Exercise #6: Choice and Complicity
Octavia Butler, John Edgar Wideman, Samuel Delany, Soleil Knowles, Daniel José Older. Charlie Jane Anders
Hi all,
Hello and welcome! I hope this edition of my newsletter finds you and yours healthy and safe, and that your summer’s off to as good of a start as possible, given the difficult times we’re in. It’s a minor thing, all considered, but I’ve personally been feeling slightly adrift this week, as a number of my self-directed projects have come to their natural ends: I finished my months-long reread of Stephen King’s massive Dark Tower series, which I’d started when the first stay-at-home order began, then completed a three-month running training plan I’d started to keep physically focused, even though there are no races to run right now, and so on. Today was also my deadline for turning in my line edits for my next novel, which are thankfully complete, so now I’m getting ready to transition back into the next next book after I take a little break. (But my temperament is such that I would always, always prefer to be busy, and never more so than right now.)
Anyway, thanks to my all-consuming novel edits, this newsletter is the first completely new writing I’ve done in a while! As I finished up, I started thinking again about the many writers who influenced the novel, as well as what I think I learned from each of them. Accordingly, this month’s exercise draws from Octavia Butler’s fantastic novels and stories, which were and are a major source of inspiration for me during the past few years, especially for the way that Butler depicts moral dilemmas and relationships to power. I should probably warn you that there might be more spoilers than usual in the exercise: it’s hard to talk about the effect I’m trying to explain without going into at least some of Butler’s plot details in Wild Seed, Kindred, and “Bloodchild.”
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to tell me so on Twitter! You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding it or sharing it on social media. If do, know that I appreciate it!
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
“JB & FD” by John Edgar Wideman, from his collection American Histories. (Available online at Harper’s.) I bought Wideman’s 2019 collection on the strength of his story “Williamsburg Bridge,” which I first read in the 2016 Best American Short Stories, and I’m so glad I did: every other story here has also been beautifully written, structurally interesting, and often emotionally or morally challenging. “JB & FD” is a kind of speculative history, imagining a relationship between John Brown and Frederick Douglas, with the former trying to convince the latter to rise up violently against slavery. Late in the story, a series of paragraphs seem to represent letters between the two men, where each states his final decision to the other in clearest terms, with Douglas refusing Brown, saying, “I shall continue my work here in the North. Offer my life, not my death, to my people,” and Brown replying, “In this business we cannot afford to bargain. To quibble about more time, less time, a better time. We are not accountants, Fred. Duty requires more than crying out against slavery, more than attempting to maintain a decent life while the indecencies of slavery are rife about us. To rid the nation of a curse, blows must be struck.”
Aye, and Gomorrah by Samuel Delany. Unlike many other speculative writers, Delany doesn’t seem to have written too much short fiction, and I believe most of what exists has been collected in this volume. I’ve been reading it a story at a time for the last month or so, really enjoying everything I’ve sampled, especially “Omegahelm” (which has an unforgettable childbirth/body horror/art-creation scene at its center), “Driftglass” (an excellent early example of what we’d now call cli-fi), and “Tapestry,” which imagines the interior life of the figures depicted in a medieval weaving: “The Virgin is disgusted. So is the unicorn: although he finds the smell of her sweating flesh attractive, the medicinal pungency of alcohol and ambergris, the rancid hair oil, sweetened with dead flowers, revolts him.”
“Lusca” by Soleil Knowles, published in FIYAH #13. A fantastically well-written speculative story about a young woman forced to hide her true nature to blend into the society around her. I can’t say too much about it without spoiling it, so I’ll just share the excellent beginning:
You wring your hands, cold and clammy and rough. Skin of teeth, salty with sea brine cuts into the humanlike fat of your palms, and you stare down the edge of oblivion. The wind whips you, sings to you. A full, fat, yellow moon casts a sultry pall over the water, the light disappearing into its mirror image on the sea. You take one step, then another. The blue hole sings its deep, droning song, and what can you do? Resist?
Exercise #6: Choice and Complicity
In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed many people posting on social media about reading Octavia E. Butler, especially her Parable of the Sower, which continues to feel prescient to so many people, with its increasingly radicalized government, its realistic depiction of climate change, and the fracturing of its future society along racial divisions and extreme class stratification. I’ll also be teaching Parable this fall, and as I work on my plans for the semester, I’ve been thinking a lot about it and about Butler’s other works.
