Ok so I was looking for historical slang terms for penis (gotta be era-accurate when writing vintage dick jokes) and I came across….something
some linguist compiled a literal timeline of genitalia slang–a cock compendium, if you will–that dates back all the way to the fucking 13th CENTURY. This motherfucker tracked the evolution of erection etymology through 800+ years, because if he doesn’t do it, who else will? Thank you for your service, Johnathon Green.
Some of my favorites include:
Shaft of Delight (1700s)
Womb Sweeper (1980s)
Master John Goodfellow (1890s)
Nimble-Wimble (1650s)
Corporal Love (1930s)
Staff of Life (1880s)
Spindle (1530s)
As good as ever twanged (1670s)
Gaying Instrument (1810s)
Beef Torpedo (1980s)
and last but not least, the first recorded use of the word Schlong, which was in 1865 CE. Tag yourself, I’m Nimble Wimble
And are the lovely ladies feeling left out? not to worry! Johnathon’s got you covered, gals, because he also made one for vaginas. Highlights:
Mrs. Fubb’s Parlor (1820s)
Poontang (1950s)
Spunk Box (1720s)
Ringerangroo (1930s)
Ineffable (1890s)
Itching Jenny (1890s)
Carnal Mantrap (1890s – a busy decade apparently)
Bookbinder’s Wife (1760s)
Rough Malkin (1530s)
Socket (1460s)
and a personal favorite, crinkum-crankum, circa approximately 1670.
uhHHHH I don’t mean to be dramatic or anything but I literally wrote 50k words in two weeks without fuckening trying,like won NaNoWriMo in 2 weeks,TWO WEEKS, after joining4thewords.comand I’m like
w h a t
OK so it’s pretty much like Neopets + Gaia Online + RPG, But You Level Up Through Writing
You “battle” cute online critters with your word count
You can dress up your avatar and whatnot and there are different regions and crafting quests
and my weird brain apparently responds VERY WELL to nerd gamification
because Holy Shit I wrote 50,600 words in 2 fuckening weeks
and am now 4thewords’ new hype squad
(also if you join, use the referral code PEUOC65061 so if you get a full membership, which I totally am, we will both be rewarded)
basically, wow I have never been this productive in my LIFE and I can’t wait for their July mini nanowrimo event (they’re doing a pride month one right now so you can get a rainbow shirt and fight rainbow beasties it’s freakin adorable)
and if this sounds like something you would enjoy, go for it, try to catch me, just do it, come at me friends let’s write some good shit together
Adding my own endorsement to this because I wrote 12k in two days when I first got it, then went on to write every day INCLUDING after 8-hour work days which NEVER happens, I usually have to wait for a light day where I do very little and get struck by inspiration and energy to write just 2k. And I’ve written almost 20k in eight days, six of which were at least 8-hour work days. This is literally impossible for me under normal circumstances, between depression and ADHD and plain old work-day exhaustion.
I’ve written up half a full legendarium for my novel project as an experiment with this site. I’ve gotten more content made in the past 8 days than all year long.
Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.
My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.
So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?
(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)
Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.
They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.
Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.
So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.
Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.
Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/
When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.
Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid. The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear. But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.
Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself
And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.
And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.
People need to know.
PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.
That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things
THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.
Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone.
But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do? Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity.
More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.
People with disabilities don’t want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe there’s a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what they’ve already been doing in the past, or explain what they’ve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Don’t just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.
This. All of this.
Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.
Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”
I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.
And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.
And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).
But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.
So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)
And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.
I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.
But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.
uhHHHH I don’t mean to be dramatic or anything but I literally wrote 50k words in two weeks without fuckening trying,like won NaNoWriMo in 2 weeks,TWO WEEKS, after joining4thewords.comand I’m like
w h a t
OK so it’s pretty much like Neopets + Gaia Online + RPG, But You Level Up Through Writing
You “battle” cute online critters with your word count
You can dress up your avatar and whatnot and there are different regions and crafting quests
and my weird brain apparently responds VERY WELL to nerd gamification
because Holy Shit I wrote 50,600 words in 2 fuckening weeks
and am now 4thewords’ new hype squad
(also if you join, use the referral code PEUOC65061 so if you get a full membership, which I totally am, we will both be rewarded)
basically, wow I have never been this productive in my LIFE and I can’t wait for their July mini nanowrimo event (they’re doing a pride month one right now so you can get a rainbow shirt and fight rainbow beasties it’s freakin adorable)
and if this sounds like something you would enjoy, go for it, try to catch me, just do it, come at me friends let’s write some good shit together
Ancient Rome was an Italic civilization that began on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to become one of the largest empires in the ancient world with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants (roughly 20% of the world’s population) and covering 6.5 million square kilometers (2.5 million sq mi) during its height between the first and second centuries AD.
