"And if it is it doesn't matter matter matter matter...."

[mrissa]

I am still celebrating my birthday until Saturday at least, and probably thereafter (because I haven't scheduled with everybody I intend to schedule with, and I doubt that all of that will happen before Saturday). But I have been asked how my "real" birthday was, and it was good. It was very good indeed. I was given sparklies and books and gooseberries and recipes and shoes and the gift of not having to shop for shoes. (Shoes are always a double gift for me, because not having to shop for shoes is such a darn relief.) And lo these other splendid things. And I'm not done, did I mention that part? It's so good.

I am enjoying a little bit of the traditional post-birthday choice paralysis when it comes to books, not helped by the fact that some of my long-standing hold items came in at the library. I enjoy the post-birthday choice paralysis. It never lasts longer than it takes for me to need another book anyway; as soon as I need one, I find myself able to choose. But the waffling is nice.

Lots of people wished me a birthday free of vertigo. And that...um. That didn't happen. At all. As I'm pretty sure they expected. But:

I'm thinking back to a post rosefox made awhile ago. She was talking about sexuality/queerness, but I was thinking of it as applied to race and sex and disability in fiction as well. The oversimplified version of the theory she was talking about (and ascribing to Rick Bowes, possibly*) was that there are three stages of having a queer person in fiction: 1) ACK!; 2) exploration of the queerness; 3) story about something else completely. And Rose was saying that she wanted another step beyond that, where the story was neither focused on the character's sexuality nor treating it as completely irrelevant, and I was thinking that I want that with race/ethnicity and gender and disability and really all sorts of other character traits, too. I see why it's sometimes interesting and sometimes necessary to have "What is it like to have a girl do these things?" stories, or "How does it change this story if the characters are black?" stories. But I feel like there are too cases where people assess whether it "matters" or not whether a character is female (/black/gay/blind/whatever) by judging whether someone was actively trying to stop them from doing something based on that trait. It can be a good story. But it's not the only way that a trait can matter.

Take The True Tale of Carter Hall, for example. Thomas Allen Lin. Called Tam because his little sister couldn't say Thomas when she was learning to talk, and it stuck. He's Chinese-American. (And not, you will note, Chinese. There are plenty of good stories to be told about born-in-China Chinese people in North America. But this is not one of them; one of the things that makes me absolutely crazy furious is when non-white people are assumed to be Not From Here due to being non-white. Will having a third-generation Chinese-American character in one hockey fantasy fix this? No. But it can't hurt.) Does it "matter" that he is Chinese-American and playing hockey? Well, on the one hand, no: there is nothing inherent that should make Chinese-American people any better or any worse at skating, stick-handling, etc. And would people picket a minor league team demanding an end to the Yellow Peril? One would most certainly hope not; not in Bemidji in 2008. I would be shocked. (I am frequently unpleasantly surprised by the newspaper. But shocked rarely.) But name for me the famous Chinese-American hockey players. I'll wait. No, good try, but Richard Park is Korean. Does it matter if you are not just the only non-white guy on the team, but the only non-white guy on any of the teams you play? Does it matter if pros of your race/ethnicity in your sport can be counted in a very short conversation? Well, yah. I think it does. Does it stop you from doing what you love to do? No. But motivational speeches aside, stopping you or not stopping you are not the only things that count. I think that's very lazy writing, frankly, and lazy social thinking. If your character interactions can be summed up in a yes/no checkbox, you're probably doing it wrong. (Oh, how many LOLauthors there could be with "Nuance: ur doin it wrong." Sigh.)

Tamora Pierce's Alanna books are dealing with the cases where someone comes out and says, You Can't Because You're A Girl. It's a pretty standard plot, done well. Her later Keladry series makes me happy because it recognizes that the world does not leap back in amazement and say, Wow, I Guess Girls Can! We Will All Reform Our Views! just because one girl did. It acknowledges that while being the first is interesting, being the second is interesting, too, in ways that are underexplored in this genre. But there are more steps down that road to take. There are more ways to explore gender mattering and not mattering in that fictional cultural context. Pierce can of course go down other roads if she likes, but this one has miles and miles ahead on it.

On the New Writers panel at Fourth Street, mmerriam said he wanted to see more disabled characters who just were disabled, who weren't there to have their disability miraculously healed at the end but who just got on with it, whether it was saving the world or contacting the aliens or what. Who were blind, or deaf, or had mobility problems, or any of a number of things, some of which show up in the real lives of the people reading this, but who were neither defined by that nor able to completely ignore it. I think there's a little more of that in books these days. I hope so. I loved how Hilary McKay handled Sarah and her wheelchair in the Casson family books. It mattered. It just didn't dominate. It wasn't the only thing that mattered.

