The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

My life is fairly crammed, and writing time is hard to come by. Today I got one of those precious blocks of time in which I could write for several hours almost without interruption, yet as I fired up the computer, I felt not excited about the prospect, but worried and on edge.  I also felt a little unsure: I had several projects I could be working on and was waffling on which one to choose.

Looking before leaping
I could have just plunged in and begun working on whatever seemed easiest, most obvious, or most attractive, and if I got deeply enough into the writing that I achieved flow, that might have gone well. On the other hand, I might have made a bad choice out of inattention, and it’s possible that even if I’d made a good random choice, my concern that I might be working on the wrong thing or my general unexplored discomfort might have seriously interfered with my ability to focus. Under those conditions, I might be especially unlikely to enjoy the work, which is a problem, because while common sense suggests that it doesn’t matter to productivity whether you enjoy the writing or not as you do it, in truth not enjoying what we’re doing tends to make us quit sooner, latch onto distractions more easily, feel less positive about what we’re achieving, and avoid coming back to do more. Liking the process of writing is a good way to write more and to be more invested in our work.

Schema journaling
So instead of starting by writing, I started by writing down my thoughts about writing. One of my current projects is a layperson’s book on mental schemas. Mental schemas (the habitual patterns called “early maladaptive schemas,” if we want to be more technical) are persistent ways of thinking that tend to interfere with living a happy and productive life, explored in detail in a branch of psychology called Schema Therapy. To provide a framework for making use of these ideas in my book, I’ve been experimenting with something I call a Schema Journal, where daily entries are an opportunity to find focus, work through confusing situations, reflect on progress and obstacles, and find answers to difficult questions. This same approach can be used without keeping a journal to sort out any situation that seems to be interfering with writing, whether it’s intellectual (like choosing which of two projects to pursue), emotional (like feeling worried that a project isn’t going well), or organizational (like having trouble finding time to write).

Schema journaling tools
Just writing freely about problems is a good approach, but it can be especially effective to write to a specific purpose. Here are some of the available tools or purposes writing about writing can have:

• Feedback loop: Reflection on how behaviors and choices are affecting a situation so far, identifying improvements, and coming up with specific plans to use those improvements at the next opportunity.
• Exploration: Thinking in detail about an opportunity or problem to come up with more specific questions or goals.
• Decision: Making a choice. This is the kind of entry I used today, starting with the question “Which of my writing projects should I work on at the moment?” This came after realizing that what was holding me back from feeling enthusiastic about writing was that I was conflicted about which project to work on. If I hadn’t been sure what the problem was, an “Exploration” entry would have been the thing to do first. That would have led me to the question I could use for my Decision entry.
• Assignment: Choosing a task that is usually avoided and setting a specific time frame for getting it done. This shouldn’t be a big project, but rather a specific thing you can accomplish, preferably in one attempt. Ideally this is something you can repeat, for instance “Choose a short story that needs a small amount of editing, edit it, and send it out.” The writing to do about the task is whatever is needed to create enthusiasm and get focused.
• Envision: Visualize a future situation that helps motivate you. The situation should be plausible, but doesn’t have to be something that’s immediately realistic. Getting used to the idea that things could go well and allowing ourselves to feel some of the emotions we experience when things do go well can help create a more positive and focused mood for writing.

There are additional kinds of entries in an actual Schema Journal that are more involved and have longer-term intentions, but the five specific tools above offer ways to get past the emotions, complications, and mental obstacles that prevent writing from getting done, or sometimes that simply get in the way of enjoying the process.

Recently I had the opportunity to read Del Law’s debut novel, Beasts of the Walking City, and between the world-building, the characters, and the hard-driving plot, I was engrossed from beginning to end. Since I know Law, I asked him if I could interview him for this site, to get a better idea of how he pulled off this surprising and entertaining story. He agreed, and here is that interview.

Del Law can be found online through his blog, House on Bear Mountain.

Del, what immediately jumps out at me about Beasts of the Walking City is the huge amount of world-building–actually, worlds-building might be more accurate, since the story takes place in a world that overlaps with a number of others. You’ve created geography, very distinctive types of magic and combat, multiple political groups, various kinds of sentient beings, cities, and history behind all of it. Where did the world of your story come from, and how did it get so detailed and layered?

I’m dying to say I found it all behind a back door in an alley somewhere in Hoboken, but no: I’ve been developing Blackwell’s world for a long, long time, almost as long as I can remember.  I played role playing games in elementary and early high school and caught the world-building bug then–as a teen-ager I covered walls of my room with maps and sketches of worlds and characters.  I bet if I were able to find those maps and dig some of them out, that aspects of Kiryth would be in them, though it’s grown and changed and morphed many, many times since those years.  Versions of some character showed up in my undergraduate writing thesis, but even then they were very early versions, written about by a writer who (I think) was still working to find a voice.

I daydream when I can.  I try and look at things from strange angles.  When I travel I try to find small details that imply a whole lot more behind them.  I watch my kids and how they see their world.  I try and write it all down and layer it in somehow.

So much modern fantasy is based on our own history here on Earth, and for good reason–it’s a shared reality we all know parts of, it’s easy for a reader to connect to, and by reading or writing books set in different aspects of our world, we all learn more about the world while enjoying a good story.  Plus, it’s easier as a writer to not have to make everything up, and if someone’s writing on a deadline you need to get your book done.

But with Blackwell’s world I didn’t want to do that.  I wasn’t on a deadline, and I wanted to build something from the ground up, something unique, with characters that feel vivid and real and embedded in social and political contexts as we ourselves are.  I wanted it to feel real and dirty and as messed up as our own world often is, not simple and contained.  I suppose I cheated a bit by then connecting it all with Earth, but by doing that I got to layer some of our history and details up against the ones I made up, and I think that gives the histories and the characters even more a sense of ‘real-ness’.

At what point did your main character, Blackwell, emerge, and how did you create or develop him?

Blackwell emerged over time, really, and for such a big guy he was pretty quiet about it for a while.  I know some writers say they have characters that stick in their heads and sort of lead the story along–not me.  I knew I wanted to write from a non-human perspective, since that doesn’t happen very often, and plus it’s a nice way to bring in more detail about the world.  But all the standard fantasy races were out for me–overdone, not much room left for originality.

So along came the Hulgliev.  Aspects of them came out as I was working through the drafts: once a pretty big deal, now pretty rare.  Hated by many–but why?  There’s a mystery.  They can pigment themselves like a squid does–that’s pretty cool.

