I Don't 'write' My Characters, I Just Watch Them Do Stupid Shit And Write Up The Incident Report.

Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad Al-Kaysani,

Proud Citizen of the Zirid Dynasty: Part 2

Ok, so now we can confidently say that the Zirid Dynasty makes sense as the homeland of Yusuf. I was going to get straight into the history of the Zirid Dynasty but honestly, there's nothing straight about this blog. I wrote one line about the city of Kairouan being founded by the Umayyad's on the site of a former Byzantine outpost and came to the conclusion that some more context couldn't hurt. Let's zoom back out for a minute and get a feel for some of the regions historic context, it's relationship with "Italy", and also get some context for "the Franks" feeling of entitlement towards the Levant.

Keep your eye on the city of Carthage as we go, that's modern day Tunis. Phoenicians founded the city in 814 BC and it became the centre of the Carthaginian Empire. Carthage was the trading hub of the Ancient Mediterranean and was an incredibly rich city.

This is probably where a textbook would start, ignoring the Amazigh peoples that inhabited the region for at least 9,000 years before the Phoenicians sailed up the coast. We'll come back to that another day. For now, have a look at Phoenicia itself on the map. Doesn't that region look familiar? People sailing around the Mediterranean and claiming other parts of it was nothing new in 1096 AD.

The rise of the Carthaginian Empire and the rise of the Roman Empire brought them into conflict. This lead to the Maghrebi region of the Carthaginian Empire becoming the Roman province, Africa Proconsularis.*

*This link is not objective and contains blatant historical bias but it was the most accurate, least biased one I could find.

In the 4th century Christianity began to spread throughout the Roman Empire after Constantine I co-signed the Edict of Milan. He was the first Christian Roman Emperor, and he founded the new Roman capital city, Constantinople (now Istanbul not Constantinople).

Christianisation was messy and complicated. There was a rich diversity of indigenous religious beliefs throughout the regions beforehand, despite the uniform picture painted by the term "pagan", and the early adoption of Christianity was varied in its sincerity. But that's a whole other story. It seemed relevant to note that it's rarely ever as simple as "us" and "them".

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, Africa Proconsularis became the Kingdom of the Vandals. Note that the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire) was still going strong. The fall marked the beginning of the Middle Ages, also known as the "the Dark Ages".

The Kingdom of the Vandals was conquered by the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century, when it became the Exarchate of Africa. The Byzantines held it until the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the 7th century. (Why yes indeed, those are both just links to Wikipedia. The other articles I could find were all a mess. The wiki entries at least acknowledge the existence of the regions indigenous peoples and both entries have referenced sources.)

As the Byzantine Empire expands and contracts during the Middle Ages you can see that it extends as far west as Carthage and southern Spain in the 6th century, that it includes Anatolia and the Levant in the 5th and 6th centuries, and that it recovered a portion of Anatolia and the Levant in the 12th century following the First Crusade.

In the 7th century Islam spread throughout the Arab peninsula, (the prophet Muhammad lived from 571-632 AD). Over the course of the next few hundred years Islam spread from the Arabian peninsula as far west as the Iberian peninsula and as far east as northern India.

By the late 7th century "Tunisia" was part of the Umayyad Caliphate. The caliphate mostly kept existing governments and cultures intact and administered through governors and financial officers in order to collect taxes. Arabic became the main administrative language. Non-Muslim subjects paid a special tax. Although many Christians migrated out of the region following the Muslim conquest there was a sizeable Christian community up until possibly as late as the 14th century.

And here we are, we've reached the 10 image per post limit so we'll finish working our way up to the 11th century next time!

Hopefully, dear reader, this gives you a slightly richer sense of the First Crusades historic context, some sense of "Tunisia's" historic cultural influences, and a sense of "Tunisia's" significance within the wider Mediterranean world.

maps: 1, 2, 3, 4

Proud Citizen of the Zirid Dynasty: Part 1

Your job is to guard a button that no one may push. Things get complex when both legendary heroes and villains arrive to attempt to push the mysterious button. Everyone seems to have a different idea about what the button does, but they all want to push it.

I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip

Using a random fic of mine as example..

The left example: ✅✅✅

The right example: ❌❌❌

Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!

If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

Does this story need to be written down? Is it not enough to have it simply live in my head?

One thing White Collar gets absolutely right and very few other shows do, is that people React to guns.

The reaction varies, depending on their level of training/comfort with firearms, but there's no cool guy bravado* when someone pulls a gun, especially not from Neal. When he sees a gun he always always always reacts like things just got very serious, this is no longer fun and games.

And you know what? Yes please. It also ups the stakes for us when a character reacts to someone pulling a gun on them, and it's also highly realistic. I just really appreciate it that guns aren't a prop to signify "antagonist" but a weapon that should and does elicit fear.

* except for when Kate pulled a gun on Peter, and even then his reaction was warranted.

