View Single Post
Old March 12th, 2015 #23
Alex Linder
Administrator
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
Blog Entries: 34
Default

[this should be crossfiled about ten ways, but i'm sticking it here. it's a response to the call for not-reading white male authors for a year to read more wimminzes and discoloreds]

XKToughBounty
Yesterday 10:07pm

Just to offer another perspective on this... I recently had a similar discussion with my wife, who I think is talented, amazing, and in most ways smarter and more successful than I am.

As a prospective author who is white, male, cis, and unpublished, I've been seeing a lot of very dismissive attitudes from literary agents for any fiction not featuring a multicultural protagonist who is female and/or wrestling with gender identity issues. It's entirely possible that the real problem is just that my fiction is not up to contemporary standards. However, despite the bestseller lists being dominated by white male authors writing white male characters, the agents I've researched seem to be looking for anything but. I do get that this is a response to the fact that a single viewpoint has pretty much dominated media for centuries—and I am glad that the trend is (slowly) shifting, and have supported that trend with my own money—but as someone who is himself simply trying to get published, it obviously bugs me to encounter negativity towards a demographic I can't change. (And yes, I understand that any amount of perceived bias I might encounter in this one scenario is nothing compared to what people of other demographics have had to (and continue to have to) face in every other conceivable arena. Still, after yet another form rejection, and after viewing yet another agent's bio who bemoaned how very, very bored they were with white male protagonists, I voiced my frustration to my wife.

Her response? If you want to get published, maybe you should make your main character Mexican.

Now, I spent years of my life living in Spain (which is totally different than Mexico, but whatever), and I feel like I do at least have an appreciation for international viewpoints. And I am 100% in favor of everyone in our world (a) reading and (b) having characters and or voices that they can identify with or be challenged by. But we're talking about a book that is already written (as are two sequels!), and the assumption seemed to be that I could and should just flip a switch and change the central character, whose thoughts and viewpoint drive the entire narrative, to another ethnicity. Ignoring the fact that doing so without rewriting the book would amount to paying lip service to the idea of diverse voices, I don't see why I or anyone else should have to do so. I think it's horrible that in the past, many female authors felt compelled to use male protagonists because the book wouldn't sell otherwise. I think the reverse is true as well. I think people should write what they want to write... that fiction (even commercial fiction) should be treated like the art it actually is.

Obviously, that's a bit of a tangent, and I apologize for that, but it might help you understand a little bit of your boyfriend's own frustration as a writer. That said, it was -obviously- wrong of your boyfriend not to support you (and your role in your girlfriend's video). If that is symptomatic of who he is, then you should drop him like a bad habit.

At the same time, people do respond to different things, and I'm not sure there's anything inherently bad in admitting that fact. I read between three and five books a week, and while I could definitely do a better job of finding work from, say, Africa—I have North America, South America, Europe, and some parts of Asia pretty well covered—the authors I read are generally from a wide range of demographics. However, I tend to be more choosy when it comes to female authors of urban/paranormal fantasy. Why is that? Because a lot of the books that I have purchased and read ended up predominantly being romances. Obviously, a fair amount aren't, and a fair amount of male-written urban fantasies are secretly romances, and the classification of paranormal romance now helps identify some, if not all, of those cases... but as someone who doesn't care for the romance genre, and has been disappointed by a lot of the books I bought and read as a result, seeing a female author in that genre does mean I will take a closer look at the content and tags for the book before I buy it.

That doesn't mean ALL women authors don't speak to me... and I'm sure the same is true of your boyfriend. (If not, then he is either incredibly close-minded or just doesn't read nearly enough, as there are many, many wonderful authors out there) But just as it didn't occur to my wife that casually suggesting I rewrite my entire book series to check a box on an agent's list was a fairly tone deaf thing to say to someone trying to express their own frustration, I suspect your boyfriend wasn't really thinking about things from your perspective when he made that remark.

And again... if he WAS and said it anyway... drop him. You can do better.

My apologies for the length of this post.

http://gizmodo.com/the-great-interne...0376231/+samer