Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

N. K. JEMISIN: You want to start asking yourself

a series of questions.

How would powerful people act in this society?

How would less powerful people act in this society?

These things will affect the character

that you ultimately decide to tell the story through.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We're reaching the point where you can no longer just write

down things on the sheet of paper

that you've been kind of putting together your--

your world and your culture on, because this

is starting to get too complex.

Human beings are impossible to kind of define

through a single sentence or a single piece

of sociological detail.

Here you want to segue from kind of making decisions

or-- or jotting things down.

You want to start asking yourself a series of questions.

So a typical example would be what are the-- the roles held

by people in the society.

What are the punishments for people

who transgress those roles?

What are the ways in which people

use these roles to determine how to treat one another,

and what are the rewards for good performance

of those roles?

Who's got power in the society?

Who is trying to maintain their power,

and who feels threatened by anyone that

steps outside of their role?

These are all kinds of questions that you

should be asking about any society,

including your own, the one that you live in.

But since you're creating this society,

you want to make sure that you've come up

with a set of social rules which may be influenced

by the element X, which may be influenced by the environment

that the society is developing in,

or it could come out of whole cloth.

You can just make something up.

But start asking yourself these questions

about how would powerful people act in the society,

how would less powerful people act in the society.

And then when you are about to decide

who's going to be your viewpoint character for the story,

ask yourself, who is the person that

has the greatest ability to accomplish

the goals of your story in the society,

and who's the person for whom it is the least likely

that they'll be able to accomplish their goals.

And which would be the more interesting story to tell,

the person who has power, who then goes forth to make changes

in the world, or the person who is effectively powerless,

who then goes forth to do the same thing.

I tend to lean towards the latter, but you know,

lots of people can go different directions on that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Now, in the sociological sense, we're

talking about power as the ability to affect other people.

Power, for example, is--

is not necessarily about, you know,

who's controlling the energy resources.

It is about who is controlling the labor resources

of a society, the morals and laws of that society,

the enforcement of those laws, all of that.

So in a lot of cases, people who have power in our world

are able to create laws that apply to them in one way

but apply to another group of people in a very different way.

They're able to dictate how other people in that world

use their time or their space.

So for example, many of you, I'm sure, have jobs.

You've had bosses.

Who in your workplace has the ability

to just show up when they feel like,

versus the people that have to be there at certain set hours?

In a factory, who has to punch in on a time clock,

and who shows up at whatever time they kind of feel like?

That's going to be the CEO in the latter case

and the regular line workers in that factory

in the case of the punch clock.

So that's time control.

Control over space.

Who's got the ability to spread out and take over

every possible surface nearby?

As another example of the ways in which different groups

assert power over others, let's talk about man spreading.

[LAUGHS] So I live in New York.

I ride subways all the time.

People on subways will often take up more space

than they actually need to.

And there's a pattern to the ways

in which certain kinds of people do this,

and one is that we've noticed that men will spread their legs

and take up as much space as they possibly

can, in some cases, making it difficult for other people

to sit near them, or forcing women near them

to sort of bunch up and take up less space, and so on.

People who have less power in our society

tend to take up less space in our society.

They scrunch themselves, or they-- they lean to one side,

or they huddle.

And people who want to assert that they have more power

will take up more space.

They'll spread their arms out.

They'll spread their legs.

They talk louder in a lot of cases.

So these are ways in which we-- we see power

demonstrated in our society.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Now let's segue into talking about role.

Now, power plus role together are power dynamics.

And role, in the sociological sense here, is social role.

And the reason that we use the term role

is because it's actually sort of taken from the theater.

It's a performance.

It's something that you do to--

to convey information to other human beings

so they know how to treat you.

So in our society, we talk a lot about gender roles

and what women are expected to do versus

what men are expected to do.

We're slowly starting to figure out

that there are more genders out there than just women and men,

and those roles are muddled by those new groups of people,

and that offends some folks.

Because they want everybody neatly divided

and easy to differentiate into what

they consider male roles and female roles.

