quote: Original post by wes
What are your thoughts on minorities in story-telling? When I say minorities Im talkin about gay/bisexual characters, people of different race..etc. Why arent these supported more often? I think we could come up with some intresting situations with these if we did. For example, a love triangle with the main character being bisexual and being intrested in a member from both sexes. Also we could give insight into different cultures and lifestyles, making them less taboo. What does everyone think?

[edited by - wes on February 15, 2004 6:39:25 PM]

I think part of it has to do with what story the author is trying to tell and if those type of characters have an actual logical place in said plot.

Also, it has a lot to do with the influences the author has when they choose to develop or place in the plot a particular character. I chose a lot of the people I admired and called friends in my earlier writing days, but as I began to get better and do more bold types of work, I began to choose designing a character out of thin air, populating it with the attributes I felt the character needed, and then took it out for test drives in scene, in action.

Also, I think it has to do less with deliberately avoiding what type of character or not to put in a story as it is more of an artistic decision to put in or design a character that serves that aspect of story best.

Each writer is different, and the work is going to be reflective of a lot of things that necessity of device or plot determines more than the choice one has in lattitude of selection of story elements such as characters.

For myself, I will always try to make a more complete representation of the diversity we have in our world in my work, but not at the sacrifice of plot which is more important. Additionally, diversity is not necessarily taboo as it might more be a function of the type of fiction you are creating.

When I make choices about characters to include/design in a plot, I don''t think in terms of oh, this character is gay or this character is black or chinese, I think in terms of this character is weak and whiney (which could be a thousand diverse types of individual persons) and I need them to attempt and fail or attempt and succeed at this aspect of story or protagonist development or advancement, not the cart before the horse.

Besides, in your example, if a main character is bisexual and is interested in a member of both sexes, that is a subordinate choice to what is it this character is here to do or attempt to do. The preferential aspects of their character are choices made for color much later if I can work out their plot purpose in the form of actions and dialogue first. Now, the exception to that is if the character is bisexual and their attraction to members of both sexes is the plot, then you have a reason for detailing this aspect of character more fully, otherwise, it''s just not a priority as much as it is a luxury.

This is often the mistake new writers in new fiction make. The lifestyle choice, or demographic makeup of a character should not be the point of the character, what the character is trying to accomplish vis-a-vis the plot is what is important and needs focus on. Only in the case of this being plot should it be ordinate in decision. And, if that is all you are writing about, a lifestyle choice or a social, political or racial demographic, you are going to have classics like "Guess Who''s coming to dinner?" or "Midnight Cowboy" or countless other works of fiction to compete against that have already explored and dimensionalized these aspects of lifestyle or character as plot already, and why would you want to work so hard to create a manuscript that could hardly be called original?

Rather, you would want to try to carve out new territory if you are going to do the job right. If these types of plots and character designs were so important to story and plotting in general, they would be in the mainstream and we would be seeing representations artistically all over the place. But, as they say in Hollywood, "it''s been done" and, it''s seen it''s day.

Living here in the San Francisco Bay area, I see alternative and ethically diverse attempts at liturature attempted all the time with these lifestyles and character designs at the center of the plot, and few worse mistakes could be made in a mass medium, with the author''s eyes agleam with best seller droolage.

A little study of the marketplace beforehand in public tastes and what really sells big would make the shock and awe of the disappointment they experience when their book only sells well to a particular target market, and hence they have to keep their day job or worse, go into cheap consulting or live the book tour, two hells beyond all imagining, frankly, would have saved them a lot of work and a lot of sadness, which they often mistake in a self persecuting manner damning their own talents, as if that were to blame when really lack of objectivity about market prospects was really the culprit.

People in a mass medium market like storytelling like characters that we all can identify with, even if it only archetypically. No matter what ethnicity or culture you come from, there are certain things that are all common to us, aspiration to dreams unrealized, the search for love, the conquest of evil, these things reach everyone, which is what the bestselling author knows. Sad as it may seem, the autobiography of a gangster on death row, or a person dying of AIDS, simply doesn''t reach a great deal of people, sad as this fact is, because the vast majority of people are not going to death row, so it is a reality they can''t understand easily, they are not going to die of AIDS because they believe they will never catch it, and, that type of material or character is simply not mainstream, and, as I heard once in a writer''s conference, "If it''s not amalgamous and all kinds of people from all walks of life can''t understand it quickly, easily and empathetically, you are a specialization writer, and not a mass market entertainment writer."

That''s the sad reality of it, imho.

Adventuredesign


I''m telling you people, the art of game design is so fun sometimes I almost believe it can be done without learning how to program, but knowing how to play.