But if the book was going to work, Blackwell really had to stand out with a strong voice, and he had to be someone that you could relate to, and not all-powerful or all-knowing.  I rewrote big sections of the book and things started appearing.  His really bad childhood.  His complex family structure.  His fondness for bourbon and noodles (things I can relate to).  His impulsiveness and poor self image and general naiveté.  His desire for something better for himself and his friends.  All of these things emerged as being pretty central to how the plot plays out in the book, so there was a lot of juggling to manage it all.  I rewrote a lot to try and get it right.

In the end, for me, he was fun to spend time with, as was Kjat, the woman who’s in love with him (though he’s pretty blind to it).  I hope they’re both intriguing for readers, too.

So Blackwell emerged in rewrites, a little at a time. I’ve had that happen myself, but it’s not an approach we hear talked about much, even though it seems here to have been pretty successful. Did other important elements of the book present themselves in the course of rewrites as well?

Del Law

Yes, completely.  Al Capone came late, and he’s pretty critical now, but early drafts didn’t have him and I think the story was more limited as a result.  Fehris, one of the important secondary characters, became not-quite-human as drafts progressed, to make him more compelling.  Some of Kjat’s backstory, and how that’s tied to Blackwell’s life, came later.  A lot of the smaller details that give the world a broader context tended to come later, too:  the Singing Dragon of Barakuu, or the Bakarh Contest of Symmetry, say.  This book doesn’t go into them in any detail, really, but the fact that the reader hears of them, knows that there’s something with this kind of mysterious name to it is out there, makes the world feel bigger.  (Unless you overdo it, and then there are just too many names and details flying around.)

Some of this comes from me knowing my own strengths and weaknesses, and how to work around them–I’m less great at plot, so I try and work that out first.  I’m better at description, so knowing that, I can give myself the leeway to push this off a little while I get the plot pinned down.  But then there are cool ways that descriptions interact with and affect the plot–you have to be perceptive enough to roll with that, even when it means a lot more work to get it all right.

The Amazon reviews so far have been overwhelmingly positive, but it’s notoriously hard for new novelist to get much attention for a new book. What future do you see for the Walking City series? What are the chances of a seeing a sequel in the next year or three?

I think there’s a great chance of another book.  I’m working on it now, though it’s hard to say how long it’ll take.  I don’t want to rush it out and have something I’m not happy with.  But there’s a lot in Blackwell’s world that I didn’t touch on in the first book.

Funny, your question came in the middle of a big promotion weekend I’m running on Amazon.com for Beasts.  The book was available for free, and was on the top 10 lists for both free Fantasy and free SciFi, and closing in on the top 100 overall free books for Kindle.  Hundreds of people were downloading it every hour.  For me, that’s totally cool, great publicity, and I think Amazon’s created a great opportunity for early authors to get their work out there. [Note from Luc: As of this writing, Beasts of the Walking City remains in the top 10,000 Kindle books, outdoing a great many novels released by traditional publishers.]

Will it make a ton of money?  Probably not this month.  But that’s ok for me right now.  I’d rather get Beasts out into the hands of readers, give them a chance to get interested in the series, and that’ll give me even more reason to write more of them.  Unlike writers who are working for a big publishing company, I can afford to be patient–my book isn’t competing for bookstore shelf space, doesn’t have just a few months in which it has to sink or swim.  Beasts can gain an audience slowly, over time, and that’s just fine.  I’ll be working on the next book, and the one after that.

This is the sixth interview and the eighth post in my series on inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction. You can find a full list of other posts so far at the end of this piece.

In today’s post, we get to finish the discussion we started some time back with writer Leah Bobet.

LUC: In our first round of questions, you mentioned Poppy Z. Brite’s book Drawing Blood, saying “Besides all the vampire sex and killing, what I took from that was that gay people are just people with relationships and problems and to do lists and lives to run and stories,” and you went on to describe how that has affected how you see and understand many kinds of people in the world. Are you consciously trying to create “aha” moments like this for your own readers? Are your goals for inclusivity in your writing explicit and specific?

LEAH: I’m not, no – and I’m not sure if one deliberately can create that moment.  Every reader’s set of experiences and stories and, well, their brains are different.  The “aha” moment is when the story being told combines with the rest of your life and data and experiences in a way that tips over a realization you’ve been on the verge of making.  It’s so very rooted in the reader that I’m not sure crafting it is possible.

What you can do, I think, is present the world as you see it, or the questions you’re sitting up nights asking yourself.  And people will either agree or disagree with what you show them, or go off asking all new questions that you never could have predicted.

As for goals for inclusivity, mostly the goal for me is to have it — which could be read as extremely explicit and specific, or not at all!  But to be clearer:  I don’t write to a moral point, or to proselytize in any way.  It didn’t take more than five minutes’ experience as an editor to learn that there’s a difference between a story and a piece written To Make A Point ™, and that the latter is very difficult to make into an interesting or engaging read.

What I do try to write is the kinds of stories I want to read as a reader, and those are stories that challenge me; stories that can both sweep up my heart and make me really and truly think; stories that examine social values without trying to sell them to the reader.  The stories I write are populated by all kinds of people because I want to read stories like that, and because that’s the world on my block, in my neighbourhood, in my city.

LUC: When a writer tackles a story that includes someone from a group they’re not a part of, what tests or steps or touchstones should be used, in your opinion, to do the job right?

LEAH: Youch – I am not at all qualified in any fashion to say how one can do the job right.  You can do all sorts of recommended things and still drop the ball on this sort of thing, or do none of them and do a really productive job.  It’s all situational, and it depends, also, on what job you’re trying to do.

I think there are two main factors to look at when you’re writing characters from a marginalized group, however you choose to tackle them.  The first: What’s the existing social and literary conversation around how that group is portrayed?  What are the in-person stereotypes about them, and what are the fiction stereotypes?  Because even if you’re not aware of or writing out of that stereotype, literature’s a conversation, and your comment (to stretch that metaphor!) will be taken as part of the larger conversation.  If it’s just reinforcing that, or not acknowledging in certain ways that there is a conversation going on, then it’s very easy to do harm.

I’ve tripped on that one myself: Thinking I knew the ground around how a minority is treated in fiction, and not in fact knowing it at all.  That particular piece of work hurt readers, and I can tell you unambiguously that causing harm with your work – using the trust a reader grants you carelessly, or using it ill – is a horrible feeling.  It’s not one I personally care to repeat.

The second factor?  Remember that your characters are people.

