Today’s post marks the beginning of our guest post series! We started having guest post slots way back when we celebrated our one year anniversary on here, but recently we’ve figured, why not expand that? So here we are!
This post is written by Anya Leigh Josephs, author of the upcoming Queen of All (9th June), and is a fascinating look at just what goes into fantasy worldbuilding, particularly the language used to describe your LGBT characters.
So, get yourself some lunch (or a coffee/tea/other hot beverage, depending on your time zone), and have a read of this!
Many writers of second-world fantasy have talked about the way world-building can feel like an endless rabbit hole. As soon as you start to consider one aspect of your brand-new, invented world (“I wonder what kind of money they use?”), you discover a hundred more questions (“what does the economy look like?” “Is it based more around coinage, or around barter?” “Are there different monetary systems in different regions?” “If so, how does exchange work?”). If you aren’t careful, you can spend all your time hashing these questions out for one throwaway line in chapter eleven, and none of your time actually, y’know, writing.
This can be more than just an intellectual puzzle, though—because the language of fantasy world building can be more than just fun decoration for an imaginative world. For some fantasy writers, like me, our work deals with important issues of identity. That leads to a new struggle. How do you describe who someone is when you’re making up your own world? That is, how do you balance depicting the world you’ve invented and relating to readers from the real world?
There are basically three ways for an author to tackle this, as far as I can tell. One is to borrow terminology from the real world. After all, second-world fantasy isn’t written entirely in an invented language—readers have to be able to understand it, and many social constructs of our world appear in many fantasy books! Another way is to try to describe the experience without using specific language. A third way is to make up your own terminology.
I’ll use my upcoming debut novel, Queen of All, as an example. It’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that, if she were a real person who lived in our world, the main character Jena would probably describe herself as a lesbian. She experiences romantic and sexual attraction only to women, has a crush on another girl, and knows she’s not interested in being romantically involved with men.
But in Jena’s world, there’s no island of Lesbos (the Greek island where our word “lesbian” takes its name). A word like “queer” or “homosexual,” in addition to being offensive to some members of the real-life LGBTQ+ community, would sound too modern or too clinical in this fantasy world. Plus, if I’m going to use just one piece of real terminology, that brings up all kinds of questions of etymology and history that I’d rather just avoid. What about other identity categories? Where did this word come from, and how did Jena—who lives in an isolated farming community—learn it?
So for my book, borrowing real-world language wouldn’t work. That’s not to say it’s the wrong way to describe marginalized identities in a fantasy setting. A lot of times it can work very well, and it’s potentially extremely powerful for people who are used to being erased to see the words they use to describe themselves appear in plain language on the page! This is often done in more contemporary fantasy, like Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart A Doorway, where a character says, in so many words, “I’m asexual.” I’m thrilled that we’re starting to see more of this kind of explicit representation of queer identities. It just didn’t feel right for my book, with how fantastical and different I wanted the world to feel.
Next is the option of just describing what a person is or experiences, without actually coming up with a name for this. For a long time, this was how I tackled Jena’s identity in Queen of All. I described her feelings for her crush, her revulsion and discomfort with the idea of marrying a man—even her sense of being excluded and different than her peers as things that could help a reader recognize her as a lesbian without using the word.
This technique often works brilliantly in second-world fantasy. I’m thinking of N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, in which a secondary character is a transgender woman. Her identity is never explicitly stated, but we hear that she was assigned male at birth and see some of the steps she’s taken to transition. The character’s identity is handled very skillfully—but it’s also tangential to the book’s main plot. If a reader were to miss the fact that this character is trans, or misinterpret something about it, they could still appreciate the book. That’s not true for Queen of All, where Jena’s identity is central to the character and the story.
That meant I had to take into consideration whether I felt like I could describe her experiences well enough that every reader would get it—and I know that, whether because of innate bigotry or a lack of familiarity with underrepresented groups, readers often miss the fact that characters are part of a marginalized group. Without knowing something about Jena’s orientation, Queen of All wouldn’t make a lot of sense to readers. And, though I knew I couldn’t make every reader who would prefer to ignore the existence of LGBTQ people appreciate my work, I wanted to give myself the best shot at being clear.
So that left trying to come up with words of my own to describe queerness in a world with a totally different history and culture. No easy task—especially because my main character doesn’t know any other queer folks at the beginning of the book, and it’s not something she discusses openly with other people. Also, in a problem familiar to many writers of fantasy, there are multiple different cultures in this world, which intersect in complex ways.
I’m proud of the language I ultimately found to discuss Jena’s identity in this book. I created a term that reflects the unique world-building of my story, while also making it clear how Jena identifies to readers. In future books in the series, there will be more queer characters and identities, and I’m using my created fantasy language, which is based on ancient Hebrew, to develop the terms they use in a culture more accepting of queerness, but still outside of our own world’s history.
There is not one perfect solution to how to approach choosing language and world building in order to best depict queer identities. These decisions can feel very fraught for writers that are working to represent marginalized people in a careful and caring way. However, as more and more LGBTQ characters appear in fiction—Queen of All is one of several hundred YA fantasy books with lesbian characters forthcoming this year—each writer will bear a little less of the burden of representation, and readers can expect to see themselves existing and thriving in our world and in the worlds of our imaginations.
About Anya
Anya Josephs was raised in North Carolina and now lives and works in New York City, where she teaches foster youth pursuing college degrees. When not working or writing, she can be found seeing a lot of plays, reading doorstopper fantasy novels, or worshipping her cat, Sycorax. Her writing can be found in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, The Green Briar Review, the Necronomicon Anthology, SPARK, UnLaced, Prouud2BeMe, The Huffington Post, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Poets Reading the News. Her debut novel, Queen of All, a fantasy for young adults, is forthcoming from Zenith Press.
2 Comments
TheKnightsWhoSayBook
Great post, excited to see how this works out in the book
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