The Geek Feminist Revolution, page 11
Storytelling is how we’ve passed on social mores, history, and morality in our cultures for tens of thousands of years. Storytelling is a universal: every culture does it. There’s a reason our religious books aren’t simply a list of shall-and-shall-nots. Morals and teachings are contained in stories, which are studied, dissected and passed down; we remember stories in a way we don’t remember lists of facts.
Storytelling instead of info dumping is a fairly well-known life hack,1 but there are still very few people who tell stories instead of facts. Even in marketing circles, where this is our business and we should deploy stories ruthlessly, I still get direction from stakeholders who want facts and bullet points. I hear exclamations about how the folks we’re talking to are analytical. But an analytical person is not an emotionless robot.
In life, as in business, it’s much easier for us to fall back on the safety of “logic.” If we’re just logical enough, reasoned enough, we’ll sway people to our side. But people are not swayed by logic. People use logic to back up their emotional decisions.
I could tell you that over and over again, or I could tell you this story:
At my day job, we’d been trying to sell a software upgrade to a pool of existing users for some time without much success. Our response rates were approaching zero. One of the things the marketing manager told me was that people adored this product; they were steadfast fans, but they were so attached to the current version that no one could see any good reason to upgrade. They’d already sent piece after piece of bulleted, logical items about all the benefits of upgrading, and how much better the product was, and offered discounts. It didn’t work.
While floating ideas with my creative director I said, “What if we send a love letter from the product? Like, nothing creepy, but something like ‘We’ve had a lot of great times together in the past, and I’ve been working to improve myself so that we can work even better together’?”
We managed to get the marketing manager on board (I’m still stunned) mainly because nothing else was working. The designer and creative director designed a really nice envelope with classy heart-shaped cutouts and signed it off “XOXO.” I framed the copy as if this was coming from a beloved, trusted partner who had been improving just for the users. We included a discount offer on the upgrade as an added carrot.
The day after the mailer went out, the responses started to roll in. The first was from a customer who said to their software rep, “I want to use my love coupon!”
Yeah, they were pretty into it.
We went from barely measurable responses to industry standard responses overnight, all because we found a way to tell a story that connected with people on an emotional level instead of a logical one. The truth is we want to fall in love. We want to care. Even when we know the game.
This works broadly across a variety of audiences, and it’s something I think a lot about when crafting marketing pieces. I still bump into resistance a lot—I write more bullet-pointed emails than you can imagine—but the pieces that make people care, that make people feel, that evoke an emotional reaction are the pieces that last. That’s how you create a customer for life, instead of just grabbing a quick sale from somebody price-hunting.
It turns out that novels are much the same way. People share books that they love. We find ourselves, as writers, trying to figure out what “sells” books. And the reality is that what sells books is writing something people love so much, and are so connected to or titillated by or excited by that they want to tell their friends, so they can discuss it endlessly, write fanfic about it, draw the characters, cosplay as the characters, get tattoos of symbols or people in the book, and celebrate the next release in the series as if it were a holiday. It’s love that sells books, not bullet points.
What readers or customers love, however, is not always easy to deduce. Sometimes it’s merely a trick of luck, of happenstance, where your work taps into the current cultural zeitgeist. Right time, right place.
But at the heart of every story is our desire for an emotional connection and catharsis. I’ve sat in creative meetings about software products where we aren’t talking about product screens and buzzwords, but about customers freed from the desktop computers at their auto dealerships who can keep track of business from their smart watch at their kid’s baseball game. “Never miss another game—or another deal.” We don’t sell things. We sell the emotion, the experience, that that thing gives us.
And when I write an essay, I’m not selling you on treating people better. I’m not berating you, or giving facts and statistics. I’m telling you a story about llamas, and how we write about them, and how writing about them changes them, and us, in ways we never expected.
“I’m going to tell you a story.”
The story is who we are. The story is how we change the world.
What’s your story?
Our Dystopia: Imagining More Hopeful Futures
If you came of age in the 1950s and ’60s you were promised a future of world peace and flying cars, so I can understand being a little disappointed with what we’ve ended up with. But if I hear one more person pine after a flying car I’ll tell them they should have built it. The utopia of flying cars and space colonies isn’t the future we’ve built. I came of age reading science fiction after 1980. I was promised a cyberpunk dystopia ruled by corporations, complete with violent reality TV and authoritarian governments, and well—here we are. I was rewatching the original Total Recall movie recently—with its security body scanners and self-driving cabs and terrorist battles—and couldn’t help admiring how well this future mirrored my reality. We may not be on Mars, but the ubiquitous evil corporations and invasive technology sure are here.
We can get angry about the fact that this is the future we’ve built or acknowledge that if this was what we chose to build, we’re fully capable of creating something else. Want a Star Trek future of world peace and slinky jumpsuits? We can do that, too. If you can dream it, you can make. It goes for dystopias and utopias alike.