In its approximately 12 centuries of existence, Roman civilization shifted from a monarchy to a classical republic to an increasingly autocratic empire. Through conquest and assimilation, it came to dominate Southern and Western Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa, and parts of Northern and Eastern Europe, Rome was preponderant throughout the Mediterranean region and was one of the most powerful entities of the ancient world. It is often grouped into “Classical Antiquity” together with ancient Greece, and their similar cultures and societies are known as the Greco-Roman world. [x]
But don’t worry, most writers are and I’m here to help because reading them is making me cRAzY.
I’m writing this because I’ve read three otherwise great romance novels back to back featuring characters dealing with PTSD (or PTSD symptoms) and each one of them made the same dream mistakes. I honestly can’t think of a fiction book I’ve read that didn’t make these mistakes, so I thought I’d compile a handy dandy list of mistakes and how to fix them.
Lucky for you, I have PTSD and a ton of fellow veteran friends who deal with these symptoms.
*This is based on my experience and things told to me by friends. This is not to say that the below doesn’t happen in real life, only that it’s not as common as you might think.
The issue with these dreams is twofold: on one side is the psychological accuracy of the dream and on the other side is how you’re using the dream within the narrative.
Oh an Black Sails spoilers-ish ahead.
1) Stop writing the dream as a shot-by-shot accurate retelling of Traumatic Event.
Listen, not only do dreams seldom follow reality, but our own memories are tricky at best. I don’t remember getting beaten up because a) it was horrifying and we block stuff like that out and b) I was going in and out of consciousness. It would be pretty strange for me to dream something I don’t even fully remember. Our brains are simply not wired to do these vivid factually-accurate cinematic retellings.
My friend dreams things that did happen, but in his own words those dreams are always wrong in some noticeable or bizarre way. For instance, he’s getting chased through the streets of Iraq by a werewolf.
2) Dreams are informed by reality, not direct reflections of it.
It’s entirely likely my friend dreamt of a werewolf in Iraq because I got him binge watching Supernatural and the two ideas merged in his dreamstate. But see, that’s how dreams work.
The trauma event exists as a constant in his subconscious, but he has all this other information right there in his conscious mind all day, every day. In dreams, there isn’t a clear delineation between that information.
My dreams are often dependent on whatever I’ve fallen asleep watching on television. The themes are consistent, but not the content.
In Black Sails, Captain Flint’s trauma dreams feature his dead partner and friend following him around his empty ship. You have an element of the trauma (the animated corpse of his friend) + his daily existence (his ship). The two things intersect to form these unsettling nightmares as expressions of his fears and grief. He never once relives the event itself in his dreams as shown on screen.
Speaking of…
3) Trauma dreams often revolve around feelings, not necessarily the events themselves.
The PTSD package generally includes heaps of shame, guilt, anger and fear. As someone who survived a beating when I should have had control of the situation, my dreams tend to revolve around fear that people will know I’m a fraud or being unable to act in a dangerous situation.
Again, it’s entirely common for trauma victims to not remember large chunks (or the whole thing) of the trauma event. So why should their dreams be stunningly accurate? What we remember are feelings. Real strong feelings.
You cannot go wrong if you write your trauma dream around feelings, not a specific event.
4) If you present trauma dreams as expressions of themes, you can let go of the trauma dream as an exposition dump/way overused suspense trope.
You know you’ve read this: MC has dreams that are a shot-by-shot retelling of Traumatic Event that always cut off right before Traumatic Event, so that the Big Reveal must happen by a discovery later in the novel.
If I were the MC in a book, the easy and common thing would be to use the “dream sequence” as an expository retelling of Traumatic Event as a way to give some backstory to why I might be surly, mistrustful, afraid to try something new, whatever, and to clumsily shoehorn in suspense where there doesn’t need to be.
