10 Things about My Stories

[alanajoli]

nalini_singh guest blogged today over at Silk and Shadows, listing ten things that were always true about her books. I thought it would be a fun experiment to try this on my own, so I did in the comments over there. It's hard! It's particularly hard since the space western story, "Rodeo in Area 51" took out a lot of the short-cut kind of things I could use if

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[alanajoli]

I started thinking about it a lot when there was the huge kafuffle back in January. (Rose Fox's Genreville blog still has some good coverage up.) Down in Rose's comments, she addressed me in what I think is one of the best summations about multiculturalism in fiction:

The best response I've seen to that dilemma (and I don't recall now where I saw it, but it was in the most recent go-'round) is that when a white writer says "I'm stuck between getting criticism for writing only white people and criticism for writing imperfect people of color", it really means "I'm stuck between getting criticism for doing the wrong thing and getting criticism for doing the right thing imperfectly". The criticism is a red herring; the fear of criticism is a red herring. None of it excuses white writers from needing to do the best job we can of doing the right thing. If we fail--if our multi-culti casts end up full of tokens who speak in wretched eye dialect, if an ostensibly diverse group is full of people who all sound like they grew up in WASPy white enclaves and never talk about cultural history or experiencing discrimination, if we daringly put a black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise and then make her a telephone operator--then yes, we will get criticism, and we need to learn from it and then keep doing the right thing as well as we can.The best response I've seen to that dilemma (and I don't recall now where I saw it, but it was in the most recent go-'round) is that when a white writer says "I'm stuck between getting criticism for writing only white people and criticism for writing imperfect people of color", it really means "I'm stuck between getting criticism for doing the wrong thing and getting criticism for doing the right thing imperfectly". The criticism is a red herring; the fear of criticism is a red herring. None of it excuses white writers from needing to do the best job we can of doing the right thing. If we fail--if our multi-culti casts end up full of tokens who speak in wretched eye dialect, if an ostensibly diverse group is full of people who all sound like they grew up in WASPy white enclaves and never talk about cultural history or experiencing discrimination, if we daringly put a black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise and then make her a telephone operator--then yes, we will get criticism, and we need to learn from it and then keep doing the right thing as well as we can.

[lyster]

Very interesting. The tension I was talking about isn't actually the not doing it-doing it wrong tension; it's more the problem of being too essentialist, e.g., at one point in the Anita Blake series, when Anita, part-Mexican and VERY assimilated into European-mainstream US culture, is presented as the good guy, while (apparently - I read this on tvtropes a while back, having only read 1 Hamilton book) a much less-assimilated Mexican woman serves as the bad guy. Or in Twilight: of course Native Americans are werewolves, because "they" are in touch with their, um, what, wild side? Inclusion success, cultural sensitivity FAIL.

That make more sense?

[alanajoli]

Ah yes, I see what you're saying. Although I'm a little more sympathetic to the Twilight situation, if only because the only characters who are at all compelling are the Native American characters. And maybe Dr. Cullen, who has an interesting faith journey. But the rest of the cast doesn't really have any unique personality (in my opinion); Jacob (the main Native American character) does, and has a brilliant struggle and character development arc in the second book, and is way, way too good for Bella. But then, you've heard my thoughts on her.

Of course, they're still werewolves with all the tropes that entails, so despite the reasoning, there's still that element of savage that makes it easy to question.