Essay? Update? The walls are falling down

Or, this mixed-race writer has an epiphany

Reading time: approximately 12 minutes

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Oh my darlings, hello and welcome and here’s a hardhat—beware of the falling debris, because we’re now in a construction zone. Destruction zone? Both, I think.

Two essays ago, I decided against re-reading The Elements of Style (a book I now understand to be deeply classist, racist, and gendered). I’d instead read How Dare We! Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse. So I did. I am. And I think it’s re-wiring my brain. The essays in this book…I didn’t know how desperately I needed to read the words of writers who felt the same way I feel while trying to learn how to write. I am reading the words of Chicanx and Black and Indigenous and Asian-American and lesbian writers who have also gone through the hallowed halls of American writing workshops and came out no longer able to put words on the page. I am reading how what they learned about craft drew them so far away from their ancestry and their authentic expression they had to struggle to create their own maps back to the stories they wanted to tell.

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In February of 2015, I gave my final presentation for my hybrid Master’s program. After I gave the presentation to thunderous applause, I remember the program chair, an older British woman who is a brilliantly wise teacher and scholar, standing to say this: that when she put out discussion questions (that we all had to write responses to on the online forum), she had a good idea in her head of what the student responses would be.

But she said that my responses were always unexpected. That never once did they fall within that usual range of responses. And she seemed to appreciate that. I took it as a good thing, that I think uniquely. Outside the box.

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Reading these essays by multicultural writers who have recovered from academia like it was a wound they needed to heal has formed this crack in my idea of who I am. Because up until last week I was a writer who has spent decades trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of craft. Trying to write stories, usually leaving them unfinished because I didn’t truly understand plot or characterization or theme or worldbuilding or scenes well enough to apply these concepts consistently.

I HONESTLY thought I am just not smart enough to figure it out. I keep trying, hoping the next book or teacher will describe the elements of story in a dumbed-down enough way that my stupid brain will finally get it.

But I read How Dare We! Write and now I think……what if I’m not stupid? What if the writing instruction I’ve received up until now was just rooted in a point of view so far from mine that when I look at my own stories through its lens, they don’t make any sense?

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So so, so so so. An example. Most fiction writing instruction starts with the basics. There is some contention about what is a “basic” concept and what is more “advanced,” but most writing instruction starts with plot, character, setting, conflict, and theme.

In the essays in How Dare We! Write, the authors don’t start with any of these things. They start with their audience.

“If, like me, you are lucky, your Chicana feminist advisor will be your backup. She will give your writing back and will pointedly say to you, “What is this? Where are you?” when you are missing from your stories. She will share with you that she stopped reading after the first paragraph. At first you will feel crushed, a bit spirit-broken, but later when you look again at what you gave her, you will come to agree with her assessment. You will look to her text, Chicana Without Apology as your muse. You will remember, you are not writing for white male academics, you are filling in gaps of knowledge, you are interrupting what has been done before. You will remember your true audience, your abuela who completed eight grades of formal schooling in Juarez, Mexico. You will remember your true audience, your mama who graduated from high school against the odds in Washington, Kansas. You will remember your true audience, your hermana who will soon graduate with a master’s degree in technical writing with an emphasis in women’s studies from Kansas State University. You will remember your true audience, your 4-year-old niece, and the young girl hungry for more, who is now searching for your book in the stacks of her community library.

- Kandace Creel Falcón, “What Would Edén Say?”

However, it did not occur to me until very recently that while it is true that we might alienate some by conveying a certain point of view and exposing what we believe to be systematic institutional oppression, power and privilege, microaggressions, white supremacy and other such concepts that will make some roll their eyes, by not disguising our truth, we will actually be more successful at drawing our true audience toward our work. Our true audience does not want watered-down truth. When we do this, we forgo the opportunity to speak directly to the hearts, minds, and souls of black and brown readers.”

- Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, “A Case For Writing While Black”

I worked for 15 years as a technical writer, and this is non-fiction writing 101. If you have ever come to me for help writing anything non-fiction—school papers, essays, marketing copy, resumes, cover letters, reports, manuals, articles, documents, anything—the first thing I ask you is: who is reading this? who is this for? what was the assignment? what question are you trying to answer? A million different ways to ask who the audience is. Will the document be for external clients or internal staff? Is the article for experts or laypeople? Are you applying for a technical job or a management job? What understanding of the readings is the professor asking you to show? What aspects of the product are most important to your customers, and why? Is this report for finance or HR?

There’s no way to know where to start without determining your audience. The audience determines the piece’s tone, content, length, and structure.

Why are we never told to ask this question when we sit down to write fiction?

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I’ve been listening to the Writing Excuses podcast on the advice of this Couch-to-10k writing class I bought, and in Season 1, Episode 5, Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells talk about “Heroes and Protagonists.”

They talk about the different types of heroes, which ones they like the most, and how to write them. They talk about the difference between the everyman hero and the superman hero. About how sometimes “you want an infallible hero who will destroy everything, and save the day, win the girl. And then there’s other types of stories that require a more conflicted main character.”

They talk about Willy Wonka, Luke Skywalker, Dirk Pitt, Aragorn, James Bond. “We need,” Howard says, “…in order to really connect with a story, I feel like the reader has to be able to see a little bit of him or herself in the story. And while we all want to be, or should want to be, heroic, we are also all flawed. And seeing heroes with flaws overcome those flaws makes them even more heroic.”

