place them where they really belonged. Which feeds into that adolescent sense of being completely alien.
It’s funny, when I teach I discover that all but, say, four or five people in any class secretly think they are passing as normal but they’re really not. And the people who think they are normal are working really hard at it. I’m afraid I think most of us are aliens. The people who we perceive as ‘not alien’ seem to us to loom large in the population. But that’s like when my son was in high school and I told him that his high school was one-fifth black. The black kids mostly all hung together and as a block they dominated the halls. Adam thought that they were the majority of students. But that’s because in his perception they loomed so much larger than the white jocks, the poetry girls, the emo guys, the nerds, the Jesus Freaks and all the other subdivisions he saw in the white kids. (He asked me one time why the black kids weren’t divided into different groups but were all ghetto. Part of that, I think, is the tendancy of a numerical minority to band together, and part, I think, was because it was hard for him to discern the subdivisions in the black kid’s hierarchy, even though right up through sixth grade, his friendships had been pretty much integrated. Seventh grade seemed to be the big separation by race and class. But I digress.)
For me, accentuating my difference was a kind of strategy, forced, in no small part, by being a reader. (Reading is a pretty isolating activity. You do it pretty much by yourself.) I’m grateful for that strategy because it has sent me all around the world and let me see and experience lots of different things. But it seems very self-serving to me when I say, ‘but I was different. I wasn’t like everyone else.’ The unspoken part of that is, ‘I was special.’ When I grew older, I think that struck me as a slightly perfidious quality in Andre Norton. ‘The one who doesn’t fit in is special. It doesn’t mean that the rest of my family doesn’t comment on my love of sushi, my weird writing, my annoying political beliefs, my entertaining but incomprehensible friends, my pretentiousness, even on the way I talk. But I notice that they, too, often have annoying political beliefs, somewhat odd hobbies (which they are often at pains to explain to me are NOT odd–hunters in particular feel that other people think they’re weird) and their entertaining but incomprehensible friends. Likewise, Christians are the majority in this country, but particularly evangelical Christians have a vested interest in seeing themselves as a persecuted minority, and the ones in my family do. They don’t perceive themselves as normal, but as the embattled truth.
When I write, I write for me. I write to see what will happen next. I write at a level that is comfortable. I don’t mind obscuring something that will become important later, but obscuring the point?
I don’t want to work that hard as a reader or a writer.
I think almost every writer writes at a level that is comfortable. And although I have been accused of being obscure, I thought it was perfectly clear. I suspect you also don’t want to flog the obvious. Part of it, I think, is where we enter into the text. I didn’t watch television for five years, and one of the effects of that was that when i did start watching again, it seemed artificial and predictable. I didn’t buy into the conventions, for one thing. So while I hear and agree with your feelings, I think what you’re saying, Steve, is kind of a way to avoid an issue. you don’t spell out the way David’s decision to convince his father to go to rehab is as much about David coming to some terms with his own feelings as it is about trying to help his dad. (If my real world experience is any indication, the rehab will probably not work anyway. At least not the first time, and certainly not until David’s father is ready to deal with himself.) Are you obscuring that point? Why not explain it?
Long winded comment, but interesting issues, I think.
March 7th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Jesus Christ almighty you people sure can gas on.
If you are revealing the truth, you are doing it right.
March 7th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Part of what complicates and skews the comments of this particular group on this particular subject (and makes it a central theme in many of our lives) is that we are indeed a special minority. We’re heavy, addicted readers, constant consumers of all sorts of information, and have been since childhood. This opened up worlds to us that many others never visit.
This does make us aliens in a different way than the typical teen alienation and angst that happens while adolescents are trying to figure out the transitions from childhood to adultness.
We probably don’t feel more alienated than they do, but I suspect that we feel alienated in different ways for different reasons. PLUS the normal reasons, too, of course.
Additionally, most of us here will score in the top 5% of the population on IQ tests. I’d like to avoid the discussion about the reification of intelligence, though it’s a perfectly legitimate counter to my statement, but it’s kinda a I-know-it-when-I-see-it issue here. I think.
