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LonCon panel partial transcript: Cities - who, where and why?
Moderator Michael R Underwood, also featuring Zen Cho (Malaysia + London), Ian McDonald (Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast) Francis Knight, Yen Ooi (grew up in same area as Zen, moved to London for uni, lived in Tokyo for 2.5 years), Candas Jane Dorsey (Canadian city)
M: How does your experience affect how you read & write cities?
Z: I'm interested, Francis, you say that you like the countryside and you live there, but you write about cities. Why?
F: I didn't mean to, to start with, it just kind of... happened, I built myself a city. It's where the action is, like you said. Hasn't ever really lived in them, has "unhealthy fascination" - very different perspective!
C: the age of the city! Difference in lived experience "in the city I live in, I have underwear older than some of the buildings" - layering, thousands of years of continuous habitation, built historical record. The city you live in is not necessarily the city you're walking through...
Y: peak population. Huge numbers of people in one place. Touring!
M: thoughts on why we see some cities more than others? Namechecks London, NY, SF, LA, Chicago...
I: thinks it's not about global west/global south - has FEELZ about Istanbul.
Z: power and money. The cities where power is concentrated are cities that attract stories - you do get people telling stories about where they live, even if it's not particularly glamourous, or powerful, or interesting, but they might not be able to get those stories published. Somewhere like London, because of the history, because of the British Empire, because English spread, it's taken up a position int he minds of lots of different people in different countries all around the world. Both good and bad - something you think you've got in common that you can write around, be in conversation with people, and that's kind of why I think certain cities draw attention - it seems very straightforward to me actually.
Y: I think that cultural differnce is actually a big point in writing or reading a city. Of course power is important, those are the cities you fly into, it's easy to get from London to Tokyo, London to Europe - but if you think about Tokyo, it's so completely alien to a Western culture - even me when I lived there - it doesn't even have to be fantasy, it can be regular fiction.
C: There's a problem here, in terms of how an area - how a story - gets privileged. Because it was written in a cultural imperium or about it? Because economic or financial? Because published in that space by people who control means of distribution? Or does it get privileged because it's really good, that touches people in a literary fashion? You can think of places where privilege is clustered more; the idea that one city is inherently more interesting than another is one we might have to talk about - what it is is that it deems itlself more interesting, or other people deem it more interesting, because there are certain remarkers about it - but if you have to live your life in that landscape...
Q: how and when is the city a character in the story, and how do you work it into the overall story?
F: created a fictional city, the character of the city. "I just start writing!" Fictional cities you have to *worldbuild* - people don't have an image.
C: I'm interested in how you named it.
F: Interesting sounds!
C: If a tree falls in a city and there are no characters to observe it... obviously whoever lives there in your story has their perspective on the place, which may not be the authorial perspective, and you can do tensions and dramatic ironies about that, but if your characters don't have a position on their city, then... the author doesn't have a place to stand, and nor does the reader, really - the authorial intention is subverted when the characters get going, and they don't experience your city the way you thought they should.
Y: thinks describing a city as a character is - you need to be able to picture yourself IN your environment that you're writing about, you need to picture your characters there. Need to be comfortable with the environment, the city has to be real - know where the buildings and lines are. All the little questions!
Z: I'm usually writing about an idea or a feeling - when I write about London in this book, I'm not necessarily writing about the London that I live in, I'm writing about the London of Regency novels, Georgia O'Keefe, Patrick O'Brien, saying "the characters I'm writing are important too and have a place here too". Not sure why place more elicits that sort of reaction from me - more inc onversation with other fictionalised cities than with the real thing. Other city that often comes up is Panang, a lot of their relatives live there, and they have a very strong attachment to the place and they romaticise it - when it comes up in stories it means home and family and a certain kind of history, not the place itself. How people feel about cities, and how that inspires stories!
I: I have to see and smell a city to write it, and just know how it all fits together. And if I'm going to write about it I should at least put some bloody money into the economy...! For me the fun bit are the tiny details you don't notice without going there, that give in detail and realness - but that's just me.
