ladies i love

I paused a moment and said, “We do have concerts coming up, yes.”

She asked, “When are they?”

And I said, “We have several options.  Is there a certain kind of concert you’re looking for?”

And she said, “what’s the difference?”

I couldn’t find the og post so I had to yoink this off reddit, but: 

got on computer, looked at document, was like “fuck this shit” and got off

wrote like 150 words that consist of bloating the existing useless conversation or scene even more

wrote SO MANY WORDS but it was because you were so desperate to escape the Bad Part

wrote SO MANY WORDS but it was because you were so desperate to get closer to the Good Part

got on your document, ran into research issue, spent like an hour on Wikipedia, ah shit

the somewhat satisfying “fixing everything I hated about the scene I wrote the day before” session

decent amount of progress that took like 3x longer than it should have because you were repeatedly distracted

In The Zone and completely absorbed, just BLAZING through a few thousand words, probably close to the ending, probably listening to playlist

Not actually a writing session, just listening to playlist

the session where you write like a paragraph, suddenly realize the unfixability of your current plot predicament, and cry

that weird session where you don’t have much time and you’re super tired and you write like a page but you reread it the next morning and holy shit these words came from the fingers of god why is it so good

that session that is purely just navigating the boring shit of getting from one scene to the next and it sucks but you leave off on the cusp of something interesting and it feels good

the satisfyingly exhausting session where you write the Good Part and you’re confident it came out pretty well and you’re full of thoughts and stuff about where things are going next but you need to let them rest

If you introduce a named character with a relationship to a protagonist, their character arc must be resolved in a way that feels reasonable and satisfying

Okay, I am probably not talking to *you*, so cool your jets. *You* are woke and understand that just as the real world has people of every color and all along the gender spectrum, fiction should too. TV has not figured this out yet. If it had, one in five characters in America-set stories would be black, one in ten Asian, and three in ten would be Latino. Fully half would be female (and of those females, only one in five would be a hot chick instead of 4 out of 5). Movies are about the same. Unfortunately a lot of fiction writers emulate what they’ve seen on the screen. Many’s the time I’ve asked one of my writing students where the female characters are, what the ethnicity of their characters are, and how race and gender affect their characters. Sometimes students will tell me that they are “colorblind” or that gender shouldn’t matter. (Yet how many times have I read that the hero’s eyes are “cerulean” – pardon me while I throw up a little in my mouth.) Other times students tell me that because they’re white, they don’t feel comfortable creating black, Asian, or otherwise non-white characters.

Here’s what I have to say to these weak excuses: it’s not cultural appropriation if you’re white and write non-white characters, so long as you give those characters depth, heart, and originality. Don’t stereotype. Don’t make up Indian legends (a la Stephenie Meyer). Avoid tropes. DO look at your four main characters and make sure some are women in power (NOT victims), add some depth and variety to your characters’ sexuality, and make no more than half of them white. Embrace the conflict that this may add to your fiction, and do investigate how that would realistically play out, add to your story’s depth, and affect the symbolism, themes, and setting.

Why is this important? It is up to us writers to change the landscape of fiction in this new century. I am astonished by the continuing whiteness and maleness of TV. Every new show that comes on, I see four white guys, the black/Asian token, the diverse, mostly non-speaking support team, and a hot chick. Sometimes two hot chicks. Sometimes there’s a black woman president or other background power figure to reassure us that the writing team cares. But the main characters? White, and dominated by males. Props to Shonda Rhimes. Make your cast of characters look like her TV shows.

Readers want to see themselves reflected on the pages of the books they choose. Yet we are trained to read about/watch white men, especially as heroes, and we need to start changing that narrative. Think about a young black woman growing up with no hero that looks like her to daydream about. That sucks. It’s even worse for Asian readers in America.

bc spider-man movies have always suffered from “white boy has two white love interests and all-white antagonists, friends, and acquaintances, despite the fact that his stories take place in the most ethnically diverse city in the US.”

and if you haven’t watched the film, no, his love interest is not the one blonde.

“He kidnaps, she screams”: words associated with gender in Wikipedia plot descriptions