I have never wanted to write outsider fiction. Generally, fantasy and science fiction has taken the perspective of an outsider or someone coming of age. It makes it easier to explain things to the reader who is also an outsider. Though I read and enjoy a great deal of stories which use this device, I have never been drawn to write it myself. In fact, I have been frequently repelled or stymied by the very idea—because my outsiders don't understand what's at stake.
Immersive fiction (and fanfiction) tends to come from the inside out, a character who is already immersed in this fictional world and understands it, is part of it, whose challenges and personality completely arise from within that world. That's the kind of fiction I write and prefer to write, fiction that digs into someone whose worldview and understanding are radically different from the modern-day real world, who belongs to the world of my creation.
Naturally, this writing of the insider poses difficulties. Reading from the inside out may be more difficult, but for me, the payoff has always been worth it. M. C. A. Hogarth writes from the insider, dipping us wholly into vastly different and immersive worlds. Beneath Ceaseless Skies, my personal favorite fantasy periodical publishes such short stories. Rabia Gale does it, and it deepens her worldbuilding because of it. LeGuin does it by times in some of my favorite pieces of her short fiction.
I'm talking about stories where the character carrying the focus or perspective is not displaced from his or her home ground, where they are sitting on the territory or in the life they've staked out for themselves, where the story is not about the upending of one's environment, merely one's world. I'm talking about stories that write about the bridge between two perspectives and don't bother to immerse us in the side we already understand but in the other, leaping the chasm between and dropping us unceremoniously into that otherness. These are stories that don't explain themselves, but reveal themselves.
Does that mean they cannot "tell" necessary background details? No. It means that they written from the inside out instead of the outside in, training the reader in a new language and set of expectations without necessarily referencing or comparing to the set of expectations said reader walked in with.
But of course, that's just the big picture stuff. The raw, in-my-face reason I write from insiders is because I need someone who really has something and knows what is at stake. I write from those inside the foreign worlds I have built, or those who are becoming insiders, those who are inextricably bound up into all the threads and dynamics I can weave into a single tale. And that requires an insider.
Do you prefer to write outsiders or insiders? Any preferences on which you prefer to read?
