This past month has felt like these are two of the most challenging areas facing me right now as a writer. This touches on a few dynamics being observed within writing and publishing.
Before the shift in the climate 18 months ago, I had posted a blog post in spring of 2020 about how I felt every other industry I am in, such as healthcare, is diverse because the best in the field are recognised. The homogeneity of publishing was extremely uncomfortable for me, and the way white members of the industry talked about diversity was cringe. Thankfully in the last 18 months, we have seen a lot of change. Personally, I was challenged to listen better and learned tremendously from that experience. However, despite these changed and advances, my trust in publishing to handle this topic is still low.
Recently meeting a publisher talking about whether we were making changes appropriately or not - I tweeted about how, as a white person, I was offended by the choice in Bridgerton, for example, to make the WOC debutant the teenage pregnancy rather than the star. Rather than avoiding that stereotype which is used to deride WOC by my own father, who was, ironically, raised by a single mother.
During that conversation they observed all of the agented white women YA novels that don't sell because agents signed them without any real confidence, hoping that they would find the next J.K. Rowling. I know that when there was more attention drawn to AOC, they themselves were complaining that it might just be a fad. It is wonderful to see more attention given to their writing and stories, and developing more writers who can tell these stories. I recently reviewed the second book in Roseanne Brown's fantasy series and recognised how deep she was able to take us in her commentary about social issues that I appreciated so much.
However, as this publisher said, the entertainment companies are still owned by white men who are only recognising an opportunity to make money from all of the attention, rather than caring about whether it is done well. This sums up how I feel about the proliferation about Comic book movies, whether they are good or not.
What I do not trust to happen, and I still feel should be the goal, is balance. Recognise good writing and good stories apart from ethnicity or cultural background. Obviously publishing was very far behind the curve in diversity, and it will take time with a lot of these conversations happening still around varying and incorrect criteria which to apply to the lived experiences going into some of these stories.
I experienced some of this recently, myself, in a homogeneous group of older white women, particularly from an academic background. Conformity was the driving goal for them. One of the women who submitted her very very safe story about a religious grandmother in Minnesota, balked at my story and did not understand the place in the creative process of confronting crimes against humanity to make the audience think about or discuss it. She was very aggressive toward me, as I surely believe many AOC provoke similar kinds of reactions, that I should change the offending bits if I wanted to sell my book to any publisher.
That brings me to my challenges finding my people. I have connected with groups in London virtually, where I have made great friends. However, one of these SFF groups has very different tastes than I do. I tried to connect with a SFF group in the US who was agnorant about my story idea. I want to network among these groups because these are some of my target readers, and I have elements of my novel that I hope will appeal to them, but being able to discuss my writing from a high concept pov is not connecting.
Being part of my alumni writing group (with the aggressively conservative academics), connected with me on that level, and pushed me to write better, which is something I am striving for. But if the organisers are not the creative people in the group who have no problem with the challenges I include in my writing, I find it hard to feel at home there, either.
Then there is also the extreme dichotomy between SFF and literary communities. Largely because of the taste level I mentioned. My book is Speculative and literary. Many of my stories are literary and Speculative. My latest short story is in a near future where I get to throw shade at Elon Musk, which is fabulous, but the entire landscape of the story is in the mental landscape of the main character. This is a story I submitted to the contest of the SFF group in London, where this dichotomy was extremely apparent. Primarily largely made up of nerdy white guys who are the foundation of SFF audience, voted in favour of a story about potty humour.
There were fans of my story in the group, but it was not 'popular' enough to rank in any category. Similarly I submitted it to a contest for SFF stories - with an Asian guest judge - and was not considered for the short list. Ironically the Asian members of our group were the ones to recognise the power and strength of this mental landscape of the story. Today I received a second rejection not to be short listed in a literary contest. Was I penalised for using a Speculative near future setting?
How can SFF improve if the literary community will not weigh in on the better quality writing and leave the genre to be dominated by nerdy white guys who like potty humour. One of my friends from the alumni group said absolutely no problem with white guys, but definitely draw a line at toilet humour. While I want a broad reader base, and want to include bits that will appeal both to literary readers and to nerdy white guys who want to see cool things happen, finding the support among writers to make that happen is proving very difficult for me.
If you made a Venn diagram among the SFF writers, the literary writers, the better quality writers who don't think the way they turn a phrase is the best thing since sliced bread, and women or people in general who aren't offended by confronting "offensive" topics, that little triangle at the centre would be people who might connect with me as a writer, and then among those, we might still have personality conflicts. So like the scene in How to Be Single with the peanuts, I've whittled down the writing community - not to those people who can be my friends, since I am finding a lot of nice people who are friends - but to those people who I feel can help me polish my book and connect with what I want it to be.
I am sure I am not the first person to have these problems with these dichotomies in this world, but this is my personal experience. Feel free to share yours!
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