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ebonypearl at 08:54pm on 07/03/2009As a non-white (but passing for white because it's just less effort than explaining I'm really "red", only I'm half-red, and I was raised by my white parent in the white trash community,so maybe I really am white, only not the kind of white that's socially acceptable, only I chose to go to college and betrayed my roots on both sides of the family and - ah, pookah puppies, maybe I am white. Whitish, anyway.), non-middle-class, old, fat, woman, I reckon I don't have to weigh in on the race issue as one thing or another because I'm such a blend of stuff, and honestly? I don't belong to any race, ethnicity, or culture. I didn't even have the advantage of being born in a real country, so I'm not native-born anywhere.
At least I was born. I'm pretty sure about that.
So, every character I write about is racially, ethnically, culturally, socially different from me.
Perhaps that's why I mostly write employee handbooks and science fiction. I write about aliens with skins colors as diverse as a Barbie doll's. I know this because I have a blue-skinned Barbie, a pink-skinned Barbie, a green-skinned Barbie, a purple-skinned Barbie, and an orange-skinned Barbie from the Fairytopia series. I never did find the red-skinned and yellow-skinned ones... I also have a Navajo Barbie even though I'm half Kiowa-Apache. If Barbies can come in so many colors and get along so well together, I reckon my aliens can be the same way. We all know Barbie has all the cool stuff, so modeling aliens on Barbie just seems logical.
Point is, I'm on the outside of every culture, every ethnicity, every society,and every class. No matter how I create my characters, they will all be appropriations and I will get things wrong about everything because I didn't grow up or live in any defined culture, ethnicity, society, or class. I am truly an American mutt - classless, uncultured (or so multi-cultured as to appear uncultured), generic, and "floatable". I can "pass" in almost any group of people except men, but I don't really belong in any of them.
When I create a character, race is important only if it impacts the plot. If I do have to bring race to the attention of the readers, the character's racial behavior and characteristics will be based people I actually know. They may not be typical people of their race, class, social status, culture, ethnicity, education, or other socially-defining characteristics. They are not likely to represent whatever, and that's OK by me because I don't ever expect any one person to be representative of their entire whatever.
So,if people get upset because Lasura Blood-Cursed doesn't represent all the Blood-Cursed people who have ever existed or will ever exist, well, them's the breaks.
If someone's so hung up over Lasura's iconic status as a representative of her species/whatever, they are going to miss the story. And it's the story that's important, not any one character in it. The purpose of each and every character is to move the story forward, no matter how likable or detestable they are, whether they are full-fleshed or cardboard. They aren't real. More importantly, if it weren't for the story, they wouldn't exist.
You can have characters without a story, but they'd be pretty dull.
You can have stories without real, individual characters - and those stories can still be exciting. Fairytales, for instance, don't have real characters. They have the youngest son, the three brothers, the witch, the 12 princesses, the frog prince. If a fairytale character acquires a name, it's often because the name itself is important to the story, like Rumpelstiltskin. They don't need personalities, just stereotypical behaviors that allow the reader/listener to identify with the situation.
So,characters are pretty dispensable.
In my stories, the characters have to fit into the stories. They have to be able to drive that story to its end. For some characters, it's a heavy burden. My characters suffer a lot. Whatever characteristics they have, be it race, color, mental abilities, wealth, education, deformities, disabilities, superpowers, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever, those characteristics are there because the story needs it there.
If I get the story and the characters within it right, then it doesn't matter who I am, what age, gender, political persuasion,race, class, culture, or educational level, because I don't matter. It's the story that matters. Did I tell it well? Did you feel it? Did it make you laugh, weep, think, mad, happy? Did it inspire you, disgust you, affect you?
That's what matters.
The story.
(no subject)
As it happens, I am also "red" (Cherokee) and "pass for white". I've never made an issue of my race. I grew up Damn Poor, and all my friends were also Damn Poor, which meant we didn't have to worry over race (and we were quite a mixture of colors) because we were all excluded due to economic status. I've always thought there was no real benefit, no "white privilege" if you are so poor that people dismiss you even though you can "pass". :)
I agree completely with what you've said here about writing. It's the story that matters. If a reader is so busy noticing my technique, vocabulary, or the way I'm "deconstructing genre tropes" I have totally failed. Writing should be as transparent as possible. Or as my favorite beta-reader says, "Shut up and tell the damn story." (Every writer should be so lucky as to have a reader who will say that.) Nice to come across another writer who feels the same way.