There’s a fair amount of evidence that gifted people solve problems not just faster and with more info than non-gifted ones, but by using different thinking mechanisms. I’ll dig that research up later, if need be.
And this topping out means that the people in the middle of the IQ bell curve are likely to make a society that’s optimized for them, but not for us. Thus, we stay out of the mainstream, because it wasn’t built for us. We end up in our little deviant sub-cultures and enclaves.
The big insight for me, and a gradual one, beginning with late adolescence, is that I always felt superior to people who weren’t as smart as me, but — though I’m still happy that I’m damn smart, I know that it hasn’t made my life easier, nor my relationships. I perceive that being ’special’ and extremely bright is not necessarily a benefit in many ways. And often has made everything a lot harder.
Still — I’d just as soon keep the IQ points and deal with the consequences. I used to joke with a former g/f that, if I was ever in an accident that caused enough brain damage that my IQ dropped below 130, I wanted her to slip me the dose that would put me out of my misery.
Only half kidding about that.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
I went through my whole adolescence telling myself that not fitting into society was the price I paid for having a high IQ. It was bullshit. Heartfelt and consolatory bullshit, but still bullshit. And I should have known it was bullshit, because I had plenty of friends who were just as smart as I was and fit in a hell of a lot better.
Of course, as Maureen points out, they probably didn’t feel like they fit in either. And neither did the people a standard deviation closer to the median, or the people at the median.
The older I get, the more I think the whole idea of the mainstream is a myth. Everyone lives in an enclave. Everyone has a subculture. Everyone is deviant.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Yeah, I’m willing to buy your viewpoint, too, David.
We’re such diverse creatures that it’s sometimes amazing that we can sometimes come together as well as we do.
I’m also willing to believe that there’s no mainstream, either, because so often, the more I find out about people, the weirder I realize they are.
On the other hand, I do remember the Eisenhower Fifties, which was pretty monocultural, at least if you were white and anywhere near middle-class. Seems that things started flying apart in the Big Bang of the Sixties. Not an original observation, of course.
But I do live in a local culture where I feel deeply alienated, and most of the people around me either don’t, or are hiding it better than ever.
I don’t know how telling it is, but, it seems that on almost every issue around me, where there’s some sort of perceived majority opinion, I find my self almost always part of some cranky fringe.
The trick word in the sentence above is ‘perceived’, of course.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Hell, yes.
Couldn’t agree more. I think there are things to be learned about writing but I don’t find myself going, “Hmmm. Not sufficiently covering his motivation here.” It’s more like, “Hmmm. Some thing is wrong there.” Typety, type. “That’s better.”
I want to write in a way that feels like reading. Very little conscious analysis.
I was fascinated when you explained what you got out of workshopping and it’s changed the way I’ll probably interact at Viable Paradise. It was something to the effect of, “I don’t learn anything about my own writing from other’s critiques. The place I learn stuff is when I compare my impressions of someone else’s story with other’s impressions of that same story.”
That’s really interesting.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
I think that a rather sizable portion of my psyche is still an adolescent. Thank God that portion is not getting nearly the burst of hormones it needs to really thrive.
Steve, it’s true. I think the biggest thing I get out of workshopping is the hard work I do trying to explain someone else’s piece to them. And then I go home and find myself right in the middle of what I noticed in their work and felt they needed to change.
Hey David! Nice to see you here. I really realized that the ‘I’m only unhappy because I’m brilliant’ defense had some serious holes in it when I got to grad school and everybody was brilliant. And some of them were really unhappy, but some of them were really not. Some of them were also good looking and didn’t wear glasses and dressed a lot better than I did, too.
March 8th, 2007 at 1:44 am
Some of them were also good looking and didn’t wear glasses and dressed a lot better than I did, too.
Don’t you hate that?
March 8th, 2007 at 11:23 am
I’m was going to try the “I’m unhappy because I’m unhappy” defense, but I’m pretty happy, darn it!
March 8th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Stories are soul food. Don’t give up! Without stories, we are without will.
March 25th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
[…] had a discussion here at EOB, following Maureen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark‘, which I took off into the ditch, about what alienated little monsters some of us were (and […]