Networking with Writers: The Perils of Representation
This is an expansion of a piece I wrote out last year to explain why a writing group I was in seemed so inclusive to some new members but so hostile to others. It is based on my experience there, but what happened so regularly there is sadly general behavior, both online and offline.
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In a previous installment I talked about how Powers are Boring, and in a sense this is a thematically similar problem which comes from a very different crowd. If the only thing you have to say about your character when describing them to another writer is their level of representation on the intersectional stack, or the sorts of wildly non-Euclidian sexual pursuits they enjoy, you don’t have a character, and everyone can see it. What you have instead is a social message robot.
Despite the two being products of very different kinds of creative damage, reliance on both powers and representation to give your characters meaning has the same impact on the reader. Worse than powers, though, intersectional representation also has a chilling effect on any useful feedback your peers might be otherwise willing to provide on your ideas and text.
It’s fine – indeed, in keeping with the traditions of literature – to have a clear message in your text. It is also traditional and even laudable to describe characters very different from the sorts of people most readers would ever meet in their normal day-to-day lives. The problems begin when an inexperienced writer tries to write characters that are simultaneously individuals (all good characters have individuality) and representative members of real groups relevant to the message of the text. Squaring these competing pressures on your work is by no means an easy task. It is perhaps among the most nearly impossible things a writer might set out to do.
When the average novice hack with a message to push discovers how difficult it is to make an interesting character who is also a believable representative of a group, the result tends to be that one of these two things is quietly dropped while credit is still claimed for harmonizing them. Either the character's design is stunted to fit into the confines of the group they are expected to represent, or the group is tacked onto a character for whom, other than occasional reminders of their representation, the group membership has no impact on the plot.
Either result is potentially insulting to the group the character is meant to represent (hilarously, the more the novice hack tries to paint the group as pure-hearted victims of evil oppression, the more insulting the portrayal usually is). Even if you avoid hoisting yourself with your own representation petard, other writers will, seeing your slavish deference to representation, be unlikely to give your characters too much criticism. Nobody likes being told that they are a bigot for thinking a fictional person's actions in a draft story don't make any sense.
Of course, even writing communities occasionally have shallow people who will reward half-assed representation with a sort of fictional-person affirmative action. Perhaps you've encountered these critiquers (they exist for professional writers too, I've heard), and have learned through trial and error to humor them so they screech a little bit less. I can definitely sympathize with this learned behavior, but it's behavior that is harmful to the quality of your work in the long run. Perhaps it can help you sell a book to a social justice crusader if the protagonist is a trans-racial Wiccan demi-snowflake - the problem is, people like that don't actually read many books in my experience. This is true even (and especially) the ones you'll meet in a writing group. Their approval is worth no more to your project than the bits used to send it across the internet, and in appeasing them you may lower the value of your story to the less screech-prone majority of potential readers.
Truth is, it takes an expert's touch to do message fiction and allegory while still having an entertaining story. While you are free to try it, expect your work to fail miserably, unless you’re trying to nerd-snipe a Social Justice professor at your local university. The best thing to do is usually to start off writing a story for the story first, and letting the characters be themselves independent of what connections people might draw between them and the world.
Sometimes a message emerges from the manuscript on its own, and sometimes one is easy to add with a little massaging in the editing phase - but if you consider yourself to still be learning the craft, I highly recommend letting interesting characters and the needs of the plot run roughshod over your message and ignoring representation. Once you've done that a few times, then you can decide whether you still want to write representation and message, and you have some hope of doing it right.