Writerly Things

[ebonypearl]

As 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.