Why I like Writing Stereotypical Characters
I like writing stereotypical characters. I can understand why many authors don’t like writing or reading stereotypical characters, but I do. Especially if they are the most extreme version of a stereotype I can think of.
This is partly because, when you encounter someone who exemplifies a stereotype, you’re encountering something that society would rather deny. Sometimes this is because of a worry that a person who exemplifies a stereotype will create bigoted reactions in a more privileged population. A character who is a loud misogynistic black man may, for instance, cause a white audience to think this is what all black men are like.
I take this worry seriously.
This is why I would never write a story (or book) that consists of nothing but loud, misogynistic black men. But I would also, by the same token, never write a book filled with articulate, peaceful black women who are tormented by nothing but loud, misogynistic white men. Both plots are trying to reassure the audience of their own prejudices. And good fiction, like good film making or good poetry, should challenge prejudices. A good story should expand your belief set, not reinforce things in you that are easy, dogmatic, or closed off to the complexities of reality. A good story doesn’t reassure; it probes and provokes. If it’s really good, it becomes a catalyst for new forms of thinking and feeling.
Stereotypical characters are useful in this regard because of what they reveal about all of us. Stereotypical characters are windows into social tendencies that are deeply pathological, tendencies best confronted with honesty rather than denial. A stereotypical character can, after all, easily mistreat others. They can act with something like an invisibility cloak around them. The loud, misogynistic black man may find it easier to be misogynistic and loud, if he exists in an environment of white women who are paranoid about their own latent racism.
Let’s take another stereotype: the HIV positive sexually promiscuous gay man of the 1980s. The easy way to write such a stereotype is to say that this man is promiscuous because it’s his way of coping with living in an oppressive society. The oppressive society denies him a chance to express his sexuality without discrimination or judgement. That’s all there is to know about him, re: his promiscuity.
The more difficult (and more interesting way) to write such a character is to explore how he is pathological, and how this pathology is both medically dangerous and an impediment to the acceptance of homosexuality, generally. That is to say, this character is both a threat to gay lives, as well as gay rights. And yet this character is oppressed, too. These things are all true, simultaneously.
From the complexity of these truths, an interesting question emerges: What’s more important about this character? The fact that he is oppressed? Or the fact that he is pathological, harmful to other gay people, and an impediment towards the acceptance of homosexuality?
This, of course, leads to a further question: Is the oppression of gays happening because of straight society or because of gay men like this character? To answer this question, the reader has to honestly ponder the relationship between individuals and society – as well as think about oppression in a way that is complex.
This complexity is perhaps what explains the grain of truth that exists in stereotypes. And the healthiest society will face these truths without collapsing into bigotry and paranoia. A society convinced it can only be kind and compassionate on the back of lies – even lies of omission, is a society primed for self-destruction.
But part of using stereotypes well is putting them in context. If you write a stereotypical character, your story won’t be insightful if its message is that this character is a representation of a certain demographic group. Your story will become something like propaganda - propaganda that propagates obvious falsehoods. Hence, if you include the loud, misogynistic black man or the promiscuous gay man in your story to claim that this is just what black and gay men are like, your story sucks.
The worst usages of stereotypical characters involve the writer making simplistic and over-generalising proclamations about entire demographic groups. It is easier than one would think to fall into this trap. This is because it’s fashionable to display one’s virtue by avoiding stereotypical characters if they come from demographics associated with historical oppression. It’s also (within the same group of people) fashionable to make simplistic and overgeneralising proclamations about demographic groups not associated with historical oppression.
I encountered this tendency in a book I was reading the other day, a book by an author who I think is otherwise a master of her craft. I was really enjoying her book, finding it clever and insightful, like it was on the verge of illuminating something interesting and tragic about the human condition.
Then I noticed something: nearly every male character in the book was either (1) an arrogant, chauvinistic, and aggressive dickhead, or (2) an inconsiderate, condescending, and overgrown child who wanted a wife who was something in-between a prostitute, a mother figure, and a slave.
All the female characters were middle aged, submissive and resentful. They resented their husbands, blaming them for the fact that these women had not pursued their dreams. Sometimes these dreams were career oriented and other times they were purely artistic. Yet these female characters all refused to leave their marriages, stoically committing themselves to unfulfilling and (frequently) humiliating lives.
The book didn’t question these female characters, or raise the possibility that these women had some responsibility for how their lives turned out. It just took for granted that this is what life is like for heterosexual women, because this is what heterosexual men are like.
