Yeah, yeah. It’s been a while. I’m not apologizing for it this time, my precious Gidsciples—I’ve been busy up here on the ol’ Golden Pedestal with writing a new, shorter, more publisher-friendly manuscript. On top of that, my job recently changed; I now write website content for a vape company. It’s odd to write like I care about vape products, when I genuinely don’t give much of a shit about that stuff one way or the other. But now I get paid to write, so I write whatever the guys who pay me ask me to write.
One of the problems I have is that (since I don’t vape,) all my knowledge comes from what I glean from the customer service I used to do for the company, the friends who do vape, and whatever I can research online. Sure, I can write that “this disposable vape hits smooth, and leaves a fantastic menthol follow-up,” but I don’t know that to be true, because I genuinely have no first-hand experience with it. This lack of experience reminded me of a very influential teacher in high school who taught me a vital phrase that I’ve carried with me ever since I learned it:
“Ignorance Is Curable, Stupid Is Forever.”
I want this phrase embroidered on a pillow. I want it on tee shirts. I want people around the world to think about this phrase, and remember it every day. You’ll hear the word “ignorant” thrown around as an insult nowadays, synonymous with being stupid, but these two terms are not the same thing. Ignorance, by definition, means that you lack knowledge. That’s it. You don’t know something. It’s not the same thing as being stupid. You can become informed when you lack knowledge, but you can’t magically become smarter if you’re just not wired for it.
A lot of people, however, confuse their own lack of knowledge for stupidity, when it’s not. If you are ignorant on how to use your brand new microwave, read the instructions and give it a try. Boom; you’re no longer ignorant. If I tell you, “don’t hold that firework in a closed fist, or you’ll blow your fingers off,” (and you didn’t already know better,) you aren’t stupid; you’re just ignorant of the fact that you’re about to blow your goddamned fingers off. Now, if you’ve been told this already, or seen it in action, and you still close your fist around the firework and blow your fingers off, that’s when you stop being labeled as “ignorant,” and become full-blown stupid. You also get an awesome nickname, like “Jimmy Seven-Fingers,” or “Stumpy The Wonder Moron.”
This is a life lesson that I use almost every single day. But, thinking about it made me recall one of the other important, every-day life lessons I’ve had beaten into me by other teachers, writers, and even a handful of non-writers who are just very smart:
“Always Write What You Know.”
That’s excellent advice, but when I want to write about other people, ethnicities, or orientations, it gets a little tricky for me. Even as someone who’s spent my life as poor or poorer than most everyone else I know, (regardless of color,) as someone who is currently sharing my life with a wonderful Mexican woman, and as someone who has a black best friend who is closer and dearer to me than my closest brother by blood, I’ve never spent my life as a minority, gay, female, or a POC of any kind. All I know firsthand is being a straight white guy, with all the privileges that come with it. I’d also have to be a complete jackass to try and deny that even I have experienced that privilege in some form or another, whether I like that fact or not.
Author’s Note: …I do not like that fact at all.
From a writing standpoint, this means that, as a side-effect from my lack of personal experience, my manuscripts tend to lean on the “this story is 90% white people” side. However, this isn’t because I think my stories shouldn’t have representation—they absolutely should. So, in my efforts to be inclusive, I tend to find myself doing a “race/orientation check,” to make sure I have included non-white, non-token people in my stories, or people of varying sexual orientations. (I myself am openly poly, but have yet to write a poly character for some reason. Go figure.) It also means that, in doing my best to be inclusive, I also make efforts to avoid the pitfalls of stereotyping the very people I’m trying to give representation to. I loathe a stereotype if it’s not justified. Someone’s race and sexual orientation is not their default personality setting. We’re all different.
Author’s Note: Somehow, we’ve all met at least one person that practically screams their stereotype from the rooftops though, haven’t we? I, for example, have the rhythm of an epileptic howler monkey in a dance-off under a strobe light.
When I decided to go back and revise one of my existing characters as gay, it was very easy. I already had a choice in mind anyway; a character who was absolutely not stereotypically gay, and in the story, simply told someone he was getting acquainted with that he was gay. That was it. This decision was helped by the fact that I know several gay people who run up and down the gamut from self-proclaimed queens to kings, and just like everyone else, they’re all different. (Some of whom you might not realize were gay right away.) The character I chose was a trailer-living redneck country boy, who happened to also be gay. I deliberately didn’t have him acting super-effeminate, or being the sassy best friend, or fawning over hot guys like a drooling, squealing queen. To be clear; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with anyone who is like that; I do believe certain stereotypes exist due to an abundant amount of precedent, but that doesn’t mean every character should wear the shoe, just because it might fit—even if that shoe is a stylish pump, or in my character’s case, a pair of black, steel-toed work boots.
I also had a character in the same story who I intended to be a sleazy, dislikable pimp; a street thug who hits women, pushes drugs, and speaks in broken hood slang. But, there was no way in HELL I was going to write a cliché that unsavory as a POC. So, I made him the whitest, Malibu’s Most Wanted motherfucker on the planet. Which actually made him even more unlikable. (Which was my intention, for the record.)
Now, here’s the first way I get myself hung up when it comes to representation: I could have made his gang all white guys, too; but then I’d have even more white people than before. I could have made them POC’s, but that feels like I’m saying that “all people of color are criminals,” which I don’t believe for a hot second.
