“Ordinary people also go to war.” – Elizabeth Bear
It’s been a week since I got exercised about the Fourth Street panel about “ordinary people,” and I’m still exercised about it, so you get a blog post on the subject,
The first problem is, as always, definition. “Writing about ordinary people” can mean writing about people who bake, weave, or drive trucks, rather than about people who are kings, presidents, or prime ministers. It can also mean writing about people who have no extraordinary talents, regardless of their station in life. It can mean writing about people who have the same worries and concerns as most people (e.g., whether they’re liked/loved, whether their kid will do well in the recital, whether they can afford that thing, whether they’ll succeed at that other thing). It can mean writing about people who never do anything extraordinary, or never find themselves in unusually demanding circumstances that force them to rise to a new level.
If one starts with that last definition, it’s fairly hard to think of fantasy that qualifies. Heck, it’s hard to think of fiction that qualifies – so much of even mainstream or literary fiction involves “ordinary” people dealing with extraordinary circumstances and growing as a result. And if you consider “real, effective magic” or “actual elves and unicorns” to be “extraordinary circumstances,” I think you have just excluded all fantasy, by definition. The circles don’t overlap at all.
That leaves the other definitions – writing about people whose jobs or station in life is part of what folks these days call “the 99%”, writing about people who have (or think they have) no extraordinary talents, and writing about people who have the same worries and concerns as most of us. I think that all of them are valid approaches, but they can lead in very different directions.
There are, for instance, loads of fantasies with protagonists who start off in a low-level job – farm boy, street urchin, foot soldier, city guard – but who, by the end of their adventures, have destroyed the One Ring, blown up the Death Star, saved the kingdom, or done something else that gets them elevated to nobility (or even marrying royalty) as their reward. I don’t think those people are less “ordinary” because they’ve gone off questing. Ordinary people go to war. A fair amount of the time, the protagonist of these stories starts off either by devaluing the skills they know they have (like Maggie, the kitchen-witch protagonist of Elizabeth Scarborough’s Song of Sorcery) or else by not realizing that they have any special talents until they discover and develop their skills/abilities along the way.
But there are also plenty of fantasies in which the protagonist starts off in a low-to-mid-level job, has their adventure, and then goes home and back to being “ordinary” (or, in some cases, mostly ordinary. Bilbo was considered eccentric after he went There and Back Again, even though he didn’t do anything else remarkable). There are even people who sandwich their adventure into the cracks in their normal lives. The heroine of Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is as worried about making sure her baking gets done so her shop can stay open as she is about defeating the vampires. The protagonist of Delia Sherman’s Porcelain Dove never goes on an adventure at all; she’s a ladies maid who stays home taking care of the lady while other people are off doing the heroic quest. Terry Pratchett’s books are full of city guards, Morris dancers, opera singers, postal inspectors, etc. who are just getting on with their (often very odd and extraordinary-looking to us) regular jobs.
I would also argue that the majority of modern-setting fantasy, whether it has an urban setting or a rural one, has “ordinary” protagonists; I can only think of one or two World War II fantasies that involve kings, presidents, or prime ministers. All the rest of the relatively-modern-setting fantasies I can think of have protagonists who are policemen or bakers or medical people or college students or musicians or writers (that being a convenient day job for people whose real job is secretly keeping demons, vampires, and other supernatural creatures from bothering everyone else).
As for people who have the same worries and concerns as most people, that, to me, boils down to “writing about people.” Kings and presidents and tycoons may not have to worry about paying the mortgage on the house, but they are still human beings who worry about being loved and whether their kids will turn out well and whether they’ll succeed or fail. That, to me, is what makes them interesting to write about. It’s also kind of the textbook definition of “writing a complex, well-rounded character,” which is generally a desirable thing to do in fiction. Doing this does require one to make one’s high-level protagonist complex and human, rather than a stereotype or a metaphor for something else, but that’s also true if you want to write about a blacksmith or a seamstress. It’s kind of the point.
In addition to writing fantasy about “ordinary people” by any of these definitions (which people have been doing for decades), one can make use of the role magic itself plays in a story. Both Randall Garrett and Poul Anderson wrote novels in which magic was a substitute for technology – everybody had an enchanted “cold box” to keep food fresh (instead of a refrigerator); Cadillac made flying carpets; “forensic magician” was a Scotland Yard specialist; doctors treated diseases by sticking pins in large (but very accurate) models of the bacteria that caused a particular disease. And you have books in which everybody has magic and uses it all the time for things like keeping their hair up or making sure their shoes exactly match their gown or keeping the soufflé from falling. This gives you a world in which, to the people living in it, magic is as utterly ordinary as things that run on electricity are in ours.
