Jacques’ speech in As You Like It by Wm Shakespeare (Act II, Scene vii) reinterpreted
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one woman in her time plays many parts, Her acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the crosspatch helper, with her ideas And tightly braided hair, pulled from her play and set Unwillingly to work. And then the lovesick, Sighing like a furnace, fizzy with delight When her eye’s fancy returns a look. Then a Mother, Full of strange life and bellied like the moon, Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, Claiming the better method Even in the night’s wee hours. And then the Karen, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and hair of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so she plays her part. The sixth age shifts Into the spare and careful yogini, With spectacles on head and purse on back; Her youthful size, resumed, covered in skin Too dry and loose, and her woman’s voice Turning again toward childish uselessness, A melancholy sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
One of the main characters in Otherwhere, the novel I’m writing, is presented as gender-indeterminate. I’ve been using they/them and it’s hella awkward. I’m a skilled craftsperson striving to make my prose as clear as possible, and some of my readers still say it’s confusing.
Otherwhere is an SF novel involving a world of three gender categories, so this is pretty key. As a reader, I get impatient with having to learn rafts of vocabulary to get along in an invented world, so I chose to go with the now-familiar they/them substitution. I included the neologism “themself” because it seemed strange to have a self-reflexive pronoun be plural when the character it referred to was obviously singular. It mostly worked.
As a reader, I get impatient with having to learn rafts of vocabulary to get along in an invented world.
Then I changed my mind. I admitted to one of my readers that I was making a point. We all know that they/them is an imperfect solution. I wanted to prove how imperfect it is. I was proving it — but was it at my story’s and reader’s expense? I’d invented names for the third gender category (par for children and twane for adults); it now seemed logical that I should do the same with its pronouns. I wanted something simple and easy on the English-language ear and tongue, and I settled on eh/em/ans. Then I went to work.
And discovered that I wasn’t done with they/them as neutral third-person singular pronouns. Let me show you:
Vesca frowned and looked at her hands, thinking. “Have you ever met someone who just does what they want, without hesitation? When you challenge them, or take exception, if there’s injury of some kind, they apologize and make amends if they can. But this woman … she wasn’t like that. She didn’t seem to feel she’d done anything wrong. No one in her community would give her a child, so she took one. From a stranger, so no House in her community would be offended. She talked like it was logical … clever, what she’d done. Like we were stupid for not seeing that.”
Now, the rule I’ve put in place in my world and my novel is that, until a character has been formally introduced, their pronouns must be third-gender/neutral. I tried replacing they/them with my invented pronouns in the paragraph above and found myself thinking, Wait. Who am I talking about? The meaning of what I was writing had changed — because it turns out that, although using they/them as singular pronouns is natural to English grammar, it is necessary and specific to ONE situation. In the paragraph above, Vesca is talking about an indeterminate, hypothetical someone, not an “actual” person, and they/them is absolutely correct. We use they/them as impersonal personal pronouns: referring to persons but still belonging to the group that includes it, this, and that. We use they/them when it feels rude to use “it.”
We use they/them when it feels rude to use “it.”
That’s why using they/them as gender-neutral singular personal pronouns feels awkward and wrong: because we’re coming from a place where this usage is wrong. In conversation, where we have an actual person in mind, we can manage it. In writing, where our minds are already working full-time on suspending disbelief or following a train of thought, this new usage is especially challenging.
However, we’re stuck with it, because invented pronouns are even MORE awkward, especially in writing. Rereading my draft, I found myself struggling with my own inventions, because, unlike the few-and-far-between nouns I’d invented, the pronouns called attention to themselves constantly. I believe this has been my difficulty with invented vocabulary all along: it’s a visual-mental distraction that burdens the reader with too much decoding, thereby disrupting understanding and sympathy.
That’s why I changed my mind and changed em/en/ans back to they/them/themself.
Invented pronouns are more awkward than they/them, especially in writing. They are a visual-mental distraction that burdens the reader with too much decoding, thereby disrupting understanding and sympathy.
In one of my writing projects, characters sometimes speak or think in a language other than English. As a writer, I need to be able to use that language when I feel it is necessary and I hope that reader will receive (consciously or subconsciously) the flavour or meaning that I am trying to convey in my choice. Of course, I understand, actually hope, that most of my readers won’t understand it. Small interjections that resemble those of English are pretty easy to figure out, and repeated words become familiar through context and use. But a whole sentence is a challenge that we both, writer and readers, will need to find a way through.
There are various techniques for dealing with the use of a language other than English in a story, according to my experience as a reader.
Glossary. Before the story if not much of the language is used, at the back if there’s a lot of it. To parse a sentence the reader looks up individual words until she gets the jist of the whole sentence.
Repeat in English. Give the phrase in the other language, then repeat it in English.
In-story translation. A creative variation on the above. Have a bilingual character repeat the question in English before answering it, or respond in such a way as to make the other speaker’s meaning clear.
Footnotes. Use the other language as desired, providing a translation in a footnote.
Endnotes. Same as above but using endnotes, either at the end of the chapter or chapter-by-chapter at the end of the story.
Instant translation. Introduced by e-reading. The publisher of the digital version of the book provides a pop-up translation feature that the reader can access by selecting the relevant word or phrase.
Reader initiative. The reader enters the word or phrase into a translation app or asks someone who know the language to get the meaning.
I confess I am an impatient reader and will guess at and or skip over foreign words and phrases until a sense of missing out on something begins to irritate me. Only then will I bother to use the tools the book provides. This includes footnotes; I’ll look at a few but ignore most of them, especially if the few I’ve looked at haven’t added anything significant to my reading. Endnotes even more so — I simply can’t be bothered to interrupt the flow and flip to the end of the chapter or the book. However, I will review them when I’m done reading the story. Same with glossaries — I’ll read through when the story is done to see if I missed anything.
What I’m saying is that I don’t think I’m the best guide as to what approach is the best here. So, I’m putting it out there. What should I do?
