under the radar: those classist book girls

In North and South, the heroine Margaret enters with a lot of assumptions about the hero, Mr. Thornton, a cotton mill owner from the north of England. She assumes him to be ignorant, propped and heartless, purely because he is wealthy and she has seen him punish an employee. She impudently attacks him without real information about him and is humiliated when he explains how incorrect she has been about his supposed background.

Mr. Thornton had not always been rich. In fact, Margaret was the propped one prone to stereotypes and demeaning behavior based on income. Mr. Thornton's past was not what she had assumed. So why did she assume it?

As in Margaret's day, classism is real and it's stinky. And nowhere is this more the case than in white-collar jobs like fiction writing. There is an underlying assumption that writers cannot be poor. This is because wealthy middle-class people control fiction writing. They establish what "good writing" is, which is invariably characters and situations that appeal to them exclusively. Lazy, spoiled, and self-dramatizing (with delirious dreams of lording it over some penniless prairie people and picturesquely hunting in rags) has been the order of the day for decades. Wealthy authors get mysterious "awards" for their mediocre manuscripts while poorer ones are shunted into endless manuscript assistance--essentially make-up aids for the starlets. And goodness do these "award-winning authors" need a lot of makeup.

There is a basic assumption that rich people want to write and poor people don't. Hence poorer writers are instantly identified by their signature tell-tale--their characters actually work and view themselves as the ones who work while the others are favored. That is not bad writing. That is not "unrelatable" or "boring" characters. That is an expression of these people's lives. Entering with an assumption they are trying to write the story of the wealthy is like assuming Mr. Thornton was always rich. They are not failed rich people or failed writers. They are successfully telling the story of their class, for readers who want it told.

Because America was built on independence and hard work, these snobs would rather die than admit they don't relate to characters who work. So they show it in secretive, deeply-felt snubs. I have so many friends, wonderful writers and all more talented than many bestsellers, who experience years of sorrowful writing failures: book signings to which no one shows up (mysteriously); interviews and tours with almost no attention (despite paid promotion and careful planning) and tiny sales for well-crafted solid manuscripts. This is not a result of the book market. This is a result of cowardly backstabbing from people who don't want to admit why they didn't "connect with" the books or found them "confusing."

But this is America. Never give up writing. All my friends out there deserve to be read and they can get read too. Because this is a land of opportunities, not of Tsars and serfs. At least, not yet.