Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

These days, most people who make a living from writing don’t make their living from writing. What I mean is that most people who earn enough money to live off of from being writers don’t earn that money exclusively from peddling words: they bring home their bread by teaching or speaking in some other capacity in public. To get those gigs, however, it is not enough to be a writer: you must be a Writing Expert (preferably with a TM). The best way to establish yourself as a Writing Expert (TM) is to prescribe certain ways of living and writing. To get those ways accepted, they should have a veneer of common sense and a slight outsider-edge. (After all, what’s a creative writing class good for if it doesn’t give its students a frisson of rebellion?)

An excellent example of How to Be a Writing Expert (TM) is this article from an “assistant lecturer in Creative Writing”: Does a room of one’s own really help you write a great novel? Sure it totally misses the point about Woolf’s work by ignoring the fact that historically women have not had the time, space, or independence which allows one to think and put words on paper, but it certainly serves the purpose of establishing Matt Shoard as an authority on how people ought to write!

Here’s the thing: comfort breeds complacency; rural bliss breeds The Lost Symbol . . . Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls “an occasional revelation”.

Ah yes, the good old Romantic valorisation of poverty. If one person who wasn’t miserable wrote poorly, then misery must be a necessity for decent writing! (Actually, I have it on very good authority that China Miéville has a lovely flat, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.)

What’s really impressive here is how the “assistant lecturer in Creative Writing” manages to position himself in opposition to the fluffy bourgeois (who would want to have a retreat in the countryside) without actually having to suffer the loss of control over one’s life that poverty entails:

Personally, I like to hold “hungry” creative writing seminars through lunch, far from a vending machine, at the cold end of campus with the heating down. You can almost see Dan Brown leaving and David Foster Wallace taking his place. “I want to smell the breath of a stranger as he speaks my name,” wrote one student this week. They’re no more prolific, but they’re gutsier. Discomfort cures overwriting.

Oh the heroic young man, holding off from his trip to the cafeteria until he has finished his day’s writing! How brave! How, like, real! (I hope none of his students have trouble with hypoglycemia.)

I’d rather not smell the breath of a stranger speaking my name because when they’re that close, they’re that much closer to attacking me. Because I am a woman, I walk through the world (even if I’m just running to the store at 10 pm for a bottle of whiskey) with that discomfort. Because I am an Aspie, I hear all the time that I need to be “cured”, that my way of thinking and approaching the world is invalid. That is real discomfort. These seminars-before-eating and cheap flats (if chosen) are at best self-indulgence, at worst appropriation of the very real struggles of the oppressed.

Oh well, at least we agree about coffee. Too many writers on this side of the Atlantic try to make due with tea, and that’s just wrong. (See, I’m an expert too. Hire me?)

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Recently, Shared Worlds asked five well-known authors of speculative fiction the following question: “What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?”. China Miéville‘s answer at least comes as no surprise:

Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

It’s worth noting that not one of the authors, even those from the US, chose a US city. Certainly, I couldn’t make  an argument for any of the cities I’ve lived in within its borders. Seattle is too much on the edge of now, New York and San Francisco too marked by a too recent past.

The cities for which I could make an argument are in Asia. There’s Tokyo of course with its high-tech towers, trains, and phones as well as shrines and forests for the fantasy element; rearranging the syllables gets you Kyoto, where you have a similar level of technology as well as more famous shrines and temples, most of which have been rebuilt to appear ancient. Nagasaki would be my choice for a ghost story; its violent history did not begin with the dropping of the bomb. 

Moving on to the mainland, Kuala Lumpur could be supported as a spec-fic city for similar reasons: there are the tremendous heights of the Petronas Towers and the rain forest of Bukit Nanas. In Cambodia, Siem Reap has its proximity to the ruins of a lost civilization, which presents all kinds of story possibilities; the ever-present tourists, and the contrast between their lifestyles and the lives of the local residents provide for the possibility of sub-plots addressing social inequality.

As settings for speculative fiction, however, all of these pale in comparison to Shanghai. The obvious SF zone is Pudong with its glistening skyscrapers and the retro-future Oriental Pearl Tower. Across the Huangpu (and who knows what creatures might rise from that river, resulting perhaps from experiments conducted by the naval ships that pass?), towers behind the old colonial buildings of the Bund appear to have been fitted with lasers. Contrasting the lives of migrant workers and residents of Shanghai’s older districts with these glistening futurismic areas provides the same sort of opportunity for addressing social inequality that I mentioned in Siem Reap, only it is heightened by the general dystopian air created by the PRC‘s authoritarian government. Moreover, like so many of these other cities, Shanghai possesses the temples and shrines that can serve as entrances for powerful and fantastic entities.

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