Suddenly the book went from seeming like a masterpiece to looking like an expression of rather dated gender stereotypes. Initially, I resisted this judgement about it. I thought, “If this is her experience of men, why shouldn’t she write men this way?” But of course, that didn’t sit well with me.
If I were to consistently take a line like that, I’d also have to say something similar if she wrote the same book but indicated that all the men were black and the women were white. I’d have to say (if I were consistent): “If this is her experience of black men, we shouldn’t she write black men this way?” And of course, I could never say that, because such a book would be outrageously racist. If that hypothetical book was racist, then of course, the actual book she wrote was more than a little sexist.
But it wasn’t sexist because she wrote stereotypical male or female characters. It was sexist because her use of them was to tell the reader a simple, straight forward point: This is what married life is like.
Her characters weren’t used to ask profound or interesting questions about marriage. They were used to simply hammer home the point that the author thinks part of being a heterosexual woman is to be powerless and resentful in a long-term relationship with a penis bearing jerk. And if women find themselves in such relationships, not only can they not leave. They have no responsibility for starting families with these kinds of men. Because, of course, it’s not as if there were any nice men that these women overlooked in their youth.
I might be more forgiving if I thought this author were simply writing a book about stereotypical men and women, a book which was not trying to make a grand statement about heterosexual relationships. But this is clearly a book attempting to comment on the nature of heterosexual marriage in 2021, not simply a tale of a submissive masochist and her boorish male partner. This is a book drawing a strong connection between heterosexual marriage and the subsequent denigration of women.
This, I should say, is not my experience of marriage. And it’s also not what I think 21st century culture normalises. But whether I agree with this message or not is secondary to a more important point: a fiction book shouldn’t be giving a straight forward message.
A good story wouldn’t tell the reader, “Western culture is not a patriarchy”, anymore than it would bang the reader over the head with the idea that our culture encourages men to be jerks. A good story, insofar as it deals with gender, will ask questions about gender, society, and the characters who are gendered in the society in which the story takes place. And in the process of doing that, the story will be mind bending and mind free-ing in a way that day to day life is not.
And yes, such a story may involve stereotypical characters. But they will not be used to say, in an uncomplicated way, that this is what all members of a demographic are like. They will be used to to probe, to unsettle, and to give rise to speculations and new ways of seeing.
They will be doorways into new visions of the human experience, rather than re-affirmations of what readers already believe.
This is the kind of storytelling that excites me.
This is partly because, when you encounter someone who exemplifies a stereotype, you’re encountering something that society would rather deny. Sometimes this is because of a worry that a person who exemplifies a stereotype will create bigoted reactions in a more privileged population. A character who is a loud misogynistic black man may, for instance, cause a white audience to think this is what all black men are like.
I take this worry seriously.
This is why I would never write a story (or book) that consists of nothing but loud, misogynistic black men. But I would also, by the same token, never write a book filled with articulate, peaceful black women who are tormented by nothing but loud, misogynistic white men. Both plots are trying to reassure the audience of their own prejudices. And good fiction, like good film making or good poetry, should challenge prejudices. A good story should expand your belief set, not reinforce things in you that are easy, dogmatic, or closed off to the complexities of reality. A good story doesn’t reassure; it probes and provokes. If it’s really good, it becomes a catalyst for new forms of thinking and feeling.
Stereotypical characters are useful in this regard because of what they reveal about all of us. Stereotypical characters are windows into social tendencies that are deeply pathological, tendencies best confronted with honesty rather than denial. A stereotypical character can, after all, easily mistreat others. They can act with something like an invisibility cloak around them. The loud, misogynistic black man may find it easier to be misogynistic and loud, if he exists in an environment of white women who are paranoid about their own latent racism.
Let’s take another stereotype: the HIV positive sexually promiscuous gay man of the 1980s. The easy way to write such a stereotype is to say that this man is promiscuous because it’s his way of coping with living in an oppressive society. The oppressive society denies him a chance to express his sexuality without discrimination or judgement. That’s all there is to know about him, re: his promiscuity.
The more difficult (and more interesting way) to write such a character is to explore how he is pathological, and how this pathology is both medically dangerous and an impediment to the acceptance of homosexuality, generally. That is to say, this character is both a threat to gay lives, as well as gay rights. And yet this character is oppressed, too. These things are all true, simultaneously.
From the complexity of these truths, an interesting question emerges: What’s more important about this character? The fact that he is oppressed? Or the fact that he is pathological, harmful to other gay people, and an impediment towards the acceptance of homosexuality?
