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What I'm Saying Is, The Search For Equality Is Pretty Messy

BWFoster78

Myth Weaver
AE,

I've been trying to avoid getting back into this, but I seemed to have failed :(

1. Obviously, this statement is the one I've had the most trouble with. It seems those on the other side of this argument take this as a given. The main point of contention seems to be that I don't take it as a given.

2. I agree completely that a huge component of successful story telling is creating a relatable character. That being said, if I rely upon race or gender or orientation to create that relatability, then I'm only making the character relatable to readers of that particular race/gender/orientation. I haven't read Lolita, but, from everything Steerpike has written about it, the author was able to make a middle-aged child molester into a relatable character. I think we, as authors, would be better served learning how to make any character that we choose to write relatable rather than relying on factors like race, gender, orientation, etc.

3. I hear the following advice on this site and from other authors all the time: tell the story you want to tell. Trying to figure out what the market wants and provide that, according to a blog post championed by a lot of people on this site, is a horrible idea. If you are passionate about telling that story about a particular group that you feel isn't represented, I think you absolutely should tell those stories. Your writing will be better for it. For you to tell me that I should include such representation when I'm not passionate about it is, I believe, foolhardy in the extreme.

The question to ask is, "Is diversity important to me?"

For me, not even a little bit.
 

Jabrosky

Banned
For my part, I occupy the middle ground in this turn of the debate. I don't think anyone should force writers to incorporate diversity if they don't want to. I also don't think anyone should force writers to leave it out in the name of tight prose. My views would be best described as championing freedom of artistic vision, regardless of overbearing political correctness or comparably overbearing literary minimalism.

That said, I have observed that incorporating diverse themes in a story or artistic work doesn't necessarily immunize you from the wrath of the social justice crowd. A short time ago they were flipping out all over tumblr because Katy Perry had the audacity to incorporate Asian motifs into her concert performance at the American Music Awards ceremony. Apparently if a white person does show interest in exotic cultures, they'll still get vilified for it. No wonder white writers have grown chickenshit scared of incorporating diverse races into their stories.
 
@Foster:I asked you this question a while ago, but I don't feel like I ever got a straight answer. You mentioned that your story has three female main characters. Isn't that representation?
 

JCFarnham

Auror
I come at creating and writing characters like this:

I ascribe to a relatively new school of thought (brought to my attention studying marketing) that states every object, person, or do-dad cannot be separated from that which makes them who they are, nor feeling, contexts, opinions, etc. which others ascribe to them. My professors (two out of three of the people who coined the phrase and the first to research this) called this "discourse". And state that a discrete object, person or otherwise, cannot have any sensible meaning unless viewed in its context.

It exists in all corners of the globe and each persons discourse influences decision making, interaction, plays off other peoples discourse. And indeed discrete object existing as they do in society accumulate discourse without even meaning to.

I'll apply this thinking to Catherine the protagonist in my urban fantasy novel. I made a decision early on that she identifies as gay. Taking that idea and ignoring other elements of her being, being gay has a bearing on who she is:

1. That's how she views herself. It is both her private and public facade. That's a conscious choice on her behalf (and mine I suppose).

2. It necessarily has influence on how others view her, whether or not they are aware of it, because they can only interact with her on the basis of what they see, what they assume, and from the perspective of their own discourse and the greater majority they exist with in.

3. More of an aside here but an important one. You can say the same thing about the meaning readers bring to the table when engaging in her story.

This is so ingrained in her being that to remove it because it has no bearing on the plot is an error. Indeed in this case she does engage in a relationship that turns out bad and which does have a bearing on the story or rather her character in all future events thus becoming more a vital part of her.

Yet until that point it remains a seemingly extraneous detail... until of course you realise what it means in terms of her context and discourse.

To bring this all back to equality. One doesn't have to open a can of worms for a trigger character (I lack a better term here, help?) to embody those things in the vacuum of a plot that doesn't involve or even come close to opening said can. A reader will bring their own meaning to said element, just as that element informs how the character acts in terms of the plot.