M: emotional relationship to cities writing/living in
F: not writing about cities she's ever been to, never has, but does write about her character's feelings about the city - changes with PoV.
C: I would absolutely love to visit all the places on a certain list that gets longer and longer so I can set stories there - I feel like being there is part of what makes it happen, but even if I did, the city that I wote would not be - would never be - that city. It's that busy of the asymptote and Achilles and the Tortoise - even if I write about my home city, which I know best, it never is that city. To sit down and talk to someone about this book that has a city in it, it kind of diminishes it to just the city I wrote, not the layerings and the history and the other perspectives. One of the reasons I love Mieville so much (you really can tell the difference between his first book and The City & The City, in terms of how he understands about how to create cities - as a mature writer, he gave up trying to control every single detail of his city, and instead controlled the experience it was possible to have within the city) - over the years I'm less interested in *how* I do it, and more interested in making space for it to get *done*. I'm a city person - I actually pretty much hate nature - it comes and crawls up your leg and bites you and gives you rashes and sunburn (I: that's my sex life you're talking about; C: that's too much information) - so cities are controlled environments and people have clustered together not just to be with each other but to control their environment more effeciently. End result: density of experience without being bitten.
F: that's an experience!
C: that's the panel down the corridor. :-p
Z: argument with someone online about how the city you write is never the real city - do you have to live in New York to write well about New York? A story about NY written by a NYer is always going to be better, but I felt - if you found a good writer and came out with "NY YA urban fantasy" versus a bad writer from NY... we *have* a fictional New York, there's so much about it - it's so rich, because of the writing - you have a fictional city you can play with and draw from.
I: It's for me not so much what you leave out as what you put in. They said of James Joyce than Dublin could be completely reconstructed in its entirety from the descriptions in Ulysses, which is bollocks, because all we do as writers is draw attention to the things we think you should be paying attention to - we draw attention to details we think are important. Writing is impressionistic not realistic - now critiquing realist painting, hrrgh. [okay I am now bored of dude but he did at leas say "I've gone on far too long!"]
M: class, money & gentrification - how it changes cities.
F: almost geological strata of money, class, what people do for a living - interleave on top of one another, don't really mix very often
C: also interesting what people will love in literature, hate in reality, and vice versa - I ran for office as a city councillor last fall, I live in a fairly historically depressed area of the city, lots of social agencies and homeless people and so on, and people love to put wise and interesting homeless people into city fiction, or maybe not wise, maybe just "broken" or "a little crazy" or "wisely crazy", but if you knock on doors as a candidate, you get a large dose of the middle class that says "please sanitise our streets so we don't have to deal with any of the people we think are very interesting in fiction".
Open up floor to question
white dude: what sort of assumptions the genre has - can see how it might be difficult to write a compelling SFF story in which Edmonton was the central character, but I could easily see writing a series of murder mysteries - the city has to be interesting...
C: Let me answer that on behalf of Edmonton county. What makes a place interesting is often quite unrelated to the place itself - when the brain-sucking aliens come, they're always after the President of the US - how can they /tell/? So in one of my novels, aliens drop sort of... proto-aliens around the planet in a number of places, some of which are populous, one of which is basically Edmonton without a name to it - how would aliens know which is an important places with the shiny lights, and which are less important? How does the story know it's not supposed to be located there? How does the story know it *is* supposed to be loacted there? Some of those factors are external - they're not in the story, they're in our conceptions of where stories should be located.
Q: For me, a city has to do very much with structure, taste, smell, colour - what about you? What senses do you use when you describe the city?
I: all of those
F: same as when describing anything else
Z: I've already said the emotional, book-sense of the city is most important to me. "Things are only real if they're written down"
Q: it seems to me that all the cities you describe as being most interesting to you have high population density and cultural crossroads, but I feel like stories also cluster around places of deep cultural history or darkness. They're not as ancient as Istanbul and don't have populations like London, but what about cities that aren't population-dense but have that history?
I: I've written about Belfast...
Q: Why are cities like Leeds with history treated as peripheral?
I: I can think of a story in Northhampton!