This sounds small, but it’s actually pretty big.  Remembering someone’s a person can mean remembering that someone from group X will have things that make them laugh and cry and roll their eyes just like someone from group Y will.  It can mean that they’ll be more or less attached to the culture and religion and society they grew up in, or in different ways, depending on their personality and experiences.  It can mean looking at their reactions as not something opaque and Other and strange, but as reactions to people around them being kind or cruel, or what has been expected of them, or what success and failure were laid out to mean when they were young.  It also means that they have a personality, and that there isn’t a standard, textbook way for people of group X to react to those things: anyone who’s ever had an argument with their siblings can pretty much back that one up.

In short, you are writing a human being.  Treat them as such: as someone complete.

This means, a lot of the time, learning not just to watch, and to see, but to empathize.  Which doesn’t mean to feel bad for someone; it means to, to the best of your ability, shift your own perspective.  What might your street look like to someone with mobility issues?  What would a character who grew up on a farm notice when they walk into a city park, and what would one who grew up in Manhattan notice?

This isn’t just a tool for writing characters different than you; it’s a tool for writing any characters well.  And it’s a tool that ends up bleeding, like all the best ones do, into your life: Because real people are complete and complex humans too, and once you’ve gotten into practice in taking other perspectives and not assuming your own is the only perspective?  You’re seeing people.  And that will reflect in your interactions; in how you treat your neighbours in the small things; and in how they notice, and treat you in return.

LUC: We’ve talked a little about Drawing Blood. Are there other books or stories that, for you, stand out in this regard? If so, what did they do right?

LEAH: Actually, this might appear to come a bit out of left field?  But: Anything by Sean Stewart.  Specifically Galveston, or Nobody’s Son.

If you subscribe to the theory that every author has a couple themes or problems they keep returning to, picking at around the edges, then one of Stewart’s is about realizing that you’re actually a complete asshole, and then what you do after that realization hits.  This is useful to everyone, I think, because I have not yet met a person of any identity makeup who hasn’t been an asshole to somebody.  In activism or just in daily living, the skill of what you do after you’ve been hurtful to someone else is a very useful one to practice, no matter who you are.  They’re flawed books about flawed people, and I’m not put off by either the books or the protagonists being flawed, because they’re also clear-eyed and kind.

So, what did those books do right for me, as a reader?  Aside from being quite well-made in a lot of ways – Stewart has a real skill with subtlety and nuance, especially when it comes to his characterization – the thing that affected me about them was that they’re so non-judgmental.  They let you in close to people who are wounded and recognize those wounds as valid and real, and then show how the behaviour that woundedness causes hurts other people, and how that pain is valid, too.  And I think that’s the key: That pain is valid too, not instead.  There’s an immense compassion in recognizing that we’re all capable of simultaneously being the people dealing the hurt and receiving it, or acting out of old hurt while acting well or badly.  Rendering that into fiction is a very tricky thing – almost as tricky as practising that kind of compassion in life.  And it’s just as worthwhile, I think.

The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

Writing professionally, or even just aspiring to write professionally, requires a weird combination of hubris and humility. You have to be willing to believe, at least for the 15 minutes it takes to put together and send out your submission, that the stuff you make up and write down is so fascinating that thousands or tens of thousands of people would pay good money to read it. The Hollywood Bowl has a seating capacity of about 18,000, but even a modestly successful midlist novelist or someone who sells a story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reaches more people than that. Who the hell do we think we are?

At the same time, we have to embrace humility if we’re not going to drive ourselves nuts. Actors and salespeople are among the few who compete with writers in the “getting rejected” department–and even those professions don’t spend two years on a project, send it out, wait eighteen months, and receive in return a form letter saying “No thank you; good luck elsewhere.”

Impostor syndrome
So is it any wonder that writers are often susceptible to Impostor Syndrome? If you’re not familiar with Impostor Syndrome, you might be interested in the article “Impostor Syndrome” on this site, but short version is that it’s when you see your successes and you think they must be due to someone making a mistake. Any time you sell a story, get a bite from an agent, or receive a positive review, it seems like a fluke. Obviously these people don’t understand that I’m really a big faker, you might think, or if I wrote something good, it was just blind luck and will never happen again.

Many many writers I know struggle with impostor syndrome. From a certain perspective, it makes sense: if you spend years and years looking up to people who are getting regularly published in certain magazines or whose novels are making it into the hands of thousands of satisfied readers, and if during this time you get a constant barrage of polite but generally impersonal messages that say “No, this thing that you poured your heart and every ounce of skill you have into really isn’t any good,” then you’d have a pretty inflated view of yourself to not ask yourself if the sale you finally get isn’t some kind of anomaly. (No disrespect intended to those who, like me, lean more to the hubris side than the humility one.) Maybe the editor who bought your story was drunk when she read it. Maybe your new agent is confusing you with another writer who’s actually good.

Misdirected expectations
It can get even worse when you have a little success: maybe you sell a story or get an honorable mention in a major contest. What happens if the next story you send out fails miserably? It just reinforces the idea that the first success was a fluke–even though any decent statistician with access to writers’ track records would predict a few failures with a high degree of confidence, even for writers who overall became very successful.

It doesn’t help that we writers are not particularly good judges of our own work. (See “Your Opinion and Twenty-Five Cents: Judging Your Own Writing”). We may think a particular piece we’ve done is the best thing ever written, or may think it’s utter trash, and in either case we can be right on the nose, tragically wrong, or even both.

Thinking your way out
So how do you stop feeling like a faker? Well, there’s thought and there’s action.

In the thought department, we’re better off when we avoid telling ourselves things that are either false or questionable and instead stick to things we know are true. For instance, instead of thinking “I know this story is going to be rejected,” we can substitute the thought “This story might sell or it might not. If it doesn’t, I’ll send it somewhere else.” That process, called “cognitive restructuring” (or my preferred term, “idea repair”), may seem elementary, but it’s surprisingly effective, as research and clinical results have shown. If you’re interested in idea repair, which is useful for far more than just addressing Impostor Syndrome, you can find articles, books, and other resources on the topic here.

Where does confidence come from?
On the action side of things, one of the most productive things to do is more. Write more, send more out, and get more used to the rejections–and the acceptances. I was at my son’s high school yesterday for a parent presentation, and I was powerfully impressed to see what complete confidence and self-possession every one of his teachers showed when presenting to groups of parents. How can they be so confident? I asked myself.