I would say that individual writers often find particular minorities, or particular characters of other types, difficult to write. For example I often write gay an bisexual characters, I usually write western characters and cultures but sometimes write oriental characters and cultures, but I would have great difficulty trying to write someone who was, say, a traditional hispanic or Indian, because these cultures are kind of alien to me. And I say this after having eaten at a Mexican resturant tonight and having neighbors who are Indian. ^_~ So it''s not that I don''t know anything about these cultures, just that I don''t have empathy with them and so can''t write them convincingly.

Another problem is, you don''t want to make your villians minorities if your heroes aren''t, because you don''t want to imply that people of that type are more villianous by nature than any other type. For example, my current writing project suffers from a lack of female characters. It would be easy for me to make the major villian female, but since there are no strong heroines to balance this, it would look very bad.

And yet another problem is that some writers simply are not particularly interested in making unique characters, and would probably be bad at making them if they tried because they haven''t studied people. Writers that have no empathy for any type of character other than themselves, basically. This you can only combat by having writers work in teams - something I would recommend for game writers in general, but difficult to organize. I have been looking for 6 years now and still haven''t found anyone I would want to be my permanent writing partner.

If you notice the shows on television, most have characters of different races. This is,in my opinion, so people don''t accuse of them if being racist for excluded minorities in major plots. If I''m writing a fantasy story in a fantasy setting, I don''t really care to make some humans one color and others another. My diversity in fantasy usually comes from the different races, like dwarves or elves or something (to be stereotypical).

As for the sexual preference thing: I don''t mess with it. I hate to say it, but everyone''s straight in my stories. This is just because I don''t focus on it, and I''d rather not have it in my story anyway. (You can take that however you''d like.)

quote: Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Because minorities make up a relatively small percentage of the population (hence the term) and as such tend not to be present in large proportion in most gatherings or events.

*blink* Where do you live? Where I live at least half the population is from one kind of minority or another. And that''s if you don''t count women, who are certainly in the minority of computer game characters even though we are slightly the majority IRL.

Just because a minority may be the majority in some places, doesn''t mean that that''s the same everywhere. For instance (and this is from personal experience), go to a city like Atlanta, and it might sseem to be a fairly equal spread of blacks and whites, go to the midwest hoever ( and this is coming from my time in illinois, and my friends time in indiana), and it''s a different story. I think the tendencey for the lack of minorties in fiction is because people write what they see, and if that doesn''t include minorities, then their writing will reflect that. I sometimes try to create and even spread of minorties in my stories, but in cerain cases it just feels contrived.

quote: Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
If you want to make minority characters, there are two ways to go: Token black sidekick, and kickass black hero who beats the odds, comes from a bad neighborhood, and works for everything he gets.

While it''s usually a bad idea to make the villian a minority, there are other story positions besides the hero and sidekick that one could use - for example the wise and mysterious helper, or the romantic object.

quote: Original post by adventuredesign
I think part of it has to do with what story the author is trying to tell and if those type of characters have an actual logical place in said plot.

So is there a shortage of logical places for minority characters, in most plots? Frankly, I think it has less to do with logic, and more to do with comfort level. I'm sure there are many non-minority writers who don't feel able to write about people who are (or whom they perceive to be) too different from themselves. And that isn't completely unreasonable... but I think writers should try to push themselves, too.

quote: When I make choices about characters to include/design in a plot, I don't think in terms of oh, this character is gay or this character is black or chinese,

But the very way you state that seems to indicate that you are making assumptions, if not precisely choices . It sounds very much like your characters are all straight and white by default -- isn't that putting the cart before the horse, too?

quote: The lifestyle choice, or demographic makeup of a character should not be the point of the character, what the character is trying to accomplish vis-a-vis the plot is what is important and needs focus on.

That's quite true. But why is it a problem for a character to be incidentally black, if they'd otherwise be incidentally white? Saying "race isn't the point" doesn't answer the question of "why aren't there more non-white characters?"

quote: No matter what ethnicity or culture you come from, there are certain things that are all common to us, aspiration to dreams unrealized, the search for love, the conquest of evil, these things reach everyone, which is what the bestselling author knows. Sad as it may seem, the autobiography of a gangster on death row, or a person dying of AIDS, simply doesn't reach a great deal of people[.] (Side note: I added the period, but you should have. Second bad run-on in your post... might want to watch out for that.)

How exactly do you jump from "minorities in fiction" to "gangster on death row / person dying of AIDS"? Like you just said, "there are certain things that are common to us all"... so what's the problem with writing a black character conquering evil, or a gay character searching for love?

"Sweet, peaceful eyelash spiders! Live in love by the ocean of my eyes!" - Jennifer Diane Reitz

[edited by - Logodae on February 15, 2004 12:09:30 AM]