by Nancy Kress
You're black, and so is your fictional drug-using pimp.
or—for another kind of sensitivity dilemma—you're not Jewish, female, religious, Arab or black. And you're uneasy because your character, in all his glorious negativism, is.
But you want to write this character. Because, first, the character is vivid and compelling and good. And second, because your observations of the world have convinced you that such politically incorrect people do exist. Certainly they're not the majority of a given group, but they do exist. Should you write about them, and reinforce destructive stereotypes? or should you not write about them, and portray either only positive members of such groups or, at least, members who are negative in ways different from the stereotypes? Which should prevail: fiction as description of everything that can be perceived in the real world, or fiction as description of what should be perceived?
There is no easy answer to this one, and I'm not going to try to insist on one. So many factors are involved: what your novel is trying to accomplish. The tone of the book. Your implied attitude toward the characters. The treatment you give all the other characters. The book's overall theme.
Sometimes even the use of stereotypes is devastatingly effective.
Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison have both been criticized for perpetuating the stereotype of the feckless, irresponsible black man— yet both authors claim they write, in their different ways, of the world they actually know. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been accused of demeaning blacks—yet Jim, the runaway slave, is the most compassionate and moral character in the book. The same contradictions could be advanced about various novels about various other ethnic, racial, religious or sexual groups.
The only guideline here that makes sense to me is to be aware of what you're doing. Give your flirting-with-the-stereotypical character considerable thought. Does he really seem true to you, or just a reflection of secondhand TV and dated potboilers? Do you know enough about his world to render it fairly? Have you looked deeply into the motivations, social conditions and background that surround him? Do you genuinely understand witchcraft, or homosexuality, or Hasidism, or black street culture, or feminism, or whatever other minority group your protagonist belongs to?
Most important, what is your motivation for creating this character? Truth, or personal anger? Observation for its own sake, or prejudg-ment masquerading as observation?
Once you've wrestled with these particular angels, go ahead and write the character. And be prepared for the inevitable criticism.
THE FINAL WORD: RESPECT
Ultimately, how effective your characters are depends on how much you respect them.
Think about it. When you respect a real-life person—friend, spouse, neighbor, teacher, public figure—you treat her in certain ways. You let her have her say, even if you disagree with the content. You listen, even if you dislike what you hear. You ponder her reasons, even if they seem wrong. You grant her the dignity of a separate existence, apart from how she fits into your own.
The writer who respects his characters does the same. He tries to see them clearly, to listen to them, to ponder what they are. He may not fully understand the character, but he grants her the dignity of having her own existence, of which he is observer and recorder and judge—but not oppressor. Even a satirist who laughs at his creations laughs at a person's pattern of behavior, not an isolated and disemboweled trait. At least, if he's a good writer, he does.
Consider the ridiculous Mr. Collins in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice—an ignorant buffoon, self-serving and bootlicking. Yet Mr. Collins has his author's respect in the sense that Austen portrays him as a member of a functional community, with his own concerns and goals. He has some minor virtues: thrift, fidelity, hospitality. He is not a straw man for the author to rip apart; he is a ruefully observed sample of what a foolish man can become. Foolish, but a man, not merely an object. Mr. Collins lives, he breathes, he has been endowed by his creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of his own venal happiness. Mr. Collins is the butt of Jane Austen's wit, but he is not diminished by it. He is treated with derision, perhaps, but he is treated as a human being.
This is the meaning of respecting your characters. They don't need to respect each other, but they do need your respect to become people to us, not didactic tools.
Because, ultimately, characters succeed by how much we are interested in them. If the fiction they inhabit offers an entertaining plot, we will be entertained only if we can suspend disbelief and accept that this plot is happening to someone. If the fiction carries metamessages about the world—and it does—these will get through to us only if we believe the characters. If the fiction enlarges our perceptions of life— how we think, or feel, or both—it is only because the characters engage us. Fiction happens to fictional people, who become, in readers' minds, real people.
Go create some.
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life itself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
1 Huckleberry Finn, Emma Bovary and Sherlock Holmes