[... and then my laptop died and I stopped transcribing. And that's as many panel notes as I'm going to post today, in the interests of not flooding you all!]
M: How does your experience affect how you read & write cities?
Z: I'm interested, Francis, you say that you like the countryside and you live there, but you write about cities. Why?
F: I didn't mean to, to start with, it just kind of... happened, I built myself a city. It's where the action is, like you said. Hasn't ever really lived in them, has "unhealthy fascination" - very different perspective!
C: the age of the city! Difference in lived experience "in the city I live in, I have underwear older than some of the buildings" - layering, thousands of years of continuous habitation, built historical record. The city you live in is not necessarily the city you're walking through...
Y: peak population. Huge numbers of people in one place. Touring!
M: thoughts on why we see some cities more than others? Namechecks London, NY, SF, LA, Chicago...
I: thinks it's not about global west/global south - has FEELZ about Istanbul.
Z: power and money. The cities where power is concentrated are cities that attract stories - you do get people telling stories about where they live, even if it's not particularly glamourous, or powerful, or interesting, but they might not be able to get those stories published. Somewhere like London, because of the history, because of the British Empire, because English spread, it's taken up a position int he minds of lots of different people in different countries all around the world. Both good and bad - something you think you've got in common that you can write around, be in conversation with people, and that's kind of why I think certain cities draw attention - it seems very straightforward to me actually.
Y: I think that cultural differnce is actually a big point in writing or reading a city. Of course power is important, those are the cities you fly into, it's easy to get from London to Tokyo, London to Europe - but if you think about Tokyo, it's so completely alien to a Western culture - even me when I lived there - it doesn't even have to be fantasy, it can be regular fiction.
C: There's a problem here, in terms of how an area - how a story - gets privileged. Because it was written in a cultural imperium or about it? Because economic or financial? Because published in that space by people who control means of distribution? Or does it get privileged because it's really good, that touches people in a literary fashion? You can think of places where privilege is clustered more; the idea that one city is inherently more interesting than another is one we might have to talk about - what it is is that it deems itlself more interesting, or other people deem it more interesting, because there are certain remarkers about it - but if you have to live your life in that landscape...
Q: how and when is the city a character in the story, and how do you work it into the overall story?
F: created a fictional city, the character of the city. "I just start writing!" Fictional cities you have to *worldbuild* - people don't have an image.
C: I'm interested in how you named it.
F: Interesting sounds!
C: If a tree falls in a city and there are no characters to observe it... obviously whoever lives there in your story has their perspective on the place, which may not be the authorial perspective, and you can do tensions and dramatic ironies about that, but if your characters don't have a position on their city, then... the author doesn't have a place to stand, and nor does the reader, really - the authorial intention is subverted when the characters get going, and they don't experience your city the way you thought they should.
Y: thinks describing a city as a character is - you need to be able to picture yourself IN your environment that you're writing about, you need to picture your characters there. Need to be comfortable with the environment, the city has to be real - know where the buildings and lines are. All the little questions!
Z: I'm usually writing about an idea or a feeling - when I write about London in this book, I'm not necessarily writing about the London that I live in, I'm writing about the London of Regency novels, Georgia O'Keefe, Patrick O'Brien, saying "the characters I'm writing are important too and have a place here too". Not sure why place more elicits that sort of reaction from me - more inc onversation with other fictionalised cities than with the real thing. Other city that often comes up is Panang, a lot of their relatives live there, and they have a very strong attachment to the place and they romaticise it - when it comes up in stories it means home and family and a certain kind of history, not the place itself. How people feel about cities, and how that inspires stories!
I: I have to see and smell a city to write it, and just know how it all fits together. And if I'm going to write about it I should at least put some bloody money into the economy...! For me the fun bit are the tiny details you don't notice without going there, that give in detail and realness - but that's just me.
M: emotional relationship to cities writing/living in
F: not writing about cities she's ever been to, never has, but does write about her character's feelings about the city - changes with PoV.
