Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

N. K. JEMISIN: You can learn by observing people,

by understanding people.

You need to understand the limitations

of your own understanding of people

if you're going to convey people right.

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So now that you have created a physical world,

and you've created a culture to populate that world,

and you've decided within this culture what kind of person

would be the most interesting person to center

on for storytelling purposes-- someone powerful, someone not,

someone who's at the center of the society,

or someone at its margins--

now that you've decided kind of what kind of person

will exist in this kind of world,

now you actually need to narrow it

down and decide who your viewpoint

character is going to be.

Now this will not necessarily be your only character

and they will not necessarily be your protagonist.

Viewpoint character and protagonist are two completely

different things.

They can be the same, but they don't have to be.

Before we get into this too deeply,

I want to point out that my own background is not in coming

from formal writing training.

What I did end up going to school for was psychology.

My bachelor's degree is in that.

I went on to get a master's degree.

And I worked in higher ed for, oh gosh, like 20 years,

working with students, late adolescents,

young adults who are going through that whole transition

into adulthood.

And so my understanding of how people develop

is rooted in psychology and this is one of the things

that I use to develop how I develop character.

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Some older science fiction novels

tended to have not great characterization

because in a lot of cases, those novels were

written by people who didn't know very much about people.

And the values of science fiction

back in the golden and silver age

were that you centered on getting the science right.

It was important to make sure that you got the science right.

And not so much with the people.

It's no longer acceptable to have

spot-on science but characters that read like cartoons.

Now it's important that you have characters that feel real.

In a lot of cases, characters of mine will come to me in dreams.

With the "Inheritance Trilogy," for example,

I dreamed up several of the gods that we ended up

following as characters throughout the story.

And in the dream, they were just images.

They were just a visual of a man with stars in his hair.

And you knew that, in the dream, that if you reached

into his hair, your hand would be in space,

and if you fell into his hair, you would fall into space

and die.

This was a dream that I had.

And I dreamed of another character

who was the child that stole planets.

And he was playing with little planets

that he just sort of juggled and made spin around in the air

just because he could.

But I needed to develop personalities for these people.

And I needed to understand their backgrounds.

I needed to understand the trauma

that they were dealing with.

Because these gods were corporeal beings who,

in this particular case, had been forced into human form

and kept from being as powerful as they normally were,

which I imagined would be pretty traumatic for a God.

And I have some experience in working with people

from traumatized experiences, or traumatized backgrounds.

And I was able to kind of at that point extrapolate

that okay, this person has been forced into a shape that

does not adhere to them.

They've been forced to do things that they don't want,

including sexual experiences against their will,

violent experiences, torture.

I needed to explore what that was

going to do to someone who previously

had complete freedom, even freedom over their bodily form.

So I was able to kind of go from there.

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I think it's absolutely crucial that science fiction

and fantasy writers understand the humanities.

You don't have to go to school for them.

You don't have to major in English,

or history, or any of those social sciences.

You do have to understand them, though,

and you do have to respect them as sciences

just as important as natural sciences, or physical sciences.

And if you don't know people, you

can learn by observing people, by understanding people,

by making sure that your preconceptions of people

aren't coming from something shallow or false,

like stereotypes.

Making sure that you actually have

tried to engage with the complexity of people.

People are three-dimensional, people are contradictory,

people don't always behave in ways that television or media

suggests that they behave.

I don't know that this is a thing that everyone does,

but you know, go sit down in a coffee shop at some point.

And try not to be skeevy about it,

but just observe how people interact.

Observe people who are not from your own background.

Observe people who have different bodies from yours,

different possible perspectives from yours.

Maybe sit down and have a conversation with them.

You know, talk to your friends who

come from those backgrounds.

Hopefully you have some.

If you don't, maybe you should work on that.

Another really important thing, though,

and I touched on this briefly before,

but another really important thing that writers should do

is read.

Read books from people from different backgrounds.

Read books written by people from those backgrounds,

read people--

read books that are about those other cultures and other parts

of the world, anthropological books and things

like that, history books that are complex,

and that ask questions, and don't just

present propaganda to you.

You need to understand the limitations

of your own understanding of people

if you're going to convey people right.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It's absolutely crucial that you avoid stereotypes, cliches,

and just wrong information about how people genuinely are.

So a good example is, for whatever reason,

people in our society have this preconception of what

traumatized people look like.

We see how this impacts our society at multiple levels.

People who experience rape aren't

believed if they aren't behaving a particular way-- shaking,

crying, freaking out.

And the truth of the matter is that trauma doesn't normally

look like what we think it dramatically does.

You know, what we see in the movies

and what we see of trauma in entertainment is not what

it really looks like in life.

In a lot of cases, people who've come from backgrounds

of abuse or torture present in this completely calm

or measured way.

They are controlled.

They have good reasons to need control in their lives.