So, circling back: did I have vertigo on my birthday? Yes. Did it matter? Yes. Did I have a good birthday anyway? Yes. Definitely. And I hope to continue to do so.

*Edited to add: Rick notes that first, this is not his theory originally, and second, he certainly doesn't see it as the be-all and end-all of what can be done with sexuality in fiction, much less other character-related topics. I think no one should have assumed the second point anyway, but it's still good to keep in mind.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

>>It acknowledges that while being the first is interesting, being the second is interesting, too...<<

That was one reason I loved that series as well. Because I've known more than a few people who took a prejudicial situation that was refuted by one person and the bigot in question said, "Yeah, X did this, but that was a fluke. It'll never happen again."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah. I've been the dancing bear in this scenario. It is No Fun.

[rosefox]

Oh, that theory--and my desire for fourth-stage-ness--absolutely applies to all sorts of things. To pretty much everything, actually.

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

My sister has been legally blind since birth. (Cataracts through entirity of the lens - inoperable.) But if you really want to find a misplaced something, she's your gal.

Glad to hear your "real" birthday turned out well. Agree, shoe and clothes shopping...feh. Glad you got a double gift.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I have always liked Kel better than Alanna because yeah, Alanna was FIRST but she also had magic and divine intervention. Kel had sheer force of will, no extra boosts. She was also a nicer person.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And the over-the-top purple-eyed magic-goddess-cat thing. Yah.

[ckd]

It acknowledges that while being the first is interesting, being the second is interesting, too, in ways that are underexplored in this genre.

Or in general. Lots of people recognize Jackie Robinson's name; who, outside of Cleveland Indians fans, remembers Larry Doby? (Who, ironically enough, was also second to Frank Robinson, the first African-American to be a team manager.)

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

http://www.mhsanctuary.com/healing/auto.htm

Above is a link to one of my most returned to poems - AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS by Portia Nelson. When I feel stuck in a habit or some such nonsense, I often think, "Hey, what chapter am I on".

Sometimes I think I get stuck because the something worked the first time and maybe even the second so it must work again...right? But in this world the very act of any movement effects change- perhaps not profound change (gravity comes to mind), but change nonetheless.

Example: I found it funny that my brother (when arguing politics as teenager) did not think that recycling was a liberal issue. For years it was - it was when I was a teenager. People who recycled were considered downright radical or too poor to anything else or both. But little by little as the issue came more or more to light. They walked down the street, fell down a hole, got out and kept going until they found a different street. When they did, it caused the line to shift. Now recycling is nearly everybody's issue.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I will often say that lack of change is itself change: if you've had coffee at the same time, in the same place, on the same day of the week, with the same person, for the last ten years, it is not the same this week as it was ten years ago. Change is inevitable because even doing something over five hundred times is inherently different from doing it once.

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

I agree. My thought is that the motion of the world and even growth/learning of the players would change that specific repeated incident.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i just suggested a panel for icon on disability in tanya huff's blood series. which i love, and think it handles it very very well up until the last book which damn near made me scream. fortunately, she then realized that would be a good time to end the series, because if she [redacted] after [redacted], i'd be even more pissed off.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I thought I was going to chew through the spine of the last book of that series in sheer anger (says the guy with RP).

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I love Swordspoint because the gay romance really matters, but not because they're gay--but because they are who they are.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

If shweta_narayan didn't already have you friended I'd have to send her over here.

Oddly, one of the better handlings I've seen of a character is a wheelchair is in Disney's Kim Possible cartoon. (It doesn't hurt that the character's mom is a robotics whiz and has tricked his chair out in drastically cool ways.)

And yes, I agree with what you said as fiction and also as real life. No one ever told me I couldn't be an engineer or a pilot or a rower or an SF fan because I was a girl, but my gender (and accompanying socialization) has definitely influenced my reactions in all those things as well as people's reactions to me. And I was probably the multi-thousandth in all those things, not even the second - but it's also not a progression, always. Rowing is well on its way to being gender-balanced but I don't think there are many more girl engineers than when I was in school twenty years (*) ago.

*The compression of time, even as you're experiencing it, is one of the odder effects of aging. Not just years but even days seem shorter now.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

And Rose was saying that she wanted another step beyond that, where the story was neither focused on the character's sexuality nor treating it as completely irrelevant, and I was thinking that I want that with race/ethnicity and gender and disability and really all sorts of other character traits, too.

