Author Topic: A Hawk's Story (hopefully)  (Read 4492 times)

Sicily

  • Extern
  • *
  • Posts: 1
on: November 18, 2020, 09:44:03 AM
Hello all--

I've been listening to authors on the YouTubes, and chanced upon a conversation between Neil Gaiman (legend) and NK Jemisin (wicked legend). I harkened and my mind wandered and played in that way where you're connecting threads and trying to make sense of things (I believe it's called 'learning'), when my toe stubbed against a question:

In a world where we have no clue to how write ourselves out of racism and sexism and all that bleh, how can a writers author stories with characters that are beautiful Michaela-Coel-Hawks, whose stories are not tedious?

See--here's the thing. We know those stories from the 1990s. James Bond, or something--comfortable stories. Stories we're used to. Profiles and victims and villains all align in ugh ways, but we're so used to it, that somehow that registers as "normal" and "good writing." Because "good" to humans sometimes means "familiar." I do not mean "how do we write a character" who is "different". I mean, how do we tell stories, where the experience of discrimination and othering does not become the defining characteristic of that character's storyline because, let's face it, that is reductive? Do we write stories, where the character does not have do go through all that, and let them run through a universe where that awfulness does not exist? Then, are these just stories we know, with a different cast? Or, do we bend into the awful, giving us yet another story full of pain, which relies on the exact reverse of the Bond-universe profile, making it predictable? A combination of all the above?

A head scratcher. I have some ideas, but, before I work my way through my scalp--your views, please!

Merci bien. *waves*