One "little" thing -- and how we see it
Before I forget, must note that tonight wraps up voting for LJ Idol: Exhibit A, Week 2 (poll open to all). The topic this time was "Throw back the little ones" -- I took it in this direction.
One of the Green Room discussions at therealljidol this week was about diversity and how we reflect that in our writings. I missed out on the conversation, but it did get me thinking, especially as we just had MLK Day and are into Black History Month now. I'm not sure how I "deal" with racial/ethnic diversity in my characters because I don't give it that much thought. (Sorry to sound like Stephen Colbert's "I don't see color, I don't see race" joke.) Being a lifelong cracker, my mind's eye tends to default to picturing humans I've invented as white -- but I don't *set out* to make them so, unless the story specifically requires a certain ethnicity.
But look at my latest entry (linked a the end of the first paragraph): What color is Angi? Her original last name is "Carson," which tells us little; I know a Carson who is white, and my Congressman is a Carson who is black (and Muslim).
One of the weaknesses of my fiction writing is that I go too spare on descriptions, concentrating more on what they do and say than what they look like. Not to excuse that, and I hope to work on it in the future, but in a short-short story like this, it works to my advantage. It doesn't matter to the story at hand whether the protagonist is black, white or purple -- it works just fine if your mind's default makes her green-striped with orange hair, if that seems natural to you and gets you to the gist of the story.
One of the Green Room discussions at therealljidol this week was about diversity and how we reflect that in our writings. I missed out on the conversation, but it did get me thinking, especially as we just had MLK Day and are into Black History Month now. I'm not sure how I "deal" with racial/ethnic diversity in my characters because I don't give it that much thought. (Sorry to sound like Stephen Colbert's "I don't see color, I don't see race" joke.) Being a lifelong cracker, my mind's eye tends to default to picturing humans I've invented as white -- but I don't *set out* to make them so, unless the story specifically requires a certain ethnicity.
But look at my latest entry (linked a the end of the first paragraph): What color is Angi? Her original last name is "Carson," which tells us little; I know a Carson who is white, and my Congressman is a Carson who is black (and Muslim).
One of the weaknesses of my fiction writing is that I go too spare on descriptions, concentrating more on what they do and say than what they look like. Not to excuse that, and I hope to work on it in the future, but in a short-short story like this, it works to my advantage. It doesn't matter to the story at hand whether the protagonist is black, white or purple -- it works just fine if your mind's default makes her green-striped with orange hair, if that seems natural to you and gets you to the gist of the story.