The mainstream isn’t for me; a ramble…

So I’m still wandering in this crisis of identity lately, not knowing what to do with myself in the absence of day long writing sprees. I’m still disillusioned and unable to recapture that creative spark that kept me working with enthusiasm, even on my worst days. But, in looking around at the creative offerings of other people, I’m reminded again of why I felt the need to write so differently.

It’s because I need diversity, and I’m not finding it in the creative efforts of most folks. Their main characters are white, and straight, and almost all narratives are set up in a heteronormative framework where anyone who isn’t straight or white is cast in shady terms for being different.

Which is not to say that all of this fiction is bad. Some of it is really good, which is why I still make an effort at reading mainstream stuff. But I can count on books like this to never push any boundaries, lest the writer risk making the mainstream squirm. So if there’s a gay character, they’re the sexless “safe gay” whom the female characters can confide in. There will be no trans characters, no bis, and nothing “kinky” in the story, unless that kink is displayed by the antagonist as a way to show off their “bizarre perversions.”

And kids. There’s only one kind of kid in mainstream fiction, the innocent angels. If you have a sexually active child, it can only be because they were trapped in a child porn ring by their druggie parents and now some cop has to take care of this oversexualized caricature as part of a plot about taking on the skeezy porn ring that had formerly employed the child. The cop will of course find the child’s sexuality to be revolting and disgusting, because that’s the only reason the child displays sexuality in the story, is to highlight how normal the protagonist is. You don’t find kids who’ve played doctor, or anyone who’s made out at a school party behind the bleachers. Those kinds of realistic and complex kids are too grey to fit into the black and white world of mainstream fiction, so they’re erased. They just don’t exist in our perfect text worlds.

I’ve been reminded a lot lately how little material out there even tries to paint a more realistic picture of people who can’t fit into the mainstream for whatever reason. You can’t make a mainstream YA with 15-year-old girl who’s already sexually active. All YA females must be 17 and still be a virgin, because that’s the real value of being “special” in YA, whether or not you can be a good little virgin until you turn 17. Look at how many YA stories use the slut stereotype as the place to dump all the worst traits into the same character. It’s like saying sex makes people evil.

It’s also seriously creepy to me how women writers of YA focus as much on their girls’ hymens as male porn writers do in penny porn. I stopped reading penny porn cause I thought it was creepy how many stories were about a virgin just turning 18 and turning into a super-slut. Well I’m sorry, but having your YA heroine never notice boys until she’s 17 isn’t much better, even if you only move the couple up to a steamy kiss scene.

The biggest issue I have with this kind of writing is, how does it make the readers feel when they aren’t a perfect person? I don’t know how other readers take it, but I find it extremely frustrating to have narrators tell me over and over that I’m freaky for having anything besides vanilla heterosexual fantasies, all the while validating straight lifestyles as being “the way the real world works.”

Mainstream fiction in its present form is a delusional fantasy that embraces escapism over all other goals. As a reader, I have so little to enjoy because I can’t find books about people like me where we aren’t treated as a freak sideshow attraction, a diversion from the straight white main character’s story. Almost every single depiction of transsexual characters I’ve seen in the last few years might as well have used the term she-male. The authors don’t even care to try and depict us as real people. We’re just sluts with dicks, and there’s nothing worthy of showcasing in that trope.

And indie fiction? Is really mainstream, still. Indie doesn’t mean people are experimenting more boldly with the text art form. It means they’re taking their mainstream work and publishing it without professional representation. You know, working independently. But that means they’re still writing about straight white people, and their stories will still all revolve around the same mainstream concerns. For them, this is probably a good story, and for the mainstream readers, it stands a good chance of having success.

So I’m not knocking the mainstream for its values, or the consumers of those values either. I’m saying that as a reader, I’ve been forced to read constantly from fiction that offers me no one to identify with. I can’t relate to these morally black and white heroes, and I often feel bad for the villains because their story is so unimportant to the writer that it never comes up.

And this is why I wrote weird shit, because I wanted to know the villain’s story more than I cared to meet another straight hero or heroine. I wanted to follow the misadventures of the slutty girl rather than follow the seventeen-year-old virgin who wonders what kissing is like, and who meets “the one true love” just pages into chapter one. I wanted to write about kids who get abused, and who don’t turn out as hypersexual caricatures. I wanted to eschew some escapism in favor of a reality cast more in grey, and less in black and white.

I always knew this would mean not enjoying mainstream success, but up until this year, I hadn’t had anyone suggest that I was doing this to promote “deviant lifestyles.” And when that happened, it sucked the creative wind from my sails. Gone are the days where I whip out 10K on a story and then spend an hour or two before bed mentally outlining what ideas I want to explore in my next book. I no longer like to talk about my work either. Now when people ask me what I write, I just say something like “You probably won’t like it.”

I want to push past this feeling of defeat, but when I sit down to write now, there’s always this nagging voice that asks, “What’s the point of writing a story that no one else wants?” I need an answer to rebut that question, and I don’t have one.

I guess what I’m saying is, I still want to write, and I still don’t have anything else that can replace my writing habit. But I can’t write when I feel like every story is a failure.