I also mention that Catherine was once a Guide (part of the Scouting Association). Extraneous, yes, meaning, debatable. But for my purposes it has every bearing on how she acts in the stories present (because its part if her life experience) and therefore whether I make this explicit or not has to be meaningful... To me at least.

These colours are what makes characters come alive for me and I can't remove them from their context or discourse simply because theirs is a story that doesn't directly address equality. But I do hope it advocates equality by being a good, honest representation of the character. Heritage, poc, and so can't readily be ignored in writing or society because of discourse consciously gained or otherwise. So for me, equality is being mindful that these things exist, have vital meaning for people, and realising these cannot be, for example, white washed, or colour-blinded.
 
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Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Thanks JC, those are some really good points/advice you're making/giving. It makes sense, but it's kind of thing I couldn't have put into words on my own like that.
 

JCFarnham

Auror
Thanks JC, those are some really good points/advice you're making/giving. It makes sense, but it's kind of thing I couldn't have put into words on my own like that.

No problem. You're quite welcome to regurgitate the subject of Discourse at a later date. After all, my professors must have thought it worthy of spending near a decade now researching, studying and teaching it. There's probably a lot more to it than I could possibly put across on my own in one post, so I urge anyone interested in this kind of thing to look up some papers on it. I found it interesting at least, and I'm pretty mindful of how it really colours my processes in the craft.

Of course other people have other ways of going about character and story creation. All of that is absolutely valid, but Discourse is by definition something that you have little control over*. One can't worry about pleasing everyone, but a homogenous setting with homogenous characters will strike a different chord with different readers, and therefore I (personally) believe that to be something one must be aware of. The story may be internally consistant, but I personally believe it has to be externally mindful in addition. Stories, books, physical or otherwise, haven't, don't and never will exist in a cultural vacuum.


*aside from altering the facade you present to others you meet throughout your life, but even that would only partially alter the discourse of society. Others may still view you in a different, possibly unfavourable light, no matter what you do, or how genuine you are. That's the final chuckle, as it were.
 
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Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
It's sort of how I feel about describing things and using descriptive words. Every word brings with it a horde of associations to other words, things and concepts and it's something I'm trying to make use of in my writing. I hadn't thought to apply it to people and characters as well.
 
@Farnham: If you change #2 in the construction of your setting, can you change #3? The webcomic Digger features a variety of humanoid species, one of which is matriarchal. One character's backstory involves him being abused by his wife, which in a conventional context is typically diminished or mocked--if not by the author, then by the fans. But the author creates a context in which a male character has very little social recourse to escape a female abuser, and the comments on the comic indicate that readers thought about it much the same way that male-on-female abuse is thought of.
 

BWFoster78

Myth Weaver
@Foster:I asked you this question a while ago, but I don't feel like I ever got a straight answer. You mentioned that your story has three female main characters. Isn't that representation?

Feo,

I have no idea what your question means.

Do I consider it some kind of representation of diversity to include a gender shared by more than 50% of the populace and whose presence is demanded by the story? No.
 
Feo,

I have no idea what your question means.

Do I consider it some kind of representation of diversity to include a gender shared by more than 50% of the populace and whose presence is demanded by the story? No.

You're not writing a story with no female main characters. You're not writing a story with one female character whose purpose is to be, and whose entire personality can be summed up as, "the girl." You're not even writing a story with two female main characters, the submissive follower and the aggressive tomboy, or, to put it bluntly, the Madonna and the Whore. You're writing a story with three female main characters, who presumably all have their own personalities. Your story may have no positive message in regards to equality, and it doesn't require one. But assuming your female characters aren't all stereotypical, your story exists outside the negative messages about what female characters are and have to be. When a particular message is entrenched in society, the very existence of views outside the message is a challenge to it, showing that there are other ways of being. That's what I mean by representation.
 

buyjupiter

Maester
2. I agree completely that a huge component of successful story telling is creating a relatable character. That being said, if I rely upon race or gender or orientation to create that relatability, then I'm only making the character relatable to readers of that particular race/gender/orientation.

I think this may be a faulty assumption about what people who do include diversity are doing. I can only speak for myself about the characters I've created who are diverse, but the situation demanded that be one aspect of their character. Not the only aspect, mind, but a part of it.

