What you put in, what you meant to put in, and what they got out

I'm peripheral to peripheral in what is now generally called RaceFail '09; I am close friends with some of the people on the fringes of it (notably shweta_narayan) and have nodding acquaintance with some of the people at the center (met at a con once, read their blog, sort of thing). To first order my reaction has been disappointment in some of those nodding acquaintances. I thought they were better people than they have demonstrated themselves to be.

One thread of it, though, I think I might have something constructive to say on. I write computer programs for a living. My employer tests these programs to make sure people who weren't involved in writing them can figure out how to use them. I don't do it myself, because one of the iron rules of user testing is: you don't let the programmers in the room. The programmers know how the program works, so if they are allowed into the room, they see the testers being confused by the program and think argh! stop making mistakes! But they're not the testers' mistakes — they're the programmers', for not making the right action obvious. My coworker Jono explains this phenomenon in more detail here.

So too, perhaps, with fiction. This whole thing started (to oversimplify a bit) when matociquala wrote a book containing a character who has characteristics that can be read as racial stereotypes. I am using hedge words here because I have not read the book. Avalon's Willow and deepad say they read the book that way; I believe them. matociquala says that her intent was not to write the character that way; I believe her too. Because it's easy to put things in fiction that you didn't mean to put there. Just as it's easy to put confusing in your user interface when you didn't mean to.

And so too the proper response. When I get test results and they say that my UI is confusing, yes, my immediate reaction may well be to think THER DOIN IT WRONG!!!1! to myself, because I have an ego just like everyone else. But then I fix the damn program. Likewise, when an author writes a book that someone has a negative reaction to, for whatever reason, they are entitled to think THER READIN IT WRONG!!!1! to themselves. For a moment. And then they should go write a better book, because the problem is with the book, not the reader.

I think, for the record, that matociquala understands this, both in general and as specifically applied to Blood and Iron; she has said things in the larger discussion that are not helpful, but I read most of 'em as intent to do the right thing not coming through because words are hard, even when you write novels, and especially after two months as a target of a whole lot of anger.

[EDIT: queenpam points out that I'm oversimplifying the user testing thing a bit. It's actually good to have the programmer in the room so they see directly where the problems are, can ask "why did you do that" type questions, and can intervene if the tester-user gets completely stuck, but you mustn't allow them to coach the tester in the use of the program. I think the analogy still goes through, since it's about the reaction the programmers/authors have to the reception of the work.]