But - strictly being devil's advocate here - sometimes if you try to write a story where that stuff is Not Important, you get scathing criticisms from people who believe that by trying to underplay those aspects, you are (check off one or more) []ignorant of the facts []a bad writer []attempting to ignore the elephant in the closet.

You end up in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't game - not always, but sometimes. If I write a black character and I make it obvious from the text that she grew up with a somewhat different set of touchstones from the white characters around her, I'm automatically doing it wrong and I don't understand that particular cultural and ethnic set of experiences and I should never have attempted to stick my nose into something I know nothing about. (I got critiqued harshly once for writing a black character whom I believe I portrayed quite realistically, since he was based very closely on an actual friend of mine. I have never forgotten this.) If, on the other hand, I make her a black character but treat her as an exact clone of the white characters around her, I am committing a worse sin in the opposite direction. (And if I don't give my characters any observed race at all, then I am writing them in a vacuum and readers complain they can't relate to these characters because they are nonentities.)

I may be oversensitive to this because I have had no end of trouble with complaints about how I characterize. I believe what a character does and says is more important than any assumptions about their background - I assume that you know nothing about the character going in and if they have something to show you, they will have to demonstrate it. This character is a lesbian hippie? Then she needs to say something that establishes it; I think just putting her in a commune in Northampton is a bad way to do that. I do not assume automatically that just because someone in a story is named Marge Gunderson and lives in Grand Forks that she is a tidy, efficient, somewhat passive-aggressive ScanAm, and it annoys me that other people not only DO make assumptions like that, but apparently need such things as an "establishing shot" to connect with the characters.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's just what I'm not saying, though: nuance, nuance, nuance. Not that race (sex, etc. etc.) is Not Important, but that the importance isn't necessarily in a simple or obvious way.

The other thing is, I think, recognizing that putting fiction out in the world is putting it open to both critique and criticism. Sometimes people are not going to like the way you handle a character element, and you have to decide whether they have a valid point or not. That's how it goes. There's nothing you can do to make yourself immune to that type of criticism, and frankly I don't think there should be.

I once got an e-mail from a reader complaining that they'd liked a story of mine except for the aliens. That story contained no aliens. That is a reader I am content not to please. If, on the other hand, one of my friends who has Chinese ancestry sits me down with the draft of The True Tale of Carter Hall and says, "Here re some things you really could do better with this," I have good reasons to listen. The rest of the world falls in some spectrum in between; part of being a writer who lets fiction out into the light of day is figuring out where the different commentary falls on your personal importance meter.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I once got an e-mail from a reader complaining that they'd liked a story of mine except for the aliens. That story contained no aliens.

How did this reader arrive at this baffling conclusion, do we suppose?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I read the story through a couple of times and could not figure it out. They were very clear on the title of the story and the main character's first name, so I had a hard time thinking it was just that they'd written to the wrong author from that issue.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Maybe the aliens beamed themselves out of the story?

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Hm, didn't Something Positive just have a comic kinda like this, where someone was talking to Randy about the ninjas in his comic? (http://somethingpositive.net/sp07232008.shtml) Maybe you have very good aliens...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Here in Eagan we have a unicycling ninja in a lime green fleece pullover. But not now. Just in the winter. I mean, obviously.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

At some point in any field involving criticism, one has to accept that there are people with so many axes to grind that they spend all their time at the wheel, and none actually bothering to comprehend the work in question. One has to find some method that doesn't involve listening to them.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I will admit that the critiquing of these things scares the bejesus out of me, especially since I'm white. I got yelled at for how DARE I, Whitey McEvil, put an Asian character in a story...by the entire writing group I was in. I have been paranoid ever since. I later wrote a story where one character was hapa and another was Irish/African-American. I'm kind of afraid to let that one out of the public closet.

*sigh*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Wow. My stories have non-white characters all over the place, and nary a peep. And not secretly non-white characters, either, but people with surnames like Vang and Srisai, where you couldn't really say, "I'll bet that's German."

I hope you've found a better crit group, because, "white people should not put Asian characters in their stories," is not a critique I've ever heard from an actual Asian-American person. Ever. Eek.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

That group was a college class, actually, so I have moved on from that. I think they were primarily pissed that the character was the narrator, too. And yes, that group was full of white people. I think a lot of us (at least in my neck of the woods) have gotten yelled at a lot that we can't understand The Other's problems if we are not The Other ourselves, and it's offensive if we pretend that we ever can.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

College writing class. Oof. Well. There are good reasons to take those -- my good reason is that it set aside time in my schedule for writing -- but when we find the crazy there, yah, not surprised.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Who were blind, or deaf, or had mobility problems, or any of a number of things...