The much more interesting thing might be if my dreams were inconsistent in content but consistent in theme. In one I’m on an alien planet (because I fell asleep watching the Science Channel again) and the ground opens up and I fall into a pit from which I can’t escape because I am helpless. In another a man is watching me while I sleep where I am again frozen and helpless. This would force the reader to think: what is the recurring issue in these dreams? Why is it important? What is this telling me about this character and what happened to her?
It could be a personal preference, but I’d rather see the Traumatic Event either told in narrative flashbacks (not dreams) or verbally retold by the character in question. Let the dreams tell me something deeper about the character. It’s not that I was beat up, it’s that I feel like a failure because of it. One of these things is a shallow factual detail, the other tells you something about me as a person that I’m sharing with you, gentle reader, because talking about this stuff is healthy.
5) The Traumatic Event doesn’t have to be a big secret.
In Black Sails, we know what happened to Captain Flint’s partner. It happened in real time in the show. That didn’t make his uber disturbing dreams less disturbing or mysterious. Fans still debate exactly what the symbolism was and what they were telling us about James Flint in those moments. We do know from the dreams that he was disturbed, obsessed, and also monumentally guilty and blaming himself for what happened.
The mystery was perhaps more heightened by the fact that the dreams weren’t direct reflections of reality. We know who this person was, what she believed, and why she died. That Flint is imagining her screaming silently in his ear is horrifying and discordant with what we know to be factual. This adds emotional complexity to his character and the decisions he’s making while suffering these dreams.
^^^this didn’t happen. It was a dream. A real unsettling dream.
Once you let go of the concept of the trauma dream as a literal retelling and exposition dump, you have the entire dreamscape to work in other narrative elements, like symbolism, metaphor, foreshadowing, etc.
Torture is a very difficult topic to write and with so much
misinformation presented as fact it can be extremely difficult to research.
It’s difficult to know where to start.
This blog was very much suppose to serve as that starting
point but now, several hundred thousand words in, the blog itself is a bit of a
labyrinth.
So this is a quick summary covering some of the most common
points that affect fiction and writing.
Common Misconceptions
about Torture
If you’ve followed the blog for any length of time you’ll
probably have heard me talk about the prevalence of torture apologia in
fiction. Here are some of the common inaccurate stereotypes about torture that
fiction continues to use.
These are the ‘arguments’ fiction often uses to support
torture, arguments that have no basis in
reality.
Showing torture making victims obedient. The evidence we have
suggests torture makes victims much more strongly opposed to their
torturers and any group the torturer represents than they were previously.
Victims may become compliant in the short term but this isn’t the same as
long term obedience.
Showing torture ‘forcing’ victims to change their strongly held
beliefs.Brainwashing does
not work. There is no way to force
someone to change their beliefs.
Showing torturers as superhumanly good at detecting when victims
are lying. They are as terrible at it as everyone else.
Showing torturers as skilled. Torture really doesn’t require
any degree of skill, intelligence or even training.
Showing torture as ‘scientific’. It really isn’t and the idea
that torture can be ‘made better’ pervades arguments justifying abuse.
Showing torture as something only the ‘bad guys’ do. This
often means twisting the definition of torture so that the ‘good guys’ can
continue to beat people to a pulp without being called into question for
it.
There are also a lot of inaccurate tropes about torture
victims, giving at best misleading and at worst insulting portrayals of
survivors. These include:
The idea that torture victims are ‘broken’.
The idea that survivors can never live full, happy lives.
The idea that torturers can control the victim’s symptoms or
experience. They really can’t. So
far no one can accurately predict an individual survivor’s symptoms, much
less control them.
The idea that certain physiological responses to torture are
‘better’ then others. This is particularly unfair to victims as it
often judges their worth based on which set of symptoms they happened to
develop.
The idea that survivors can ‘always remember’ what they endured. Torture
causes memory problems and while victims rarely completely forget such a
traumatic event they often get
key details wrong because of this. This makes prosecuting and proving
torture extremely difficult.
The idea that ‘good guys’ resist torture and ‘bad guys’ don’t.
This rather neatly blames victims for being tortured, whatever their
beliefs.
What counts?
The legal definition isn’t really what most people think. It
depends less on the practice or technique used to inflict pain and much more on who is doing it.
