“Writing difference is a challenge, particularly in fiction. How do men write women and vice versa? How do writers of one race or ethnicity write about people of another race or ethnicity? More important, how do writers tackle difference without reducing their characters to caricatures or stereotypes?” Roxane Gay reviews Joyce Carol Oates‘s The Sacrifice and simultaneously explains how to write difference well. Hint: it “demands empathy, an ability to respect the humanity of those you mean to represent.”
How To: Write Difference
Not These Titles, Please
Looking for the perfect title for your short story / essay / novel / whatever? We wish you the best of luck, and also suggest you don’t pick one of these severely overused options.
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Spinal Tap
“Who is this woman?…What yoga DVD did she escape from?” Chloë Schama criticizes the recent trend in book covers featuring women with their backs turned to the reader, including Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth and John Irving’s In One Person.
The Made-up Divide
For The Guardian, Richard Lea investigates the fine line between fiction and nonfiction writing, a boundary that is drawn most firmly in the anglophone world. Pair with this Millions piece in defense of blurring the lines of fiction and autobiography.
Well, She Should Know
“Here is a rare recording of Flannery O’Connor reading an early version of her witty and revealing essay, ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’”
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How the Fulbright Started
“Whatever the [Fulbright] program became,” writes Boston Globe correspondent Sam Lebovic, “it was first conceived as a budget-priced megaphone to transmit American ideas to the world, rather than as a genuine international dialogue.” Indeed, one 1940s newspaper columnist dubbed the program “an ingenious piece of higher mathematics…[that] found a way to finance out of the sale of war junk a worldwide system of American scholarships.”
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Lincoln vs. Hitler
“Adolf Hitler loved books—that nasty bent for book burning notwithstanding—and the book industry loves him back. Type his name into Amazon, and while he doesn’t trigger the English-language numbers of Jesus (186,740) or Lincoln (70,710), he registers a solid 18,597—a stunning figure for someone who died less than 70 years ago.” On the Fuhrer’s paradoxical relationship with literature.
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All Stories Are Stories
Last week, I directed you to a piece in The Atlantic by John Yorke on the substance of stories. His argument: that all stories have one thing in common–their plot. Now, Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature suggests that rather it is all story structure models that have one thing in common–and that thing is bullshit.
Lest the hasty reader think this is article is about how to actually write about people different from oneself, the link is to a review of a book that stupendously fails to do it.
Or rather Joe, the link is to a review by Roxane Gay, who calls Joyce Carol Oates “deeply offensive” for not writing about black people in the right way (a way in which, apparently, only Roxane Gay is privileged to).
@Mygod
Considering she provides some examples of books that write across the racial divide, I’m not sure your parenthetical is charitable.
Although you could maybe take issue with the examples she provided. Southern Cross the Dog is a Southern Gothic novel about a black man written by an Asian American who has never even visited Mississippi. Considering the many imaginative leaps Cheng was already making, Gay may have been more generous with her assessment than she would have been in a strictly realist approach, such as Oates’. Round House is written by Erdrich, a native American, but almost all the characters are Native American except a handful of secondary characters (including the villain) are white. So that strikes me as an odd example for Gay to pick.
I don’t think Gay’s position is indefensible at all, just that her examples are somewhat strange. I wonder what she thinks of Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner.
It’ll be interesting to see if other authors or critics, particularly black writers/critics, will respond to Gay’s review.
Oops. Please excuse the typos.
@Ross – thanks for the detailed reply. To be a little clearer about it – while Roxane Gay does indicate that there writers who can write across “the racial divide,” I was implying that I don’t see how Gay has more claim to being an arbiter than Oates.
In other words, there’s a bad faith at work here – wherein Gay assumes she knows “the correct racial fiction” and Oates has clearly failed whatever definitional line Gay thinks is clear, I strongly doubt that the definition holds up under any scrutiny. This is unfortunate, because if it’s this easy for a good author like Oates to be accused of racism (which is the underlying message here, or at least, an accusation of drastic racial insensitivity) the less people will write novels with a diverse cast.
Another perspective on Oates and difference:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mchadburn/wonderland-woman#.lw5KRA4REV
@Robin Thanks, that was a welcome counterpart.
I myself think that Oates can be critiqued as much as one likes from a literary standpoint but accusing her of a lack of empathy and then saying she writes “deeply offensive” works about race is pretty much the definition of insanity, or rather, the definition of the “if you’re not on my side in my exact way you’re expressing ancient evils” mode of argument that people like Gay fall into at the drop of a hat.