busyThe thing is ... there are people with multiple minority traits. There are gay Asians. There are autistic Pagans. There are poor black lesbians in wheelchairs. And those people sometimes feel overlooked because the stacking effect can change their experiences so much that a single-trait character doesn't feel much like them. I've read essays upholding this end of the debate but couldn't find one to use as an example here.
My stance is that I write characters as they need to be. I have a lot of characters who are female/other trait because roughly half of humanity is female. Other combinations are less common but also appear. Brelig is a normal-sized Duurludirj man (which we'd consider a dwarf) and missing one hand. Maryam Smith is African-British, genderqueer, duoclass, and of illegitimate birth. I'm more likely to focus on minority protagonists than to use them as filler, something my audience seems to enjoy if you look over what's been published. I don't tend to write a lot of straight white Christian men, though, so the core of the mainstream doesn't get a lot of traffic from me. Meh.
Also, if I haven't specified a trait in canon, yes it could fall outside the mainstream. Characters have done this to me often enough, and my cultural awareness is diverse enough, that there's no permanent default. They may pop out an uncommon religion or sexual orientation or invisible handicap or whatnot, and they may do that after two stories or six poems or twenty years. I'm more likely to mention physical features such as skin tone and gender up front, because they're noticeable points of diversity. But I've also had characters refuse to reveal their sex/gender, and not just the ones for whom "I'm not telling" is their gender.
I'm interested in other people's perspectives on the matter of single vs. stacked traits.
June 25 2013, 03:28:14 UTC 8 years ago
Thoughts
June 25 2013, 04:03:27 UTC 8 years ago
Apparently that's not obvious. I mean, it is to me; that's how I usually write about diversity. I put it in the foundation. But then other writers act like I'm doing something weird. The standard approach seems to be picking out traited characters one at a time and writing a story "about" their salient trait(s). Sometimes I assemble a team, and if I do that in any kind of multicultural setting, I'll aim for a diverse team; and I generally tend to have a mix if the setting allows for it. But I really like settings where the defaults differ from where I happen to live.
>> Beyond that, mentioning characters whose, say, religious minority status makes them relevant to the plot (in the sense of dissatisfied with the current regime's treatment of minorities) will lead to a lot of "stacked" traits. Ditto characters who acquire physical disabilities over the course of the narrative. <<
Those are both true. And some other folks pointed out that certain traits lead to others, like disability and poverty.