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ecritetmort · 6 years

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PrideFest Questions [part 1: me]

Picked from this wonderful post which personally I thought sounded cool but have received none from to answer. I wanted to take a chance to shamelessly talk about me discuss certain aspects of my current projects and the characters of ATTWDC’s evolutions in particular (with them ofc).

[There will be a Part 2 with characters that I’ll add a link to here once it’s up.]

Without further ado:

Why do you write LGBT+ characters?

I won’t pretend that there isn’t already a whole world of LGBT fiction (and general queer lit, and lately more ace-centric lit). Representation, odd as it is to say, is almost secondary to something else that I remember reading about: when it comes to minorities, whether that’s physical disability, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender identity, those traits almost always end up the focus of the story. Don’t get me wrong--that’s hardly a bad thing! It’s good to see stories that document our struggles, and particularly with ethnicity and LGBT groups, our oppression. Especially in the queer community, it’s important to remember history; unlike other groups, we’re often disconnected from our elders.

For me, though, I write LGBT characters because I want more fiction that, frankly, doesn’t focus on sexuality. That doesn’t mean erasing gay culture, mind, it just means that I want to write more (YA in particular) fiction that shows us just... being characters. Books where we’re not ashamed to be ourselves and instead of worrying about bullies can focus on being rulers or studying medicine or finally being noticed by my crush, goddammit. I want more fiction where you don’t have to focus on coming out, because who cares when there’s a supervillain about to destroy half the city?!

So, yeah.

Have you always written LGBT+ characters? If no, what inspired you to start? Is it a deliberate representational choice?

Reveal time! Up until the summer before my freshman year of high school, I only had two LGBT characters (Life and Death, who at the time were both aroace). Although I knew before then that I was probably a-spec and had begun ID’ing as demisexual in eighth grade, I wasn’t really inspired until I had my first gay crush over the summer. Starting in my freshman year with some now-unused OCs and then over the course of my sophomore year, all of my characters became LGBT. To be honest, it was more of just a “this feels right” than deliberate at first. There weren’t really moments when it felt like I was changing anything, it was just sort of lifting this heterosexual curtain, and bam! gay, or trans, or both.

Do you use modern labels in your work? Why or why not?

I try to keep labelling period-accurate, particularly for my apprentices WIP, which takes place in the 1910′s-1930′s. Otherwise, I use modern labelling, though to be honest explicit labelling (using ATTWDC as an example) only happens for like, one character. which is Karyn, and mostly because a part of her character arc is discovering her sexuality. Part of this is that, especially among the characters of ATTWDC, it’s not like the plot is taking them to Pride, and outside of a few times, it’d just be awkward to insert scenes where characters detail their specific sexualities. That doesn’t mean it’s not glaringly obvious in most cases, but it does mean that labels aren’t really tossed around.

World builders: do you have any neat societal twists?

Explicitly mentioned in canon, everyone involved with the nations (Aquarius, Helike, Darvaz, Avalon) is LGBT.

Every. Single. Person.

Do you write outside your own experiences? (cis writing trans, wlw writing mlm, etc.) If yes, how confident do you feel about it?

Depends on how you define it. I have plenty of characters who are different from me (mlm, non-binary folk, trans dudes, aro). I have characters who are sexually attracted to people they don’t even know, and I have characters who are sexually repulsed. I have characters who experience dysphoria. I have others who just change to fit shifts in desired appearance. I don’t pretend to know how all of that feels, and while I try to absorb as many personal narratives as I can, I try not to focus heavily on recreating the “experience”, especially social, of groups where I know that I’ve never treaded before. No more than I would want a straight author to use homophobia to make a cheap enemy for a wlw character who is like me, I don’t want to use transphobia and dysphoria as cheap angst.

I’m confident on how I can include characters with different identities than my own (of which all of them are in some shape or form!) as characters, taking their sexuality and gender into consideration. I’m confident on how I represent sexualities that aren’t mine, gender identities other than my own, and the ways in which those two interact and intersect.

But if you’re asking if I feel confident talking about the journey of finding the pronouns that feel right, or about the specific anxieties of being a bisexual man in the 1940′s? No, I don’t, because I know there’s someone out there who has, and deserves to tell that story better than I ever can.

Any advice for someone else writing LGBT+ characters?

Read and listen to others’ experiences, both those who are of a different identity from you and those who share one. If you’re a-spec, read the stories about people’s sexual attraction, and read about other people’s experiences with being on the asexuality spectrum.

Listen to people who are of a different ethnicity and nationality, especially if you’re white and American. Sexuality and ethnicity are not isolated, just like how sexuality and gender are entwined. If you’re Asian-American like me, listen to people who live back in Asia. Listen to the experiences of people living in Poland and the Philippines and México.

#lgbt writers #writblr #amwriting #pridefest #the writer #from the writer's den

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