This, of course, leads to a further question: Is the oppression of gays happening because of straight society or because of gay men like this character? To answer this question, the reader has to honestly ponder the relationship between individuals and society – as well as think about oppression in a way that is complex.
This complexity is perhaps what explains the grain of truth that exists in stereotypes. And the healthiest society will face these truths without collapsing into bigotry and paranoia. A society convinced it can only be kind and compassionate on the back of lies – even lies of omission, is a society primed for self-destruction.
But part of using stereotypes well is putting them in context. If you write a stereotypical character, your story won’t be insightful if its message is that this character is a representation of a certain demographic group. Your story will become something like propaganda - propaganda that propagates obvious falsehoods. Hence, if you include the loud, misogynistic black man or the promiscuous gay man in your story to claim that this is just what black and gay men are like, your story sucks.
The worst usages of stereotypical characters involve the writer making simplistic and over-generalising proclamations about entire demographic groups. It is easier than one would think to fall into this trap. This is because it’s fashionable to display one’s virtue by avoiding stereotypical characters if they come from demographics associated with historical oppression. It’s also (within the same group of people) fashionable to make simplistic and overgeneralising proclamations about demographic groups not associated with historical oppression.
I encountered this tendency in a book I was reading the other day, a book by an author who I think is otherwise a master of her craft. I was really enjoying her book, finding it clever and insightful, like it was on the verge of illuminating something interesting and tragic about the human condition.
Then I noticed something: nearly every male character in the book was either (1) an arrogant, chauvinistic, and aggressive dickhead, or (2) an inconsiderate, condescending, and overgrown child who wanted a wife who was something in-between a prostitute, a mother figure, and a slave.
All the female characters were middle aged, submissive and resentful. They resented their husbands, blaming them for the fact that these women had not pursued their dreams. Sometimes these dreams were career oriented and other times they were purely artistic. Yet these female characters all refused to leave their marriages, stoically committing themselves to unfulfilling and (frequently) humiliating lives.
The book didn’t question these female characters, or raise the possibility that these women had some responsibility for how their lives turned out. It just took for granted that this is what life is like for heterosexual women, because this is what heterosexual men are like.
Suddenly the book went from seeming like a masterpiece to looking like an expression of rather dated gender stereotypes. Initially, I resisted this judgement about it. I thought, “If this is her experience of men, why shouldn’t she write men this way?” But of course, that didn’t sit well with me.
If I were to consistently take a line like that, I’d also have to say something similar if she wrote the same book but indicated that all the men were black and the women were white. I’d have to say (if I were consistent): “If this is her experience of black men, we shouldn’t she write black men this way?” And of course, I could never say that, because such a book would be outrageously racist. If that hypothetical book was racist, then of course, the actual book she wrote was more than a little sexist.
But it wasn’t sexist because she wrote stereotypical male or female characters. It was sexist because her use of them was to tell the reader a simple, straight forward point: This is what married life is like.
Her characters weren’t used to ask profound or interesting questions about marriage. They were used to simply hammer home the point that the author thinks part of being a heterosexual woman is to be powerless and resentful in a long-term relationship with a penis bearing jerk. And if women find themselves in such relationships, not only can they not leave. They have no responsibility for starting families with these kinds of men. Because, of course, it’s not as if there were any nice men that these women overlooked in their youth.
I might be more forgiving if I thought this author were simply writing a book about stereotypical men and women, a book which was not trying to make a grand statement about heterosexual relationships. But this is clearly a book attempting to comment on the nature of heterosexual marriage in 2021, not simply a tale of a submissive masochist and her boorish male partner. This is a book drawing a strong connection between heterosexual marriage and the subsequent denigration of women.
This, I should say, is not my experience of marriage. And it’s also not what I think 21st century culture normalises. But whether I agree with this message or not is secondary to a more important point: a fiction book shouldn’t be giving a straight forward message.
A good story wouldn’t tell the reader, “Western culture is not a patriarchy”, anymore than it would bang the reader over the head with the idea that our culture encourages men to be jerks. A good story, insofar as it deals with gender, will ask questions about gender, society, and the characters who are gendered in the society in which the story takes place. And in the process of doing that, the story will be mind bending and mind free-ing in a way that day to day life is not.
And yes, such a story may involve stereotypical characters. But they will not be used to say, in an uncomplicated way, that this is what all members of a demographic are like. They will be used to to probe, to unsettle, and to give rise to speculations and new ways of seeing.
They will be doorways into new visions of the human experience, rather than re-affirmations of what readers already believe.
This is the kind of storytelling that excites me.
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