Fathom the Depths of Imagination

A moving article by Jeffrey Davis, Fathoming Black Lives, is so worth spending a few minutes reading. And hours, days, years contemplating.  I think his idea of imagination--the ability to consider the plight, the feelings, emotions, history of "other"---or the inability, for many, is a dividing line that needs more exploring.

Imagination: the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

Empathy requires imagination. Reading, writing, and being pulled into fictional worlds requires imagination. A 2013 study by Castano and Kidd showed that reading literary fiction increases one's empathy. They conclude that, because literary fiction requires more mental processing than genre fiction or nonfiction, "readers of literary fiction are tasked with interpretation, or critical thinking. Literary fiction, they posit, has the power to “disrupt our stereotypes”; what’s more, it is full of “complicated individuals whose inner lives are rarely easily discerned but warrant exploration.”"

Another study conducted by Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar found that reading activates neural "that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness."

In another study by the same researchers in 2006, 94 subjects were asked to guess the emotional state of a person from a photograph of their eyes. “The more fiction people [had] read, the better they were at perceiving emotion in the eyes, and…correctly interpreting social cues.”

In 2009, wondering if “devouring novels might be a result, not a cause, of having a strong theory of mind,” they expanded the scope of their research, testing 252 adults on the “Big Five ” personality traits — extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness — and correlated those results with how much time the subjects generally spent reading fiction. Once again, they discovered “a significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities” allowing them to conclude that it was reading fiction that improved the subjects’ social skills, not that those with already high interpersonal skills tended to read more.

Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is critical to really comprehending the world around us. No, I can never be a black man. I can never fully know what it's like to be an undocumented immigrant, but I can imagine and feel the stress and the terror that is a part of their lives every day. I can also empathize with those who cause that stress and terror--not sympathize, but I can attempt to get into their head and imagine what they're feeling and why. And no. That doesn't make me sympathetic to them. It makes me angry.

It makes me wish they'd read more fiction as a child.

Fathom the Depths of Imagination

A moving article by Jeffrey Davis, Fathoming Black Lives, is so worth spending a few minutes reading. And hours, days, years contemplating.  I think his idea of imagination--the ability to consider the plight, the feelings, emotions, history of "other"---or the inability, for many, is a dividing line that needs more exploring.

Imagination: the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

Empathy requires imagination. Reading, writing, and being pulled into fictional worlds requires imagination. A 2013 study by Castano and Kidd showed that reading literary fiction increases one's empathy. They conclude that, because literary fiction requires more mental processing than genre fiction or nonfiction, "readers of literary fiction are tasked with interpretation, or critical thinking. Literary fiction, they posit, has the power to “disrupt our stereotypes”; what’s more, it is full of “complicated individuals whose inner lives are rarely easily discerned but warrant exploration.”"

Another study conducted by Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar found that reading activates neural "that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness."

In another study by the same researchers in 2006, 94 subjects were asked to guess the emotional state of a person from a photograph of their eyes. “The more fiction people [had] read, the better they were at perceiving emotion in the eyes, and…correctly interpreting social cues.”

In 2009, wondering if “devouring novels might be a result, not a cause, of having a strong theory of mind,” they expanded the scope of their research, testing 252 adults on the “Big Five ” personality traits — extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness — and correlated those results with how much time the subjects generally spent reading fiction. Once again, they discovered “a significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities” allowing them to conclude that it was reading fiction that improved the subjects’ social skills, not that those with already high interpersonal skills tended to read more.

Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is critical to really comprehending the world around us. No, I can never be a black man. I can never fully know what it's like to be an undocumented immigrant, but I can imagine and feel the stress and the terror that is a part of their lives every day. I can also empathize with those who cause that stress and terror--not sympathize, but I can attempt to get into their head and imagine what they're feeling and why. And no. That doesn't make me sympathetic to them. It makes me angry.

It makes me wish they'd read more fiction as a child.

On women's fiction, women writers, and initials

I just came across this very interesting, although not particularly surprising, piece in the NY Times about differences in perception and treatment of men and women writers. Not just treatment by readers, but by the whole publishing industry--from cover fonts and art to placement at the bookstores.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/on-the-rules-of-literary-fiction-for-men-and-women.html?pagewanted=1&smid=fb-share

Of course this isn't surprising. At the last writers' conference I attended, agents (both male and female) made a big deal about "chick lit"has evolved into "women's fiction." But, the grown up version of chick-lit is still relegated to the bottom shelves, next to the romance novels. Whereas a man and woman might write the same story, the male author will get the more interesting, gender-neutral cover with a bolder title font, and a book blurb with more focus on the action and less on the heroine.

Is it any wonder Joanne K. Rowling wrote as JK rather than Joanne?

Is it any wonder I considered only using LM for Chupacabra?

I don't write chick-lit, I don't write romance, and I don't write about knights riding to the rescue of the damsel in distress. In Marina Melee, George's eventual romantic interest had a very minor role and wasn't even present at the end of the book. The romance was secondary to the madness and mayhem George faced on Sao Jorge. The sex wasn't, but that was separate and apart from the romance. The sex was just part of who George was, right along with the drinking, gambling, and golf. It's a guy's story. It just happens to be written by a woman.

According to the NY Times article, that means the audience who would most enjoy it, who should most read it, won't ever pick it up because it's written by a woman. I don't have any doubt it's true since a male friend who knows I don't have a romantic bone in my body, assumed because I'm a woman writer, Marina Melee must be a romance.

Once again, I'm considering publishing Chupacabra as LM Hinkey, rather than Lynne (that damn "e" keeps prevents any possible ambiguity a "Lynn" has). Maybe I need to find the correct box to put myself in, but for now, it eludes me. The boxes that people expect don't fit. In the south particularly, people expect women to write southern fiction. I don't. I just live here. And I don't write "women's fiction," as I'm expected to do, either. I'm a female writer. And I don't write paranormal romance with vampires and werewolves, even though there is a supernatural beast in my current work.

My paranormal murder-mystery has no romance (okay, the dog is a bit randy), no sex (except for the dog), it isn't set in the south, and the protagonist is a man. True, there are some strong female characters like Kiki, Senora Milagros, and Carmen, but their estrogen-laden presence is balanced by the equally strong testosterone of Jack, Eddie, Flaco, and Norbert Ellis.

For now, I'm holding my breath that the agent I would love more than anything to represent me, and who represents a number of my favorite (male) authors--those who I emulate (at least I try)--will like Chupacabra despite it not fitting in the boxes I've been handed. Of anyone, I would trust her to guide me and my MS through the process to ensure my work is read and marketed as the quirky, satirical look at gods, monsters, and human belief in both of those that it is.

What do you all think? Do women author's get pre-judged and labeled because they're women? Is it just a sad reality of our world that if women authors want men to read their books, they have to use initials or a pseudonym?