The answer to where the confidence came from was quickly obvious to me: these are teachers who enjoy their jobs, and they stand up and talk like this for most of every workday. They have get in more public speaking in the typical week than many people will do in their lifetimes. Effective practice makes you better and better at what you’re doing, and it also quells concerns about whether you have any right to do it. I’ve written about 15,000 words of fiction in the past week. I know from critique responses (we sometimes get very rapid turnaround on critique in my writer’s group) that at least some of those words worked well for a good sampling of readers, but I have no way of knowing if the stories I’ve put together will sell or just become more rejection magnets. However, having written all that, and especially doing that and then sending the work out, I know that I’m a writer. Whether or not editors buy what I write is up to them and out of my direct control. All I can do is keep plugging away, always working on something new, concerning myself not with whether people accept what I’ve written but with how well I’m doing the job of churning out words worth reading.

The thing is, regardless of how successful your writing is now or ever, if you bust your hump putting out new works, and if you push the envelope to try to make yourself better at what you do, then you’re a writer–and you might as well be proud of it.

Photo by V’ron

This is the fifth interview and the seventh post in my series on inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction. You can find a full list of other posts so far at the end of this piece.

In today’s interview we talk with author Anaea Lay.

LUC: Modern fiction–and some might argue fiction throughout history–seems to have a much more limited cast of characters than real life does, often putting characters who are straight, Caucasian, fully able, neurotypical, relatively young, and otherwise a lot like the typical American CEO or politician center stage. From your point of view, what difference does it make? What, if anything, is there to be gained from having a more diverse range of people in the center of our novels and stories?

ANAEA: I’d specify that modern English-language fiction does that. You get a much broader cast if you branch out into fiction from other parts of the world.

That said, the biggest risk with limiting your cast is that you’ll be boring. There’s nothing wrong with writing about a straight white middle class American male in good health, but you better give me something that’s going to set that work apart from all the other stories about the same character. If you stretch out and write about somebody else, somebody I haven’t read about a thousand times already, you’re starting off on stronger ground.

It’s one of those truisms you hear all the time that there are only x number of plots and every story is just a variation on one of them. Expanding your cast of characters opens up your possibilities for variations. It lets you tackle new problems, see new obstacles, go to different places and play with new ideas. As a reader, I like to see different characters because finding new things is part the joy of reading. When I get bored, I start to nit-pick what I’m reading and everything falls apart for me.

There’s also an element of excitement when I run into a character who’s like me in a way that I’m not used to encountering. There really ought to be more child-hating polyamorous women in fiction, because I’m a sucker for them.

As a writer, creating interesting characters keeps me engaged. I’m not a planner, so I rely on my characters going interesting places and doing interesting things to find my plot and get me through it. “Unmarked” characters run a high risk of winding up invisible to me while I’m writing. But the characters who challenge me, who come at the world from a different angle or background, force me to be a better writer. World building matters so much more because they way they interact with the world and the world interacts with them is different.

Making sure your prose is spot on matters because you can’t rely on the assumptions of what everybody knows about your default character to do your work for you and you might be bumping up against expectations trained by those defaults.

LUC: So does a broader range of groups of people attract you when reading fiction, too? What do you look for in fiction you read? What kinds of novels or stories would you most love to find in this regard?

ANAEA: I’ll read most anything if its good, and some things even when they aren’t. Having a broad range of characters, or characters I haven’t already read umteen billion stories about definitely stands out when I’m looking for fiction. One of my favorite authors right now is Nora Jemison. A lot of that is her prose which is lush and gorgeous, but her characters are fascinating and complex and not people I’ve read tons of things about, which makes it really easy to wind up completely immersed in her story. I’m not mentally checking off tropes as I read, and I’m not switching into analytical-reader-mode just to find something interesting enough to stay engaged.

I don’t look for fiction with character diversity as an explicit criterion. That said, I hate reading things I can predict from early on because I know the shape of the tropes they’re using. Having non-standard characters is a signal that the author is doing something different, and that makes it much more likely that they’re doing something I’ll find interesting. Greek and Norse gods? It’ll take a lot to make those compelling again. Tlazolteatl, though? Do your research well enough to keep from hurting me, and I’m there. Whiny white guy who wants to get a girl? Meh. Whiny Chinese-American guy who’s lost his connection to his mother? I contemplated crying. That’s what I want to read.

LUC: What other kinds of inclusivity, apart from race and ethnicity, connect particularly well for you or raise your interest in a story?

ANAEA: Women getting to play traditionally male tropes, and and bi or homosexual characters outside their standard boxes. See Alice from the BBC series Luther for a great example of the former, “Astrophilia” by Carrie Vaughn in Clarkesworld for the latter.

LUC: What do you hope to see happening among writers over, say, the next decade that’s different from what we’re seeing now, in terms of inclusivity?

ANAEA: I’d hope that going forward we continue to find the characters who’ve been neglected and tell their stories, and to keep talking to what’s going on. For example, I was having a conversation where somebody was lamenting the loss of the “Coming out” story as a compelling story. At this point, there have been so many stories about the difficulties of coming out, and coming out is so much easier than it was twenty or thirty years ago, that it’s hard to bring anything new to that particular story, even though it was hugely popular in the 90’s. I’d hope that we’d keep pressing the boundaries, keep making progress to the point where things that seem fraught now become normal. But I’d also hope that we don’t neglect where we are now or forget what it’s like to be breaking this ground and learning these lessons.

There’s an arc you can see over time as you look at fiction. If you look at some of the classics that try to paint a better future, or warn about a problematic future, they’re ridiculously simple and naive by today’s standards. Just compare Brave New World to The Windup Girl and you’ll see what I mean. I’d much rather have more fiction like The Windup Girl, and I’m excited about where that conversation will go from here because it’s going to have to break new ground, get more nuanced, richer. But it’s handy to have Brave New World as a yardstick to see how far we’ve come, or haven’t come.

You can do the same thing with looking at trends across time to include more characters. It’s still easy to run across cringe-inducing badly written women, but the good ones aren’t the exception anymore. There seems to be a movement toward non-white characters and pulling from non-western traditions and while a lot of that is creators deliberately making an effort to do that, audiences are getting savvy and starting to demand it, too. I’m not the only jaded and bored reader our there.

So I suppose I don’t have any specific desire for ten years from now, except that we keep doing what we are doing, and keep getting better. Though I will not complain if sparkly vampires have disappeared.

• 7/27 – interview with Leah Bobet
• 7/29 – Where Are the Female Villains?
• 8/3 – interview with Vylar Kaftan
• 8/9 – Concerns and Obstacles (multiple mini-interviews)
• 8/10 – James Beamon on Elf-Bashing
• 8/17 – Steve Bein on Alterity

This is the third interview and the fifth post in my series on inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction. You can find a full list of other posts so far at the end of this piece.

Today’s interview is with James Beamon, a writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories that often tackle questions of race and economic class in the midst of humor and wonders.

