Good afternoon. I just wanted to say that I'm so heartened by the many thoughtful and fascinating responses to the piece thus far. Also, thanks to those of you who included links to related articles, all of which were very interesting.
All I worry about is taking the desire for social justice to a point of absurdity. Imagine "To Kill A Mockingbird" without any depiction or mention of Tom Robinson or the black people of the community who are supporting his quest for exoneration. Should Mark Twain not have Jim talk about his family and how much he misses his wife and children in "Huckleberry Finn"? Should Jim just be kind of mentioned as an aside without any effort to show the man's humanity? Should black writers not be allowed to write white characters? Should gay men not be allowed to write lesbian characters? Should we Balkanize art altogether?
After a lifetime of standing for social justice, and in some cases losing relationships with family members because of it, I'm not going to change my worldview. But writers and artists should write and do their art. And if ever I get to the point where I can only write about 70 year old Polish-American men who were born in Chicago I'm moving to Mars.
And Henry James said we as readers and critics should grant each author their option. In other words let them write what they want. The question was, were they doing it well?
This is one of the reasons I write so much science fiction. It's hard to argue that my portrayal of a crab-like alien living on one of the moons of Jupiter is inauthentic.
Thank you Vivianne. The "plausibility factor" that you describe is especially irking. The biggest criticism (often justified) of writers depicting characters from underrecognized groups, when they don't belong to the group, is stereotyping. Yet, the editors complaining about plausibility do exactly the same thing. They label and reduce people to cliches - she can't have a graduate degree, the kid can't come from a 2-parent home ... This is toxic and further feeds the inequality these well-intentioned people mean to fight against. Humanity is complex, let's not stick it in a discrete number of boxes.
This is one of the most frustrating challenges of our current writing lives. I've literally had an agent stick his/her face in mine and tell me I can write only from the perspective of a white woman. As for the fact that I'm an immigrant, well, no. That won't work either because I'm a white woman and no one wants to hear about white immigrants. And so it goes. I have no desire to usurp the stories of others, but neither do I want to be told what to write. We have to get past this, somehow.
I love what the Roman writer Terence said ages ago: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."
I've written stories from the POV of women and was never excoriated. But then, that was before Twitter mobs ran rampant like David Bowie's Diamond Dogs.
I would not be able to maintain my composure should an agent ever do that to me. Luckily I am not associated with colleagues who are as ridiculous as that.
As a former librarian and teacher, I'm used to dealing with this kind of behavior. You just have to hold your ground, wait for them to finish, say thank you, and move on.
The editor's job shouldn't be to vet every story for plausibility and the likelihood of objection and cancellation. The editor's job should be to look for well-written and effective stories (since we're talking about fiction) that shed light on the difficulties and mysteries of human existence, no matter the subject or theme or the ethnicity, status and gender-multiplicity of the characters. Plausibility! If that were the standard, Kafka or Carson McCullers or Toni Morrison would never have been read or published. The writer's responsibility is to make the implausible seem inevitably real; the editor's responsibility is to recognize the goodness and greatness of that effort, courageously, if necessary.
Anyone ever read Will Self's Cock & Bull? I can imagine the uproar today. It was published in 1992: matching novellas of fantasy/horror/weird romance in which a woman grows a penis and a man grows a vagina.
This is a complicated set of issues. There are unquestionably historical and current biases that continue to affect the ability of voices that are not white, male, academic, etc. to be heard. It is absolutely a correct and needed initiative to give such under-represented voices real and equitable access to publication. It seems to me a pity though that a quest for equity extends to a restriction on what kind of character any writer is "allowed" to attempt to portray.
It seems to me that it comes down to a question of the quality of the writing. Tom Clancy was a white, cisgendered male. His white cisgendered males characters are cartoonish and implausible, speaking in ways that no actual human being ever did. This is not because Tom Clancy did not understand jerky right wing white guys like himself. It is because he was a very bad writer.
A character is plausible or not plausible by virtue of how well they are portrayed as an individual person, within the context of the world built by the story.
