Sunday 31 August 2014

Fractures & Fish


I'm telling you now, I'm not sure what the fish are for. Warning given.

I hang out on the nanowrimo forums a lot, which, if anyone other than myself is reading this, you probably already know. Occasionally, I see threads on race and sexuality and so forth and it makes me thoughtful. Now I'll admit I've become a little bit of a dinosaur in my attitudes, and I don't really understand a lot of the new branches of sexuality. The reality for me is that after a time, someone is wearing just another shade of red. And that's fine, if that's the shade they like, that's all good.

With race, on the other hand, I often see a slightly different tack. While with sexuality people's attitudes seem to be a bit more along the lines of "consider including this", which they maybe have to take because there are lots of people like me who probably shouldn't write about something they can't quite understand, with race, people seem to me to be a little more forceful.

And I'm not sure I agree with that.

I feel like the instant you start to say to someone that they should be writing something in some way, you're missing the point. The idea isn't to compel or shame people into writing a specific way, it's to simply put more tools on the table, add ingredients to the mix, have more options at the store.

I must admit, I often write white characters in my stories and I'm all right with that. I'm generally pretty bad at describing my characters overall, and their descriptions tend to be more along the lines of "once mentioned, never revisited" when it comes to things like skin colour. It just doesn't come up very often, and I think that's fine, too.

People seem to have slightly forceful attitudes to writing race, and really, I just don't see it. Writing race shouldn't be a war, it's nothing like the real battles people face out there in the world. That's a different field altogether and I don't think the two should be confused. I'd rather think it's more about adding colours to the palette of people's dreams.

Race shouldn't be a demand, it should be a gentle interjection with...well, more colours to paint that sky with.

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