Remember all the controversy that sprung up when Hunger Games movie audiences realised that Rue (who is described in the book as black) turned out to be – you know, black? A lot of people had defaulted to ‘white’ in their imaginations, and they were surprised when the movie contradicted that.
Not all defaults are as negative as that episode – in fact, defaults themselves aren’t inherently bad. Picture someone opening a door; envision it in your mind. What did that person look like? Were they a man or a woman? What colour was their skin? These are probably some of your defaults, and they’ve let you create a vibrant, visual word out of a very simplistic description: a door opening.
But when we forget to challenge those defaults, we can rob ourselves of the richness of a world that we aren’t necessarily in. For my part, I’m a white, middle-class, bisexual woman. When I create a default in my mind, that person is often very much like me. This can serve to help me empathize with characters by putting myself in their shoes, but it can be a weakness, too. Fiction can – and should – be so much more than my experiences. Fiction lets me be a sixty year old black man from London, or a twelve year old Chinese girl from Beijing. As a reader, your defaults can rub the soul off of a truly unique and special character.
But as an author, defaults can destroy your world.
Command the Tides is about an epic journey – one to slay an evil King 
and take back a kingdom ground down by a tyrant’s rule – and it’s been on a pretty epic journey of its own. I wrote the first draft of this novel when I was still in high school. I’m sure you can imagine, it was a very different story back then. It was simpler, with a straightforward story and a very rosy happy ending; it was also default in many ways.
Many, many years later, I dusted the manuscript off and did some reading (and is there anything more painful than rereading what we thought was brilliant in high school??) While the prose was terrible, the bones were good, and I started eagerly rewriting. I spent months chopping, massaging, reweaving and polishing, and finally I sat back and admired my finished work. This time, I thought the prose was great, but… there was a problem with the bones.
My defaults were showing.
I once asked the question, “why is it that we can imagine a world with dragons and fairies, but not a world without institutionalized sexism?” Here I had created a fantasy universe with a decent religion and interesting geography, but I had hit the default button on society, and I had hit it hard. I don’t entirely blame myself – those defaults have been ground into me, thanks to Tolkien and everyone who came after; even authors like George R. R. Martin, who get a lot of well-deserved credit for powerful female characters, still set those characters down in an unrelentingly sexist world.
So I decided to change my defaults. I sat down and really thought about where these ideas come from, and which ones I could change. I knocked on my friend’s metaphorical door and I said to her, “Okay, I have a problem. I have this premise: a woman wants to own property, but she can’t, so she enters into a sham marriage with a sailor boy. Only problem is, she falls for him. Now…. how the heck do I do that if sexism is taken out of the equation?”
I can’t overly stress how helpful it is, as a writer, to have a friend with a door that you can metaphorically knock on. We batted ideas back and forth, and finally came up with the idea that would become the backbone of all of the anti-defaulting I did in Command the Tides: society is skewed towards “family.” Only couples are allowed to own property, and the size of the property they can own is dictated by the size of their family. Suddenly possibilities were blossoming: if religion dictated societal values, what specific teachings meant that their religion dictated the importance of family? I already knew Ashua, a goddess, had lost her only son, Yariel, and that was a foundational myth to this culture. So I built on that. Without modern science, many people believed that men were the ones really “creating” children, that women were just ovens. So, men became the ‘life-givers,’ and ‘Yariel’s seed’ was something that had to be guarded. Men weren’t allowed to have sex outside of marriage, but no one minded if women did. This means we’re guarding young men but letting young women run free; so women become more individuated at a young age, are given more freedom. Boom. Smash. Defaults shattered.
Of course, now that I had totally finished rewriting my book, I had to start again, essentially from scratch, without my defaults. I went over the book from head to toe, and it was fun to see where defaults had come into play, and where I had successfully avoided them. My female characters were already pretty strong, for instance, but my soldiers? Every single one was a man! Well, that was the first (and easiest!) change to make. One scene I had a lot of fun reworking was an interaction where a disapproving shopkeeper runs into Taya’s particular brand of self-confidence. In the first draft, this nobleman is appalled to discover a woman running a shop. In the new draft? He’s appalled to discover that she’s not wearing any of the high fashion she’s selling.
Challenging our defaults isn’t always an easy process. But it is always a rewarding one, and it makes the worlds we build – and the worlds we consume in literature – so much more meaningful. And isn’t that something worth working for?