An important topic and astute attempt to break through the noise! As a white writer, I have often written Black characters, some as focal ones, others as secondary. In fact, I had a story declined by the Kenyon Review for just this reason, despite the fact the editor wrote in a long handwritten apology that she found the piece powerful and moving. (Ironically, the story was published by Callaloo, the journal devoted to works "by and about African-Americans" with no questions asked.)
Yet I recognize the need for under-recognized voices to join the discourse, and understood the KR editor's decision. In grad school, I studied cross-representations vis a vis whites and Blacks, and was, with only a couple of exceptions, appalled by the shallowness of Black characters written by white authors. (The opposite was, interestingly, not true: Black authors displayed a fuller understanding of the humanity of their white counterparts, a difference that likely traced back to our Black subculture living and working within the white-dominant culture, whereas whites rarely penetrated the inner sanctum of our segregated pockets of African-Americans.)
I agree with Henry James (thx Lev) that writers must be given license to write where their imaginations take them, as long as they do it well (at least, if they wish to be read). What it means to write well, and who gets to decide, remain thorny questions, with ever-changing answers dictated all too often by fashion and whimsy. For me, more than plausibility (which seems to address the situation more than the character), it's about credibility--not of the author but of the characters. In the context of the fiction being rendered, does a given character serve the piece's ultimate aim of revealing human nature? If it does, who cares who writes what characters? I am a fierce supporter of under-recognized voices joining the discourse, but there is also a need for the dominant voices to evolve. Isn't the fundamental point of writing to overcome, or undermine, convention, thereby using our imaginations--all of our imaginations--to forge new neural, and social, pathways?
Don't recall much from Portrait of a Lady--back when I read it it all felt too mannered for me, but what did (do!) I know? He sure was sage in his writing advice!
A few summers ago, I re-read Portrait of a Lady--not the grand, austere New York edition, but the 1881 version. It was a revelation: the earlier edition was much more affecting. If the New York edition is a marble bust, polished and cool, the 1881 edition is a pointillist canvas.
You need to slow down to read writing from that period, imagine you're on a river cruise on the Rhine, sipping a nice Riesling with all the time in the world, with no Internet, no media, nothing to distract you but the scenery, the castles, the sound of dinner being prepared. The pace of everything is slower, is luscious, you sink into it, it embraces you and then boom! There are shocks of consciousness.
But with James, I always suggest to start with shorter works like Washington Square, about and abusive father, then Daisy Miller and The Europeans, also like Portrait about the clash between Europe and America. Comic and not so comic. Much less dense.
I read most of those but never got pulled in. It's not the era so much--I love other late 19th/early 20th cent writers, such as Hardy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Conrad, Dreiser. Not sure if James is too British for me, or too mannered (for want of a better term), but like a couple of other vaunted novels of realism that feature alienated women (Madame Bovary and House of Mirth come to
mind), Portrait just didn't work for me. Though I loved Tess of the D'urbervilles. I will give them, James at least, another shot soon. Right now, I'm reading Lord Jim for the fist time, very slowly, and loving it.
James's journeys are precursors of Virginia Woolf and Joyce IMHO: they are about the ordeal of consciousness. I don't find him mannered. I find him subtle.
Subtle over mannered sounds accurate. If you're right about James anticipating Woolf and Joyce, well, that explains my disfavor, neither of them working for me. I am an unabashed curmudgeon when it comes to literature, especially the modernists. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
The question of who gets to write about which groups/people/etc is tricky because in my view, it's not actually a writing question. It's really a question of, what is your relationship with this underrepresented group? And this isn't really a question easily answered on a lit mag submission. It's not always easily answered by the writer themselves.... witness the many examples of poorly written women by men, pretty much all of whom would likely say they have many relationships with women.
So #ownvoices, while well-intentioned, becomes a very awkward and not very accurate measure of those relationships.
The other side of this, of course, is the editor trying to look at a piece of writing and see if there's anything problematic in it, who similarly doesn't have deep relationships with every underrepresented community (who does) and is therefore in a really poor position to judge... It's an unenviable task.
What about poorly written women written by women, and poorly written men by men or poorly written nonbinary characters by binary writers? Do they get a pass? Asking for a friend.