The first Butler novel I read was her Wild Seed, part of her Patternist series, the last to be published but the first in its chronology. As I read, I was struck by the many ways Butler created situations in which Anyanwu, the novel’s chief protagonist, clearly understood that a system or society she had entered was unjust, oppressive, or outright dangerous, but still chose to participate in some aspect of it, usually for some other good reason: in this case, her most frequent reason was that giving in or going along meant having a chance to protect other people who had even less power than she had. (In Wild Seed, Butler depicts a version of the African slave trade and New World plantations, as well as eugenic breeding programs meant to produce ever-stronger telepaths for Doro, the novel’s antagonist.) I was frequently frustrated by the choices Anyanwu made—as we put ourselves in the protagonist’s shoes while we read, don’t we also like to believe that we would always take the highest moral ground if faced with the same situations they are, even if that’s demonstrably not true in our own lives?—but the more I thought about Anyanwu’s choices, the more I understood how she’d been brought to her decisions.
At some point in reading Wild Seed, I realized that I’d grown used to expecting speculative worlds in which a protagonist wholly rejects a dystopian society or overthrows it, rather than ones in which characters have to make the best choices they can from within that society, deciding what they can do inside the structures they’ve inherited or had imposed upon them. But Butler, at least in her novels that I’ve read, rarely offers such a clean escape as I’ve come to expect (perhaps especially from Hollywood films, rather than from literature). In her novel Kindred, for instance, as Alice time-travels from 1976 California to the pre-Civil War plantation where her ancestors lived, she has to save the life of her white ancestor Rufus over and over, and eventually she becomes further involved in his plantation. Rufus is a repugnant character—in addition to being a slave owner, he’s a rapist and a coward who uses violence and the threat of the same to get his way even on petty matters—but Dana’s relationship to him remains complicated by her circumstances from the beginning: saving his life in 1815 and in the years that follow makes her life in 1976 possible; begrudgingly helping him in the past frequently temporarily relieves the plantation’s enslaved people of some of the immediate dangers they face, in addition to making the months at a time Dana eventually spends trapped there safer and at least marginally more bearable.
Butler presents another such situation in her masterful short story “Bloodchild,” where a boy named Gan is chosen to carry the eggs of an insectoid female alien, a Tlic named T’Gatoi. The humans in the story left Earth sometime in the past to live on the Tlic homeworld; afterward, the Tlic discovered that humans made good hosts for their offspring, first exploiting the humans as nothing more than “convenient, big, warm-blood animals,” before creating a Preserve where humans could live more typical lives, as long as members of their families consented to being hosts when the time came. Opening on the night T’Gatoi must lay her eggs, “Bloodchild” gives Gan a choice: she wants Gan to give his consent, so he does have the right to choose to refuse the Tlic, in which case her eggs will be laid in his willing sister instead; he can try to kill T’Gatoi with the illegal firearm his family possesses, which might save his life tonight but likely doom his family; he contemplates suicide, but doing so won’t protect his sister, and again his family might be punished. If he consents to implantation, the process might kill him, but might not; either way, his family will receive their share of the Tlic’s sterile eggs, which have a life-extending effect on humans who eat them; only giving in ensures his family’s place in the preserve, offering all of them long life and better health, and protects the privileged relationship they have with T’Gatoi. In the end, Gan chooses to allow her to implant him with her eggs, in part because the consequences of refusing are more uncertain and potentially more dangerous than those of consenting—and also because he realizes he loves T’Gatoi, who’s been a part of his family’s life since before his birth, a friend to his mother even though she’s also their jailer: in case we might miss this, her embrace is frequently referred to as a cage. It’s a fascinating story, and its depictions of consent and complicity are honestly probably even more complex than I’ve presented them here. I can’t recommend reading it enough. (If nothing else, it’ll help with this exercise!)
Where am I going with all of this? I’m thinking about how politics in the United States and abroad have increasingly been characterized by discussions of privilege and of how to dismantle or thwart systems designed to oppress people, in addition to other kinds of harm: whiteness and white supremacy, misogyny and sexism and violence against LGBTQ+ persons, runaway capitalism and extractive fossil fuel economies in the face of catastrophic climate change. All of these systems and power structures can and should and will be resisted, but at the same time many people have no choice but to live within them, with someone always benefitting even as others are injured, and of course I know that standing up against one power structure doesn’t automatically mean being able or willing to do the same against another. We all make choices from inside these systems, and for me, Butler’s novels are some of the best examples I know of how to depict those choices in fiction.
