Last night was Productivity Thursday with my friend Kim McShane. She’s in the preparatory stages of launching a business, and I’m at the point where I’m thinking about plot and characters for my next “Big Writing Project”.
I mean, I always have about…five?…books in progress at any given time, if not more. I am not one of those “sit down, write the book, finish it, write the next book” kind of people. I’m one of those who works furiously on one project, stalls or writes my characters into a corner, goes and writes/edits a completely different story, then maybe another one after that, then comes back and fixes the problem in the first story.
Writing, to me, is more like baking bread than cooking: you have to let the bread rest between kneading it, sometimes several times, then bake it for a while.
I also tend to throw characters at plots the way a Russian general throws troops at an invader, I mean, you can never have too many (you can totally have too many, but whatever, winning is what matters).
But the issue I was having in this particular book is that it was unabashedly racist.
Not intentional? Of course it was not intentional. But when I last worked on this story seriously, probably ten years ago (!!!!!!!), I created a family of incredibly stereotyped people of color, for no other reason than to serve as a plot point.
When I re-read this recently I just sat there and stared at the screen in wonderment. I wrote that. For all my liberal, lefty, SJW leanings, I still wrote one-dimensional characters that traded on negative stereotypes because it was just easy for me to do.
Thoughtlessly. Pointlessly. Insultingly.
I brought this up with Kim who is, really, something of a plot magician. We wrangled with the idea of why those characters were in the story in the first place, and did I need them to be people of color, and if I did, why?
I think we came up with an answer that really deepens the themes of the stories and makes for some quality, multi-dimensional characters. It took work, though. I’m proud I did that work, but I’m not kidding myself that it makes me any kind of hero. Using minority characters as a plot crutch for the white folk is, well, let’s say it’s been done and setting out not to do that is simply the least a white author should do these days.
It was an important lesson for me, though: That even with the best of intentions and what I consider to be a healthy amount of self-awareness, my privilege can seep into my work like sewage. We (white folk, I mean) need to be cleaning our (mental, creative, emotional) houses regularly of that shit.