I was referencing the Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit/etc conversations on that specific topic (men writing women) that come up periodically and then result in a lot of articles and such, and are therefore generally well-known, almost to the point of cliche.
Sorry, should have clarified. No one's getting a pass.
In one of her online craft talks, the poet Ellen Bass quoted another poet, Chris Abani, on the topic of writing the Other. Abani's take, according to Ellen, is that we have every right to cook Korean fried chicken, but it has to be *tasty* Korean fried chicken. And if it isn't tasty, we deserve our bad reviews (or rejections).
Thanks for this piece which invites nuance into a topic that is rarely greeted with nuance. I have my university fiction-writing students read Kaitlyn Greenidge's 2016 essay from the Times, but would love to share this to them as well, if that's okay with you. (Not till Jan 2024.) I also note that this is posted under "Humor & Opinion" and, thanks to the Martian lead-in, succeeds at both.
Thank you, Vivianne, for this thoughtful piece. I think about this a lot as well. I often write about my experience as a transracially adopted Korean person in America a fair amount and, frankly, am rarely impressed when non-adopted writers create characters with similar backgrounds. I’m not saying that it’s off limits but I think writers need to do their due diligence with thorough research and even beta readers if needed to make sure they are not flattening characters. On the other hand, I write White characters. I belong to a White family (and grew up in White communities). I feel confident about how I portray them in my work. Thanks again for starting this conversation.
Good afternoon. I just wanted to say that I'm so heartened by the many thoughtful and fascinating responses to the piece thus far. Also, thanks to those of you who included links to related articles, all of which were very interesting.
Best,
Vivianne
All I worry about is taking the desire for social justice to a point of absurdity. Imagine "To Kill A Mockingbird" without any depiction or mention of Tom Robinson or the black people of the community who are supporting his quest for exoneration. Should Mark Twain not have Jim talk about his family and how much he misses his wife and children in "Huckleberry Finn"? Should Jim just be kind of mentioned as an aside without any effort to show the man's humanity? Should black writers not be allowed to write white characters? Should gay men not be allowed to write lesbian characters? Should we Balkanize art altogether?
After a lifetime of standing for social justice, and in some cases losing relationships with family members because of it, I'm not going to change my worldview. But writers and artists should write and do their art. And if ever I get to the point where I can only write about 70 year old Polish-American men who were born in Chicago I'm moving to Mars.
And Henry James said we as readers and critics should grant each author their option. In other words let them write what they want. The question was, were they doing it well?
What an excellent, and thought-provoking, article. You've provided readers with much to ponder, nibble and chew on.
This is one of the reasons I write so much science fiction. It's hard to argue that my portrayal of a crab-like alien living on one of the moons of Jupiter is inauthentic.
I dunno. We Shrimp-Alikes from Amalthea were blurping about it the other day and...
Hello, fellow Amalthean!
Wow, well said!
Thank you Vivianne. The "plausibility factor" that you describe is especially irking. The biggest criticism (often justified) of writers depicting characters from underrecognized groups, when they don't belong to the group, is stereotyping. Yet, the editors complaining about plausibility do exactly the same thing. They label and reduce people to cliches - she can't have a graduate degree, the kid can't come from a 2-parent home ... This is toxic and further feeds the inequality these well-intentioned people mean to fight against. Humanity is complex, let's not stick it in a discrete number of boxes.
This is one of the most frustrating challenges of our current writing lives. I've literally had an agent stick his/her face in mine and tell me I can write only from the perspective of a white woman. As for the fact that I'm an immigrant, well, no. That won't work either because I'm a white woman and no one wants to hear about white immigrants. And so it goes. I have no desire to usurp the stories of others, but neither do I want to be told what to write. We have to get past this, somehow.
I love what the Roman writer Terence said ages ago: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."
I've written stories from the POV of women and was never excoriated. But then, that was before Twitter mobs ran rampant like David Bowie's Diamond Dogs.
I would not be able to maintain my composure should an agent ever do that to me. Luckily I am not associated with colleagues who are as ridiculous as that.