LUC: In a blog post of yours last year, you asked a question I’ve been hearing more and more about science fiction lately, in your case especially SF movies and TV series: Where are all the black people? You answer this question in part with some of your own stories, but your characters span not only a variety of races, but also social and economic classes and other groups that are often missing from fiction. Two examples that spring to mind are a convict and a young man with a severe stutter. Your characters sometimes struggle with questions like how they’re going to eat or how they can get around disabilities and prejudices to do things other people take for granted. How conscious is the way you choose your characters and the groups to which they belong, and do you have any specific hopes for how your work will affect readers and/or other writers?

JAMES:  Sometimes I choose a character with the active intent to highlight racial issues and prejudices.  Such was the case in “Orc Legal,” the second story in my 7 Realms series, which was always the writing outlet I used to deal with preconceived notions latent in high fantasy.  Honestly, I’m not sure if Tolkien understood what he was doing with Middle Earth, I’m not going to sit here speaking on his intent, but if anything comes close to a master race, it’s his damned elves.  They’re all tall and lithe and have 2% body fat and are acne free and will never ever age … what they wear is always in fashion, plus the clothes are enchanted with their elvish magic to glow at night and really highlight their angular sex appeal.  Meanwhile, the brownest dudes around are either the mud-covered orcs or the human mercenaries working for the greatest evil the world has ever known. Oh, and the elves are all white.  Sure, there are dark elves in high fantasy, but they stereotypically live in caves and plot murder and make poisons and other dastardly crap befitting a dark race.

I make it a point in the 7 Realms stories to see the world through the disenfranchised races … goblins and orcs and trolls.  And while I don’t profess to make them noble (after all, the orc in “Orc Legal” is a career criminal in prison) I make them engaging, believable entities, with goals and desires that make them transcend one dimension. More importantly, I strive to have my audience laugh at the absurdities inherent in racial disparity while destroying preconceived notions.  If I can break preconceived racist notions in high fantasy (e.g. … all orcs are dumb, all elves are beautifully perfect) then I believe it’s a step to realigning how people view the world around them.  That’s what stories do … highlight the human condition.  Besides, it’s extremely therapeutic for me to make fun of those stupid elves.

Again, sometimes I choose the character with my intent active and known.  Sometimes the character chooses me to tell the story.  That was the case with Mums in “The Homeless Man of Greater Zimbabwe.”  I was completely swept up with notions of this lost and rediscovered city in the highlands of Africa, I saw it as a trade hub, a multicultural place where anyone could come.  And while I wish I could claim genius or some sort of insight to why Mums came with a disability, he showed up at my door as he was … the homeless man.  Ironically, he always spoke to me with a severe stutter.  His problem arose out of that.  This story was a chance to show readers a forgotten world with characters they could invest in who are active members of this lost culture.  If the reader comes away feeling like it was possible, or with a deeper appreciation for what could have been, I will feel like I gave the place a decent tribute.

LUC: Come to think of it, that was one the things I found most startling and thought-provoking in “Orc Legal”: the elf-busting. I honestly hadn’t thought much about it before, but it’s true that elves seem to symbolize a version of white people that is especially pure and pretty and shiny. I know there are examples of stories and media that handle elves differently, but I’m talking mainly about the elf stereotype in and after The Lord of the Rings. In “Orc Legal,” you raise a topic that I haven’t come across so much in discussions of inclusivity and fiction, namely bringing some kinds of characters down out of the stratosphere. Inclusion is one thing, but how important is it to break down or redefine some of the groups that have tended to dominate Western, English-language fiction?

JAMES: Inclusivity really doesn’t mean much without equal footing.  Again, with Tolkien as an example, it doesn’t matter if there are a thousand black people in the novels if they’re all in dark armor working for the evil overlord.  Even if they chose different career options, in the Rings universe no matter what they strive for they will never attain the seemingly unassailable awesome inherent with being a fair elf.  Extending this to the real world, to people who like to imagine and cosplay, and to young readers, all a white person has to do to attain a seemingly ideal state is stick on some ears.  What’s that say for non-whites?  Because ears aren’t gonna cut it.  You get to be the orc or at best the dark elf.

That’s why I make it a point to elf bash, because it causes a re-evaluation.  Instead of seeing perfection you see human foibles … elvish disdain and discrimation towards other races, vanity, an empty pursuit of perfection, qualities that aren’t attractive.  If stories like Orc Legal, which makes an orc look smart and savvy and fun to be around while making elves petty and vain and pretentious, how much more does that idea of all races have something to offer permeate to the reader?

I think it’s a start if nothing else.  The alternative is the mono-race syndrome that’s prevalent in both fantasy and science fiction, where everyone in the culture is the exact same way.  When was the last time you saw a clean-shaven dwarf reading a book thoughtfully?  How about a Klingon holding a piece of chalk scratching out mathematical theorems on a chalkboard that left Data astounded? The problem with mono-culture is that eventually writers start associating known stereotypes onto their created races.

You remember Star Wars Episode I, and how the trading Neimoidians all talked with a funny accent, mispronounced their “l” and “r”, and wore Far Eastern inspired clothing … it wasn’t hard to associate them with a present day non-white culture based on stupid stereotypes.  I know I couldn’t stand that bastard Jar-Jar Binks … aka alien Stepinfetchit.  Again, including all races and cultures in fantasy and science fiction  is important, but not merely as extras, sword fodder for the white hero, thinly disguised stereotypes, or backup dancers.  Inclusivity means more than a medieval eurocentric experience in fantasy with the one black Moor or Eastern trader as a sidekick.  It means more than one non-white on the bridge of the starship.  It means the ability to see good things and bad in all races, even when those races aren’t human.

LUC: I don’t think I’m alone in saying I’m with you on the Jar-Jar thing especially. If only they would have left the stupid racial stereotypes out of those movies, we could have spent our attention in the more rewarding pursuit of deriding the terrible plot.

I guess that isn’t, properly speaking, a question, so let me change gears and ask you this: How do the issues change when we take up the issue of economic class? Poorer people are badly underrepresented in most fantasy and SF too–but not in your fiction. In some of your stories, getting something decent to eat not only shows up, but it’s central to the plot in the same way that it’s central to the lives of millions or billions of people in real life. Are the problems and solutions the same for economic class as they are for race?