And one of the reasons this happens is because in--

in the performance of role, those who perform it poorly

or who don't perform it in the expected ways

are often punished by our societies.

They're treated as rude, or they're treated

as somehow transgressive.

Somehow they are-- they are doing taboo things.

And a lot of that has to do with the maintenance of power

in our society.

If men claim that they have power because they--

they are more assertive, they're better at talking,

they're better at decision making,

and then we have a woman who is assertive and powerful and good

at decision making, then maybe the men's maintenance of power

is not something that makes a lot of sense.

And maybe then women should challenge men for the power

that they have claimed in our patriarchal society.

So the maintenance of these social roles

is a protective measure on the part of people in power.

Challenging those social roles is one of the things

that less powerful people tend to do in our society

in order to deliberately push against those strictures

of power that are already in place.

So in a lot of cases in a society,

we'll see people who are generally

ascribed less power in our society,

people who are called marginalized,

because of their skin color, or their gender, or their ability,

or their sexual orientation.

In a lot of cases, those people will deliberately

take up more space, the way that men do.

Or they'll talk louder and deliberately flout

rules the way that other powerful people in our society

are allowed to do.

And they do that as a way of kind

of holding up a mirror to society and saying, hey,

it's okay when they do it, but not when I do it?

How is that fair?

So these performances and this push and pull of who has power

and who doesn't and how those people should act or don't act,

these are all power dynamics, and this

is part of any human society.

So if you've created a society that exists

or that consists primarily of human beings,

and you've created a society that

wants-- that you want to feel plausible to your readers,

it's got to have these power dynamics present.

They don't have to be the same power dynamics as in our world,

but they have to be some kind of power dynamics.

These things will affect the character

that you ultimately decide to tell the story through.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It's important to remember that the power dynamics of our world

are going to affect how your story goes over.

Your readers are coming to this--

this story with their own embedded notions of how people

are supposed to act, how power rules are supposed to--

are supposed to play out.

And in a lot of cases, those readers are going to make

assumptions about your characters based on how

you've described them as looking,

what social role you've--

you've named for them.

I mean, they're going to make decisions

about that based on their own social roles, in some cases,

and on your social roles as the writer.

They're going to make assumptions in a lot of cases,

for example, that your--

your female characters should behave in certain ways.

Or if they don't behave in those ways,

they may be harsher to judge those female characters,

because their society has not given quite as much space

and time to novels or stories that center female

protagonists.

And the same will apply to you as an author.

If you were an author from a marginalized group,

then in a lot of cases, your readers

are going to make some assumptions about why you've

decided to write this story.

It may not be right, but they're going

to make those assumptions, and you need to be aware of those,

and you need to anticipate that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All cultures, because we are syncretic,

because we are acquisitive people,

and we interact with other cultures,

and we all tend to develop or to incorporate aspects

of other cultures into our own.

The issue comes up when that appropriation

becomes inappropriate.

[LAUGHS] And when you've got members of a majority or very

powerful culture taking characteristics or aspects from

a less powerful culture and using those aspects,

either out of context or in disrespectful ways or in ways

that sort of muddle the-- the meaning or value of those

cultural aspects to such a degree that it's--

it's almost harmful, and it can be harmful to that culture.

We see aspects of this in our real world all the time.

There's a New Zealand airline that

uses a Maori symbol as its logo, but in a lot of cases,

there have been issues of Maori--

and I may be mangling the name of this-- but Maori flight

attendants who have ta moko and other of these actual symbols

from this actual culture worn on their bodies,

they have been unable to either get or hold jobs.

So, you know, this is a case where

if you're using the symbol, but you don't

like the people that the symbol are attached to,

or you don't treat the people that the-- the symbol is

attached to in-- in a good way, then there's something just

kind of grotesque about taking and using

aspects of that culture because you think that that culture is

cute, but you don't think the people themselves

are worthy of respect or time.

And another thing that's kind of important to remember

is experience and own voices.