Science fiction writers create all sorts of futures—that comes with the job. But it’s not the type that matters—hopeful or dark—it’s the variety we see as readers. It’s nurturing the imaginations of those who will go on to create the world around us. Not just the technology but also the social policies, attitudes toward natural resources, the realities of climate change, even our ever-evolving sense of morality.
When I was in my early twenties I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie because I’d heard so much about it, and I admit that I didn’t get it. My girlfriend at the time looked up some chatter about the film and said it was supposed to be a metaphor for how life grinds you down. Bowie is a Martian come to Earth to save his family, but as the years pass and his plans to save them wither on the vine with every bureaucratic roadblock, he eventually gives up. He turns to drink and whimsy. His people are dead. Why should he care anymore?
It’s this resignation with getting a future we didn’t want that the people in charge are relying on. The systems are too old, too ingrained. Power cannot be moved. These structures have always been here. This is the only way the future can be.
They love it when we think this.
Yet, like so much of the world we’re told about, it’s all a lie. It doesn’t really exist. The future is malleable. That’s what they don’t want you to know.
When you believe people can’t change the world, they win.
Of course people can change the world. Who do you think got us here in the first place?
* * *
We did not talk much about a malleable future when I was a kid. Mostly my dad was obsessed with the idea that we would get AIDS. It was the scariest part of the future he could see for his daughters, and he gave us lectures about girls who had sex once and got AIDS and died of it. It was sex as a death sentence. The future as death. Maybe this is why I’m so hopeful about the future: the one I could see coming in the middle of the ’80s, with AIDS deaths climbing and the fear of a Cold War apocalypse and rising crime and rioting countries and the images of Somalia’s famine, all looked like dispatches from a future that would go on and on just like this: a future of death and violence and nuclear disaster.
I guess our cyberpunk, corporation-ruled future isn’t so bad when you look at what most folks at the time thought we were in for. At least a cyberpunk future is a future. Not a fiery end.
So in a sense, we really did get the most hopeful future we wrote.
* * *
People often ask me about the power and purpose of science fiction. Are we future-prophets? Should there be a religion founded on William Gibson texts? Should we make Octavia Butler our patron saint of change? Will Connie Willis found the next Scientology spin-off?
I don’t think we’re seers. Most of us can’t even predict what we’ll have for lunch tomorrow. I’m even conflicted about the idea of us on advisory committees for NASA. We don’t know the future any better than anyone else. If you’d asked me in 1988, I’d certainly have thought the world would have exploded into a fiery World War Three by now and we would all be being hunted by Terminator robots. In truth, some of the worlds I created, like the one in my God’s War trilogy, look far more like post-apocalypse novels than anything else. That’s still the future I turn my head toward when shit gets real. It’s the future I know. It’s the one I grew up with.
* * *
When I consider building more hopeful futures, I actually wonder if that’s the right idea. Maybe it’s the terrifying apocalypse books that helped us avoid nuclear meltdown. Maybe it’s fear of pandemics that ensures the CDC gets any decent funding at all. Maybe we are nurturing just the right amount of fear to keep us avoiding disaster.
I would argue that it’s a mix of fear and hope that sustains us. It’s reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, which posits a future where we all blow ourselves to hell several times, and then watching a few episodes of Star Trek to balance it out. It’s believing it’s possible to get our shit together, while admitting that it may not be anytime soon. It’s saying we’re staring into the edge of the apocalypse, but we may be able to stave it off just a little bit longer.
So when people ask me, Where are the hopeful futures? I say, I’m writing some of those too, but they have to live alongside the terrible ones, the fearful ones, the nuclear holocaust we narrowly avoided, the AIDS epidemic that went from death sentence to chronic illness. We need them to exist together because if we forget the worst case, we can’t appreciate what we have, and if we don’t have the more hopeful ending, we won’t know to strive for that. We won’t even know it’s possible.
These are the stories we must have, this balance of light and dark, hope and fear. It is the two sides of our nature given voice. It’s acknowledging a future of many possibilities and allowing them to coexist in a way that we will never experience in real life. This is the power and promise of science fiction, this magic of creating and living in every possible future. It’s a power I love to pieces. It’s a power that comes with a terrible responsibility, to ensure that we avoid the worst that we are capable of while continually striving to transform into the best that humanity is possible of becoming.
Where Have All the Women Gone? Reclaiming the Future of Fiction
“Women don’t write epic fantasy.”
If I had a dollar for every time some dude on Reddit said something that started with “Women don’t…”, I’d be so rich I wouldn’t be reading Reddit.
Erasure of the past doesn’t always follow a grand purge or sweeping gesture. There’s no great legislative movement or concerted group of arsonists torching houses to bury evidence (that’s usually done to inspire terror). No, erasure of the past happens slowly and often quietly, by degrees.
