From: jwkenne@attglobal.net

On 2014-11-22 05:04:17 +0000, William Vetter said:

> It happens that J.Pascal formulated :
>> On Friday, November 21, 2014 5:23:08 PM UTC-7, John F. Eldredge wrote:
>>> On Thu, 20 Nov 2014 06:58:36 -0800, William Vetter wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wednesday, November 19, 2014 9:06:56 PM UTC-5, John F. Eldredge
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, 17 Nov 2014 15:28:43 -0800, David E. Siegel (siegel@acm.org)
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Saturday, October 25, 2014 11:16:04 PM UTC-4, William Vetter
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> On Sunday, October 5, 2014 8:53:55 PM UTC-4, J.Pascal wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Sunday, October 5, 2014 5:45:42 PM UTC-6, William Vetter wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On Sunday, October 5, 2014 3:18:46 PM UTC-4, J.Pascal wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> (...)
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Saying "You can't use weather to indicate mood" is like saying
>>>>>>>>>> "no more using short words and sentences to heighten a sense
>>>>>>>>>> of urgency."
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> There is another one they say universally...the character can't
>>>>>>>>> look in a mirror and describe herself.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> The other day I was thinking about that, that there used to be a
>>>>>>>>> TV show named "Quantum Leap" involving Scott Bakula, where he
>>>>>>>>> looked in the mirror at the beginning of every episode.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Of course that worked really well in "Quantum Leap" where Bakula
>>>>>>>> ran around looking just like Bakula but for the story was actually
>>>>>>>> in other people's bodies so we got to see in a reflection what he
>>>>>>>> looked like to everyone else.  Sort of like if there are vampires
>>>>>>>> there's at least one instance of non-reflection required. :)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> But anyhow, the mirror description thing....
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Honest, I think that was a solution to a non-existent problem.
>>>>>>>> Someone or other decided that a "good" writer in a single POV 3rd
>>>>>>>> person narrative or 1st person never let anything on the page that
>>>>>>>> their POV character wouldn't actually think.  So since I already
>>>>>>>> know that I have blond hair and blue eyes and am 5 feet tall I
>>>>>>>> would never think about my blond hair and blue eyes.  I might
>>>>>>>> think about my height if the author asked me to get a bowl from a
>>>>>>>> high shelf but in order to think about my *hair* I need to be
>>>>>>>> looking in a mirror fixing it.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I dunno.  Women say, "I hate my hair" all the time.  It's pretty
>>>>>>> much universal.  And black women have an even bigger thing about the
>>>>>>> hair relaxer.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Other solutions could be to have someone else say something
>>>>>>>> like... "Julie, I sure do envy your beautiful blond hair... it
>>>>>>>> flows like sunshine..."  *Gak*  And besides, this has to happen at
>>>>>>>> the beginning of the story, and giving me a love-sick stalker just
>>>>>>>> to describe my looks is even sillier than having me walk past a
>>>>>>>> mirror.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A stalker needs to appear frequently in the manuscript, be almost
>>>>>>> inescapable, or the stalker is not a stalker, just an annoyance.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> And I imagine that people started to notice that "the mirror
>>>>>>>> trick" seemed forced, too, and frequently applied...
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> ...to a wholly made-up problem.  Just describe your POV character
>>>>>>>> and get it over with.  If a mirror is *appropriate* then use a
>>>>>>>> mirror. If a love-lorn stalker is *appropriate* use a love-lorn
>>>>>>>> stalker.  If it doesn't really matter what your POV character
>>>>>>>> looks like, or what specie they are, or sex... then leave it out.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I think you really need to let reader know if the POV character is
>>>>>>> an alien quickly.  And probably the gender.  If they think the
>>>>>>> author is playing games with them, like intentionally hiding that
>>>>>>> the POV character is a female physician or a male nurse to prove the
>>>>>>> reader is a sexist, they'll feel their intelligence is being
>>>>>>> insulted.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If it is too blatant yes. But it can work. I recently reread _Alien
>>>>>> Island_
>>>>>> (1970) by T. L. Sherred, and it is not until page 55 that the gender
>>>>>> of the PoV character is clearly stated to be female, a point which
>>>>>> soon becomes important. The character has two often but not
>>>>>> invariably male occupations: bartender (as a cover) and intelligence
>>>>>> agent (subordinate). There may have been a few cues, but they were
>>>>>> too subtle for me to pick up on, and I suspect for most readers. I
>>>>>> think it worked well in this particular case, and can work if it is
>>>>>> well done. Of course default gender assumptions were perhaps even
>>>>>> stronger in 1970 than they are now.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -DES
>>>>>
>>>>> Melissa Scott's novel _The Kindly Ones_ never does reveal the gender of
>>>>> the protagonist, Trey Maturin, and does so skillfully enough that I
>>>>> didn't realize that I didn't know his or her gender until the second
>>>>> time I read the novel.  Maturin is always addressed by name, by title,
>>>>> or in the second person.  This is the only novel in which Melissa Scott
>>>>> has done this.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I have never seen this done by professional writers.  What I meant when
>>>> I originally mentioned this was that, at times, I have seen it in
>>>> workshop manuscripts that represent perhaps the level of the 75th
>>>> percentile of the slushpile where some young or inexperienced author has
>>>> concealed the gender of a POV character in a piece of short fiction, or
>>>> written almost entirely in character dialog with the purpose of
>>>> concealing a gender of a physician, so that the physician can be
>>>> revealed to be a woman in the final paragraph as a sort of twist ending.
>>>
>>> Melissa Scott hasn't used the gender-hiding technique in any other
>>> novels.  I suspect she decided that it wasn't worth the effort to avoid
>>> ever using a gendered pronoun.
>>
>> I view it as one of those things like writing in 2nd person or present
>> tense or with events out of order, or backwards, or without punctuation
>> *once* just to see if you have the chops to pull it off.
>>
> There was another thing like that about 20 years ago where you weren't
> allowed to use any verb tenses that incorporate the verb to be.  Or
> something like that.  People called it e-prime, and it was supposed to
> be, like, really cool.

It was supposed to be something epistemological (and, I suspect,
Logical Positivist) about not using "to be". They don't seem to have
clearly understood the difference between using "to be" as the copula
and using it in periphrastic conjugations, so that what they forbade
you to say depended on what language you were speaking. Interestingly,
at least one sample passage of "E-prime" indicated that they also
regarded atheism as a necessary corollary, as though, perhaps, Anselm

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