There's a post floating around the tumbls to the tune of "stop writing your characters like they're winning at therapy." The overall thrust of this "advice" seems to be that it's not interesting characterization or good fiction to write characters who already have good self-awareness and the ability to communicate with the people around them.  The strong implication of the post was that self-awareness and therapy are boring, so don't put them to paper.  

There's another post that's a kind of follow up, talking in a more nuanced way about how characters, like real-life people, may well have extreme difficulty 1) identifying the emotions they're having, much less 2) being able to talk about them, or 3) being willing or feeling safe enough to say it aloud.  It's not such an intentionally quelling piece of direction about how to write effectively, but it still comes down on the side of "conflict makes for more interesting reading in the end." 

The other implication of "this isn't good writing" is that those kinds of stories do not hold value, and that conflict has a very narrow meaning.

It's true that people grow up in all kinds of situations that affect their understanding of their feelings, much less their ability to communicate them or ask for help. Those folks may struggle alone for a long time before they are in a place where it's safe to slow down and think things through.  Some folks may never get to that place, and it's important to read their stories and struggles.

It's true, too, that there are people who are naturally more self aware, who are able to speak up for themselves regardless of any past trauma or any ongoing anxiety disorder or whatever other thing might have otherwise hampered their insight and communication about their needs and desires. Their current success doesn't mean their story isn't worth penning.

Here's what the "don't write it, it's not realistic" crowd and the "don't write it, most people don't have these skills" folks fail to answer: why is it wrong to write and read stories where the characters behave like self-actualized people who love themselves enough to spend the time doing the work getting over their shit, and who love and respect the people around them enough to communicate clearly with them?  Why is it wrong for a writer to give a reader a lens into a world where some people reach a point in their life where they don't have to deal with drama, understand why they feel a certain way, and take affirmative steps to solve their problems?  Why is it wrong for some writers and readers to want a story where there isn't conflict, and where there is a calm, peaceful ending for everybody involved?

"Conflict's more interesting!" 

Maybe, but it also contributes to stress, anxiety, depression, physical health issues, sleep disruption, anger issues, violence, crime, self-harm, and suicide.  Acting like everyone ought to be writing conflict instead of healthy communication is racist, ableist, and classist as hell-- pretty mean-spirited, too, if all you care about is the drama.  It's also incredibly intellectually lazy.

It's pretty rude to assume you know what all writers ought to write, or what all readers must read.

People write for all kinds of reasons, and people read looking for all kinds of things-- mirrors of their own life, but also windows with views onto something they might not have been able to imagine before reading your story. 

Some people have already been through the wringer and did the work, and want to write a world where they can remind ourselves and other people that it's possible to do the work-- even when it's hard-- and end up on the other side of things in a better place.  We've been through conflict, and we don't want anyone else to have to go through it, either. We want to share our tools and coping mechanisms and reframing devices so that others who are having a hard time while they are reading have at least one positive view that gives the reader permission.  Stories that write about winning at therapy are important, because they say this: 

"Go ahead, you're allowed.  Acknowledge that what's happening to you isn't fair or healthy.  Admit that you deserve better, because you know that the character in this story is like you and you can see clearly for them what's still hard to accept for yourself.  Understand that you're not a failure for having strong feelings. Know that it's not selfish to take care of yourself and to read the books/see the therapists/erect the boundaries/take the meds you need in order to feel like life can be better."

Getting better and staying that way isn't boring or unrealistic, and neither is writing about it. One of the hardest stories I ever wrote was a story about communicating about mismatched needs. When it was done, I reread it and saw-- oh, I need to do the thing I just put my characters through the therapeutic exercise of figuring out for themselves.  It was embarassing, to know myself better through fiction writing than through therapy-- but the process of writing let me figure out on paper what I wanted to happen. The kick in the teeth of realizing it wouldn't happen was what let me make a hard decision-- that my story gave me permission to make.  And then I published the fic, which was more embarrassing because there were several folks IRL who realized what it meant for my offline life. I published it anyway, and few years ago, someone read the fic and commented something along the lines of:  "I'm going to therapy and making X decision because of reading this fic." 

My uninteresting story about a character telling another character that they needed to talk some things through and get help?  It helped someone else.  And it was a popular story, because lots of people who read it understood-- the struggle to understand yourself and your needs is one of the hardest conflicts all of us face, and coming out on the other end of it is a victory that we deserve to share with others, in the hope that they'll see a way through too. 

So, dearly beloveds-- please be assured that you have at least one writer's permission to write boring, uninteresting stories about people who know how to solve their own problems and put on their own emotional oxygen mask before helping others.  I, for one, can't wait to read your story and tell you how much I enjoyed it, and how happy I am that you're sharing that kind of success and the hope it might give to others.  

Some truths about the publishing industry because I certainly got blindsided when going in. Now I'm so broken by this industry I struggle to encourage aspiring writers lmao

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

“In general…there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”

— Anne Lamott