elfs | Where Ideas Come From, Part CXXXVI

I've often considered it a failing of mine that I can't draw. It's not that something that comes naturally to me. I see the world in terms of shapes, colors, perspective, but that sort-of comes naturally, so much so that it's hard to translate to the page. Instead, I believe I see the worlds in the terms I least understand, because those are the terms that I spend the most time thinking about: the motivations, especially the romantic motivations, of other human beings.

I've often wondered if other people have ever made this connection: artists make art about that aspect of the human condition they least understand. To me, the fact that people find one another and stick it out together, especially when there is no particular reason for them to do so, fascinates me, and so I write about it, circling the subject, taking it apart and putting it back together again, asking myself, "Does this make any sense at all?"

I think that's one of the reasons why science fiction appeals to me as a setting: aliens and robots have different motivations from human beings, and I get to put humans and xenos into the same room. The xenos let me take away something that is usually found in the human character and then I get to ask myself and the reader, "Is this still human enough to make the story work?" That's also why I have more women than men in my stories: men are easy to understand, women not so much. Although as I and my peers get older, that seems to be changing: the women are becoming easier to grasp (in more ways than one), the men less so.