“The charm of the Superman hero,” Brandon says, “is that they represent someone we would want to be. They have powers or abilities which we wish we could have.” Howard adds: “At this point in the podcast when we say Superman, really we’re talking about the Übermensch ideal of an infallible hero.”

{Übermensch, definition: the ideal superior man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values, originally described by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85).}

They talk about how to write an everyman hero that “doesn’t come off as just a wuss.” How we like reading about people who are competent, but not competent in the area they need to be competent in, and yet manage to make it work anyway. (Like how Sam in The Lord of the Rings is a shitty warrior but a great loyal friend, so he makes being a loyal friend work to save the day.)

In their final wrap-up, they give some advice on what to do when you are crafting your hero: Make him or her interesting, give them flaws and faults, and when you establish a conflict, make it difficult. Find ways for this hero to use the things they already know to save the day, but don’t make it easy, and then they will come off as heroic.

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This podcast episode is a pretty standard examination of protagonists and how protagonists should be portrayed and how to write them, especially the final wrap-up bit (which is a summation of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey).

But….why is it standard? Brandon and Howard and Dan told me very directly that a Superman hero is who I should want to be. (I don’t.) That sometimes I want an infallible hero who will destroy everything. (I really don’t.) That I like reading about competent people. (Do I? Competent according to whom?) That a hero is either a superman or an everyman. (MY heroes are not.)

What if this very standard idea of a protagonist is not a definition, but a point of view?

“Even the literary concept of “conflict” is culturally biased. Man versus nature. Man versus man. Man versus Self. Man versus Society. This is not “truth.” It is not the only way to write, to view the self and the world. It’s a viewpoint. An aspect of an individualistic culture in love with the idea of a white, straight, male hero who exerts great strength and willpower despite all the odds, i.e., despite nature, despite other men, despite his own demons, despite society. It is, in a nutshell, the ideology of manifest destiny, of white male Amerikkka—the outcast hero conquering all. So if you don’t belong to a culture that idolizes those traits, or you want to tell a different kind of story, and you want to write, what do you do? Your writing won’t be considered by many to be any good.

- Chris Stark, “Crazy”

The thing is, right or wrong, I’ve read a lot of these sorts of stories (including some by Brandon Sanderson) and I’ve found many of them to be pretty enjoyable. But even as I am enjoying them, I can clearly tell these stories are not written for me as the intended audience.

The problem is assuming a template for how to write cis white male heroes is going to work for MY hero of MY story. No one ever says, this is one way to write a specific kind of hero in a specific kind of story. (If you are wondering why that might be, I refer you to Matthew Salesses’ history of the Iowa Writing Workshop.)

So when my multicultural not-male self tries to sit down and write a hero that I find relatable, who is not “competent,” nor infallible, nor a destroyer of things, nor trying to save the day and win, using the only rules I’ve been given, is it really a big surprise when that doesn’t work out?

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I’ve always assumed that if I wanted to write a novel with a mixed-race protagonist, I just declare her mixed-race and then send her off on her Hero’s Journey. I assumed that what I was taught about plot and character and setting and conflict and theme was universal. I assumed my true audience—those who identify with the unique point of view and feelings that come from being a person caught between multiple communities—would want to read a Hero’s Journey type of story. How Dare We! Write is helping me to see that all of my assumptions are wrong. And now that this new perspective has shown me that the way I was taught to write is only one way, not universal at all, I can see why my assumptions are wrong.

Ok. Long before Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (which is a theory found in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces that he wrote in the 1950s), there was Aristotle. Aristotle analyzed the literature from his time period: Ancient Greece. From that analysis he created the basic three-act structure (which the Hero’s Journey fits neatly into) that nearly all of today’s movies and books are based on.

Why does that matter? Because you know who the mixed-race people are in Ancient Greek myths and stories? Monsters.

“Anthropologist David Wengrow argues that hybrid monsters proliferated during the Bronze Age, because new trade routes and cultural mixing elicited psychological anxiety. Creating monsters is a way of channeling our cultural and political fears into tangible forms, into objects of loathing and dread.

Monsters might not seem like helpful memes because they frighten us and increase stress, but they are almost always part of a larger cultural cautionary tale. The monster plays an important role in norm enforcement. If you don’t follow the rules, the bogeyman will get you. If you don’t walk the path of virtue, the devil will take you. If you succumb to gluttony, you’ll become a “hungry ghost” in the next life (according to Buddhist traditions). Most monsters function as disgusting threats that heroes and gods vanquish, repudiate, and cleanse from the community. They offer surrogate rehearsals for how the real community (“us”) will resist actual enemies (“them”). Monsters are sticky memes that draw groups together into moral communities.”

- Stephen T. Asma, “Why Are So Many Monsters Hybrids?”

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I’ve been looking in all the wrong places for the rules on how to write MY books. I keep going back and back and back to learn from wonderful instructors who teach how to write stories without ever thinking about who stories can be written for and why that matters. I keep reading books meant for an audience that is out of my point of view. And while I enjoy those stories, they don’t help me feel my way toward writing mine.

I’m going to find more teachers, more authors, and more stories that help me write rather than hinder me. I don’t know what any of that looks like yet, but apparently this is the journey I find myself on.

Thank you so much for hanging with me while I got the burning galaxy that was the ideas in this piece out of my head and onto the page.

♾️ 💖s,

Elnora