For an act to be ‘torture’ in the legal sense it must be
carried out by a government official, public servant or member of an armed group occupying territory. A police officer
beating someone while on duty is a torturer. The same officer beating their
spouse is an abuser.
Beyond that torture is: ‘any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted [] on a
person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or
confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or
other persons.’ (UN Declaration
against Torture)
This means that lot of things that get dismissed as ‘not
really’ torture definitely count.
Practices like sleep deprivation (for example constant noise and light),
starvation, dehydration, stress positions, beatings, forced exercise, virginity
tests and prolonged solitary confinement- all count.
Be aware of what you’re writing.
Torture in Narratives
So where does that leave us as writers and what kind of role
can torture play in a piece of fiction?
Barring tropes that are used to encourage real life torture
I don’t think there are ‘bad’ plots
so much as badly executed plots.
Well written torture isn’t
a narrative shortcut. If you’re looking for something to keep a character out
of the story for a short time with no long term effects or an easy way to add
drama then a torture plot probably isn’t
a good fit.
But it can add greater
depth and emotional impact to a story.
Pratchett’s Small Gods
and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children both use
torture to tremendous effect: adding depth and urgency to their stories along
with searing critiques of the societal structures that allow abuse to flourish.
The Age of Shadows
and Pan’s Labyrinth both use torture
to highlight particularly bloody historical periods, showing the pressures
normal people were put under to allow abuse and how they often rebelled.
If you’re considering using torture in your story think
about what it’s actually adding to the narrative. Is it essential? Does it have
a long term impact on the characters and situation, even if it isn’t the focus
of the story? What does it reveal about the characters and the plot?
These are stories
worth telling, whatever the genre. If you need help writing them I’m here. 🙂
more on writing muslim characters from a hijabi muslim girl
– hijabis get really excited over pretty scarves – they also like to collect pins and brooches – we get asked a lot of questions and it can be annoying or it can be amusing, just depends on our mood and personality and how the question is phrased – common questions include: – “not even water?” (referring to fasting) – hijabis hear a lot of “do you sleep in that?” (we don’t) and “where is your hair?” (in a bun or a braid, usually) – “is it mooze-slim or mozzlem?” (the answer is neither, it’s muslim, with a soft s and accent on the first syllable) – “ee-slam or iz-lamb?” (it’s iss-laam, accent on the first syllable) – “hee-job?” (heh-jahb, accent on the second syllable)
– “kor-an?” (no. quran. say it like koor-annn, accent on the second syllable) – people tend to mess up our names really badly and you just get a sigh and a resigned nod or an awkward smile, maybe a nickname instead – long hair is easy to hide, short hair is harder to wrap up – hijab isn’t just covering hair, it’s also showing as little skin as possible with the exception of face, hands, and feet, and not wearing tight/sheer clothing – that applies to men too, people just don’t like to mention it ( i wonder why) – henna/mehendi isn’t just for special occasions, you’ll see people wearing it for fun – henna/mehendi isn’t just for muslims, either, it’s not a religious thing – henna/mehendi is not just for women, men also wear it, especially on their weddings – there are big mehendi parties in the couple of nights before eid where people (usually just women and kids) gather and do each other’s mehendi, usually just hands and feet – five daily prayers – most muslim kids can stutter through a couple verses of quran in the original arabic text by the age of seven or eight, it does not matter where they live or where they’re from or what language they speak natively – muslim families tend to have multiple copies of the quran – there are no “versions” of the quran, there has only ever been one. all muslims follow the exact same book – muslims have no concept of taking God’s name in vain, we call on God at every little inconvenience – don’t use islamic phrases if you don’t know what they mean or how to use them. we use them often, inside and outside of religious settings. in islam, it is encouraged to mention God often and we say these things very casually, but we take them very seriously – Allahu Akbar means “God is Greatest” (often said when something shocks or surprises us, or if we’re scared or daunted, or when something amazing happens, whether it be good or bad; it’s like saying “oh my god”) – Subhan Allah means “Glory be to God” (i say subhan Allah at the sky, at babies, at trees, whatever strikes me as pleasant, especially if it’s in nature) – Bismillah means “in the name of God” and it’s just something you say before you start something like eating or doing your homework – In Shaa Allah means “if God wills” (example: you’ll be famous, in shaa Allah) (it’s a reminder that the future is in God’s hands, so be humble and be hopeful)
