Some thoughts on writing outside my experience

[brown_betty]

Recently, and not so recently, I've come across a couple of stories, or had them pointed out to me, within greater fandom, where the history or culture of marginalized groups was employed to make a story more exotic or interesting, with the result the story was offensive

Comments

[lazar_grrl]

One thing you might want to consider (and I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this, and it may fall under #5): Is the culture/event necessary to or a vital part of your story? If you have, say, a Chilean refugee as a character, does bringing up the fact that she was tortured for dissident activities during the reign of the military junta mean anything to the story or are you just throwing in backstory for her where you haven't for anyone else? Why should the reader know about it? Are you putting this in just for the sake of putting it in to show how "different" she is? And how big of a departure from the story is this cultural or historical information?

I've never quite gotten why people will write something that was essentially an action-driven piece, then suddenly stop and go into the "different" character's background with nary a tie-in to the plot, then just keep going with the action. Does this make any sense?

[brown_betty]

I think I see what you mean: is this one character's "exotic" background developed in detail just because it's so shiny and unfamiliar, and if so, maybe it didn't really need to be there in the first place. Yes?

[lazar_grrl]

Yeah, it's like a jarring note, singling out one or more characters to emphasize how different and wierd they are when none of the other characters get that level of detail. To me, it just sort of seems like another form of tokenism, no matter how snesitively-written or accurately researched.

[slashpine]

Hee - like mentioning that Albus Dumbledore is gay, just because, well oooh, it's neat?

You add a really good point, IMO. This would be, on a smaller scale, comparable to TV shows or magazine ads with all-Anglo casts, who randomly make one of the people in the background a PoC to show they care. (My university's marketing brochures *cough*)

[brown_betty]

Hm. I'm not sure I'd agree there. There's a tendency to see details about minority figures as "intrusive" because they're non-standard, when the truth is that no one has to tell us that everyone else in the book is straight and white; that's already what we're assuming. So if the author wants to put a Chilean lesbian in (and why shouldn't she?) she's probably going to have to tell the reader.

[slashpine]

Mmm, yes. I was thinking more about how when people do that, the problem is that the minority person is there for reasons that aren't the same as anyone else in the text. Sometimes they are stridently a 'token', visibly striking a note from outside the text. Sometimes they're just, say, Anglo clones with their skin tones darked. To be honest, that bothers me even more, because it takes so much not-thinking to do this not-realism

[slashpine]

Mmm, yes. I was thinking some more about how the problem is that the when people arbitrarily add a 'token' minority person -- or, in this case, a token 'exotic scene' -- that exotic person is there for reasons that aren't the same as for the majority group in the text. Sometimes they are stridently token, visibly striking a note from outside the text. Sometimes they're just, say, Anglo clones with "higher contrast" on their skin tones. In all other ways, though, they *are* cut-outs of the Anglos. To be honest, that bothers me even more, because it takes so much not-thinking to do this not-realism