I had to chuckle when I read that. When we were putting together Shimmers & Shadows, the running joke was that: The writer is blind, the artist is deaf, we've got a guy in a wheelchair right on the cover and we couldn't find a traditional publisher willing to handle it, so the poor little book didn't stand chance out in the wild.

I really enjoyed this post. I really want (and in my own fumbling way try to write) stories about people who just are, whatever that happens to be.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

If I ever get the trilogy-in-progress published, I wonder how this is going to go.

(a) I have a bisexual character, who I will probably have date a woman at one point in the story, but her sexuality is more "just there" than a major major plot revolver. It relates in that (a) she's been in many short-term relationships with both genders, not always for purely romantic reasons, and (b) having the purely romantic LTR with the woman gives her another reason to want to keep her current scheme running. Said character is "kind of" a villain (i.e. she is getting up to bad stuff in the first book, and changes later, but she will lose the girlfriend due to the bad stuff), so does that mean that Bi People Are Evil? How dare I make bi people look evil?

It also occurred to me that if I get her involved with a man and then a woman in the trilogy, it'll come off a lot better than if I had it go the other way around. Or it might just be easier to have her stay single thereafter. Much as I loathe the "nobody in the Buffyverse is bi" thing, I can kind of understand why Joss didn't want to go there now. (Then again, it's not like that stopped him from a certain stereotypical death.)

(b) As for disability, I plan on having one character acquire a disability at the end of the first book. In the second book, she spends a good chunk of it trying to find a magical MacGuffin that she thinks will fix her all the way back to normal. I don't plan on her being 100% magically healed even if she gets it back (and she may not!), and she will have to get out of the bargaining stage and deal with how things are. But that might be offensive as well.

*sigh*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think the way to do it is to be as sensitive to, for example, actual people with the disability in question as you can manage, to pay attention to what they say about their experience of that disability. To get feedback from a variety of intelligent people. And then, once you've done the very best you can including enlisting help, to let it go. To understand that you cannot reach everybody with every character portrayal, and that trying will drive you crazy. Sure, there might be people who say, "How dare you, as a white person, put any non-white characters in a story ever?" if you do, and there will be people who say, "How come you never have any non-white characters?" if you don't. The difference is that the latter is, y'know, a reasonable question in many contexts, whereas the former is sort of batshit insane.

I'd like to think that if someone was completely mangling Scandosotan cultural stuff, or physics major interactions, or whatever, that I could make it clear that I objected to specific aspects of it being done badly rather than to the person trying at all. And I would hope that other people in similar situations could try for the same tone.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday! I hope this year brings you all the things you need and want.

[teadog1425.livejournal.com]

Here via truepenny...

Just delurking to say, every time you mention 'The True Tale of Carter Hall' I want more and more to read the story itself...! If I emailed you, would it be possible to have a copy? Pretty please?

Tam

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas for us both, it is not only unpublished, it is unfinished.

Four of the sequel short stories are finished, two of those four published, one of them sold but not published yet. But the book itself is a work in progress. It will probably be a work in more active progress next week or the week after.

[teadog1425.livejournal.com]

Yay to the 4 that are finished - even more yay to the 3 that are published - would it be possible to find out where so that I could track them down? I live in the UK, so hopefully that would still be poss...

Good luck with the progress on the book itself - that will definitely be one on the 'buy now' pile! - I look forward to further updates!!

Also, I think perhaps I was confusing 'The True Tale' with another Carter Hall short story that you have mentioned, 'Carter Hall takes the Puck'? (not sure if I have the title correct?) I remember a v interesting analysis of that in one of your posts, and am now hoping that that might be one of the published short stories?!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The first two Carter Hall stories are in issues of On Spec (Spring 2006 and Spring 2008). On Spec (http://www.onspec.ca/back.htm) is a Canadian magazine, and the third one will be in it as well.

If you don't feel up to paying overseas shipping for single stories within a magazine, I can send you a copy of the story on e-mail. "Carter Hall Recovers the Puck" is in Spring 2006, so yes, one of the published ones.

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, since a guy would be interested in not missing them, close to the bottom of the current issue page (http://www.onspec.ca/current.htm), under Upcoming Issues, er, should we be looking for works published under more than one name in the future or is that a typo?

Searching does get me a few publications under both names. Nothing recent though.

If this was a bad question, please don't hesitate to delete it on my account.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not a rude question, but no, that's a mistake on their part. All publishing should be under Marissa Lingen; anything that shows up under Marissa Gritter is wrong.