(no subject)
I like your beta-reader. If you're a writer, the story eats everything. The writer doesn't owe the reader anything but a story rendered as well as possible. What the reader takes from the story isn't entirely in the writer's control, no more than parents are in control of how people like/dislike their grown offspring.
(no subject)
Now there is a line everyone involved in the mess needs to read. If we can't write about anything but our own genuine real-life experiences, people are going to get mightily tired of reading nothing but boring memoirs.
It made me very sad, that controversy. I never commented to it because I always felt anything I said would be the wrong thing. Usually words don't fail me, but they surely did in that case. I'm afraid there's been such damage done that it can never fully heal...or, at best, there will be some dreadful scars. What a shame.
I had only recently posted about what writers "owe" readers on my blog. These are weird times for writers, aren't they? We're expected to know everything, be everything, give everything because we "owe" it. Bound to be scaring a lot of new (and not-so-new) writers half to death.
(no subject)
Me, too. Because people chose to twist words to spin them to the worst possible light and they chose to be offended and hurt instead of saying, "well, you got this wrong and this wrong, have you tried that to get a better perspective?" because really, when anyone tries to see something from someone else's perspective, no one's ever going to get it totally right. Yes, it's work for the ones wearing the original moccasins to give those moccasins to someone else for a while and to help them evaluate their mile walk, just as it's work for someone to ask to walk that mile and then to evaluate it afterwards. If the moccasin wearer not only refuses to give up their moccasins but attacks both those who do give their moccasins and those who wear them to understand, we'll never get anywhere.
I was involved with a car accident and am facing possible permanent disability over it, so I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to this when it sprang up and I haven't and won't read the comments on people's post about it, just the posts as they appear on my Reading List. But, since I have occasionally been in confrontations for daring to write a character from some other culture, I wanted to point out that, for me, anyway, every culture is "other" to me and it wasn't the characters who were important. They aren't real people, they are tools to tell the story and they have to have whatever attributes I give them in order for the story to be that story.
These are weird times for writers, aren't they?
Oh, yes! We aren't allowed to just tell a gripping good story anymore. We also have to have absolutely sterling characters with no history of any wrongdoing in a our past, we have to be absolutely gracious to each and every reader no matter how awful we feel, we have to accept being stalked and threatened by strangers as mere charming fannish adulation, we can't have any kind of personal opinion whatever, because if we offend even one reader, we are horrible, evil fascist meanie pooh-pooh heads who should be ripped from limb to limb and our books burned.
It's stories. Who I am is unimportant. I rather prefer that no one can associate me with what I've written because then my stories are out there exactly as they should be - starkly alone, unsupported, open to anyone's interpretation and need. I don't want people to read my stories and go, "Hey, wait! This fat old woman can't know what it's like to be a 14 year old male prostitute on heroin. How dare she write a story like that! Burn her!"
So, yeah, anonymity is the way to go these days if you want to avoid stompfests like this one. Even my children don't know all the stories I've written and published, all the books I've authored. And they never will, just because of crap like this. I don't want my children attacked because of stories I wrote.
Of course, the non-fiction I write comes under totally different rules. This almost requires people trust me as a person for them to be able to trust my words. In matters of non-fiction, I must indeed be impeccable in character, dedicated and meticulous in research, honest and clear in the words I write.
But fiction? The characters, no matter how apparently well-rounded and written, are still plot devices. They are tools to move a story forward, and they are often stereotypes, archetypes, and/or creations of necessity, imaginary people in imaginary situations. They aren't real people, they don't represent real people, stories aren't anthropology texts. Fiction authors create characters that are blends of people and things they know, stuff they've read, bits they've overheard, experiences they had or heard other people have, and these characters are not real - they are story tools, plot devices, not much more than a Prince Charming or the witch in the forest. You can't switch the prince and the witch, but neither are they Every Prince and Every Witch.
But we authors know that. It's the readers who seem to expect too much, and we are right to talk about what authors owe readers (a gripping good story).
Few people speak about what the reader owes the writer. Maybe we should address that topic?
(corrected typo)