JAMES:  I do believe racial and economic exclusion exists in fiction for some of the same reasons, predominately in that writers write what they relate to.  One of the reasons you see a huge glut of white protagonists having adventures in euro-centric worlds in science fiction and fantasy is because many of the writers of speculative fiction are white people with euro-centric upbringings.   I believe this same type of self-projection happens on an economic level as well … it’s kind of hard to write poverty when you’ve only seen it at a distance.  I’m like Steve Martin in The Jerk … I started life as a poor black child.  I know what government cheese tastes like.  I remember Christmases where the only presents came from Oasis (a kind of Salvation Army where richer people donated toys).  So while I can relate to the point where it appears convincingly in my writing, I don’t think this is a common thing for most writers.

Writing’s not necessarily expensive, like say golf or mountain biking, but it is an educated game.  I can’t speak for all poor kids, but I know I had to work against my conditions to become fairly proficient at writing.  A lot of it was self-education by reading voraciously and walking a lot to the library.  The rest was paying attention in school, wanting good grades and all.  People tend to flow like water and electricity … they take the path of least resistance, and in my hood this was definitely not a resistance free path …  There were a lot of single parents who was always away from home working where I grew up, either that or they weren’t very proactive in their kids’ lives, and few kids will pick up a book if left to their own devices unless parents spend those first formative years helping that child foster a love for books.  Luckily my mother helped foster that early love of fiction, so I was looking for books for an easy escape to places I couldn’t go.  That love of reading germinated and grew into a love of writing, something I think virtually all writers share.

So this long, auto-biographical answer relates to why you don’t see more poor folk in fiction, but that doesn’t provide any solutions, does it?   Given my stated cause for this lack of representation, a lack of author experience, I’m sure I don’t like the obvious answer… which seems to suggest having more writers who could relate to poverty.  I’d rather there’d be less poor people and writers in a post-modern world are forced to guess what it’s like to get that government ration of peanut butter that just has bold, black “PEANUT BUTTER” stamped across the packaging and loving that hard, poor-grade ration because you don’t really have any basis for comparison, this being the only peanut butter you’ve ever had.  Since quality fiction has a way of inspiring readers, and inspired readers grow to love writing themselves, I see a clever author who either had to unfortunately grow up poor or is awesome at extrapolating poverty being able to paint a realistic picture that inspires future writers to reach outside of their own experiences to write on both races they don’t belong to and socioeconomic conditions that they’ve never experienced.  That’s the ideal solution… because its not writing from experience unless that experience involves private jets and the playboy mansion.

LUC: Any comments, answers to questions I haven’t asked, or closing statements?

JAMES: I don’t have any particularly insightful parting words … no last inspired nuggets of profoundness for your readers.  Just like we all hail from different backgrounds and cultures to come together to live, work and play in today’s global village, I’m sure the issues you’ve put to all the writers you’ve interviewed will come together to make for a bigger, more profound understanding than I could ever state alone.  That’s what makes inclusion so awesome.

Wait … were those particularly insightful parting words?

Posts so far in this series

• 7/27 – interview with Leah Bobet
• 7/29 – Where Are the Female Villains?
• 8/3 – interview with Vylar Kaftan
• 8/9 – Concerns and Obstacles (multiple mini-interviews)

I’ve been doing a series of interviews and posts on inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction, beginning to look at the circumstances of and solutions for various groups of people not being well-represented in fiction based on race, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, gender, disability, neurology, social and economic class, and so on.  So far in the series, I’ve posted two interviews and one additional item:

7/27 – interview with Leah Bobet
7/29 – Where Are the Female Villains?
8/3 – interview with Vylar Kaftan

More interviews will appear here every Friday for some time to come.

For today’s post, I assembled responses from several Codex and SFWA members to a mini-interview I put together about concerns and obstacles to inclusivity in fiction. My main reason for doing this is that while there appears to be a lot of support for writing inclusively, there are sometimes real dangers involved, and these are sometimes dismissed as simple fear of making a mistake or looking bad. I think that there’s much more to it than that, and I was fortunate enough to get a variety of insightful and clear responses that explore the topic well.

Because there’s one respondent whom I didn’t explicitly make sure to get permission to mention by name as of publication time, I’ll use “Anonymous” for that author here.  You can find out a little about some of the authors who responded at the end of this post.

LUC: What concerns or anxieties do you have when it comes to writing characters who are very different from you, for instance in terms of gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, physical ability or disability, mental or neurological condition, background, or age?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: Getting it right! When I write about a character who’s substantially different from me I do as much research as I can in an effort to get not just the details but, as much as possible, the inner experience right. One of my most gratifying experiences was getting a shout-out from a Nigerian blogger for my story “Lagos,” which is set in near-future Nigeria and has a Yoruba woman as a main character — definitely a bit outside of my own experience, so I was very relieved to get such positive feedback!

ANON: From most important to least important my concerns are:

1. That I am fundamentally incapable of comprehending people from said group in a way profound enough to accurately represent them.
2. I may spread inaccurate information to uninformed readers who are also not of said group.
3. I may discourage a reader who is of said group from reading more of my work, or more of the genre, or prevent them from enjoying the story in question.
4. That by trying to acquire the necessary information to present said group accurately, that I will appear ignorant, racist, insensitive, or otherwise bigoted to the person(s) of that group whom I’m interviewing (and thereby damage the personal or professional relationship I had with said person).
5. That even if I accurately represent said group to some degree, that an individual from that group will have had a different experience and publicly decry my story telling abilities in a way that will impact the success of the story in question.
6. That the actual content of the story may be overlooked or under-appreciated because some of my characters are of a particular group and some/most readers are prejudiced against said group.
7. That an error or perceived error may damage my writing career.

STEVE BEIN: Being PC doesn’t concern me.  Being authentic does.  Politically speaking, I’m not overly concerned with this sort of thing, but I’ve taught a lot of ethics courses in my time (I’m a philosophy professor by day), and I always include feminism and critical race theory in those courses.  The disability rights movement often comes up in my classes too, as does social and economic injustice.  Coupled with all of that, I’ve done some academic writing on diversity, so I feel I’ve indirectly put a lot of thought into how to approach characters who are very different from me.  That said, the primary problem for the writer is authenticity.  No caricatures or stereotypes allowed; the character has to be a lot better than that.  I feel I have to do a lot of research and pay very close attention to crafting the language.

ELIZABETH MOON: Very little. There’s a basic concern for getting things right, of course. But there’s no more concern or anxiety for “different from myself” on the axes you mentioned than I would have for accurate portrayal of a farmer, an auto mechanic, an investment banker, a soldier…the character has to feel real to the reader, someone who could emerge from the culture as shown, and become the person he or she is. One advantage of being older and from my background is a lot of experience with people very different from myself. So it comes naturally to include a variety (though certainly not every possible variation of every category–that would be a catalog, not a story.) There are cultures and occupations and backgrounds I’m more familiar with; the ones I’m less familiar with do require more research and care if they’re in the story. The advantage of writing SF and fantasy is that I’m not bound by existing cultures or existing situations and attitudes, and can move backward, forward, or sideways to change parameters and play the what-if game with more than technology. I don’t worry about “balance” according to any formula in any given book, because the books and stories are different, and overall I know there’s variety.

