Today’s guest is Gabriel Valjan, author of the Roma Series from Winter Goose Publishing; (Turning To Stone, Book 4 of the Roma Series, was released just last month). Gabriel says that in his travels, he came to appreciate and enjoy Italy’s diversity, and the Roma Series presents an authentic representation of contemporary Italy. He writes:
Writers transmit perceptions, real or imagined. Writers convey their time, for better or worse. In our shared language, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are very different writers, though they both took the measure of racism and slavery. To step outside our language and culture requires special consideration and writers should act like archaeologists; they should respect what is unearthed and interpret differences with humility. Readers should also understand that every writer’s imagination is a foreign country. Time and effort, patience and trust are required. Through words, a writer creates experiences and, through the world created between the pages, readers can discover a diversity of perspectives that are, at times, individual yet communal because of a common bond: our humanity.
You can learn more about Gabriel on his website and blog, and follow him on Twitter.
Import Foreign Cultures Into Your Fiction
I disagree with the advice that writers should write what they know. In fact, every good story requires a con. Fiction writers are like criminals without the crime, luring readers into conflict with characters they like, hate, or distrust. As artists of the written word, we are always pulling off the literary heist by deception and illusion. The stakes are simply higher when a writer decides to venture into unfamiliar territory.
Donald Maass devoted a chapter to Time and Place in Writing the Breakout Novel. He discusses world building, a technique familiar to sci-fi and fantasy authors, though writers of historical fiction also build worlds when they recreate history. If you have not read the chapter, Patricia C. Wrede offers a checklist for sci-fi and fantasy authors.
Importing foreign culture into your fiction is another form of world building, regardless of genre. It’s risky, but if done well, your world becomes a seamless reality. English-speaking readers long familiar with UK authors don’t experience cultural dissonance because there’s a common language. Aside from issues of orthography and slang (Brighton Rock or Clockwork Orange anyone?) readers know that our relatives across the pond prefer tea to coffee and that football is a completely different sport. Within the U.S. there are other cultures that demand attention but are not alien. Readers of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries don’t blink when they hear African-American slang or see Easy’s perspective on institutional racism. In addition to a rich immigrant past, America’s changing demographic has encouraged publishers to translate Latin American writers, such as Isabel Allende, Paulo Coelho, and Gabriel García Márquez. The catalog keeps growing.
Aside from this catalog, literature in translation for English-speaking readers has had, traditionally, limited shelf space devoted to French, German, and Russian classics. But publishers today have been introducing English-speaking readers to a wider range of cultures and perspectives. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy reacquainted readers with noir – an American literary genre – with a Scandinavian twist.
As to American writers, unless they’ve been an expatriate, a foreign correspondent, or had a unique experience (Shōgun’s James Clavell was in a Japanese POW camp) few writers have made the leap across the cultural divide. Yet writing foreign culture into your fiction doesn’t require citizenship papers. It only requires resourcefulness and imagination.
I don’t believe in hard and fast rules, so I’ll make suggestions, some of which you may find helpful.
- Stereotypes? We don’t need no stinkin’ stereotypes!
Remember Sheriff JW Pepper on holiday in Thailand in The Man With The Golden Gun? An American in Paris who wears the loud Hawaiian shirt, speaks with a Texan accent, and throws a hissy fit because nobody speaks English and his burrito is not authentic Mexican food is an obvious and insulting caricature. So imagine how a foreigner would feel if he or she were to read your creation in translation and see his countrymen portrayed in equally broad terms. Not all Italians are Tony Soprano or Joey Tribbiani, and not all French people are snooty, or started smoking Gauloises in the crib. Having your plot center around iconic tourist spots is another form of stereotyping. Just as there is more to America than the Statue of Liberty, so there is more to Rome than the Coliseum and The Vatican.
- It is what you say and how you say it.
