If you're going to misrepresent me, at least get it right
I see it all over blogs every day. Personal blogs, author blogs, feminist blogs, political blogs. It's the same question we all ask every time we pick up a book, or turn on the television, or go to the movies, and see a bunch of people we don't recognize. Why aren't there more female characters? More gay characters? More black characters? More fat characters? More Jewish characters? More Hindu characters? More red, green, purple characters?
Why aren't there more realistic representations of these cross-sections of our society?
Why is everything so…safe? Why do we still have doe-eyed female characters who can't cope with the world, or tramps who need to be punished? Why do we still have sensitive white characters "reaching out" to characters of color, because they can't help themselves otherwise? Why do gay characters still have to have coming out specials? Why do fat characters still have to go on journeys of discovery, to conquer their self-esteem and body issues, in order to justify their existence in the story?
It's 2011, for god's sake. We're supposed to have rocket-packs and flying cars, but we're still here. Unable to figure out why we keep misrepresenting one another.
Everybody puts their heads together and talks about what's wrong with writing and writers, who keep recycling safe clichés and characters instead of putting bigger ideas out there. We all feel bad about it, maybe a little alienated, maybe a little angry sometimes. We all want to write these characters "respectfully," see them portrayed "with respect." But by recognizing it, we all say, we feel we're taking steps to move past it. Do better, write better, in the future. We all feel just a little bit better about it, even though we all agree that nothing really changes.
Turn on the TV, go to the movies, pick up a book. You still see something so stupid and contrived that you just get mad and walk away.
Then I go around the corner to one of the writing blogs, the writer's self-help columns, the publishing news sites. I see the same advice over and over, the same articles and essays. Selling manuscripts is hard. Publishing is competitive. Publishers are picky. If you want to write something that doesn't fit into neatly defined genre categories, you probably won't make money. So follow market trends. Write what's going to sell. Write what's popular. Write for the moment. Play it safe and sell your manuscript. Oh god, please, be a visionary, but don't say anything too scary. Don't rock the boat; otherwise you'll have trouble publishing.
So what's safe? Safe is primetime television and national bestsellers. Safe is money. Sometimes something new and scary slips through the cracks, and maybe it sells a million copies. Most days though, we sigh and shake out heads.
Hey, publishing is a business and a business is supposed to make money. Publishing companies sell what's going to make them a profit. They're not all evil, but they're not exactly on the pulse of changing culture, or worried about fair and equal representation. And as a writer, you want to make some of that money they're making, so you play ball. I get that. I can't fault you for that, either. So maybe writing familiar stories about familiar characters will help you a book deal in some places, plus movie rights and a line of t-shirts. But if people keep writing these stories, they'll just keep getting published, and we'll still all ask where our characters are. We'll all still ask why.
So the question for me becomes, if you write safe stories, do you get to complain when safe stories are the only ones getting published? If you don't try to practice what you preach, do you get a say? Either we all write characters with the respect we say they deserve, or we go home. We don't get to have it both ways.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I do have a white male protagonist in my novel. He's also gay, broke, misanthropic, and hates authority. He enjoys gardening, burnt hamburgers, and arguing with his therapist. If you try to argue his status as a cliche, he may fight you for it.