– Astaghfirullah means “i seek forgiveness from Allah” and it’s like “god forgive me” – Alhamdulillah means “all thanks and praise belong to God” and it’s just a little bit more serious than saying “thank god” (example: i passed my exams, alhamdulillah; i made it home okay, alhamdulillah) – when i say we use them casually, i really mean it – teacher forgot to assign homework? Alhamdulillah – our version of “amen” is “ameen” – muslims greet each other with “assalamu alaikum” which just means “peace be on you” and it’s like saying hi – the proper response is “walaikum assalam” which means “and on you be peace” and it’s like saying “you too”
A small list of random ass sites I’ve found useful when writing:
Fragrantica: perfume enthusiast site that has a long list of scents. v helpful when you’re writing your guilty pleasure abo fics
Just One Cookbook: recipe site that centers on Japanese cuisine. Lots of different recipes to browse, plenty of inspiration so you’re not just “ramen and sushi”
McCormick Science Institute: yes this is a real thing. the site shows off research on spices and gives the history on them. be historically accurate or just indulge in mindless fascination. boost your restaurant au with it
Cocktail Flow: a site with a variety of cocktails that’s pretty easy to navigate and offers photos of the drinks. You can sort by themes, strengths, type and base. My only real annoyance with this site is that the drinks are sometimes sorted into ~masculine~ and ~feminine~ but ehhhh. It’s great otherwise.
Tie-A-Tie: a site centered around ties, obviously. I stumbled upon it while researching tie fabrics but there’s a lot more to look at. It offers insight into dress code for events, tells you how to tie your ties, and has a section on the often forgotten about tie accessories
Even more:
Types of High Heels: A page describing twenty five different types of high heels. It gives a description and pictures. Shake it up from just “stilettos and kitten heels”
Random Job Generator: Exactly as it says. The site offer more generators like characters, plots, or town names.
In modern popular culture torture is consistently linked to
interrogation: to getting information from a prisoner.
Now I’ve written several times why this trope is not only
wrong but also harmful and is used in the real world to justify torture. O’Mara
and Rejali also cover this in depth over several hundred pages for anyone who
wants more information.
I often get asked for realistic alternatives: what does actually work? How can characters,
bad or good, actually go about gaining information in a realistic way?
This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list, and I feel I
should state that I have no practical experience of interrogation. Hopefully
though it can serve as a starting point that will help you think about how characters come by information in
your stories.
The first important
point is that interrogation generally isn’t very effective.
Very little useful information comes from interrogation of
suspects when compared to all the other sources of information police and
intelligence agencies draw on.
There are a several reasons interrogation isn’t hugely
useful including:
·
Human memory isn’t that good. Even well meaning
people who want to help forget important details.
·
People are much better at lying than detecting
lies. Even people who describe themselves as good at detecting when someone is lying do a very poor job.
·
Memories are easily modified in stressful
situations. Even someone who isn’t trying to can plant suggestions leading to
false memories, directing the interrogation in a particular direction without
even realising it.
Some useful
information does come from interrogation (and I’ll come back to how to handle
it in a moment) but, realistically the following are more important sources of
information in any investigation:
Physical forensic
evidence
This doesn’t just mean things like hair samples and DNA.
Computer records, credit card bills, surveillance camera footage, library
records and letters can tell you an awful lot about a person. Reading a
character’s emails or letters and keeping track of their bills can reveal a lot of plot relevant information such as
whether two characters are in contact or why a character might be desperate for
money.
Gathering this sort of information takes a lot of time and
hard work. It’s not as simple as collecting
evidence, such as a piece of hair or a computer hard drive, the information has
to be analysed and interpreted correctly.
The hair could be DNA tested and cross referenced with a
database or simply identified as human and of a particular type and colour.
(Identifying it as human is important, I know at least one forensic tech who
was handed cow hair and told it was definitely from a suspect)
The computer hard drive would need to be poured over file by
file. It’s not quite enough to suppose character A could access character B’s
emails, A has to have the time and inclination to read the damn things.
An important point to consider is how dedicated your
characters are. Careful collection and examination of evidence is probably the best way of finding something out.
But it requires patience, hard work and a lot of time.
There’s a reason police work is a full time job and there’s
a reason a lot of people in professions like policing might think torture is
easier. Gathering and analysing evidence
is hard.