I try to create relatability by putting my characters into a situation that is similar to those that many people have faced: a horrible boss creating trouble which makes it hard to get the job done, a lack of money/a loss of societal privilege/exile and the way that makes some people cling extra hard to traditions/beliefs that no longer make sense.

I would be a "bad" writer if I relied on one aspect of any character to relate to my reader. If I only used anger, or compassion, or beauty, or brown hair, or height, my character would be flat as all get out. I'm not "relying" on gender, race, or orientation to do my characterization work for me. I'm definitely not allowing gender, race, or orientation to drive the stories I tell either (with the exception of the romantic story I'm writing). They are facets of my characters, and they may drive romantic subplots, but they are never emphasized.

If I emphasize the differences from a WASP culture, I'm creating a socially charged and potentially moralistic work, and letting my belief structure take over the work, instead of telling a story. I don't think it's my job to moralize about current society. I do think it's my job to not make a homogeneous cast of characters, and I use elements of diversity and personality to ensure I have different enough characters so that I'm not confusing the reader. (You know those long cast listings in the beginnings of some fantasy novels? Sometimes I can't tell characters apart, even after finishing the thing. I'm trying to avoid that.)

I was going to go into how I could relate to characters who are far outside of my worldview, but then I realized that characters in Like Water for Chocolate, or Invisible Man, or heck even Fight Club, were relatable to because they are human, and they struggle with identity questions, with love, with the effects of injustice, just like everyone else. They weren't relatable just because they were Latina, or Black, or weird. Those were just aspects of their character. And, to be fair, in these examples esp. Like Water and Invisible Man, ethnicity and culture are a huge part of their identities, but their struggles are universal.
 

BWFoster78

Myth Weaver
Buyjupiter,

This is the section that that portion of my post was in response to:

2) Because readers want to see characters who reflect themselves and their lives. This is the money answer, and readers vote with their entertainment dollars. Readers, more and more, really are showing increasing interest in seeing a more diverse reflection of life in genre fiction - they want to see the single mother, the black dragon slayer, the space waitress, the gay squire. The world, and the reading public, is not made up of straight white farm boys and princes, and they're getting bored with reading about them. So why not add richness, depth, and realism to our fiction while attracting readers who are clamoring for just such diversity, because they want to see characters they can identify with?

I'm trying to understand how my assumption is faulty when the original statement flat out says, "they want to see characters they can identify with" in context with the rest of the paragraph talking about adding "diverse" characters.
 

Mindfire

Istar
You can often tell people are arguing for the sake of arguing when the discussion starts going into a tailspin.
 

Jabrosky

Banned
So why don't I nudge the subject a bit by mentioning how we're incorporating diversity into our own writing?

At the moment I am working on an adventure/romance story set in the late 17th century, the so-called Golden Age of Piracy. The major characters I have planned are listed below:

- James Swann, a dashing English pirate privateer with golden hair and eyes paler blue than any sea he's sailed. He has a swaggering, cocky demeanor, though this may be a mask for internal insecurity and fear. Maybe he even has Asperger's Syndrome. James Swann functions as the story's male lead.

- Tshomba, a beautiful Bakongo healer and mage from Central Africa. She is the female lead, Swann's lover, and at the moment my PoV character. She has a sweet, nurturing personality and a lot more common sense than her man.

- Don Gallego, a pompous Spanish bounty hunter who's eager to catch Swann to win his Crown's favor.

- Nakhte, a 3000-year-old Egyptian priest and sorcerer whom Gallego revived so he could have a counter to Tshomba's magic. Nakhte's mind-reading abilities aid him in psychologically manipulating his opponents. For example, he tries to sever the bond between Tshomba and Swann by telling her that Swann, as a white man, can't truly love her.
 

buyjupiter

Maester
Buyjupiter,
I'm trying to understand how my assumption is faulty when the original statement flat out says, "they want to see characters they can identify with" in context with the rest of the paragraph talking about adding "diverse" characters.

I believe the point you've made several times boils down to "adding diversity means that the story is inherently about diversity, the character is inherently about diversity" when that is not the point that I (nor anyone else I believe) has been trying to make.