Presenting unexpected (to some readers) diversity often means they miss it entirely (not something I expected, starting out) and read characters as whatever that reader’s default is. I should have expected that; I did the same myself as a kid, automatically placing myself, a girl, in the heads of characters who were clearly boys or men. They did the interesting stuff. Since I myself could skate past the very clear signals that a book’s main character was male…I have quit worrying that my clear signals about skin color, age, background, etc. are not getting through to all readers. There’s only so much you can do without messing up the story.

M. BENNARDO: My feeling is that any fears or concerns I may have about writing characters who are different from me are really fears about appearing ignorant, or fears of being accused of ignorance. To a certain extent, those concerns are productive — I’ve certainly done a little extra research now and then in the hopes of looking less foolish.

But ultimately I have to accept that no amount of research will ever be “enough” and that I will always be exposing some amount of ignorance to people who are better informed than I am. (In this case, better informed about some set of life circumstances that I do not share.) My responsibility is to write the most compelling story I can today, and then to write an even better story tomorrow. Part of this is being informed and thoughtful, but another part of it is also taking the plunge and risking looking like a fool.

If I do get called a fool because of some act of ignorance or carelessness on my part — well, that just means I’ve become part of a conversation where I am not the smartest or most informed person around. I’d really be missing out if I let my fears get in the way of that.

LUC: Have these issues ever prevented you from writing something you otherwise would have pursued?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: No, but there have definitely been cases where I did a lot of research to make sure I got everything right. My story “The Face of the Waters” was probably the most nerve-wracking, but I can’t say why without spoiling the twist…

ANON: Yes, on more than one occasion.

STEVE BEIN: Not yet.

ELIZABETH MOON: No. But that’s largely because I wanted to write SF and fantasy, where I wasn’t constrained by current events. I wanted to change parameters and see what happened. Also, even when I realized some readers misread a character to their default…that’s their choice, or their problem, or their limitation. I give them the clues; they can use them or not. I have no control over that, any more than the authors of the books I read as a child could have stopped me from imagining myself into the male characters. There are, inevitably, some categories I’ve used less or even skipped–some I don’t know much about, others that–despite knowing something about–just aren’t that interesting to me in the story sense. Putting someone in just to be the poster child for his/her category, so I can claim more inclusivity is….in my view…a big fat fraud. The diversity that’s in the work is organic to the work. I didn’t write a book about an old woman to show off–but because that old woman, Ofelia, came into my head and pestered me. I didn’t write a book about an autistic man just because we have an autistic son, but because Lou showed up and said “I want to ask the questions.” (Having an autistic son, and having met other autists and parents along the way, certainly gave me plenty of background material–but the character snagged me.) The exploited children with various disabilities in the story “Combat Shopping” were there because the situation demanded them (and because Andi got into my head and said “Write me!”)

About Some of the Authors Above

Photo by  tomswift46

Last week I began posting a series of interviews about inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction–that is, what groups of people are conspicuously underrepresented in fiction based on their race, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity, age, ethnicity, disability, or other factors; and why; and what can we do about it?

I started with this interview of Leah Bobet and followed up with a short post about the lack of female villains. Today’s post is an interview with Vylar Kaftan, who has described herself as a “queer white writer” and who has made inclusivity a particular mission in her work.

LUC: A few years ago, I gather you spent about 5 hours putting together statistics on the characters in your fiction in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, age, and class (readers: you can see Vylar’s results for all her characters and for her protagonists. Aliette de Bodard and Marshall Payne followed Vylar’s lead and reported their own results). I think it’s safe to say that in most categories, your numbers were much more diverse than the general run of English language fiction in North America and Europe. Were you satisfied with where you landed? Did anything change after you saw your results?

VYLAR: I thought the results were fascinating, and I’m sure glad I did it.  I was generally satisfied with where I landed.  What I found most interesting was that despite conscious efforts to diversify my characters, I still suffered from a touch of “me-ism” where my characters reflected my own experiences as a queer white woman.  After looking at my numbers, I made an extra effort to increase characters of color, both from my own culture and others around the world.  The results were very rewarding.  I have sold many of the new stories I wrote, and I feel like I learned more about the world as a result of the research I’ve done.  In fact, both the stories I’ve sold to Asimov’s stemmed in part from my desire to include more characters of color.  “Lion Dance,” which will be out in August 2012, has mainly Chinese-American characters; my forthcoming novella “The Weight of the Sunrise” is an alternate history with mostly Incan characters.  My diversity analysis directly contributed to my development of both stories.

LUC: What’s the difference for you, if any, between writing a character from a culture that no one living has experienced and writing a character from a contemporary culture or group that isn’t yours? Do you worry about “getting it wrong”?

VYLAR: The biggest difference is ease of research.  If there are living people in the culture, it’s my responsibility to be a good listener and learn everything I can.  If it’s historical research, I’m forced to rely more heavily on books–but it’s still crucial to read accounts from people who lived in and wrote about their own culture. This question is actually more about primary sources than about diversity; you need to find sources written by people in whatever culture you’re working with, whether that’s the Roman Empire, the New Orleansjazz scene in the 20s, or modern teenagers in Nagasaki.  It’s easier when there are living people to email, because they essentially write some primary sources for you.

Of course I worry about getting it wrong.  If I didn’t worry, I shouldn’t be writing it.  I’m sure I’ll get something wrong, or maybe I already have.  All I can do is try my best. If someone points out a mistake, I need to listen and learn gracefully (instead of getting defensive).

LUC: In addition to races and ethnicities, you identified and measured how many of your characters fell into some other often-disregarded groups, such as seniors, people with disabilities, and people in working class families. Does the issue of racial diversity in characters have a different kind of status or different challenges than some of these others? Do these other groups pose special challenges for writers?

VYLAR: Every kind of diversity has its own challenges.  Some are easier to show in text than in others, just by their nature.  I think many writers are more afraid of writing characters from different racial backgrounds than some of the other “isms,” and I’m not entirely sure why that barrier seems harder than other ones.  I do think that the book “Writing the Other” by Nisi Shawl is a great way to learn how to explore these boundaries and diversify the characters in your fiction.  Sorry to have an incomplete answer here, but I think other writers have covered this topic far more eloquently than I.  The Carl Brandon Society is dedicated to increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the speculative fiction community, and their set of resources will be very useful for a writer looking to learn about this topic.