It’s worth considering whether your character has the
resources and inclination to go down this route before you decide to use it.
Observation
This is the stake-out scene from every police movie and tv
show. It’s having one character physically following and watching another
character for as long as humanly possible, recording everywhere they go and
everything they do.
It means finding out where a character lives, watching them
at work, noting where they eat lunch and who with. Finding out where they go in
their free time and how often. When they go to bed. Who they visit. How long
they do it for. The minute detail of everything someone does in their day recorded
for a period of weeks or months to build up a picture of the person.
If that sounds creepy that’s because it is.
This is a very time consuming strategy. It requires a lot of
focus and patience and dedication or the ability to hire someone who has those
qualities. It’s simpler than systematically gathering physical evidence and
it’s easier to do discretely.
Informants
This is probably the simplest major method of gathering
information. It can be as complicated as the Soviet Union network of paid informants
or as straight-forward as people coming forward and volunteering information.
This is incredibly
important to police investigations. Information from voluntary informants
led to the capture of the London tube bombers in 2005. The suspects were identified
by their family and neighbours who went to the police.
This sort of informal reporting doesn’t just occur in police
contexts. From a writing perspective the way I tend to think about it is in
terms of crossing societal lines.
Every culture and subculture has ideas about what is and
what is not acceptable. Every group has an idea of what’s ‘going too far’.
You might be writing a story set around a violent, criminal
subculture where theft and murder of other adults are the norm. But the same
characters who wouldn’t dream of reporting an enemy for killing another adult
might feel differently about the murder of a child.
A religious character might excuse their priest’s affairs,
but report anything they’d see as desecration or blasphemy.
A scientist might ignore a colleague harassing their lab
assistants but report data fraud.
Think about what matters to the characters and you’ll be
able to tell when they’d freely
volunteer information.
If you can’t think
of anything emotional that would cause them to inform remember that your
characters could pay informants. And then consider how many people who really
need some cash might be in a position to watch or steal from other characters.
Cleaners, drivers, people who deliver supplies- anyone who
would be on a low wage, have regular contact with the character but only a
superficial relationship could be a very valuable informant.
Interrogation
At the time of writing there is really not enough systematic
research on effective interrogation. As a result I’m going to try and
concentrate on things we’re reasonably sure help
rather than getting bogged down in academic discussions about what might be useful. Those discussions are
interesting but not much help to writers.
1)
The first important point is that interrogation takes time.
If a character is volunteering information that probably
won’t take as long but somewhere in the
region of 3-6 hours would still be reasonable. A witness to a crime or
victim would probably need time and reassurance in order to tell the
authorities what they know to the best of their ability.
Someone who isn’t
really willing to talk (for whatever reason) will need much longer. A day is
actually unusually short. Weeks or even
up to a month is not unreasonable.
Timeframes are going to vary depending on the characters and the situation the
plot has put them in but I think it’s important to remember that interrogation
isn’t quick and it isn’t simple.
2)
Interrogators and characters being interrogated should
speak a common language.
It sounds simple and obvious but if the characters can’t
communicate effectively interrogation is almost
certainly going to fail.
Using translators does not seem to be as effective as using
people who speak the language but there haven’t been systematic studies of
speakers vs interpreters as far as I know.
3)
Good record keeping is essential for effective interrogation.
That’s straightforward in a modern setting with recording
equipment but less so in a historical one.
Having a record of everything the suspect character says
when interviewed means that everything they say can be analysed by multiple
people, can be cross checked against what they said previously and can be
stored in a legible format in case it’s needed later.
Checking what a
suspect character said today against what they said yesterday or even last week
helps investigators to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Lies
are difficult to keep consistent, especially over longer periods of time.
Inconsistencies can be helpful and consistencies can help highlight areas
investigators should look into in greater depth.
Having multiple people able to analyse information also
helps hugely, each individual brings their own specialist knowledge to the
investigation. Which can be as simple as recognising a local’s nickname (and so
correctly identifying them later) or as complex as analysing how a suspect
claims they made a bomb and recognising that that process wouldn’t work.
4)
Even someone who genuinely wants to help will forget
details and get things wrong.