Diverse characters and good stories are not mutually exclusive. Nor are diverse characters and non-moralizing, non-politically correct stories.

I do have to wonder why you've argued so vehemently about adding diversity, when you've already stated you had no intention of doing so. I've not been saying you're wrong not to do so. It's your work. I can't make a value judgment on your behalf. I am wondering if you've been playing devil's advocate, or if there's an underlying concern that those of us who value diverse characters will break out the pitchforks and torches and force you to write about diverse characters.
 
I do have to wonder why you've argued so vehemently about adding diversity, when you've already stated you had no intention of doing so. I've not been saying you're wrong not to do so. It's your work. I can't make a value judgment on your behalf. I am wondering if you've been playing devil's advocate, or if there's an underlying concern that those of us who value diverse characters will break out the pitchforks and torches and force you to write about diverse characters.

As best I can tell from what he's said in other threads, he seems to believe that promoting female equality may (will?) eventually result in a society where women dominate and subjugate men. He's never been exactly clear, though--the most anyone's gotten out of him was that weird rant about pendulums that got a previous thread locked. I'm still trying to draw him out so I can debate his ideas properly.
 

Mindfire

Istar
As best I can tell from what he's said in other threads, he seems to believe that promoting female equality may (will?) eventually result in a society where women dominate and subjugate men. He's never been exactly clear, though--the most anyone's gotten out of him was that weird rant about pendulums that got a previous thread locked. I'm still trying to draw him out so I can debate his ideas properly.

I may be wrong, but I don't think he's arguing because of any deeply held convictions in that regard. I think he just likes to argue.
 
I may be wrong, but I don't think he's arguing because of any deeply held convictions in that regard. I think he just likes to argue.

Oh dear God, I may have just made my worst forum mistake since joining Mythic Scribes.

I keep a sort of mental file of the various quirks of forumites as they relate to arguing--specifically, things they believe that may or may not influence how they argue. However, since it's not written down, I sometimes get confused as to who exactly believes what. I may have been trying to argue with Foster on something that was actually said by T Allen Smith. If so, I am so, so sorry to Foster for this.

P.S. I might as well note this, as a curiosity: Mindfire, you have the "biggest" file of anyone on Mythic Scribes, and the second-"biggest" of anyone I've ever debated with. That's partly because certain kinds of arguments are guaranteed not to convince you, partly because you're really, really well-informed on certain subjects, and partly because you're so fun to debate with. (For reference, the biggest was a monarchist who thought that promoting social equality would inevitably lead to genocide--his positions were totally alien from mine, but they were completely self-consistent.)
 
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Mindfire

Istar
Oh dear God, I may have just made my worst forum mistake since joining Mythic Scribes.

I keep a sort of mental file of the various quirks of forumites as they relate to arguing--specifically, things they believe that may or may not influence how they argue. However, since it's not written down, I sometimes get confused as to who exactly believes what. I may have been trying to argue with Foster on something that was actually said by T Allen Smith. If so, I am so, so sorry to Foster for this.

P.S. I might as well note this, as a curiosity: Mindfire, you have the "biggest" file of anyone on Mythic Scribes, and the second-"biggest" of anyone I've ever debated with. That's partly because certain kinds of arguments are guaranteed not to convince you, partly because you're really, really well-informed on certain subjects, and partly because you're so fun to debate with. (For reference, the biggest was a monarchist who thought that promoting social equality would inevitably lead to genocide--his positions were totally alien from mine, but they were completely self-consistent.)

I'll take that as a compliment. As an aside, I took the liberty of trying to track down that "pendulums rant" you mentioned. I did manage to find a comment BWF made somewhat along those lines in a previous thread, but it was quite brief and I wouldn't call it a "rant". I'm also not aware of T Allen taking the position you're referring to either. My best guess is that you have the right person, but you're taking BWF's ostensible zeal in this thread and others and mis-attributing it to a strongly held ideological stance, whereas I think it may be more rightly attributed to pure stubbornness. Or maybe, in the matter of diversity, he just doesn't see what all the fuss is about and feels compelled to express his bewilderment through arguing.
 
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