As a former librarian and teacher, I'm used to dealing with this kind of behavior. You just have to hold your ground, wait for them to finish, say thank you, and move on.
The editor's job shouldn't be to vet every story for plausibility and the likelihood of objection and cancellation. The editor's job should be to look for well-written and effective stories (since we're talking about fiction) that shed light on the difficulties and mysteries of human existence, no matter the subject or theme or the ethnicity, status and gender-multiplicity of the characters. Plausibility! If that were the standard, Kafka or Carson McCullers or Toni Morrison would never have been read or published. The writer's responsibility is to make the implausible seem inevitably real; the editor's responsibility is to recognize the goodness and greatness of that effort, courageously, if necessary.
Anyone ever read Will Self's Cock & Bull? I can imagine the uproar today. It was published in 1992: matching novellas of fantasy/horror/weird romance in which a woman grows a penis and a man grows a vagina.
By coincidence, I just posted a review of Yellowface on my substack: https://levraphael.substack.com/p/mystery-and-mockery
It's a brilliant publishing satire that deals with the thorny issues of representation and authority and how publishers try to navigate them.
I enjoyed that novel, too. Next on my list: Percival Everett's Erasure.
Very thoughtful piece. Thank you.
This is a complicated set of issues. There are unquestionably historical and current biases that continue to affect the ability of voices that are not white, male, academic, etc. to be heard. It is absolutely a correct and needed initiative to give such under-represented voices real and equitable access to publication. It seems to me a pity though that a quest for equity extends to a restriction on what kind of character any writer is "allowed" to attempt to portray.
It seems to me that it comes down to a question of the quality of the writing. Tom Clancy was a white, cisgendered male. His white cisgendered males characters are cartoonish and implausible, speaking in ways that no actual human being ever did. This is not because Tom Clancy did not understand jerky right wing white guys like himself. It is because he was a very bad writer.
A character is plausible or not plausible by virtue of how well they are portrayed as an individual person, within the context of the world built by the story.
An important topic and astute attempt to break through the noise! As a white writer, I have often written Black characters, some as focal ones, others as secondary. In fact, I had a story declined by the Kenyon Review for just this reason, despite the fact the editor wrote in a long handwritten apology that she found the piece powerful and moving. (Ironically, the story was published by Callaloo, the journal devoted to works "by and about African-Americans" with no questions asked.)
Yet I recognize the need for under-recognized voices to join the discourse, and understood the KR editor's decision. In grad school, I studied cross-representations vis a vis whites and Blacks, and was, with only a couple of exceptions, appalled by the shallowness of Black characters written by white authors. (The opposite was, interestingly, not true: Black authors displayed a fuller understanding of the humanity of their white counterparts, a difference that likely traced back to our Black subculture living and working within the white-dominant culture, whereas whites rarely penetrated the inner sanctum of our segregated pockets of African-Americans.)
I agree with Henry James (thx Lev) that writers must be given license to write where their imaginations take them, as long as they do it well (at least, if they wish to be read). What it means to write well, and who gets to decide, remain thorny questions, with ever-changing answers dictated all too often by fashion and whimsy. For me, more than plausibility (which seems to address the situation more than the character), it's about credibility--not of the author but of the characters. In the context of the fiction being rendered, does a given character serve the piece's ultimate aim of revealing human nature? If it does, who cares who writes what characters? I am a fierce supporter of under-recognized voices joining the discourse, but there is also a need for the dominant voices to evolve. Isn't the fundamental point of writing to overcome, or undermine, convention, thereby using our imaginations--all of our imaginations--to forge new neural, and social, pathways?
Thanks for the shout out. His portrait of Isabel Archer is brilliant and it change the life of this queer Jew. Made me the writer I am today.
Don't recall much from Portrait of a Lady--back when I read it it all felt too mannered for me, but what did (do!) I know? He sure was sage in his writing advice!
A few summers ago, I re-read Portrait of a Lady--not the grand, austere New York edition, but the 1881 version. It was a revelation: the earlier edition was much more affecting. If the New York edition is a marble bust, polished and cool, the 1881 edition is a pointillist canvas.