In her book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, science fiction writer Joanna Russ wrote the first internet misogyny bingo card—in 1983. She listed the most common ways that women’s writing—and, more broadly, their accomplishments and contributions to society—were dismissed and ultimately erased in conversation. They were:
1. She didn’t write it.
The easiest, and oftentimes the first appearing in conversation, is the simple “women don’t” or “women didn’t.” If delivered to an indifferent or ignorant audience, this is often where the conversation stops, especially if the person speaking is a man given some measure of authority. “Women never went to war” or “Women simply aren’t great artists” or “Women never invented anything” are common utterances so ridiculous that to refute them becomes tedious. As I grow older, I’ve ceased making long lists of women who, in fact, did. More often, I’ll reply with the more succinct, “You’re full of shit. Stop talking.” If, however, the person who says this is challenged with evidence that yes, in fact, women have and women do, and here are the examples and the lists, the conversational misogyny bingo moves on to …
2. She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have.
I hear this one about my own writing a lot, and I see it applied to romance writers and other outspoken feminists in particular. The writing is too sexual, too political, too feminist, or even—funny enough—too masculine to be real writing. This type of writing, because it is written by women, is considered somehow deviant or disorderly. It puts me in mind of those angered at the idea that science fiction is only good if it isn’t “political,” which is code for “does not reinforce or adhere to the worldview shaped by my personal political beliefs.” The reality is that all work is political. Work that reinforces the status quo is just as political as work that challenges it. But somehow this type of work is considered particularly abhorrent when it’s written by women.
3. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
Men, famously, can write about anything and be taken seriously. Jonathan Franzen writes books about family squabbles. Nicholas Sparks writes romance novels. Yet these same subjects, when written by women, are assumed to be of lesser note; unimportant. Jennifer Weiner is especially vocal about this erasure of the weight of her own work. Yes, she wrote it, they will say, but of course she wrote about romance, about family, about the kitchen, about the bedroom, and because we see those as feminized spheres, women’s stories about them are dismissed. There is no rational reason for this, of course, just as there’s no rational reason for any of this erasure. One would think that books by women written about traditionally women’s spaces would win tons of awards, as women would be the assumed experts in this area, but as Nicola Griffith’s recent study of the gender breakdown of major awards shows, women writing about women still win fewer awards, reviews, and recognition than men writing about … anything.1
Writers of color also see this one in spades—yes, they wrote it, but it wasn’t about white people’s experiences. Toni Morrison labored for a very long time to finally get the recognition her work deserved. It took a concerted effort, complete with very public protest, to finally get her a National Book Award. Arguments were made that Morrison’s work was dismissed because she wrote about the experiences of black people. This type of erasure and dismissal based on who is writing about whom is rampant. While white writers are praised for writing about nonwhite experiences, and men are praised for writing about women, anyone else writing about the experiences of the people and experiences they know intimately is rubbed out.
4. She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it.
Few creators make just one of anything, including writers. It generally takes a few tries to get to that “one-hit” book, if one ever achieves it. We also tend to remember writers for a single, seminal text, as with Susanna Clarke’s massive undertaking, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Yet Clarke also has a short story collection available—though few hear about it. Others, like Frank Herbert, write a number of wonderful novels but become known for just one great text, like Dune. Few would argue that Herbert only wrote one novel worth remembering, but I have checked this off on the bingo card listening to someone dismiss Ursula Le Guin because “she really only wrote one great book and that was The Left Hand of Darkness.” A lack of reading breadth and depth is on the reader, not the author. But one sees this applied most often to women writers. “Yes, that was a great book, but she only wrote one book, so how great or important could she really be?” one says, forgetting her twelve other books.
5. She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art.
Genre writers have contended with this one for years—men and women alike— but this excuse for dismissal is still more often used against women. Even within the genres, women’s work is skewered more often as being not “really” fantasy, or science fiction, or simply not “serious” for one reason or another. It’s a “women’s book” or a “romance book” or “some fantasy book with a talking horse for God’s sake” (I actually saw a female writer’s book dismissed this way after it showed up on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist one year, as if whale-shaped aliens and time travel were any less ridiculous).
Women’s backgrounds are also combed over more than men’s, especially in geek circles, and you see this with the “fake geek girl” backlash, too. Is she a real engineer? Okay, but did she actually work for NASA or just consult for them? “Yes, she wrote a science fiction book, but it doesn’t have real science in it” or “Yes, she wrote a science fiction book but it’s about people, not science” are popular ways of dismissing women’s work as being not “really” part of the genres they are written in, or simply not real, serious art the way that those stories by men about aliens who can totally breed with humans are.
6. She wrote it, but she had help.
I see this one most with women who have husbands or partners who are also writers. Women whose fathers are writers also struggle with this dismissal. Rhianna Pratchett, a successful writer in her own right, finds her work constantly compared to her father Terry’s, and, coincidently, folks always seem to find ways her work isn’t as “good,” though Rhianna’s style and her father’s are completely different. For centuries, women who did manage to put out work, like Mary Shelley, were assumed to have simply come up with ideas that their more famous male partners and spouses wrote for them. The question “So, who really writes your books?” is one that women writers still often get today.