Using foreign expressions does not guarantee authenticity. Readers can suspend disbelief even if you translate everything your characters say into English. If you do use a foreign expression, then attach significance to it for the sake of character development or to advance the plot. And have a native speaker verify what your characters say for context and accuracy. Let context enable the reader to infer the meaning. Words your foreign characters employ do matter, as do their gestures. The flick of the hand under the chin is a vulgar expression here, but in Italy it is simply impolite, used only among people you know to mean ‘Meh, I don’t care.’
[pullquote]We say ‘Break a leg’ in theatre, whereas Italians say, ‘In bocca al lupo,’ or, ‘Into the wolf’s mouth.’ The response is a tad sinister: ‘Crepi il lupo!’ ‘May the wolf croak!’[/pullquote]
- Try a little empathy.
Like life, differences are points of celebration and conflict. Alter your perspective. Start with daily experiences, with what you take for granted. Americans are used to hearing ‘God Bless America’ at the end of every political speech, but to most Europeans that closure sounds bizarre, especially for a country that claims separation of Church and State. Cultural traditions around authority, body language, fashion, meals, marriage, and death are fertile subjects for exploration. Example? We wear black for mourning, whereas Asian cultures wear white. One last example — though we love it, cappuccino after dinner is considered toxic to digestion to most Italians.
- It’s as easy as ABC.
Read in translation — publishers today have hired some of the world’s best translators working. Watch foreign films. Travel. Attempt a foreign language. Every language is a treasure. This video, for example, shows regional differences in Spanish vocabulary and accent (warning: some racy language). A foreigner can watch Breaking Bad and be simultaneously amazed at Walter’s ingenuity and appalled at his situation (though they know it happens, the idea of financial ruin from medical bills confounds most Europeans). We can watch Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo to understand just how byzantine Italian politics really is, and how the British import, the House of Cards’ Frank Underwood would have had a formidable opponent in the late Giulio Andreotti.
Writing culture into your fiction is a rich experience on multiple levels and far from impossible. As food feeds the body, diverse perspectives challenge the mind and emotions, so writing culture into our creative fiction enriches our understanding of each other.
What cultures are woven into your fiction? Have you held back from attempting to write a foreign culture into your work? Why?
As a reader, do you enjoy learning about other cultures in novels? Share some of your favorite titles in comments.
Gabriel–
The un-ignorable reality of a global economy (not to mention the Tower-of-Babel atmosphere that characterizes much of urban America) makes your post especially timely and important. I was in a Starbucks yesterday, among people speaking three or more different Asian languages. I was in no position to be sure.
Imagine writing about Miami or LA or anywhere along the Mexican/American border, and excluding any reference to Hispanic people and culture–goodbye credibility.
But your post is important to me personally, as a caution to do my best to avoid clichés. I don’t speak Spanish, and must rely on friends whose first language was Spanish to help me with my next suspense novel. It’s set in gulf-coast Florida, and a central character is an undocumented alien from Mexico. The same will be true in the novel that follows. Both these characters commit criminal acts, and your post will help me to be especially hard on myself about getting the details right. No movie-based stereotypes, no retreaded gestures and expressions. Maybe this is especially true in dealing with characters who are criminals: it’s all too easy to lift details from pop culture.
Thanks a lot. Posts like yours help keep me honest.
Thank you for the kind words, Barry. A forum such as Writer Unboxed is a treasure trove for writers. You are correct that writers should be honest and do justice to other cultures. Should you write about Florida, for example, or Mexico, you will learn that Cubans and Mexican have their own slang, ways of phrasing things that you would never learn in a classroom. Dig in and have fun doing historical research. In the Roma Series, I found one way to ‘show’ culture was to include authentic regional cuisine. My strongest advice, however, is to find yourself what I call a ‘cultural editor’ — a native speaker of the type of Spanish spoken wherever you situate your story. I hope that you checked out the link to spoken Spanish in the article. Best of luck to you, Barry, and let us all know how the writing goes for you.
My Icelandic-Canadian grandparents instilled in me a fierce passion for their culture. And so I do my best to share what I know in my writing. For example, I have used Icelandic names for my characters.
