Write What You Know...at Least a Bit

 

If you've been published by The Saturday Evening Post's "New Fiction Friday," you know those stories get a lot of attention. My own On Blackpoint Road made enough of a ripple that I was asked to try turning it into a screenplay. A friend and sometime client who has done well in the film biz generously offered to read my first draft, and I eagerly agreed.

I had in mind Josh Brolin and Robin Wright to play the couple on the big screen, or maybe Michael McGrady and Julia Roberts. The main characters in On Blackpoint Road, a middle-aged couple, are white because…well, because I'm white, I guess. As are, according to the latest UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, about 90 percent of working film and TV writers.

As it turned out, my colleague liked the script, more or less, but objected strongly to my having described various supporting characters as African-American or Black, when they might have been of any race with little impact on the plot.   

I had done this purposefully. It's my idea that film and television writers - whatever their ethnicity - can help ensure that actors of color get cast in their works by specifically writing into the script that this is "a Black cop," "a tall brown-skinned teacher," "An Asian ballet dancer," and so forth, even when race is not integral to the plot. This is necessary because white, in most cases, is the default. If the writer of a script is white, and the main characters are white, most of the cast is going to be white, too, unless someone makes an effort to deem otherwise. So why not me?

But my friend said that for me to specify the race of any character unnecessarily is a kind of cultural appropriation at best, and racist at worst. That doesn't make sense to me. Why should I trust that filmmakers will diversely cast the supporting roles or bit parts in my script? Can't I help that process along by describing some of the characters as I'd like to see them?  

But he's the film guy, not me. Maybe he's right.

The main character in my "librarian on the run" series is white, like me. She's thirty-something, as I once was, and she's similar to me in many regards - social class, educational level, general snarkiness, and so on. But the stories are populated by a diversity of characters - Lori's best friends, Marta and Tony, are Mexican-American. He is from a middle-class suburban background, and she is from the hard streets of East L.A. They are like me in that they are warm, funny, reasonably intelligent, and hard-working. They are parents, as am I. They pay taxes and drink beer. Sames. They're also unlike me in many regards. Tony is a man, and a police detective. I've never been either of those things. He's fully bilingual, whereas I speak English pretty well and am permanently stalled at "beginner" in Spanish and French. Tony and Marta own a home in an upscale section of Los Angeles, and I never will. Does that make me unqualified to give Tony a supporting role in many of my stories?

Lori solves murders. The corpses,  survivors, and villains have been male and female, young and old, Black, mixed-race, Latino, Asian, and white. I'm not a criminal, but many of my characters are. I'm not gay, or Christian, or (very) elderly, or disabled, or rich, or poor. But many of my characters are. I'm not a child, though I once was, and I write about children and teenagers often. 

So what about my friend's idea that race should not be specified unless it's integral to the plot? I think that's nonsense. Every story that includes a Black character does not have to have racism, or even race, as its primary focus, though if you're writing realistically, that evil may not be far beneath the surface. In my story The Longest Pleasure, Lori (here known as Cam Baker) is stunned when Matt Larkin explains his wife's feelings about their son's girlfriend:

"Look, she was a nice enough girl, just maybe not wife material. She

 frequently had dirt beneath her nails and her hair made Nancy crazy,

 bushy and wild and half the time clearly uncombed.” He met my eyes

 and lowered his voice. “Her race didn’t help.” 

Larkin thinks he's exposing his wife's inner thoughts, but his own are on clear display. Race is not the issue here - the fact that Nancy Larkin murdered the girl is. In fact both Nancy and Tom would probably be horrified to find themselves characterized as racists. So their prejudice, while not integral to the plot, fleshes out their characters and makes them believable. 

Similarly, in What the Morning Never Suspected, Cam is helping her client's daughter plan a wedding.  The "maid" of honor is the bride's best friend - a gay man. This detail is completely nonessential to the plot. Its purpose is to make the bride real and quirky and likable, before we learn that, oh, yeah, unfortunately she may be a killer. When the killers are exposed, Cam takes a minute to feel sorry, not just for the victim, but for Mikey, who will never get to strut down the aisle with his bouquet of tulips and baby's breath. I don't need to be gay, or male - or even to have been a bridesmaid - to include Mikey in my story. He's real to me, more than a caricature,  and I hope he comes across that way to the reader, too.

I wouldn't set a story in Paris because I don't know the city well enough to do so without making a gaffe. But I spent a decade teaching in an international community where most of my students and colleagues were French nationals. So yes, I write stories that include French people as important characters, though never as the main character. I know enough to eschew the berets, striped mime shirts, and baguettes, to get my French slang checked by a native, and to keep the accents to a bare minimum. Ditto when Tony Morales exclaims in Spanish, or when Elmont Crawford, an important character in an upcoming librarian story, says "aight," or "This Delilah," omitting the linking verb "is." A very light hand is best when writing accents and dialects.

When the horror of Sandy Hook was still fresh in the news, I wrote a story from the point of view of a middle-aged woman teaching a three-year-old how to handle a gun. The genesis for They Look Like Angels was a prompt I use in my writing classes: write from the point of view of a character very unlike yourself. I'm a strong gun control advocate. I've spent too many "instructional" hours teaching kids what to do if our school is invaded by a homicidal monster. Little Marty's pistol-packin' granny is about as unlike me as one could be, despite our similarity of age, gender, and occupation. But something must have worked; Aimee Liu chose They Look Like Angels for the Orlando Prize offered by A Room of Her Own. The story was subsequently published in The Los Angeles Review and was included in an eponymous collection, which was a finalist for The Claymore Prize two years ago and will be published later this year.

It's my belief that we can - and should, and must - populate our work with characters who are unlike ourselves in many ways: in gender, or sexual orientation, or nationality, or race, or religion or politics or culture or…you get the idea. If we don't reach beyond our immediate scope to find commonality and a shared humanity, our stories cannot possibly reflect the real world - and the screenplays made from them are going to be as flat as pancakes, and a lot less palatable.

Anna Scotti's first collection, It's Not Even Past, went out of print with the recent closure of Down&Out Books. It will be available from a new publisher soon – but if you can't wait, contact the author via her website; she has a few copies available. Meanwhile, find Anna's short fiction in current and recent issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Chautauqua, and Black Cat Weekly.

 On Blackpoint Road - Scotti

They Look Like Angels - Scotti

What the Morning Never Suspected - Podmatic