Updates and Thoughts

There’s been a lot happening since I last popped on here. Part of why I’ve been quiet is because of that (well, the anxiety that goes with it!).

So Covid-19. With the pandemic, I’m mostly living off unemployment right now and looking for work. I’ve been keeping home and safe, doing some writing, ignoring the feedback from a beta reader on my last project, but overall progress has been slow. My anxiety has been through the roof, but in a way that just makes doing hard (but isn’t full-on panic attacks). I just kind of plod along, watch a lot of TV, and participate in #SmoreWords on Twitter (check it out)!

Black Lives Matter. BLACK LIVES MATTER. Not really a point up for discussion, and millions have said it better than I have.

However, that does bring me to a personal thought, that has come up on Twitter (mainly): white people shouldn’t write POC POVs (without a shit-ton of research).

I’ll admit, my initial reaction was a quiet hiss at my phone, because this has come on the tail of years of being told to diversify books! And, okay, my current WIP has a black POV as one of the POVs. So was I supposed to just stop writing? Make that POV a white guy? To me it felt weird to make the black POV a white POV, like some sort of white-washing.

But I sat on it, thought about it, and while it still weirds me out, I can understand and respect where the push is coming from.

To me it’s strange, and it’s come up before with other topics, because this is fiction. I can doubly get behind the “don’t tell a story focused on race if you’re not that race,” because it’s not your story to tell, in the way you cannot truly understand the struggle and if you’re specifically writing about that struggle, you’re toeing a line.

But how real does fiction have to be? (This is something I want to make a whole blog post about, so not getting too deep here.)

Writers know we have to avoid “things that will throw the reader from the story” because it’s wrong/false, but in life experience, there’s a lot more wiggle room. Because my experience with XYZ might not be the same as someone else with the exact same background and identity. The fact that there are black and gay republicans, when that seems mind-blowing to others of those identity, seems to illustrate that. So, saying in fiction that “this ignores the X experience”…feels like it’s only allowing for one experience. Is it likely that X identity has experienced Y? Yes. But can there be a person who hasn’t? Also yes.

That said, I think the larger point to “white people shouldn’t write POC POV” isn’t necessarily that white people are telling the stories, but that white people are telling the stories that black people should be (and are). Because in publishing, white authors are chosen over black authors to tell the stories of black people. Much like “own voices” stories (an idea which is good in theory and generally awful in every other way), white folk need to not focus on gate-keeping who can do what (which mostly makes people ornery, IMO, and distracts), but LIFT UP the people who should be heard first.

All of this is still bumbling around in my head, and I still have to decide what to do with my story. See, in the first write, it was all from one POV, the white guy, with a black LI. But as I explored the issues the betas had and I developed the plot and fleshed it out, the story felt cheated by not having the second POV to fill in the gaps and explain the LI’s problems better. Which means I’m writing a black POV that I hadn’t initially intended.

My hope is to finish the draft, get a sensitivity reader to review it, even if it’s to have them tell me “Yeah, you just wrote a white dude that happens to be described as black, just make the dude white.” If that’s what I have to do, that’s what I have to do, I guess, though it will still feel super weird, and he’ll always probably be black in my head. Or maybe with revisions he won’t. Who knows. It’s going to be a learning experience.