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On diversity
May. 2nd, 2014 01:20 am(Keep reading. I know what I'm doing.)
I'm going to come out and say it:
I don't need diverse fiction.
This will be obvious to anyone who reads my stuff, because I don't actually write diverse fiction, in that sense. I write the kind of stories I like to read. I do try to include major characters who are not men, who are not automatically white and British and middle-class (though the Nyronds are and always will be), and I try to make sure that they are three-dimensional and have agency within the story; but the settings I use, however far-future or fantastic they may be, remain settings with which I'm comfortable, which I know how to write, which I enjoy reading about. And that means something that looks vaguely European if not British, and probably would be instantly recognisable to any reader of Agatha Christie or Margery Allingham, because that's the kind of world I know best. Some of my far-future worlds have sound-only telephones. Sometimes they have rotary dials. Most of my worlds are some part of Britain writ large, and all my characters speak English, because I can't joke in any other language. As a writer, I'm as limited as P G Wodehouse; it may be the only characteristic I share with him.
I don't need diverse fiction.
But I'm only me.
We, the reading public, desperately do need diverse fiction, because we're not all like me. We're all different, and people like to read about people like themselves as well as about people who are different, and they like the people like themselves to be central to the story and to drive it. That's why we desperately need people from all the many cultures and ethnicities that inhabit our globe writing stories and getting them published, and why if a writer from my culture has a yen to write stories about people from other cultures, then (as long as s/he takes the trouble to get them right and treat them with respect) s/he should do so.
I'll keep on doing what I do, because I don't believe diversity is a zero-sum game and I think there will still be room for my stuff. But (assuming we don't all die in the next twenty years) I hope to live to see bookshops (I definitely need there still to be bookshops) filled to bursting with books I wouldn't particularly want to read, by writers from Africa and Germany and Kazakhstan and Greenland and Peru and Bangla Desh and Indonesia and Lapland and everywhere, in which characters of every kind and shape and orientation get to be the people the story is about.
Not because I need it; I don't. Not because you need it, even though you may. Not even because we need it, though we definitely do.
Because it's what should be. And it's well past damn time.
I'm going to come out and say it:
I don't need diverse fiction.
This will be obvious to anyone who reads my stuff, because I don't actually write diverse fiction, in that sense. I write the kind of stories I like to read. I do try to include major characters who are not men, who are not automatically white and British and middle-class (though the Nyronds are and always will be), and I try to make sure that they are three-dimensional and have agency within the story; but the settings I use, however far-future or fantastic they may be, remain settings with which I'm comfortable, which I know how to write, which I enjoy reading about. And that means something that looks vaguely European if not British, and probably would be instantly recognisable to any reader of Agatha Christie or Margery Allingham, because that's the kind of world I know best. Some of my far-future worlds have sound-only telephones. Sometimes they have rotary dials. Most of my worlds are some part of Britain writ large, and all my characters speak English, because I can't joke in any other language. As a writer, I'm as limited as P G Wodehouse; it may be the only characteristic I share with him.
I don't need diverse fiction.
But I'm only me.
We, the reading public, desperately do need diverse fiction, because we're not all like me. We're all different, and people like to read about people like themselves as well as about people who are different, and they like the people like themselves to be central to the story and to drive it. That's why we desperately need people from all the many cultures and ethnicities that inhabit our globe writing stories and getting them published, and why if a writer from my culture has a yen to write stories about people from other cultures, then (as long as s/he takes the trouble to get them right and treat them with respect) s/he should do so.
I'll keep on doing what I do, because I don't believe diversity is a zero-sum game and I think there will still be room for my stuff. But (assuming we don't all die in the next twenty years) I hope to live to see bookshops (I definitely need there still to be bookshops) filled to bursting with books I wouldn't particularly want to read, by writers from Africa and Germany and Kazakhstan and Greenland and Peru and Bangla Desh and Indonesia and Lapland and everywhere, in which characters of every kind and shape and orientation get to be the people the story is about.
Not because I need it; I don't. Not because you need it, even though you may. Not even because we need it, though we definitely do.
Because it's what should be. And it's well past damn time.