That isn’t unusual and it certainly isn’t a sign that the
character is unwilling or being deliberately unhelpful. In fact a story that sounds too detailed and too precise might well be
a sign of a pre-scripted and pre-rehearsed lie.
5)
Very very few people refuse to talk.
Whether they talk about anything helpful is of course another matter but the stereotype of a tough
criminal sitting completely silently and staring down a cop is incredibly rare
in reality.
A smart interrogator
will try to get their suspect chatting in the hope that some useful information
will come out.
Let’s say one of our characters is suspected of being part
of a larger conspiracy of some kind. And he won’t chat about any of the
‘interesting’ material the cops have found in his house, but he’s happy to talk
to the interrogator about the local football team.
The interrogator might notice that he seems to go to watch
the local team regularly and that he goes with the same set of friends. Friends
who might not be part of this conspiracy but might have heard something useful
from the suspect.
A smart suspect will
try to keep up a conversation peppered with misleading hints and
misinformation.
6) Have the interrogating character establish a friendly
rapport with their interviewee.
It is easier to talk to someone who comes across as
friendly, interested in what you have to say and broadly sympathetic to your
position.
It is much more difficult to talk to someone who shouts,
screams and acts in an aggressive and confrontational manner.
The interrogator’s job is primarily to make it easy for the suspect to talk. Everything
else follows from that.
A polite, engaging, sociable character who can keep calm
under pressure would be a good pick. Someone who can be ‘friends’ with anybody.
Let me stress that
this can be extremely difficult. We’re talking about a character who can
walk into a room with the worst possible criminals and try to make friends with
them; a character who is successful
at doing so. Don’t be afraid to show the kind of toll that takes on the
character.
7)
Don’t let suspects talk to each other before hand.
I’ve discussed elsewhere why solitary confinement is
harmful- keeping characters completely isolated might well impair their memory
of events.
But allowing characters to talk to each other before their interrogated also affects
memory both for characters who want to
mislead interrogators and for characters who want to help.
Essentially we edit our memories all the time. Discussion of
shared experiences with other people is a major trigger for natural alternation of memories.
Four witnesses of the same events who don’t talk to each
other in advance will give four different but broadly similar accounts.
If the same witnesses talk to each other before they’re interviewed
they might well all report the same
inaccuracies.
8)
Have interviewed characters tell their story backwards.
This is a pretty simple memory aid that makes it easier for
interrogators to spot inconsistencies in a story. These inconsistencies don’t necessarily indicate a lie but they
highlight areas a character might be unsure of or might have inaccurate
memories of.
For instance if a character witnessed a car crash they might
be instructed to start their account from the moment the ambulances arrived at
the scene and work backwards from there until they reach the moments just
before the crash.
This technique can also help remind characters of additional
details as they tell the story.
9)
There is no reliable way to tell if someone is lying by
looking at them.
Even people who judge
themselves as ‘good’ at detecting lies perform poorly in tests.
There are no reliable ‘tests’ for lying. There are no working lie detector tests and based
on how complex an action lying is short of literally reading minds I don’t
think it would be possible.
The only reliable way to tell if someone lied is to double
check everything they said.
10) Body
language is not a reliable indicator of a character’s guilt or innocence.
A lot of people still believe that it is and there isn’t
necessarily anything wrong with your characters believing that- but I’d advise
caution.
An interrogator character might recognise that a suspect
character is nervous, but to instantly ‘know’ why they’d need to be psychic.
The vast majority of people who conduct interrogations in
real life have little to no formal training. In the USA (2013) the average was
between 8-15 hours of the full training program. Consider how many hours you’d
spend on a year long full time education course and you’ll get an idea of how
little training that is.
We are what fills in
the gap.
People with almost no training look to our portrayals of tough, aggressive interrogators who ‘always’ get
results and, consciously or not, those portrayals influence them.
The truth is interrogation isn’t a great way of getting
information and interrogators are only human: they don’t have a supernatural
insight into the suspect or crime.
But we tend to write them as if they do. Personally I think
that’s part of the problem- We focus on interrogation because of its dramatic
potential. That focus warps how both the public and people involved in investigations view interrogation. It places
too much focus on a comparatively poor information gathering technique and
leads to assumptions that interrogators are capable of more than they
realistically are.
Trust, human interaction and treating other people as human
is important. Anything that undermines that undermines interrogation.
Queer Fiction Writer 