Shelly Li, a Writer to Watch, and the Issue of Separating Writer from Story

July 9th, 2010

Shelly Li is about the most talented teen I’ve ever known in my life, and I’m proud to call her a friend.   She’s 17 and just sold her first novel and has been regularly selling science fiction to high-profile professional markets like the Futures section of Nature.

I want to do two things here with this post.   First, I want to plug Shelly and put her on your radar if you’ve never heard of her.   She’s going to be around for a long, long time.   Discover her now.

Second, I want to discuss writing about controversial topics and how strange and inappropriate it is to confuse the writer and the story they’ve written, and I want to use one of Shelly’s stories as a launch pad.

As a writer, I like to learn new things, try on different perspectives, and explore a variety of issues I find interesting or important.   Sometimes in my work there will be a character a lot like me who will be my mouthpiece.   Sometimes not.   And sometimes the story doesn’t even reflect my worldview at all, but I want to just look at things differently for a while.   It makes sense not to read too much into a story about the author, because you just don’t know.   Some people think they can read a story and tell if someone is racist or sexist, for instance, and while the story probably provides clues, they might be totally wrong in the cases of very skilled writers doing a subtle point of view trick, or bad writers using biased research materials.   A friend read one of my stories once and told me I had to be in love, but I was in between girlfriends and was not.   I know a popular writer who got turned down from Clarion West because his horror story was so horrible he had to be kept away from other students (and I just thought writing a horrifying horror story meant you were a good writer!).   I’ve seen enough people get it so wrong that I rant about it from time to time, and have little patience with folks who claim magic powers to know what someone is like from their writing, or in fact their art in general.   Some artists who create scary stuff are nice, polite, and friendly.   Some scary looking people create the sweetest things.

Now, back to Shelly.   I’m not going to assume anything about her religious beliefs — I don’t know them and we haven’t discussed them.   All I know is that it’s something she thinks about and discusses sometimes.

Shelly wrote an interesting short short story for Nature called “The End of God.”   First of all, Nature only buys very short stories, so they are not usually excessively deep explorations of a topic.   I almost think of short short stories as jokes.   They have a set-up and a punch line.   They need not be funny, but they’re so short that they have to have a quickly grasped point and an impact to take away.   Shelly’s has that and it works, I think.   Appreciate that they’re really hard to do well and if they make you feel anything, think a bit, and stick with you any length of time, they’ve succeeded at some level.

Shelly’s story makes out atheists to be well-meaning but oppressive bad guys, at least from the perspective of the male protagonist.   I point this out because in comments at the site and at PZ Myer’s atheist-oriented blog, the main character is made out to be a “she” — already people confuse the writer and the story.   Especially with first person perspective, readers identify the author as the main character.   It’s a short story, the “sir” in the first line of dialogue makes it clear…but I digress.

What amazes and disappoints me are how many comments amount to personal attacks on Shelly, or assumptions about her own religious belief.   Some are amazingly condescending, suggesting that when she gets older she’ll gain deeper wisdom about religious issues.

You can’t read one short story by an author and know for sure anything that they believe about the world!

I myself have a story about faith I’ve wanted to write for years, but the project requires a lot of research and I haven’t gotten around to it.   I suspect that readers of that story would be surprised to discover that I was an atheist.   Faith is antithetical to reason, but it provides strength to people and I want to explore that in this story.   We’ll see if I get around to it.   I also want to write a novel called GUNWORLD, and I’m not a big gun guy, but I digress again…

Most of the time, especially when you read a body of an author’s work, you figure out their worldview and what they think about things.   I think we have a pretty good idea about what Hemingway admired and what he feared.   Tarantino is obviously a foot fetishist.   I think it’s clear that Stephen King is clearly a murdering maniac…wait, this doesn’t work all the time!

Anyway, it’s hard enough for a new writer to take criticism of their work.   It’s crazy hard to take criticism of themselves, and it’s unfair to offer it.

I’ve heard stories from editors about a writer who finds fat women attractive and apparently puts plus-sized gals into his books.   An appropriate comment from an editor might be to advise him to slim the women down, at least some of the time, if he wants to find a more receptive audience (although a niche audience can be powerfully good, too, if large enough and faithful enough).   It would be horrible to tease him for his preferences or to tell them that he’s a weird pervert.   Or consider the case of a writer wanting to explore the mind of a chubby chaser and this was a one off thing and being accused of a sexual preference he doesn’t have.   Straight writers do write about gay characters, and vice versa, and it’s ok.   We follow our muses.

I remember having a talk at a convention with Tom Godwin’s daughter.   Godwin wrote “The Cold Equations,” a classic of hard science fiction.   In the story, a young innocent girl bravely commits suicide to save the lives of other people.   Apparently Godwin, whose early drafts of the story did not have the girl die, got a lot of flak and was accused of hating women on the basis of this story, and it pained him very much according to his daughter.

So next time you’re going to rip on an author for views or attitudes you think they have, think twice.   By all means rip on a story if you think it deserves some harsh criticism, but don’t be so sure you know what the author thinks.   Sometimes we mean just what we say, and sometimes we’re turning things around to get a new perspective.

In any case, check out some of Shelly’s stories at Nature or elsewhere and look out for her novel if you’re into YA.

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