When I started writing this book I’m now working on again, I had a pretty solid cast of characters figured out. This is how I’ve always started writing—a person comes to me and I have to tell their story. The plot, the conflict, the narrative arc all reveal themselves through the character.
The characters that came to me were less about the individuals they were, and more about the practice they have and the concept I wanted to explore with that. As with most of my writing, I got the idea from reading other writers’ explorations of something. Specifically, the idea of rebirth.
This is not an uncommon theme, and I’ve seen it done well and I’ve seen it done poorly, sometimes within the same book. When a concept I find interesting is done really poorly, that’s about when I want to give it a go myself.
It was David Mitchell’s ‘The Bone Clocks’ that spurred me on for this project. He had all these characters who had an awareness of having come back from some stream of consciousness for multiple lifetimes. Sometimes hundreds of lifetimes. And they all identified with the gender of their first life.
Absurd.
Honestly.
If you have lived multiple lives and are aware of them, even only subtly, you’ll know better than anyone what a ridiculous concept gender is. And race. And any number of other social constructs.
If you’ve been enslaved and master, female and male and gender queer, brown and Black and white, lived in countries that don’t exist anymore and in countries that weren’t there three lifetimes ago, then ones identity and sense of self is going to be entirely different than what we are used to.
This is why world-building matters. And I know, in my last post, I talked about how much I hated world-building. I did. For a long time. But that was before I read really good, really interesting, clever, unique science fiction and speculative fiction.
Now I’m excited about it because I understand what it allows you to do as a writer. Particularly as someone who really disliked sci fi as a genre for most of my life. The only sci fi I knew was written by old white dudes decades before I was born.
Discovering writers like Octavia Butler, Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie, Louise Erdrich, Nnedi Okorafor, and of course, N. K. Jemisin, changed all that for me. Particularly N. K. Jemisin.
I am not exaggerating when I say that Jemisin is one of today’s greatest living authors. I am as grateful to be alive at the same time as she is as I am grateful to be alive while Angela Davis is still teaching and writing and speaking. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy is a work of genius—a melding of sci-fi and fantasy that subverts every trope you might expect. The concepts she explores in the worlds she builds are mind-blowingly clever.
Jemisin runs workshops on why world-building matters. My wife sent me a link to a recording of one such workshop. She uses a popular videogame and how it was marketed as a way to illustrate the importance of not only the world, but who is in it, and that these things go hand in hand. Diversity cannot be an afterthought if you’re going to do it well. One cannot simply substitute a person of any race, gender, culture or species (aliens and all) for the usual grizzled, white, male protagonist. Who the main character is determines how the world is experienced, and what that character does within the world.
When I chose my characters for this book, I knew I wanted them to be diverse and I knew that this was important because they would not necessarily have a concept of ‘diversity’ as we do. Difference, to them, is just how things are, so when they encounter anyone still operating within dualistic confines, the contrast is meant to be stark, calling attention to our own limiting and limited ideas about humanity.
But now that I’m revisiting it, three years on from when I started writing and with a lot more awareness of my own prejudices and implicit biases, I realise I need to be even more intentional. For example, my protagonist has Indigenous ancestry, which I was very deliberate in choosing. I have rarely read any books with Indigenous characters, let alone a main character. They are few and far between. So I created this character and did some searching for a name on the Internet as I commonly do. I found a name that claimed to be of Indigenous roots—although I can’t say specifically what nation language it came from.
When I looked at what I’d written, this name didn’t sit well with me. There was something off about it—untrue to the character and how I imagine her now. I typed the name in, looking for the meaning, and felt an instantaneous aversion to the usual Baby Name sites that popped up.
In the last year in particular, I’ve learned so much more about the genocide of the hundreds of Indigenous nations that thrived across what is now known as North America, but was once commonly called Turtle Island. The result of this constant onslaught and hundreds of years long attack on languages, customs, and ways of life is that most Indigenous groups hold their practices close. The Internet was built by white people. You will not find a whole lot of details about the many Indigenous groups who survived and continue to resist colonialism.
I suspected that any so-called ‘Native baby names’ listed on your average baby naming website, were white people’s ideas of a Native name and not at all legitimate.
I’ve learned that one must search a little harder on the Internet when it comes to getting to sources that aren’t from a white dominant view. The top hits will not be what you are looking for.
With a little searching I found a site full of useful information, including an entire page confirming what I’d deduced about the name I’d chosen. A charming missive shares how the website’s moderator is contacted on a weekly basis by white teenagers asking for the details of their supposedly Native name. “No, Chenoa does not mean "white dove" in Cherokee,” writes the moderator, “and Aiyana does not mean "blossom" or "eternal bloom." Kaya does not mean "little sister" in Hopi. Nadie does not mean "wise" in Algonquin. These and many other translations are flatly false and we have no idea where they came from.”
They do offer a solution however, to these misinformed name choices. You can make a donation and fill in a form requesting a name that would actually be used in a particular Indigenous language. They will send you a selection of five to choose from. So this is the route I have gone for re-naming my protagonist!
All part of building a believable and authentic world.