Doubts

Recent discussion has dredged to the surface some doubts I've had for a long time.

Of the books I've written, all of them have had women as the main protagonists, and in two of them the main character is a a black woman, who is not heterosexual. I had four major reasons for doing this, and though I have been reluctant to say it out loud, I feel I need to consider the possibility that I have failed on each of those points:

Goal #1: To add to the range of badass, non-derivative heroines in fantasy fiction, and to create characters who represented intersectionality.

The Problem: Such heroines aren't in short supply, they just haven't been in the things I have been exposed to as a white male. What's needed is more exposure for those characters outside of their literary 'ghettos', and white men adding more simplistic, tone deaf characters drowns out the existing work. 

Goal #2: To buck certain stereotypes, while playing with traditional archetypes.

The Problem: Keeping to a traditional fantasy trope, Rise of Azraea is about a human, an elf, and a dwarf at odds with an evil dragon. Beyond that, though, things are pretty non-traditional. Azraea, is not an Aragorn-esque Arthurian hero, but rather a black woman in her thirties. She is also highly educated, sophisticated, charming, and in her own way emotionally vulnerable, which in my mind is a sharp contrast to the stoic 'Amazon' role black women are often assigned in science fiction and fantasy - so the stereotype is bucked, but does the character really have any more depth than the cliches? Azraea's closest friends are not explicitly PoC and she never interacts with her family in the story, so she's placed in the situation of being in the extreme minority. While that's all justified in the context of the story line, having an isolated black character is also terribly cliche, and a relative cop-out, because of course, having two black people in the story would just be impossibly complicated for a white author to imagine. In other words, she is the black character in the story, and although she is the main character, I can't help but look back and wonder if there's some tokenism there.

Goal #3: To use my position as a white male author (e.g., someone people are frankly more likely to pay attention to) to help steer attention towards systemic inequality and discrimination based on gender and race (among other problems) - not to 'save the day' or 'solve' anything, but simply to contribute to a collective voice, saying that we have problems. 

The Problem: Despite my intentions, my treatment of any aspect of the underprivileged person's experience could probably be described as "trite" and "shallow". (In fairness to myself, I did *try* to vet the book with someone who would be more savvy in this regard, but they never finished the book, if they even started).  

While Azraea's background has some deeper twists in it, they are only hinted at in the first two books, and wouldn't be explored until the third book. The challenges she faces as a queer black woman trying to maintain a position of power without giving into the temptation to just kill everyone who annoys her might be interesting, but that likewise wouldn't become an issue until book III. Before that, her experiences with discrimination are so overt that they come off as quaint. They're also generally resolved with a measure of consequence-free violence, which to my mind is part of the cathartic escapism of a fantasy world, but it could easily be seen as flippant towards the experiences of women of color in the real world, who don't have the option of lighting a man's crotch on fire. Furthermore, the systemic, societal problems that back Azraea's experiences are referenced, but not shown; I don't really know how to address that in a fantasy novel, but I guess that's part of the problem. 

Goal #4: To prove to male readers that women *aren't* an inscrutable mystery, and that they can be just as relatable to them as male characters.

The Problem: Azraea has dealt with some life challenges specific to her identity as a woman of color in higher education, while also tapping into a ruthless, ambitious side of herself that's akin to Napoleon Bonaparte - so she's relatable to men in the sense that she acts out some masculine power fantasies, not as the subject of the power, but as the wielder of it. So far I've had all of two men read Rise of Azraea: Book I, so I don't really know where that stands. However, I've realized that even if the characters are relatable to them, it only 'proves' that characters written by a male author are relatable to male readers - in other words, it's very possible my characters aren't actually women, but rather men with boobs.

So, where do I go from here?

Three responses immediately jump out, of course:

Response #1: Become a better writer.

That's not exactly an easy thing to just 'do' and I'm not sure I'd know it if I did it. I can certainly point to different bad habits and inadequacies I have as an author. For example, I used to chew through books, but all but stopped reading in graduate school. The last two novels I started I never even finished. But the fact that I haven't amended those deficiencies makes me doubtful I'd succeed at trying to improve, and it also seems that I finish every day with a large portion of my tasks unfinished, as it is, so resolving to do more things seems fruitless. I'm also not sure any amount of book-research would actually help, and I no longer live and work inside the diverse social network that inspired Rise of Azraea in the first place. Actually, I don't really live or work in any social network at all. Perhaps because of that, I'm rather attached to my characters, and would find it difficult to just 'burn' them and start over with something else.

Response #2: Restrict myself to writing characters I 'know'.

Some white male authors have decided to back off and give PoC space, avoiding appropriating their experiences by restricting their writing to protagonists that are like themselves - white men. For me, the problem with that is twofold, though. First, I feel like white men are pretty damned boring. Whenever I ask myself, 'what sorts of challenges do white men face?' every example that comes to mind has either been done to death, or would make for a wildly boring read. When I do write a male character in a story, they're generally a two-dimensional prop or comic relief, good for handling basic tasks and throwing out one-liners. The more significant problem, though, is that I'm not really comfortable writing male characters. Although I really hate being told that I'm "not like other men", that I'm the "exception to" whatever BS rule someone's made up, or that I'm one of the girls, there's a reason I also hate it when I hear the opposite. Growing up, I did not have terribly positive experiences with other boys, and while I had male friends, I was never really close to anyone. Now, as an adult, I don't go 'hang out with the boys' or do anything like that, so I'll admit that, in my mind, I'm not a "privileged white male", I'm still just the freak that got spit on getting off the school bus.

Response #3: Quit writing.

Dwelling on the ideas of appropriation, insensitivity, and exploitation, I got out of bed tonight partly to do a simple Google search, "What can white men write about?" Honestly, I actually just expected a simple answer: alien robots. Instead, the top Google hits asked a more brutal question, "Should white men stop writing?" The nominal consensus was 'no', they shouldn't, but it really felt like the underlying answer was more like, 'I would never tell you to stop writing, but we wouldn't miss you if you were gone.' One of the suggestions literally amounted to, 'keep writing as much as you want, just don't publish so much of it,' and encouraged white male writers to devote more of their time to promoting work by PoC, rather than their own writing. Considering how difficult it is to get published in the first place, being told to publish less feels like it's basically the same as being told to just get out and make room for others. 

To make things more confusing, the fact that I'm writing this is in questionable taste. One person's response included, "We whites have to stop hijacking the debate to talk about us... By all means grapple with this question on your own... But we have to stop taking up space on Twitter, in Voya, and elsewhere to do so" (Larbalestier, 2016). I get he reasoning, but... wow, in practice, that's harsh.

Anecdotally, I have been told that I may be 'an expert in academic writing' but I don't know jack about writing outside of that context,* with the lingering implication being that I should stay in my pin. That angers me more than you can probably imagine, but in the context of the above, it's a point of view I should probably consider. 

*[Granted, when someone says something like that I don't think they really understand what's entailed in academic research; physically writing the ten page article that gets submitted to a scientific journal is not the main task in conducting academic research, it's a relative afterthought that comes from cobbling together your research proposal, your literature review notes, and your hours upon hours upon hours of math.]