Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

Since I'm suddenly exhausted and I want to get back to writing since I took the afternoon off, I'm just going to point you

here
where I talk about authors helping authors. In lieu of that, here's the same writing links I have there.




Top 10 Writing Posts of 2018

Making A Living From Your Writing

Should You Give Non-Human Groups Marginalized Traits?

10 Writer Takeaways From My Trip To Disney World


Are You A Writer, Or Someone Who Dreams Of Being A Writer?


Trends In Publishing

Cut and Cut (and Cut Again) — The Self-edit Credo


A Million Jelly Beans And No Bowl (facts and narrative)


Filling The Holes In Your Story

Writing Phone Conversations to Forward Your Plot and Draw Your Characters

Comments

[all_choseny]

Very good article about marginalized traits for non human characters. I remember describing one of my characters to a friend and they flat out asked me about my characters race. The entire time I had pictured my character as a white Male. My friend thought that was the strangest thing because I'm neither white or male. I started writing for nano and purposely gave my characters marginalized traits because I realized that you rarely find POC as leads in YA fic. So in some cases when you're trying to break the mold I think it is okay. Thanks for sharing the article.

[cornerofmadness]

Mythcreants has some good ones. I have a different perspective, or should I say fear in using marginalized traits/races because I am White. I want to write diversely (in fact am expected to write diverse characters) but worry am I getting it right? Will I get yelled at for trying to write diverse characters (because I've seen a lot of that out there so the whole damned either way dilemma) and then realize that there is NO one way to be for anyone. I think about the handful of classmates I went to med school with that I've stayed in touch with. Two of them grew up in some very rough areas of town but their children grew up with a good deal of affluence. The racial identity is the same but the experience is not.

That said, absolutely PoC are terribly under represented in YA (and elsewhere) and #OwnVoices authors are even harder to find.

[all_choseny]

I have a friend that I RP with who is white. She had the same fear at first. But she's been rping with my friend Viv and I for so long, she's observed how we have our characters interact etc. When viv and I first started rping together there weren't a lot of black rpers and we were the only ones making custom black characters. Someone messaged me once and said, "your character is black, but they speak normally." Well, yes, yes they do (I understood they meant standardized English)lol. My characteters speak like I do. Even in RP viv and I adopted code switching. Our characters spoke using some AAVE, but I guess they expected something else? Anyway, we told our friend that we rp with to consume as much lit or media written by PoC to help find your character's voice. Personally, I love to see non-PoC take on the challenge of diversifying their characters as long as they aren't using stereotypes I am a happy camper. I had a few people step into our game and make black characters and they had them speaking in some kind of weird slave dialect. I laugh now, but it was annoying back then. That said, I think observation is key and consulting with someone you trust to make sure you aren't getting into troupes. I do it all the time when I play other PoC characters.

[cornerofmadness]

I'm glad to hear you say that. To me, an author should be able to write anyone if they put in the time to learn and do it right but I've personally encountered a lot of resistance. For example one prominent Chinese author (who's name I can't recall now probably because he upset me so much) who said Whites should never be allowed to write Asians and on a daily basis I run into people telling me I shouldn't be allowed to write gay men because I'm female. So it has made me gun shy (that said one of the stories I sold had a half African descent/half Asian gay man in Wales so there's that)

I understand where the pushback is coming from, lifetimes of badly written stereotypes and PoC always and forever being the villains of the piece.

At least now sensitivity readers are a thing (I used a few friends for the Christmas story that I had published last month where one was blind from RP (as are two of my friends) and the other Puerto Rican and my friends jumped on that to help) Even so Stiefvater's last work featuring Mexican characters was trolled hard because she's not Hispanic (and she did have sensitivity readers). There's a lot of work I guess to do.

I definitely would have been annoyed by the gamers coming in and having their characters speak some kind of Pigeon English.

As for me I like to travel and I like to learn about other cultures. I've always written diversely. I need to flesh out the characters in the thing I have planned for later this year.