Might situation comedies be examples of stories about “people who never do anything extraordinary, or never find themselves in unusually demanding circumstances that force them to rise to a new level” – at least for values of “extraordinary” that are relative to the setting?
I’ve often wanted to reach for small, domestic adventures in my stories, as in the case of the human woman who goes shopping for clothes on an alien planet. (I commented in the brainstorming post some time back that I wanted to close off the Big Event branches when brainstorming a plot for that story.) This especially applies when I want to write a series of short pieces about the characters.
Writing about someone ordinary in a situation extraordinary would be a good way to develop a theme about just what’s ordinary, and what it means (or doesn’t) to be ordinary. I’m reminded of the Doctor Who episode Father’s Day, where the Ninth Doctor tells a couple of minor characters that there’s nothing in the universe more important than ordinary people.
And of course there’s good old Frodo, showing how a humble hobbit saves the world, because only the humble can bear the Ring for long…
One thing that limits and focuses me: I can sometimes enjoy stories set in the mundane world but with secret magic, supernatural beings, aliens, and/or super-science. But they’re not my favorites, and I’ve never felt the urge to write such stories.
I much prefer settings where the supernatural and extraordinary elements are out in the open. ([flattery] Like the two Mairelon books [/flattery]) The general population might have a garbled idea about how it works, but they don’t dismiss ‘frogmakers’ as being purely mythical.
One advantage of not-a-secret exotic elements is avoiding gratuitous specialness from simply being in on the secret.
I like Deep Lurker’s post about “small, domestic adventures.” Sitcoms, yes, and a lot of genre romances. There’s also a category of children’s books that I think of as “family adventures”: Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy books are my favorite examples. Often these can be as absorbing and enjoyable as the more dramatic tales.
There may be an intermediate category of stories where the main characters live in a SF or fantasy world, but the things happening to them are mostly important to the characters themselves, rather than world-shaking save-the-universe events. Some of Heinlein’s juveniles fall into this group (_The Rolling Stones_, for instance). Or take Connie Willis’s _Uncharted Territory_, or a number of Zenna Henderson’s “People” stories. I find this kind of story is often a relief, or at least a palate cleanser, after enjoying some edge-of-the-seat adventure novel.
There may be an intermediate category of stories where the main characters live in a SF or fantasy world, but the things happening to them are mostly important to the characters themselves, rather than world-shaking save-the-universe events.
I’ve heard several people say they wish this was the tack J. K. Rowling and Hollywood had taken with the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movies – leave out the rise of Grindelwald (or do a separate movie about it) and just have Newt and his friends traveling around having adventures with magical creatures. I think they’re right – that would have suited Newt’s character so much better.
The category of ordinary-people fantasy I like best (and which I had hoped there would be more discussion of in that panel) is the kind where the setting is magical/extraordinary, but the protagonist is in a low-level job of some sort. I think it’s fascinating to explore the possibilities of being, say, a cook in an enchanted palace where objects move on their own, or the secretary to an official in the Elvish government. (I wrote a story recently set in a complex where the ambassadors of various magical cultures could meet to do business, and the three protagonists were a clerk in one of the complex’s numerous offices, a minor member of the Fae Ambassador’s staff, and the person responsible for maintaining the decorative murals around the building.)
That sounds very much like a ST: The Next Generation episode called “Lower Decks” or something like that. It followed three lower-level ensigns in three departments and how the upper levels (ie, our regular high ranking characters) influenced them with their adventures. I always loved that episode, because how many of us can be the influential upper level characters?
I must paraphrase an author’s blurb at the end of his short story I read in a fantasy anthology some seven years back. “Every fantasy is about an ordinary boy/girl pulled into a quest to save the world. Nobody has written a fantasy where the hero has known his/her whole life who they would become and what they would face at maturity (the awakening).
Well, I was a fool to take on his challenge. It is my first attempt at writing and in seven years, I have over one million words spread out in five books (so far). The frightening aspect I face if I continue to follow the progress of my heroes (one man and three women) is I have created gods. Many times in the last seven years I have thought of shelving the project and return to him at fourteen to begin again. But I’m a stubborn old man and will not quit. If I must make gods, I’ll make damn good gods.