Icelandic-Canadian is different from Icelandic culture. I travelled to Iceland in 2007 and, though most tourists stay in the South, I went north to visit distant relatives.
If you would like to have a taste of Icelandic culture I highly recommend Voices: A Reykjavik thriller by Arnaldur Indridason.
Thank you for writing in, Leanne. Iceland has a long literary tradition that traces back to saga-literature. Readers new to Scandi-noir would not only enjoy Indridason but find delight in authors Ragnar Jonasson and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Your use of last names in your own writing is a nice cultural touch, since Icelanders use either patronymics/matronymics for last names, meaning that one adds a suffix to the first name of one of the parents
Thanks Gabriel. I have a secondary character in the novel I’m working on who is Italian, who lives in Paris and works in the publishing industry in the 30s. It’s necessary for a plot line that he be strikingly handsome—in fact, close to a personification of the “tall, dark and handsome” cliché—but I don’t want to reduce him to any kind of empty “type.”
I’m keeping your advice in mind so that I don’t limit him to a shell character, or just a means to move the plot forward.
Tom, thank you for writing in. An Italian in 30s Paris, eh? Alan Furst has a 12-book series called Night Soldiers set in Paris, with various nationalities as heroes throughout the volumes. An Italian of that era would have had definite opinions about Mussolini and the Fascists, so perhaps take a look at Maurizio De Giovanni’s Commissario Ricciardi mystery series. Don’t forget that there are plenty of blonde and blue-eyed Italians. Wish you well in your writing.
Thank you so much for this post. I believe it’s all about understanding the nuance in different cultures – that, and the empathy that you so beautifully described. I suppose the most difficult thing is having the wisdom to remain students at all times, and to realise that all we can do is portray the multifaceted aspects of cultures in which we are only guests as best we can. Lovely advice.
Thank you, Topaz. ‘Empathy’ is the keyword and from there comes openness, compassion and wisdom. The difficulty, in my opinion, is resisting the urge to ‘fix’ or change that which we do not understand. Difference is simply different, but all the same: human. Thanks again.
Gabriel,
I’ve lived in south Florida for the last ten years and the cultural diversity is one of the best things about it. I come from a predominantly mexican american part of Texas, so moving here and learning there were other forms of Spanish shocked me. The first time my Puerto Rican mother in law asked me to wash dishes, I was like, “Excuse me?! What did you just say to me?” because that’s not what “fregar” means where I come from!
But I think all words are beautiful so I just try to soak it all up. I’ve even learned some Portuguese and Creole and I can tell whether someone is Cuban, Dominican, Haitian, whatever, just by listening to them speak.
Recently, I diversified the kids in a series I am writing. I originally had a very generic group that I thought could reach a broader audience, but then I read an article about Latino kids not relating to protagonists in the books they read. I went back and embraced my character’s true identities-no washing out, no sugar coating. They are a bunch of poor kids, so some of it is hard, but the story is still funny, and the monsters are still silly.
And if I’m that fascinated by the different people around me, maybe kids will be, too.
Thanks for your list of suggestions, they will be helpful!
Celeste,
Thank you for sharing. I’m still laughing at what your in-law said. Guess, you’ll never look at those dishes quite the same way again. You are right: language is beautiful and it is what makes us human. You must have an excellent ear for dialog. Excellent that you did your research on Latino kids not relating to protagonists — the assumptions we make, right? I’m glad that you caught that ‘mistake’ early. We all make them.
I heard an Italian say “que caldo” (what a soup) instead of “que calor” (it is so hot (weather)). For those reading this: In Italian caldo = warmth, in Spanish = soup. A friend made a classic mistake, thinking fast on his feet for a cognate in English, when he said, “Estoy embarazado.”
He had just emphasized his pregnancy instead of his embarrassment.
I’m particularly fascinated with bilingual pets — yes, they do exist. There’s a minor character to accompany the kids in your series.
¡Buena suerte!
Gabriel