Entry tags:
Writing status/thoughts
My vampire x vampire hunter romance has inched to 39k words. I'm not really actively working on it right now, but once in a while I get some inspiration to fill in some of the hashtag breaks I left in while my beta readers are slowly making their way through the story.
One of the things I've been wondering about, with this particular story, is how to convey ableism without miring the character in ableism such that the character would become a victim and the story would probably be toxic for autistic readers to read. It's not fun, as a marginalized person, to read a book that is filled with -phobia/-ism all the time. (Which is, incidentally, one of the major problems that comes up when authors write about a marginalized group they're not part of—when the author turns that experience of being marginalized into "tragedy porn.")
For example, I, as an Asian American, don't want to read books that are filled with racist microaggressions against Asians (unless the author can handle it in a nuanced way, like an #ownvoices author). I don't like to read books like Antisocial by Heidi Cullinan that frame the asexual-spectrum character as a victim of a sexually coercive environment and in constant need of rescuing from his own self-hatred by the allosexual love interest.
So that brings me to my book and how to handle the ableist microaggressions that the autistic protagonist receives.
This book was in large part driven by a desire on my part to vent my frustration against horrible portrayals of autistic characters that I keep seeing in fiction, which is why I wanted to confront that ableism head-on. Also, I haven't really read a book that features an autistic character who gets angry about ableism, even though that describes a lot of autistic people. But, of course, I don't want to turn my autistic character into a victim of ableism because...that's just not fun to read, let alone write.
For example, I thought about writing a scene in which my protagonist has to confront ableism from his relatives, because family ableism is a topic I want to talk about. And yet, given my protagonist's background, I realized he wasn't in a position to argue back against people who are his family members, which means he was just going to sit silently and sadly through a conversation with toxic ableism lobbed at him, and I was like "Uh...this is kind of uncomfortable."
So, I've decided that instead, the conversation would be between his ableist family member and his (neurotypical) boyfriend, so he's not participating at all. (The book would be told through dual POVs, which is why this works.) That way, the points about ableism can still be made for the reader's benefit, while not harming my protagonist in the narrative.
So yeah. Those were some thoughts I had on writing about the experience of being marginalized.
One of the things I've been wondering about, with this particular story, is how to convey ableism without miring the character in ableism such that the character would become a victim and the story would probably be toxic for autistic readers to read. It's not fun, as a marginalized person, to read a book that is filled with -phobia/-ism all the time. (Which is, incidentally, one of the major problems that comes up when authors write about a marginalized group they're not part of—when the author turns that experience of being marginalized into "tragedy porn.")
For example, I, as an Asian American, don't want to read books that are filled with racist microaggressions against Asians (unless the author can handle it in a nuanced way, like an #ownvoices author). I don't like to read books like Antisocial by Heidi Cullinan that frame the asexual-spectrum character as a victim of a sexually coercive environment and in constant need of rescuing from his own self-hatred by the allosexual love interest.
So that brings me to my book and how to handle the ableist microaggressions that the autistic protagonist receives.
This book was in large part driven by a desire on my part to vent my frustration against horrible portrayals of autistic characters that I keep seeing in fiction, which is why I wanted to confront that ableism head-on. Also, I haven't really read a book that features an autistic character who gets angry about ableism, even though that describes a lot of autistic people. But, of course, I don't want to turn my autistic character into a victim of ableism because...that's just not fun to read, let alone write.
For example, I thought about writing a scene in which my protagonist has to confront ableism from his relatives, because family ableism is a topic I want to talk about. And yet, given my protagonist's background, I realized he wasn't in a position to argue back against people who are his family members, which means he was just going to sit silently and sadly through a conversation with toxic ableism lobbed at him, and I was like "Uh...this is kind of uncomfortable."
So, I've decided that instead, the conversation would be between his ableist family member and his (neurotypical) boyfriend, so he's not participating at all. (The book would be told through dual POVs, which is why this works.) That way, the points about ableism can still be made for the reader's benefit, while not harming my protagonist in the narrative.
So yeah. Those were some thoughts I had on writing about the experience of being marginalized.