What does this mean for writing? Perhaps we might begin by seeing how “every character has a relationship to power,” as Daniel José Older writes in his essay “12 Fundamentals of Writing ‘The Other’ (And The Self)”: “This includes institutional, interpersonal, historical, cultural. It plays out in the micro-aggressions and hate crimes, sex, body image, life-changing decisions, everyday annoyances and the depth of historical community trauma. Power affects a character's relationship to self and others, and their emotional and physical journey through the story.” As we think about our characters’ relationships to power, we might find that as in real life, there are contradictory impulses at play: we can want more than anything to see a system dismantled and at the same time feel trapped, believing we have few options at present but to live inside it as morally or as safely as possible. For instance, it is likely easier to see why our current form of capitalism should be dismantled than it is to immediately choose to escape it, leaving many people with only attempts to consume as ethically as they can, even as they continue to crave the benefits of other aspects of capitalist economics: it’s possible to both want capitalism to end and also to want to be paid as much as possible while it lasts.
In her novels and stories, Octavia Butler’s extraordinary moral clarity and moral intelligence was so applied again and again to many of these complex, interlocking systems of oppression, exploitation, and violence. I’ve tried to learn from her example to create my own scenes where for better or worse characters choose their own complicity inside such a system, scene by scene deciding what they can accept (no matter how reluctantly), often changing both their choices and their reasons as they learn or grow. I’ve found that the success of such a scene is not usually dependent on whether what the character chooses is right or wrong—the moral vision of a writer like Butler, at least, is too clear for such ambiguity—but rather the reasons behind the character’s choices, which are often complex and contradictory, related to both their own needs and those of others, as well as the pressures exerted on them by power.
For this exercise, your task is to explore such complicities by writing a scene or story in which a character is explicitly or explicitly asked to do something for someone else with whom they have an unequal power relationship. In this passage, there should come a moment where your protagonist has to choose from a clearly defined set of choices with clearly defined consequences: this isn’t an exercise about trick endings or twists, but about depicting the ways we navigate power structures and relationships with others.
Some things you might keep in mind:
In my experience, many of the best stories and scenes of this type are dialogue-driven. Don’t be afraid to let characters discuss these ideas, or to make their wants and asks and worries clear. Remember that most conversations have an element of competition and conflict to them, and this one certainly will, no matter how friendly it seems on the surface. The character in power wants something from your protagonist; your protagonist has their own sets of wants and needs and worries. As your characters make their asks and their arguments, imagine how their conversational tactics might change to accommodate new information and, perhaps, reversals of power.
Even though I’ve given examples above of massively systemic power structures, don’t forget smaller-scale relationships, including the interpersonal: it’s just as easy to make these same kind of moral choices inside the family unit or the workplace, the church or the classroom, all locales containing their own power structures that require navigation.
A scene about complicity is necessarily one about choice, as noted above, but they’re also frequently about a character’s trying to arrive at the best possible option, rather than the absolute best. Many readers are drawn to characters who make decisions they would otherwise disagree with, if they do so for the best of reasons, in part because those characters allow us to reflect on our morality, wondering what we would do differently in such a scenario.
Finally, there’s an opportunity here to complicate the relationship between the protagonist and the reader. We’ve been trained by a lifetime of reading to automatically empathize with the protagonist, to want what they want, and to cheer for them as they try to get it. These complex moments of imperfect choice are places where we might be discomfited by the character’s actions, leaving our relationship with them made at least temporarily uneasy. There’s a lot of potential emotion in such a moment.
Once you’ve finished with this admittedly difficult task, you might try writing a second scene, or continuing the story past the point where you ended it. Why? Because while it’s powerful to explore the ways in which we’re sometimes forced to choose complicity and its complications, most of us would also like to imagine going beyond such choices, doing our part to make a more just world by choosing a previously unseen option that would free us and others. As Charlie Jane Anders recently wrote at Tor:
In a made-up story, you can see justice taking shape—or being thwarted. You can show how the human heart struggles with huge questions, and sometimes even finds an answer. […] Fiction can work all kinds of magic during horrendous times: inspire us to resist evil, expose the reality of the world, create empathy, and help us to understand complex systems from a vantage-point that could be hard to reach in non-fiction. But the most powerful thing that fiction can do is show that people can change, and that we all have the potential to be different. That’s where I get a lot of my hope when everything around me feels hopeless.
In your new scene, imagine what would have to happen for your character to successfully avoid or diminish the complicity they (perhaps reluctantly) chose in the first scene, while continuing to navigate the web of consequences they foresaw. What consequences are they willing to bear in order to refuse what they were asked, to dismantle or thwart this system that demanded their complicity, assuming it still has the upper hand? What will making a different decision cost? And, better yet, what might it win, for them and for others?
Good luck! See you in August!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in 2021. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.