And in a lot of cases, we hear stories about police or judges

not believing in rape or other kinds of trauma victims

because they seem so controlled, so visibly, outwardly safe

and together.

But it's important to understand that that's how trauma

frequently presents itself.

Trauma is often calm, unpleasant--

because people who've been traumatized

have a good reason to keep others

at bay, or at arm's length.

Unpleasant, unfriendly, sometimes hilarious.

Sometimes people who have been traumatized tell great jokes.

You know, I've heard that a lot of really great comedians

come from backgrounds of trauma.

And it's partly because if you can't overcome

this horrible, harmful thing that's happened to you,

you might as well laugh at it.

It's important that a lot of us kind of

reexamine the ways in which we think

people behave and make sure that they actually

do behave that way.

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If you were creating a character,

iceberg theory doesn't really apply

because every part of a person's background and personality

is immediately and visibly relevant

to how they present themselves over the course of a story.

You don't necessarily-- they're not necessarily

going to spend a lot of time talking about their childhood,

but their childhood has an impact

on the adult that they have become.

And you, as the author, need to be aware of that.

So let's say that you decide to create an unlikable character,

as I did with Essun in "The Fifth Season."

Essun comes across as standoffish,

cold, angry, sarcastic.

She has a deeply traumatized background, and one of the ways

that her trauma sort of communicates itself

is in a combination of trying to kind of keep other people

at arm's length and flashbacks.

If something triggers her trauma response, she can--

and does throughout the story--

kill hoards of people.

She doesn't necessarily intend to do it.

She's not necessarily trying to do it.

It's just the way that she was trained

and it's the way that her body reacts.

This is a thing that I know as a counselor, which

is that if you have been traumatized

to the point of PTSD, you tend to react to small threats

the same way that you did to that big threat that caused

the PTSD in the first place.

And so you know, minor things happen

to Essun over the course of the story in some cases,

and she overreacts wildly.

And I deliberately made her behave in these ways on purpose

because I know that this is what traumatized people are like.

And I wanted her to be realistically traumatized,

even if it made her an unlikable character.

[OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYING]

So in "The Fifth Season," when we're

following Essun's plotline, Essun

has run away from her community.

The world is slowly descending into the state

of being in a fifth season because

a terrible, huge earthquake has happened

far to the North that has started to blot out

the light in the sky.

It's getting colder.

She's on the road traveling, away from her old village,

looking for her daughter.

And at some point, there an incident

where she wakes up and finds a weird kid sitting next to her,

sitting at the fire that she's been keeping all night.

So this is her first real chance to look at Hoa.

She wakes up in the middle of the night and finds him there,

but then the next morning, she can actually

get a good look at him.

"Hoa also has icewhite eyes.

Real, actual icewhite.

Scared you a bit when you woke up in the morning

and he looked at you--

all that dark mud surrounding two points

of glaring silvery-blue.

He doesn't look quite human, but then people with icewhite eyes

rarely do.

You've heard that in Yumenes among the Breeder usecaste,

icewhite eyes are-- were--

especially desirable.

Sanzeds liked that icewhite eyes were intimidating,

and a little creepy.

They are.

But the eyes aren't what makes Hoa creepy.

He's inordinately cheerful, for one.

When you rose the morning after he joined you,

he was already awake, and playing with your tinderbox.

There was nothing in the meadow with which to make a fire--

only the meadowgrass, which would have burned up in seconds

even if you could have found enough dry,

and probably touched off a grassfire in the process--

so you hadn't taken the box out of your pack the night before.

But he had it, humming idly to himself

as he twirled the flint in his fingers,

and that meant he'd been digging in your pack.

It didn't put you in the best of moods for the day."

So this was the way that I decided

to introduce this character, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I wanted you to understand

that part of his uniqueness, or part

of what makes him an interesting character,

is the fact that he's visually distinctive.

He turns out to be from a race that Essun has never

seen before.

He's got physical racial characteristics

that she's seen, but never like kind of all in one collection

before.

He's wearing a coating of mud because--

you know, he looks like he's been

through some kind of disaster obviously,

but he's a kid who's been through a disaster who's

somehow cheerful.

There's a tendency for people to assume

that those who've been through trauma all

have a very predictable and recognizable pattern

of behavior.

That they're going to be distraught,

that they're going to be crying, or maybe catatonic,

or not speaking very much.

And you know, this is a child who's been through, obviously,

some kind of terrible thing, if he's covered in mud and naked.

But obviously, he's having fun, and he's

digging through people's stuff.

So you know, his behavior is a little disturbing,

not quite what you expect it to be.

And I wanted to let audiences know, kind of through Essun's

perspective, that there's something

really weird about this kid.

And that there's maybe something worth paying

attention to about him.

He's not just a normal child who's

decided to join her for fear of being alone after a disaster.