If you are a writer who is talking about a culture

that you yourself come from, or a group that you yourself

have actual lived experience in, then you're

going to be able to speak to that much more

easily than people who are from outside of that culture.

However, in-- in the power dynamic situation, again,

where you've got majority writers, or--

or you've got centered writers taking material

from marginalized groups, or in some cases,

telling the stories of marginalized groups, what that

ultimately result in is you end up

having bunches of books about Black people written

by white people, or bunches of books

about queer people written by cishet people, and it just--

it starts to get kind of grotesque.

What it means is that people who are actually

from those backgrounds can't tell their own stories.

The people from the majority culture

are taking up that space.

And that's a huge problem.

If we want more voices and more rich, complex storytelling,

we're going to need to get that from people who actually have

lived from those perspectives.

So it's important to keep that in mind.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you do decide to tackle an existing

culture in your fiction, there's some things

that you have to kind of keep in mind.

First of all, is this still a living, active culture?

In the case of the "Dream Blood" books, "The Killing Moon"

and the "Shadowed Sun," I decided

to set it in, basically, a fantasy

variation of ancient Egypt.

Well, ancient Egypt doesn't exist anymore.

It's now several thousand years dead.

The Egypt that exists these days has a lot of similarities

to it, because cultures are syncretic,

and many of the aspects of ancient Egypt

are still very much a part of that culture today,

but it's not a living culture anymore, and the people who

created that language and--

and those gods and those belief systems, for the most part,

don't exist.

There are people who still worship Egyptian gods.

In many cases, those are modern adherents

that have chosen to sort of adopt these old faiths

and kind of revive them.

And I try to be respectful of-- of people

who hold those belief systems, even though I

don't share them myself.

But for the most part, the fact that I wasn't writing it

on Earth, and I wasn't using existing belief systems,

made a huge difference and helped a whole lot.

Things that you want to keep in mind if you are yourself going

to do this are, like I said, first, you

want to make sure that you're not

encroaching on a culture that is actually living.

If you are, then there are a number

of ways that you can approach that culture

and try and make sure that you're doing it respectfully.

You can reach out to members of that culture

or to cultural sort of touchstones, museums.

You can find books written from perspectives

of people in that culture.

You can educate yourself as much as possible on what

it's like to be a member of that culture,

but you're still going to be an outsider speaking to that.

And so another thing that you might want to consider

is what kind of outsider do you want to be.

There's a great book that I recommend,

called "Writing the Other," by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward,

which touches on different ways to respectfully approach

cultural appropriation.

And they talk about the fact that when

you are coming in to a culture as an outsider,

you can come in in a lot of different ways.

You can come in as a tourist, where you're at least welcome,

and at least you're giving something back

for what you're taking.

You can come in as an invader, and you just

show up, take what you want, trash everything, do

a lot of harm, and then leave.

Or you can be an invited guest, or you

can strive to be an invited guest, where you're not

only coming in and are at least welcome,

but you are doing something that contributes

to the people that are hosting you,

that have chosen to welcome you in.

So there are a lot of techniques that are recommended on--

on how to do this respectfully.

If you're approaching a group of Indigenous people, for example,

you want to make sure that you've--

you've asked someone to read your work for you

and make sure that you're not touching

on any material that is sacred or secret or otherwise

important or--

or precious to that group of folks.

This is a sensitivity reader.

This is someone who is from that background, who

can read your work for you and help you determine

whether you're doing it in a way that

is respectful and non-harmful.

Now, you probably, ideally, want to have multiple sensitivity

readers from that background, because one person can't

speak for a whole culture.

But you've got to pay these people for their time.

There are going rates for sensitivity readers.

You want to try and make sure that you are--

are putting a certain amount of the money that you've got to--

or that you're-- you're putting into creating your piece,

because you've got to put some money and some time into it

in some way, whether you are paying for a research trip

or paying for research books or materials,

you need to set aside some funds to be able to do that as well.

If you're a published writer, your publisher

may help you with the process of getting a sensitivity reader.

But this is a cost of doing business as a writer,

and you're going to have to keep that in mind.