Here’s a serious and overlong one, and I don’t know yet if there’s a photo to go along with it: pretty, engaging, or whatever else. Most of the photos that apply to my state of mind on this matter reflect an unhappiness or impatience IN REGARD TO THIS TOPIC (it could happen with other topics, but I will try to limit it to one today). For the most part, I’m as cool and composed as anyone can be on a planet savaged by climate change during a pandemic with the need to somehow manage my budget and my health in a way that serves the ones I love while all around me, people are fighting and fucking and failing and flourishing, as people do.
Guess what? I figured it out.
In 2019, when I decided to revisit the novel (a single novel, ha ha; right now, it’s become 4.5 novels) in the hope of shaping or reshaping a creative outlet for myself in a challenging time, I knew I’d glossed over some things that an older me, a person who’s proved she can write and finish a novel and people will read it and like it, would write or handle very differently today.
I knew if I wanted to tackle this manuscript again, things would change. First of all, there is romance. My idea of what’s romantic and what makes a person sexy and appealing has certainly changed through the decades. My ideas of the things that build or break our relationships perhaps haven’t changed as much, but now they come from lived experience (my own and others) more than a tenuously negotiated future.
One thing that that wouldn’t change is the value that friendships, acceptance, and created families have in our lives. I still hit that checkmark hard. Also, I don’t and never will write flatly perfect characters as the main voices in my fiction. I want my characters to be flawed. I want them to fuck up. I want them to win and lose, to rise and fall, to rise again: whatever it takes to make them real to me.
I have never known a perfect person, though I have known many, many good ones. Some fucked up. Some of them crushed me. I forgave. I moved on. Or not. I’ve known some real jerks, too. Some I even understood. Some I had compassion for. I forgave and definitely moved on.
The biggest concern that arose for me, from the moment I made the decision to rewrite this, was how I’d handle race. The years 2008 to 2016 shocked me out of any sense of complacency or progress on matters of race in this country (yep, it’s global, but I know this country better than others). From 2016 forward would be the subject of a lot more blog posts.
My story began with two little girls growing up in the South in the 1950s. I had Black characters, who were peripheral to the characters I’d written. I wanted them to stay and be a bigger part of the story.
Meanwhile, many of the writers who I follow began talking about things like own voices, privilege, and how they as white writers were beginning to see how badly we were getting it wrong. Someone I know told me, “Oh, you can’t write about characters of color–people will come after you.”
Telling an Aries she can’t is rarely a productive strategy.
I wanted to keep all the characters. I wanted to add layers to another character who did not grow up in the South but whose art was inspired by Southern artists. So I began a journey. A journey to learn. To listen. I wasn’t looking to engage, to debate, to argue, to explain, to advocate, to preach, to sway, whatever other words might indicate that I in any way would ever think I knew everything and accepted a mission to enlighten the world.
My intention was to examine who I was to see how to be a better me and as a bonus, hopefully a better storyteller. It may shock you to hear me say that I am like every other person on the planet. I am my center. I am my frame of reference. My history, the life I was given and then shaped, is extraordinarily important to me. You scratch any saint and you will find a human being who, no matter how selfless their behavior or aspirations, remains the center of their own universe.
I’m no saint. Neither are you.
With all that in mind, I did what I do. I listened not only to the audible voices from and in my life, I read Black voices in fiction. In memoirs. In cultural analyses. In biographies. In poetry. I will never, never know what it is to be Black in this society or this world. I can listen, empathize, believe, respect, ache, but I am not Black and I have no moral or ethical right to speak for Black people and Black experiences.
That doesn’t mean I can’t write Black characters. I can. Because we are all human; we share many of the same attributes as humans. However, I can write with the same sensitivity and degree of thoroughness I use for any of the characters (minor to major) I like to write. I think most of the novels I’ve written, solo or with partners, have provided a diverse group of friends and families. This is the same, except I’m applying some of the things I’ve learned to encompass THIS group of characters, and I want to do right by them.
I don’t know why this effort of mine, wherein my motives are good, my intentions transparent, made some people in my life come at me. Do I think some of them are racist? Sure. Some of them know it. Some of them deny it.
Some want to debate me. They get mad when I speak and mad when I don’t.
Some try to explain me to myself. Another ill-advised idea with this Aries. A pursuit of two-and-a-half years is just part of a journey of decades of living my own life and seeing with my own eyes and puzzling over my own questions. Nobody knows me as well as I know myself, even if they think they can label me and use those labels to hurt me.
They can, in fact, hurt me. Words can wound. They are the best weapons to use against a writer. I hear and know their meanings, subtexts, and connotations too well to pretend, Oh, they didn’t mean it like that, or, Oh, s/he was just kidding, or whatever justification someone uses to try to make me think I didn’t hear what I heard or know what I know.
I didn’t want to have this discussion on this blog. Ever. Then recently, I read something from an unexpected source. The actor Wentworth Miller self-diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Then he got an informal medical diagnosis. Then he got a formal medical diagnosis. He spoke about it publicly on his Instagram account, and below is part of what he said.
Right now my work looks like evolving my understanding. Re-examining 5 decades of lived experience thru a new lens. That will take time. Meanwhile, I don’t want to run the risk of suddenly being a loud, ill-informed voice in the room. The #autistic community (this I do know) has historically been talked over. Spoken for. I don’t wish to do additional harm. Only to raise my hand, say, ‘I am here. Have been (w/o realizing it).
His words gave me clarity about my quest to learn about racism. This is my understanding evolving. Not only am I not Black, I’m so far from knowing all I want to know, so far from coming to terms with the pain this journey sometimes causes me.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about keeping a person comfortable with their prejudices, but I care very much about never letting my voice speak over any marginalized voice, be it a person of color, a certain gender, a person with a disability, someone whose nationality differs from mine, or a member of the LGBTQIA community. I am an infant at this. You should seek your education from the words of people whose experience falls into those categories (and I don’t mean by debating them or demanding that they explain themselves to you–they have lives to live, families to love, a pandemic to deal with, jobs to go to, animals to care for, and are entitled to a damn bubble bath now and then).
There are many resources at your fingertips where wisdom and lived experience are easily accessible. However, know that if nothing spoken by the voices you find ever makes you uncomfortable, you probably need to expand your sources to more voices with more experiences than the ones that fit the narrative that keeps you comfortable. Growth is painful. It usually requires that you let go of some lifelong thoughts and ways you stay comfortable enough to maintain the status quo that serves that center of your world–YOU.
You can also choose to stay there; that’s your prerogative. But I can’t let you beat me up emotionally and psychologically while you do it. I would like to spend my limited time on this planet, and my decreasing level of energy, on the people I love who love and respect me. On surviving this pandemic. On writing my stories with full awareness that only a handful of people may ever read them. And listening to music or watching a little Netflix now and then. I don’t take bubble baths.
Peace.
From the Council of Europe website.
There are many, many people in this world who will find fault with something – everything. I think there is a lot to be said for activism, but that there are some activists who only want to bludgeon others with their own point of view – the right and only acceptable point of view, as far as they are concerned.
When people say write about what you know, I wonder does JK Rowling have personal experience of magic?
I also wonder about when LGBTQIA activists go off on one when a straight actor is cast in an LGBTQIA role. Does this mean that gay and trans actors shouldn’t be allowed to play straight cis characters? That would severely limit the opportunities for gay and trans actors. But fair’s fair.
Maybe I should only write about white male gay British men? That might work, actually! Pinkie out when drinking tea from a china cup, of course – and cut-glass accents all round!