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blatherskiteI'm a fairly frequent participant in the forum of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There's a small group of contributors, and after a time, you get a sense of what people are like and build a mental image of who they are and how they are likely to respond to certain things.
But every so often, you discover that your mental image was at best incomplete, and sometimes disastrously wrong. Two recent examples illustrated this point. The first involved a reader who canceled his subscription to the magazine and left the forum because he was offended by a story that he felt trivialized and insulted his religious beliefs. To that point, he'd shown no evidence of those beliefs, likely from the knowledge that those beliefs were largely irrelevant to the topics of discussion and possibly from the assumption that he would not be treated respectfully should he reveal those beliefs. (Fans of speculative fiction tend to be fairly intolerant of religion, which is odd for a genre that prides itself on its ability to embrace diversity.)
A second reader, who'd previously seemed to be a sane and intelligent individual, suddenly and surprisingly revealed a dogmatic and unreasoned inability to distinguish between socialism and communism, thereby lumping (for example) Canada with Stalinist Russia and Maoist China in the same unpleasant and crowded boat. Simultaneously, he revealed a no longer surprising blindness to the flaws of his own country, which I pointed out somewhat acerbically. (It's all there in the forum should you care. It's not worth repeating here.)
I raise these examples not for their own sake, but rather to illustrate a point that seems largely to be neglected by many fiction authors: that we rarely understand each other as well as we think. (Of course, anyone who's married quickly learns this lesson, and has it repeated ad nauseam over the years.) Almost all of the modern fiction that I've read simply assumes that when two characters interact, they understand each other well -- often completely and accurately. Authors also assume that people understand their biases and dogmas or are at least willing to acknowledge them when they are pointed out by someone with better perspective. These things would be unusual for any group of real people.
There are, of course, fictional misunderstandings that arise because of plot purposes. One of my favorite examples is when the humans of Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 universe meet a powerful and dangerous alien race and inadvertently start a major war by incorrectly assuming the aliens will respond to them the same way humans would. This is probably quite realistic given how poorly even modern human cultures understand each other. (For endless examples, examine American international diplomacy during the past century.) That episode gave rise to one of my favorite lines of dialogue ever, as an alien ally of the humans tries to warn them this won't work, and when he is ignored, observes: "Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you."
There are also important examples such as Pride and Prejudice in which a fundamental misunderstanding of another person is a primary driving force behind the plot and its resolution. The genre of comedies of manners probably does the best job of revealing and playing with such misunderstandings. But it seems largely in the minority among genres.
I can't resist adding in another favorite line, from The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Having joined my life with a fellow editor, this lesson repeats with surprising frequency, since we come from different cultural backgrounds and have therefore acquired decades of baggage in our beliefs about what words mean. It's very human to assume you understand words better than you really do.
So if you're a writer of fictions, have a careful look at what you're creating and ask yourself whether things are going more smoothly than they should because the characters understand each other too welll. Consider adding a few unseen layers to your characters, since few real people are truly "what you see is what you get"; these layers should not be completely random and they should affect the character's surface behavior, at least to some extent. (In fiction, unlike life, you must play fair with your readers by giving them hints that might not be so obvious in the real world.) And last but not least, consider the possibility that communication is at best an imperfect vehicle for understanding, and that some communications will go badly astray.
By no means is it necessary to base all of your fiction on the principle that true understanding is rare, nor should all of your characters have surprising and unpredictable depths or exhibit bizarre errors in their understanding of a language. (Unless the context is a foreign language, in which case: go wild!) But characters should overestimate their ability to understand someone else far more often than they typically do -- doubly so when that someone else is "the other". And sometimes characters should have hidden depths that they have kept hidden beneath their public persona for reasons fair or foul. Considering those possibilities makes for a much richer and more realistic-seeming fictional world.
But every so often, you discover that your mental image was at best incomplete, and sometimes disastrously wrong. Two recent examples illustrated this point. The first involved a reader who canceled his subscription to the magazine and left the forum because he was offended by a story that he felt trivialized and insulted his religious beliefs. To that point, he'd shown no evidence of those beliefs, likely from the knowledge that those beliefs were largely irrelevant to the topics of discussion and possibly from the assumption that he would not be treated respectfully should he reveal those beliefs. (Fans of speculative fiction tend to be fairly intolerant of religion, which is odd for a genre that prides itself on its ability to embrace diversity.)
A second reader, who'd previously seemed to be a sane and intelligent individual, suddenly and surprisingly revealed a dogmatic and unreasoned inability to distinguish between socialism and communism, thereby lumping (for example) Canada with Stalinist Russia and Maoist China in the same unpleasant and crowded boat. Simultaneously, he revealed a no longer surprising blindness to the flaws of his own country, which I pointed out somewhat acerbically. (It's all there in the forum should you care. It's not worth repeating here.)
I raise these examples not for their own sake, but rather to illustrate a point that seems largely to be neglected by many fiction authors: that we rarely understand each other as well as we think. (Of course, anyone who's married quickly learns this lesson, and has it repeated ad nauseam over the years.) Almost all of the modern fiction that I've read simply assumes that when two characters interact, they understand each other well -- often completely and accurately. Authors also assume that people understand their biases and dogmas or are at least willing to acknowledge them when they are pointed out by someone with better perspective. These things would be unusual for any group of real people.
There are, of course, fictional misunderstandings that arise because of plot purposes. One of my favorite examples is when the humans of Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 universe meet a powerful and dangerous alien race and inadvertently start a major war by incorrectly assuming the aliens will respond to them the same way humans would. This is probably quite realistic given how poorly even modern human cultures understand each other. (For endless examples, examine American international diplomacy during the past century.) That episode gave rise to one of my favorite lines of dialogue ever, as an alien ally of the humans tries to warn them this won't work, and when he is ignored, observes: "Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you."
There are also important examples such as Pride and Prejudice in which a fundamental misunderstanding of another person is a primary driving force behind the plot and its resolution. The genre of comedies of manners probably does the best job of revealing and playing with such misunderstandings. But it seems largely in the minority among genres.
I can't resist adding in another favorite line, from The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Having joined my life with a fellow editor, this lesson repeats with surprising frequency, since we come from different cultural backgrounds and have therefore acquired decades of baggage in our beliefs about what words mean. It's very human to assume you understand words better than you really do.
So if you're a writer of fictions, have a careful look at what you're creating and ask yourself whether things are going more smoothly than they should because the characters understand each other too welll. Consider adding a few unseen layers to your characters, since few real people are truly "what you see is what you get"; these layers should not be completely random and they should affect the character's surface behavior, at least to some extent. (In fiction, unlike life, you must play fair with your readers by giving them hints that might not be so obvious in the real world.) And last but not least, consider the possibility that communication is at best an imperfect vehicle for understanding, and that some communications will go badly astray.
By no means is it necessary to base all of your fiction on the principle that true understanding is rare, nor should all of your characters have surprising and unpredictable depths or exhibit bizarre errors in their understanding of a language. (Unless the context is a foreign language, in which case: go wild!) But characters should overestimate their ability to understand someone else far more often than they typically do -- doubly so when that someone else is "the other". And sometimes characters should have hidden depths that they have kept hidden beneath their public persona for reasons fair or foul. Considering those possibilities makes for a much richer and more realistic-seeming fictional world.