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

Comments

[lyster]

That's a really interesting idea, and very cool to think about! I might steal, I mean borrow, it for my own blog. :) Maybe we could throw these up on the Substrate site? It'd be interesting to compare!

[alanajoli]

Oh, that's a great idea! I'd love to post these over at substrate.

[lyster]

Representing other cultures etc. in fiction is tricky -- "whitewashing" can be dangerous, but so can cultural essentialism. I try to be relatively random in my assignment of genders, ethnicities, etc. to story roles before I start writing, and it's worked decently well so far.

[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

[sartorias]

Interesting stuff!