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.
no subject
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.