The solution? I mixed it up a little. He had black henchmen, and Puerto Rican henchmen, while the sleazy pimp and another, more villainous associate of his were both white. The black and Puerto Rican guys don’t really fall into any “dumb thug” pitfalls that I have seen (or had my test readers point out,) but at what point am I providing diversity, and at what point am I stereotyping? It’s a fine line to toe, and I don’t want to do someone a disservice; but I figure that, regardless of race, we can all be bad guys, as well as good guys, right? Half the villains were white, after all; so maybe it’s fine. The villains in my sequel manuscript to that one were British, Chinese, and Japanese, all based in existing myths and legends from those cultures. It wasn’t too difficult, because I had the myths to draw on when crafting the story, and while they were a persistent threat, the story didn’t focus on them.
But, that takes me right to the second way I get myself hung up when it comes to representation. My protagonists are, for the most part, white people. (Remember ‘write what you know’? This is where it bites me in the ass a little bit.) I feel like, as a white person, it’s really not my place to write a narrative structured around a heritage or people I can’t directly relate to or don’t completely understand. (All that white privilege, remember?) I do my research to the best of my ability when I need to write on a subject in which I have no personal experience; and I can do all the research in the world, but it will never replace firsthand knowledge. I don’t know what it’s like to be a gay person whose been beaten up over their preference in romantic partners. I’ve never been a Mexican born in America who gets told to “go home” by some racist asshole who thinks “American” means “White Person.” I have never, ever been afraid that a police officer will shoot me dead because I’m black and holding a sandwich they “mistook” for an AK-47. In fact, the ONLY time I’ve worried about something like that happening is when I’m out with my best friend, other friends, or my girlfriend, and I think it’s going to happen to one of them.
I frequently wonder how I could possibly write a story from a perspective I’ve never personally experienced. I honestly don’t know if that’s a shortcoming or not, but it’s something I’m just not completely comfortable doing. This isn’t because I doubt I could write a compelling story centered around a group of POC main characters, but because I feel like It’d be a misstep for me to try; like it isn’t my place to do so. I wouldn’t write a story about the struggles of black Americans, or French immigrants, or even Hawaiians on vacation in the Swiss Alps, because these are things I have no experience with.
Author’s Note: My lack of personal experience obviously only really matters with writing real-world situations. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to travel the stars and meet aliens to write decent sci-fi. I mean, it helps that I have, and they were very nice aliens, but it’s not a requirement.
Regardless, I still try to include POC’s among my protagonists, even if they aren’t the lead character in the story. I try to avoid using them to “prop up” the white person, and make them competent, individual characters of their own. They’re also not likely to be considered disposable characters, or one-note stereotypes. A lot of the POC characters I do write tend to be loosely based on people I know in real life, and I’ll frequently ask them, “Hey, is this thing I just wrote cool/not cool/ignorant?” because I want to write characters who are both believable and relatable, but I also desperately want to avoid stepping into any socially or racially charged beartraps by accident.
This doesn’t just apply to ethnicity, either. One of the things you will see a lot of, (and something my early writing suffered from,) are female characters written by men, who don’t sound like female characters at all. You’ll see it in movies, TV, video games; all of it—and sometimes it’s very obvious. You can listen to them for a few seconds, and immediately say to yourself, “This was clearly not written from a woman’s experience.” In fact, one of my own manuscripts had horrible dialogue between two female characters, to which my girlfriend said, “They sound like dudes. This is not a conversation women would have.” I don’t even remember what it was about, but when I re-read the section, I realized she was absolutely right. When I asked what I could do to fix it, she said, “…There’s a Sex and the City marathon on right now. Watch that, and learn.” So I turned on the marathon, and I watched many, many episodes. Women talk very differently about things, (which I already knew,) but I soon realized a few tricks to writing believable dialogue for women. (Thanks, Samantha.)
Author’s Note: According to the multiple online quizzes I’ve taken, I am SUCH a Carrie. But I just don’t see it.
Honestly, when it comes down to it, I still don’t get it right all the time, and I still run into corrections and suggestions from my female readers regarding things that I would have no idea about. (However, I now know that I have a wealth of resources, when the time comes, for me to write a storyline involving a girl’s first period, though. So, that’s nice.)
There are tests out there for these sorts of things; to gauge whether or not you’re doing your representation right. The Bechdel Test is probably the most well-known, obviously, but one that I used to check myself combines female characters AND POC’s into a single test: “The Kent Test.” If you want to check it out, here’s a link. I’m proud to say the characters I’ve run through this have passed with a 7 or higher. So, if you’re like me, (and I know I am,) and you want to know if you’re doing okay with your representation, take the time to look into things like these.
I want to end this post by telling you that there is a lesson to be learned, and that I’ve learned one, and we’re all improving as people; but honestly, there isn’t. Am I going about this the right way? Am I doing right by my friends and loved ones who are every shade of the rainbow? I honestly can’t say for myself, but according to them, I seem to do just fine with my inclusion; and I know that I’ll never personally understand their plights as intimately as they experience them. I’m still not comfortable trying to write their stories, and I genuinely feel like I shouldn’t even be trying to. But, that doesn’t mean that POC’s, strong females, and people of orientations different from mine won’t exist as fully realized people in my books and manuscripts to the best of my straight, cis, poly white ignorance.
The best part is that I have enough people in my life who are different from me, that I can count on someone to fill in my ignorance whenever it may rear its ugly head.
Until next time, dear readers!
…Seriously. A Carrie? Come on. Like Big would ever notice me.