Writing First World Problems...WELL

It may surprise you long-time blog readers who have seen my posts about keeping characters' problems in perspective, and generally making sure that first-world problems don't clog up the works when high-stakes conflicts are in process that I am a fan of Jeeves and Wooster, both the books and the TV series. The great thing about these stories is their ability to get the audience invested in what are, objectively, trivial problems in the lives of incredibly sheltered characters. Because of this, the series is an excellent lesson in how to write a story centred around 'first world problems' and do it well. The key, I think, is a combination of context and characters.

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• Comedic tone. We know (even if the characters lack of sense of scale) that the characters' troubles are harmless and funny, and can laugh at them. More importantly, it is clear from the delivery of the work that we're not expected to see these conflicts as life-or-death struggles. 
• An compassionate character. This is probably the critical piece of the puzzle. Bertie, spoiled nitwit though he is, gets into 90% of his scrapes because he is trying to do a good turn for one of his equally dim friends. On the rare occasions when he acts with something in the general vicinity of malice, it's in a playful spirit lacking in the desire to do actual harm (beyond puncturing the occasional hot water bottle). He genuinely cares about other people's happiness, and that makes it easy to sympathise with him.
• In-universe insulation. Unless it's in the context of satire or bitter social commentary, it's a very hard sell to show characters angsting over trivial troubles while the world is falling apart around them. If your characters live in a world which is largely insulated from these issues, however, the audience's mental sense of scale is reset. If someone's love life is the most serious business at hand, we can forgive a lack of larger perspective.

If we can laugh about the characters and enjoy investing ourselves in their adventures because no one is going to get hurt, it is great fun.

Friday Humour: Strange Laws, Scotland Edition

Everywhere has their weird laws, and Scotland has some entertaining ones. Most of these are old-school bits of legislation that never got taken off the books. And since Scotland runs on common law, some of these haven't actually been legislated.

Trespassing is legal under a set of old laws allowing free passage through people's land. Originally intended to allow people to cross large tracts of land belonging to neighbouring clans, it's now a great boon to hikers. You're not allowed to squat or camp out on other people's property, or damage things, so don't try your luck there, but you may indeed cross through someone's farm to get from Point A to Point B (watch out for vicious cows).
Eating mince pies on Christmas is illegal. This law was passed under Oliver Cromwell's dictatorship, and technically never got taken off the books.
One may not wear armour in Parliament. I can only imagine this 14th century law is an obvious rule patch.
No Tweeting or Facebooking in Parliament either! A hilarious necessity of the 21st century.
If someone comes to your house and asks to use the toilet, you have to let them. A combination holdover from old hospitality conventions and efforts in the 18th century to prevent people from relieving themselves in the street. 
However, you're allowed to kill someone who breaks into your home (assuming they did so whilst you were home), so burglars beware-- Scottish self-defence common law heavily favours the person protecting their safety, loved ones or property.
It is illegal to fish on Sundays. We've been a hardcore Calvinist country for a while, and Sunday is still serious business in many places.

Is any of this enforced? No, except for the first one, which is called on by hikers, hunters or other outdoor enthusiasts wanting to cross tracts of private property, and the one about messing up someone who breaks into your home, which was recently upheld in court.

Timothy Rogers: 17th Century Sensitivity Training

For the BlogMeMaybe Thursdays, I'm going to introduce a few favourite people from my family tree. This one is from Dad Stewart-Laing's side of the family. I've mentioned in passing that I have a spot of English ancestry, one bit of which* ended up in our family tree at the turn of the 18th century. This is that guy's dad. 


Meet Timothy Rogers. He was a Quaker minister who lived in England in the late 1600s**. Unfortunately, like many in the family, he suffered from clinical depression. What I find inspiring about him, however, is that even in his darkest moments, he managed to think of helping others. Namely, in a time when mental illness was treated with fear, superstition, and derision, he wrote a sensitive and insightful treatise on how friends and family members should treat their sick loved one. He offers insight, dispelling the ideas that the insane are making it all up for attention, need to 'grow up' and snap out of it, or are intellectually deficient. 
Given the grim modern statistics on discrimination against the mentally ill, not to mention the regular deluge of derogatory comments, unwanted advice, and general disrespect towards people with mental illness, his 300-year-old pamphlet should be mandatory reading.


*The other is from 1503.
**For how/why/when this bit of the family ended up being shipped to the Americas and falling in with a bunch of Iroquois and deported Scots... three guesses, first two don't count.

Squicky Characters

In the course of your writing, you'll almost inevitably end up creating a character whose worldview squicks you out in some way. Maybe they're a villain (and good writers understand their villains intimately, in order to avoid the MWAHAHA EVILZ types) or more disturbingly, a sympathetic 'good' character who holds some views you find icky. Maybe they're from a different era or cultural background or whatever, and things that are OK in that time and place give modern folk the shivers.

So how do you handle writing those characters, particularly when they need to be sympathetic?

Gender-what?

Long-time blog readers probably know that I don't identify as a particular gender. Even as a kid, I was pretty gender-fluid. As an adult, anytime someone refers to me with a gendered pronoun, a small part of my brain goes 'huh? Really? Since when am I a girl/guy?'.
It's a bit harder to explain to people than being 'conventionally' transgender. We're socialised in Western society to expect that everyone identifies with a binary gender, and don't really have the language or social 'scripts' for people who don't. Some cultures do. But even then, every gender-fabulous person is different.
That said, there are some aspects of 'performing' binary genders that I love. I wear a gender expression depending on my mood, simultaneously expressing my inner life and wearing a surface decoration. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a strong gender identity, or if my lack of a definite gender leaks into my writing of binary-gendered people, but I'll probably never really know.

Ending Trouble, Part IV: Romantic Mop-Up

There seems to be an obsession in a lot of stories with getting everyone hooked up with a romantic partner, pairing off all the neat little couples.
Now, if these pairings are organic to the story, that's great. And it's not that unrealistic to see post-action hookups, since scads of studies show that people who go through a stressful experience together are very likely to form relationships. However, pairing off characters for the sake of 'cleaning up loose ends' is annoying. Think about the characters as individuals, and whether they would actually couple up. It's your fictional world, not slash fanfic, so no need to force it.
Also, it's time to drop the subconscious worry that seems to bubble up in fiction that 'single = failure'.  Yes, this is an unfortunate attitude that turns up in real life. But it doesn't need to creep into your writing. If it's organic to the story for your characters to be happily single at the end, let them be happily single. They'll be OK.

Friday Humour: Man vs. Nature

Even David Attenborough, the legend himself, isn't safe from a Scottish grouse on a rampage.



And adorable pandas? Less adorable when they're grabby.