C: I would absolutely love to visit all the places on a certain list that gets longer and longer so I can set stories there - I feel like being there is part of what makes it happen, but even if I did, the city that I wote would not be - would never be - that city. It's that busy of the asymptote and Achilles and the Tortoise - even if I write about my home city, which I know best, it never is that city. To sit down and talk to someone about this book that has a city in it, it kind of diminishes it to just the city I wrote, not the layerings and the history and the other perspectives. One of the reasons I love Mieville so much (you really can tell the difference between his first book and The City & The City, in terms of how he understands about how to create cities - as a mature writer, he gave up trying to control every single detail of his city, and instead controlled the experience it was possible to have within the city) - over the years I'm less interested in *how* I do it, and more interested in making space for it to get *done*. I'm a city person - I actually pretty much hate nature - it comes and crawls up your leg and bites you and gives you rashes and sunburn (I: that's my sex life you're talking about; C: that's too much information) - so cities are controlled environments and people have clustered together not just to be with each other but to control their environment more effeciently. End result: density of experience without being bitten.
F: that's an experience!
C: that's the panel down the corridor. :-p
Z: argument with someone online about how the city you write is never the real city - do you have to live in New York to write well about New York? A story about NY written by a NYer is always going to be better, but I felt - if you found a good writer and came out with "NY YA urban fantasy" versus a bad writer from NY... we *have* a fictional New York, there's so much about it - it's so rich, because of the writing - you have a fictional city you can play with and draw from.
I: It's for me not so much what you leave out as what you put in. They said of James Joyce than Dublin could be completely reconstructed in its entirety from the descriptions in Ulysses, which is bollocks, because all we do as writers is draw attention to the things we think you should be paying attention to - we draw attention to details we think are important. Writing is impressionistic not realistic - now critiquing realist painting, hrrgh. [okay I am now bored of dude but he did at leas say "I've gone on far too long!"]
M: class, money & gentrification - how it changes cities.
F: almost geological strata of money, class, what people do for a living - interleave on top of one another, don't really mix very often
C: also interesting what people will love in literature, hate in reality, and vice versa - I ran for office as a city councillor last fall, I live in a fairly historically depressed area of the city, lots of social agencies and homeless people and so on, and people love to put wise and interesting homeless people into city fiction, or maybe not wise, maybe just "broken" or "a little crazy" or "wisely crazy", but if you knock on doors as a candidate, you get a large dose of the middle class that says "please sanitise our streets so we don't have to deal with any of the people we think are very interesting in fiction".
Open up floor to question
white dude: what sort of assumptions the genre has - can see how it might be difficult to write a compelling SFF story in which Edmonton was the central character, but I could easily see writing a series of murder mysteries - the city has to be interesting...
C: Let me answer that on behalf of Edmonton county. What makes a place interesting is often quite unrelated to the place itself - when the brain-sucking aliens come, they're always after the President of the US - how can they /tell/? So in one of my novels, aliens drop sort of... proto-aliens around the planet in a number of places, some of which are populous, one of which is basically Edmonton without a name to it - how would aliens know which is an important places with the shiny lights, and which are less important? How does the story know it's not supposed to be located there? How does the story know it *is* supposed to be loacted there? Some of those factors are external - they're not in the story, they're in our conceptions of where stories should be located.
Q: For me, a city has to do very much with structure, taste, smell, colour - what about you? What senses do you use when you describe the city?
I: all of those
F: same as when describing anything else
Z: I've already said the emotional, book-sense of the city is most important to me. "Things are only real if they're written down"
Q: it seems to me that all the cities you describe as being most interesting to you have high population density and cultural crossroads, but I feel like stories also cluster around places of deep cultural history or darkness. They're not as ancient as Istanbul and don't have populations like London, but what about cities that aren't population-dense but have that history?
I: I've written about Belfast...
Q: Why are cities like Leeds with history treated as peripheral?
I: I can think of a story in Northhampton!
[... and then my laptop died and I stopped transcribing. And that's as many panel notes as I'm going to post today, in the interests of not flooding you all!]
no subject
There are people who live in my city and write about it who seem to see a quite different side of it. Always a bit strange to read.