The Superversive - Quotha: John C. Wright on writing

Oh, very nice; thank you!

The trouble with Wright's sample is, the conceit is so interesting, that I wish he would just go ahead and Tell it so we could get on with the story.

A lot of fun can be got by taking stereotypes and tweaking them.

I'm remembering a Local History talk where the speaker described a 19th century writer she was quoting from as "racist" and using racial stereotypes because he had described a group of Irishwomen in London as wearing red flannel skirts and shawls over their heads. From what I've read, the situation at the time was that an Irishwoman would not necessarily dress like that, but nobody who was not Irish did, and it was the usual garb*. If you are describing something that is the norm, and there is no reason to go outside the norm, is it a stereotype? If a woman is wearing a hijab, is it stereotyping to assume she is Muslim?

*Checking my notes on the talk, I see that what she took exception to was the description of the clothes, not the assumption that the women were Irish; the writer had heard them speaking and that was clearly the case. Apparently a simple description of the type that the writer used throughout was stereotyping from her point of view; can a factual description of something in front of you be stereotyping?

It may be mere secondhand opinion, in which case there is nothing to get, because the speaker's got nothing either. But I see another possibility, which is that - in the speaker's experience - this presumably authentic image, or (worse) that wording of it, had become a mere convention for visible Irishwomen, until everything but that particular icon disappeared beneath it. A context fault more than an explicit one: like a writer who goes into America's Midwest today, and emits stock descriptions of lean dusty laconic leathery-skinned men eating chili and wearing big hats, &c., ad naus., until the reader wonders why and whether their guide ever bothered leaving New York in the first place.

That may be a symptom of bias - a bias against noticing anything outside the writer's default expectation of Midwestern men, which may extend to less superficial matter than hats and chili. Or of a bias against any perception not previously sorted, processed, and labelled for the writer's benefit. Or it may be a symptom of reality's being more profoundly like the stereotype than the critics' own bias can credit, so their complaints are full of beans. I'm fairly sure I've seen all three in action.

i might try that since i'm married to one. ;']

but seriously...i don't try to use actual people, God having done a better job. i have used what i call archetypes of community roles, and expanded characters from these. the doctor, banker, po-lice ;'], teacher.... others have called them stereotypes but since these are roles or jobs in the small-town community i think them archetypes. the stereotype is more personal, having to do with the exaggerated personal trait, i think. jobs relate more to muses or assignments given [or taken on for love].



Edited at 2012-03-18 12:05 pm (UTC)

The way one uses stereotypes well is to use the stereotype as a starting place and develop the character from there. The stereotype is true, to some extent, or it never would have become established -- but it's never the whole truth, in real life or in good fiction.

I resist stereotypes because it seems to me he's fuzzing the meaning. We use recognizable patterns in building characters, but unrecognizable ones, too. The art comes in the mix and match.

I really want to read that book, tho.

YES YES YES. I've been wanting to write about this for a while, because we all have pictures in our head of everything. When I think of a "tree," it's probably not the same type that you think of. But there are ways of making those thing both more like a type and also more specific, and those make communication possible.

Count another one in for the old men's dreams.

All this points up an irritating collective-action problem for writers' successful use of stereotypes. Suppose that - from some common American perspective - I am a thoroughly stereotypical Englishman. Suppose this is such a true stereotype that fully three-quarters of real Englishmen ring its bell in one way or another.

Then the typical Englishman in a stereotype-crunching American novel - quite likely every instance of an Englishman in many stories, especially those where such characters are few - is going to resemble me quite a lot. Well and good, supposing the stereotype was cast in the service of truth rather than self-indulgence or some worse thing. Many are, or at least begin so.

But the handiness of the stereotype begets massive reinforcement, so that the reader who would encounter 75% of people rather like me (amongst real Englishmen) may be getting as many as 90, 95, 99% of people very much like me amongst our fictional counterparts. Which is annoyingly inaccurate for the English, and annoyingly tedious for almost any reader capable of boredom.

This raises the bar for "tired, trite, shopworn, or expected" quickly - for pure fictional stereotypes no less than fictionalized real ones, so long as they're common enough that the poor reader begins to feel an Attack of the Clones coming on as they move from one encounter to another.

So the unnatural magnification of the expected must be balanced, on the writer's side, with a magnification of surprising, true, and interesting variation. At least, that's how I see it.

Or to sum up the point another way: if I mean to use my reader's expectations as a springboard, I owe it to everybody involved to jump!