On writing and cultural minutiae

[selenay]

This week, I went to my monthly critique group (which was held at a Mexican place where I ate the best veggie chili ever and sampled churros at last, but I digress) and the short story I'd written provoked some interesting discussions about culture and so on.

I live in Canada, but I grew up in England lived there until around nine years ago. So most of what I write is heavily influenced by where I grew up and I make no bones about happily digging into the weirdness that hides under the tourist version of England. The specific story I wrote was all about the destruction of the world, triggered by a meeting at a village fete.

And thus, I included a coconut shy, because it's one of those staples of a fete. Baking and vegetable competitions, Morris dancing, vicars benignly watching people lose their rag when they can't knock a coconut off its stand. Except it's a thing that's unknown outside Britain and my readers had to look it up, which was when we started discussing whether a story is marketable if its set so firmly in the minutiae of its culture that there are going to be references people outside that culture don't get.

And I pointed out that there are references in North American lit--including in their work--that I've had to research, but because things get American-ised, most people over here don't realise it. They're not used to having to dig in and learn. It's standard fare for people living outside North America. I mean, I cannot count the number of times I had to double check that Unspoken (by Sarah Rees Brennan) was supposed to be set in England, because so many references and terms had been shifted that it was a strange experience for me. I'd really like to read the British-published version, to find out whether it was done for all versions or if the Brits got a less confusing experience.

It was an interesting discussion, because we're not even talking about two cultures that are far apart on the surface. Same language, same racial background, our histories are tightly tied together. And yet, at times, it can feel like we're so far apart.

My conclusion was that I'm going to keep writing the way I do and throwing in references, and if readers need to look something up, hooray! Education! If editors one day want me to smooth out and Americanise stuff...I'll cross that bridge when/if I get to it, and I'll probably find the line I won't cross.

(Hint: the line will probably when someone tries to take out my coconut shy.)

Comments

[choirwoman]

Yes, so much yes! (If editors wanted *me* to smooth out and Americanise stuff, I'd get a 'stet' stamp instanter.)

My spouse has a set of translated-into-Dutch Paddington books in which all the cultural references have been taken out, probably because "Dutch readers won't get that anyway", making the whole story so incomprehensible that he didn't know what the Guy Fawkes and Christmas stories were about until he read my English copies as an adult.

I write fantasy that way too, and it annoys me when a writer thinks they have to explain everything: explanation breaks immersion for me. My beta readers chide me sometimes for not explaining, and then (when I agree with them, which is not always) I try to be clearer *without* explaining.

[selenay]

If editors wanted *me* to smooth out and Americanise stuff, I'd get a 'stet' stamp instanter

I suspect this will be me. I'd be willing to allow them to change my spelling for the North American version of something, but not language and word usage.

making the whole story so incomprehensible that he didn't know what the Guy Fawkes and Christmas stories were about until he read my English copies as an adult.

This is the problem with editing to remove cultural references! It makes things much harder to understand than just leaving them where they are and expecting readers to look up anything they don't get. A story set around Guy Fawkes night will make no sense if you remove the term.

My beta readers chide me sometimes for not explaining, and then (when I agree with them, which is not always) I try to be clearer *without* explaining.

Yup, this is probably the best way to go. If I explain in detail, for example, what a coconut shy is, then any English readers are going to roll their eyes and peace out at the info-dump. So I need to make it clearer what the context is, but not throw in a definition that wouldn't be needed for a large part of the readership.

[conuly]

There's also glossaries or appendices. I've found those helpful both when reading fantasy and when reading books from England or Australia. (And let's face it - to a New Yorker, stories set in rural England are just as fantastical as those set on a space station or in Middle Earth or wherever.)

[selenay]

Glossaries and appendices are great for some things. The story I was writing when this came up was a short, so that wouldn't work, but I get so annoyed with fantasy that has loads of made-up terms and no glossary!

I guess rural England can feel like a fantasy world to people from very different places :-) Heck, people think I lived at Hogwarts just because my school had prefects, a head girl, and houses with a house cup. That was the part of Harry Potter that didn't feel at all magical to me!

[dirty_diana]

Okay, googling a term and learning about something new doesn't even sound like the end of the world? People are weird.

[selenay]

It's not to me, but I'm accustomed to it. When media is always edited and massaged to avoid presenting unfamiliar terms and ideas, though, it can be a shock to the system to encounter them. And that editing happens so much for media within North America, but outside of NA it's expected that we'll adjust and learn.

[paranoidangel]

My aunt had a book published by an American publisher (she lives in Australia) and they made her change everything to Americanisms, even though it was set in the south of England with English (and one Irish) characters. She did manage to convince the CEO to allow her to include "shite" but decided after that that self-publishing was the way to go. (And then I didn't read them after that because there was too much sex in them and that's just weird when it's your aunt)

[thisbluespirit]

Fight for your rights to a coconut shy! Or possibly to throw coconuts at editors, whatever.

;-)

[havocthecat]

Honest to fuck, I get so annoyed by the Americanizing of everything. What if I want to be confused about something from another culture and learn about it from context or have to research it? Why should I be forced to have it spoon-fed at me or reordered to make my worldview more comfortable? I DON'T WANT MY WORLDVIEW MORE COMFORTABLE.

(A coconut shy looks like a bottle toss! Only with coconuts instead of bottles. I researched it. See? Not that hard! And I could mostly figure it out from context anyway. Though now I want coconut-based baked goods.)

[conuly]

Y'know!?

Though I imagine I know all about coconut shies anyway because of Neopets. I mean, I probably don't, but I imagine I do.

[selenay]

Heh :-)

The part that I sometimes suspects gets missed is the rumours that will abound that the coconut shy has been 'fixed' by nailing the coconuts to the stands. I'm guess that's something that doesn't happen with a bottle toss? But from what I can tell of a bottle toss, all you have to do is knock the bottles over. The coconuts in a shy are sort of in little cup-like stands? So it's tricky to get them out and sometimes they get smashed open long before they get knocked out of the stand.

And that kind of cultural knowledge is the bit that can't easily be conveyed in the text without a huge info-dump.

[conuly]

Oh, carnival games are always rigged. That's gonna come through loud and clear. But them getting smashed, now, never thought of that.

[selenay]

Heh, I wasn't sure, but I'm glad to hear it's not just the Brits with rigged fair games! Even at little village fetes :-D

I don't think anyone would think of the coconuts getting smashed until you've actually been to a coconut shy and seen the shattered bits of shell on the ground.

[katlinel]

I applaud your stand on this. I remember reading, for example, the Katy books when a child and I was fascinated by things I didn't understand, such as the jumbles. It was clear from context that it was a cake with a hole in the middle, but I always hoped to find out, one day, what exactly it was, this not-quite a ring doughnut. And now it's so easy to find out such things, I don't see why it's a problem. Surely your writing group could work out what type of activity a coconut shy is, regardless of the specifics of it, which probably don't matter. Colour can be provided just through encountering the unexpected, even if every detail of that colour is not immediately clear to the reader from a different background.

It reminds me of discussion around privilege, in that the less-privileged take on the work of understanding and adapting to the more privileged norms and mores in order to survive.

[lilacsigil]

Yes! I have never in my life seen a coconut shy, but I know what it is from reading other books.

[luckykaa]

It does make me sad that people only want to know about stuff they already know about. I guess it does take you out of the story if you have to pick up a device and google something.

Still, even if I didn't know what a coconut shy was, I'm sure I'd be able to piece it together from the sentence about trying to knock a coconut off it's stand. It seems a much better way to handle it than removing the reference. And that's assuming it matters.