You need to slow down to read writing from that period, imagine you're on a river cruise on the Rhine, sipping a nice Riesling with all the time in the world, with no Internet, no media, nothing to distract you but the scenery, the castles, the sound of dinner being prepared. The pace of everything is slower, is luscious, you sink into it, it embraces you and then boom! There are shocks of consciousness.
But with James, I always suggest to start with shorter works like Washington Square, about and abusive father, then Daisy Miller and The Europeans, also like Portrait about the clash between Europe and America. Comic and not so comic. Much less dense.
I read most of those but never got pulled in. It's not the era so much--I love other late 19th/early 20th cent writers, such as Hardy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Conrad, Dreiser. Not sure if James is too British for me, or too mannered (for want of a better term), but like a couple of other vaunted novels of realism that feature alienated women (Madame Bovary and House of Mirth come to
mind), Portrait just didn't work for me. Though I loved Tess of the D'urbervilles. I will give them, James at least, another shot soon. Right now, I'm reading Lord Jim for the fist time, very slowly, and loving it.
James's journeys are precursors of Virginia Woolf and Joyce IMHO: they are about the ordeal of consciousness. I don't find him mannered. I find him subtle.
Subtle over mannered sounds accurate. If you're right about James anticipating Woolf and Joyce, well, that explains my disfavor, neither of them working for me. I am an unabashed curmudgeon when it comes to literature, especially the modernists. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
The question of who gets to write about which groups/people/etc is tricky because in my view, it's not actually a writing question. It's really a question of, what is your relationship with this underrepresented group? And this isn't really a question easily answered on a lit mag submission. It's not always easily answered by the writer themselves.... witness the many examples of poorly written women by men, pretty much all of whom would likely say they have many relationships with women.
So #ownvoices, while well-intentioned, becomes a very awkward and not very accurate measure of those relationships.
The other side of this, of course, is the editor trying to look at a piece of writing and see if there's anything problematic in it, who similarly doesn't have deep relationships with every underrepresented community (who does) and is therefore in a really poor position to judge... It's an unenviable task.
I don't have a good answer to this problem.
What about poorly written women written by women, and poorly written men by men or poorly written nonbinary characters by binary writers? Do they get a pass? Asking for a friend.
I was referencing the Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit/etc conversations on that specific topic (men writing women) that come up periodically and then result in a lot of articles and such, and are therefore generally well-known, almost to the point of cliche.
Sorry, should have clarified. No one's getting a pass.
Got it. Thanks for clarifying.
But my tongue was actually in cheek.
My mistake. :)
I'm just wary since this topic tends to end in many frustrating discussions for me.
Yes, and it all circles down the drain eventually. Exhausting. So I don't go there.
In one of her online craft talks, the poet Ellen Bass quoted another poet, Chris Abani, on the topic of writing the Other. Abani's take, according to Ellen, is that we have every right to cook Korean fried chicken, but it has to be *tasty* Korean fried chicken. And if it isn't tasty, we deserve our bad reviews (or rejections).
That you for sharing that. I like the way Abani put that.
Thanks for this piece which invites nuance into a topic that is rarely greeted with nuance. I have my university fiction-writing students read Kaitlyn Greenidge's 2016 essay from the Times, but would love to share this to them as well, if that's okay with you. (Not till Jan 2024.) I also note that this is posted under "Humor & Opinion" and, thanks to the Martian lead-in, succeeds at both.
(I was trying to link to the Greenidge piece but can't do a hyperlink in the comments, so here's the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/who-gets-to-write-what.html)
Thanks so much, and that's absolutely ok.
I posted a link too: I hadn't read this far down in the comments before I did!
Thank you, Vivianne, for this thoughtful piece. I think about this a lot as well. I often write about my experience as a transracially adopted Korean person in America a fair amount and, frankly, am rarely impressed when non-adopted writers create characters with similar backgrounds. I’m not saying that it’s off limits but I think writers need to do their due diligence with thorough research and even beta readers if needed to make sure they are not flattening characters. On the other hand, I write White characters. I belong to a White family (and grew up in White communities). I feel confident about how I portray them in my work. Thanks again for starting this conversation.