Write Whatever
Write Whatever
From one former ally, who has finally embraced the label of pansexual, to a current ally who may want to represent me in their work, I have one suggestion: write whatever the hell you want.
This may sound like terrible advice; dismissive and insincere. I want you to know that I mean it, and it’s an important first step of any project. It’s the advice I wish I had gotten when I still thought of myself as straight and was struggling to learn how to be more inclusive in my fiction. I’d like to share a personal moment with you.
It’s 2017.
I am sitting on the bed I share with my boyfriend, legs curled up to my chest, waiting by phone. I have had crushes on women. I have had a few online flings with them. Flirted with them. One kiss at a convention. I don’t think about those things, because I’ve been with my partner for years now. We’re living together, and I think that it could last forever. My social circle refers to me as “the token straight friend.” I’m comfortable with that. It’s easy. I believe it to be true.
What isn’t easy is inclusivity in my writing. I’m trying so hard to make the leap from ghostwriter into published author and I want to tell a story that my friends will be proud of. That I can be proud of. Never mind that it will take years to edit, and it’s a body horror novel about a pandemic that I will be understandably too afraid to send out when it’s finally ready in 2020. I don’t know any of that’s coming. I don’t know I’m about a year away from coming out as pansexual. I just know that I want the story to be good.
I’ve sent it out to Alan. He’s my best friend and my first beta reader. I only sent him the first 3 chapters, and was hoping for a response by now. My anxiety whispers that he hated it. That I messed something up. That I should only ever write straight characters because I don’t know shit about what it’s like to be a lesbian, and now my best friend knows that I’m talentless.
I want to give up in this moment because I feel like I’m not gay enough to write queer characters. I was so scared, as an ally, to write something that misrepresented the community.
That’s an irrational fear. And the sad thing? It didn’t magically go away when I came out as pansexual. It didn’t go away when my boyfriend and I split up. Or when I started flirting with people regardless of their gender. There are days when I still just don’t feel gay enough to be putting forth representation for the community. Or gay enough in general.
The issue comes from forgetting the fact that you don’t have to represent the entire community to represent part of it well. Your writing should be a reflection of yourself first and foremost. You should be telling a story that you believe needs to be told. We get so caught up in good representation sometimes that we forget what the core of the idea was.
People like different things. Not everyone will react positively to your depiction of them — because not everyone will react positively to anything. Especially in the horror community and especially when covering difficult themes.
I’m not saying to give up on the idea of sensitivity readers, or beta readers, or to ignore their advice. Those are all important parts of the process too. They need to come after you’ve told the story that you want to tell, however, and you need to remember to check in with yourself along the way as edits are made. You can’t please everyone if you’re not happy with what you’re producing.
One piece of feedback that my gay friends (including Alan) gave me about my novel was that the ending was too bleak. My instinct was to ignore that advice (terrible instinct, by the way, very worthy of vanquishing). I was writing a horror novel. I wanted it to be bleak. I played around with making it more uplifting, and there was a draft that I almost paid to have edited where things looked more promising for my protagonist.
That didn’t feel genuine to me, and it sure wasn’t the story I had set out to write. I had to fight the urge to just revert back to my rough draft, because I honestly didn’t see anything wrong with it.
Digging deeper, I learned about the “bury your gays” trope in fiction for the first time. That rabbit hole lead me to opinion pieces and tumblr articles about how frustrated people were about one half of their favorite lesbian couple always dying. Having been totally unaware of this (from my time outside the LGBTQ+ community) I hadn’t even realized I was walking into a cliche dynamic with my leading couple.
My solution wasn’t to make the ending happier. It was to include more representation so that it didn’t feel like I was targeting my queer characters for their identities. I was targeting everyone because that’s what kind of story it was. The feedback was a lot better after that, and the bleak nature of the story’s conclusion landed in a different way. But it was still my story as I had intended it to be.
I think there’s a lot of good advice buried somewhere in this rambling tale about the debut novel that was not meant to be. A lot of it is stuff you’re probably sick of hearing if you’re an ally that has ever asked about representation. Have a sensitivity reader or two. Listen to feedback. Avoid tropes. Educate yourself about LGBTQ+ fiction if you haven’t done so already. Edit constantly.
The one thing I really want to leave you with, is that your story is important, and you don’t have to compromise the key elements of it to make it represent us. We all have different tastes, different experiences, and there is always a way to bring good representation into whatever tale you already want to tell. You just have to find out how.
So I will tell you one more time, and understand I mean it with full sincerity and the best wishes for your creative endeavors; write whatever the hell you want.
By Cat Voleur
Cat Voleur (she/her) is a professional Dungeon Master and writer of weird fiction. She lives with a small army of rescued felines where she spends her free time studying fictional languages. She's also been known to co-host Slasher Radio.