LUC: How included do you yourself feel in the novels and stories you read? Is it a different experience from when you were young? Is inclusiveness in your writing ever a response to what you’re reading?

VYLAR:I generally prefer writers who make an effort to have diverse characters in their fiction, so this hasn’t been a huge problem for me.  Sometimes I find story ideas by asking myself, “Who’s not being written about?”  And the answer to that stems from what I’ve been reading and seeing in current sf/f stories and novels.

My friend James Maxey recently invited fellow Solaris writer Rowena Cory Daniells to guest post on his blog, and her blog post explores the problem of there being very, very few powerful female villains in literature. I don’t know if this idea surprises you, but it does me. First of all, I hadn’t realized there were so few, but she’s right: when I try to think of some, I come up with Disney villains, Madame Defarge and then not much else outside children’s stories, though of course there are always exceptions to this kind of thing.

Second, though, it surprised me to be told that a certain group being underrepresented as villains was a problem. Yet I think Daniells is right on the money: the lack of powerful female villains seems to reflect attributing relatively little power to women. Not only do women seem to be less likely to tote around guns, for instance, but they also seem less likely to shoot you even if they have them.

I recommend the post for anyone interested in inclusivity in fiction: you can read it at http://dragonprophet.blogspot.com/2012/07/powerful-women-factual-and-fictional.html .

Attending Readercon recently, I was struck by discussions I heard and took part in that brought up the problem of inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction: that is, what kinds of characters are conspicuously not present or very often stereotyped. This applies to race, but also to a lot of other categories: sexual preference, gender and gender identity, age, disability, mental health, social and economic class, and others.

The question I’m left with as a writer is this: what am I not doing and not seeing that’s contributing to the problem, and what can I do and understand that will contribute to making things better? So I’m doing a series of interviews with writers I admire who have things to say on the subject, starting with this one with Leah Bobet, whose novel Above (Arthur A. Levine, just out in April) tackles physical differences and marginalization in a novel and compelling way. Publisher’s Weekly gave it starred review: “Bobet effortlessly blends reality and fantasy, her characters are both gifted and broken—hers is a world that is simultaneously fantastic and painfully real.”

LUC: A lot of your fiction deals with characters that aren’t common in the books and stories we often see. From your point of view, is this tendency of most commercial fiction to prefer white, fairly young, straight, “non-ethnic”, monotheistic, neurotypical, non-disabled, and otherwise “normal” (perhaps I should say “as-though-normal”) characters a problem, or are you just taking a different path? If it’s a problem, what’s wrong with it?

LEAH: Hah – you’re asking me if this is a creative decision or a political one!  Well-played.  And, well, it’s both.  They’re inextricable.

I feel that it’s definitely a problem, yes – and it’s because of that word “normal”.  We’re none of us normal, and we’re all normal, and that’s not just the thing your parents tell you to make you feel better when some bigger kid pushed you around for whatever invented reason.  Calling one (fairly narrow!) kind of person “normal” makes people expect that their stories are the most important, and ultimately, that anyone who falls outside those lines doesn’t really have stories.  And they do.  We do.  You do.

Not only does that rob everyone of a whole lot of interesting stories, but it slowly and concretely gives us the idea that those people who aren’t “normal” don’t really matter.  They don’t have stories, so they don’t do interesting things; fight fights; reconcile; cry; learn; fail.  They don’t exist.

And telling most of the people in your society that they subtly don’t exist?  Just, well.  Seems like a bad idea to me.

LUC: So what happens when traditionally disregarded groups of people do make it into our novels and stories, especially as central characters? What kinds of impact can or do we have on readers when we write more inclusively?

LEAH: Well…just like with any work of fiction, a few things can happen.  It depends on who’s writing the work – are they in the group, or out of it? – and who’s reading it, and how well the portrayal is done.

The portrayal can be done sloppily or on the basis of the kind of harmful stereotypes that most people have about someone else without even realizing it, and then people are hurt and angry, and there are negative feelings all around.  Or, when it’s done thoughtfully, it can still sink like a stone: Books or stories fail to catch on all the time, for reasons I’m sure most of publishing would pay in body parts to figure out.  Or, well, there can be a benefit to readers, or to the community overall.

I think it’s probably hard to say where those social benefits begin and end.  Readers are people, and each person has a different and individual relationship with the various labels and roles that make up their identity (and that’s the first trap of all: thinking that just because someone is a member of a minority group, that that identity is their identity, or that all members of a given group have the same relationship to that part of their lives.  It’s not, and they don’t.)  So one reader might see themself in a character and feel like their existence, their stories, are being acknowledged by the larger community.  Another might start thinking about how their neighbour sees the world, and even if that’s not how their neighbour sees the world at all, learning to be considerate is, I think, a real plus.  Another might say, “That’s not what being X is like,” and then be clearer on what, for them, being X is actually like and why someone else might see it that way, whether that someone else is a member of the group or not.

Someone else might realize, in the back of their head, that there are more stories and ways of living out there than their own, and develop further the kind of open-mindedness that makes you not automatically reject someone living differently than yourself.

This happens.  This works.  Once upon a time when I was eleven years old, and didn’t even have much of a concept of gay people (yeah, it was a pretty isolated and homogenous suburb, and it was the early nineties.  I know.) I read Poppy Z. Brite’s Drawing Blood. Besides all the vampire sex and killing, what I took from that was that gay people are just people with relationships and problems and to do lists and lives to run and stories.  And although here and there I’ve struggled with the kind of ingrained prejudices you get when you grow up in a largely racially homogenous, economically homogenous, religiously homogenous isolated suburb, that has never been one of them.  Right story, right time, right reader.

So I guess what I’ve been groping towards here is that portraying characters and people who aren’t in that narrow band of traditional North American “normal” can, at its best, make people different from a reader not other.  It can make a reader go, “Oh, right, that person is still a person,” instead of seeing a role, a stereotype, an other.  It can make all the readers out there who don’t fit in that narrow slice of the population whose stories are always told – being, most of the population of North America right now – feel like yes, everyone else sees them; they are acknowledged as part of the community too.  That they have a voice and a place, and space to be more than the stereotypes that are frequently expected.  It gets writers who aren’t part of that narrow slice of the population out there, heard, and paid, which is really important, because having homogenous professions in a heterogenous community can be really toxic when it comes to things like public policy, and who needs what, and how it needs to be done in the everyday world.

And then?  Maybe we all treat each other better.

I’ll have more questions for Leah in a follow-up interview down the road.