Just wanted to gauge people's general opinions on this.

I wrote a book length story a couple of years ago. Other than the first few pages I have never had it reviewed as I'm a little uneasy to have people I don't know read it, but not because I am worried about having negative feed back on how I write.

The story has one main antagonist and her friend/sidekick. I recognise that the Antag. needs a lot more work to seem like a real human being and when I started the story she began as a young white female from a privileged background.

After some reflection I felt she was too stereotypical and so put extensive thought into how I might make her a little more unusual and rewrote massively. So I have now ended up with my main antagonist as a black woman. This actually works better for conflict with my Protag. who comes from a farm and has never had anything to do with people from a different cultural background. Although not a racist, the Protag. finds the Antag. quite daunting as she doesn't quite know how to act around her.

The secondary Antag. and sidekick is an Israeli.

It was only after I left the story alone for several months and then went back to it did I realise that from writing this I must seem like a racist and anti-Semite which is absolutely not me at all - there is no colour or religion in my mind, you're either someone I like or someone I don't - and was not my intention in any way.

So, do I re-work them from fear of being accused a facist? Or should one take the attitude that just because a person is black or Jewish doesn't automatically give them a free pass to being a likeable person and therefore stick with my characters as they manifested in my mind?
Perhaps if I were black or Jewish it wouldn't bother me so much but as I was born in a Christian country and I am white (oh so white- my legs reflect the sun from the planet!) I feel I have to consider that people may find it mortally offensive.

I put in a lot of thought to these characters and they each have full backgrounds - I would loath to have to re-think them as they are now so familiar to me. When I say they need more work, it's that with the way the story is written I am finding it difficult to weave in their nicer aspects and history. However, I'm sure I could find a way but I don't want to slog away at it if reviewers are going to tell me to change them completely because they are too non-PC.

I don't know if I would ever look to have this piece of work published but the whole fact that I was so caught up in the mechanics of writing I didn't notice the overall connotations made me wonder how far you should go in sticking by your characters. Or should you fold under PC pressure?

The fact that you are questioning the assemblage of characters may be a sign that it is unbalanced. May be it would help to ask yourself 'if I changed any of these characters' backgrounds - eg, making the Isreali a French catholic - would it change the essence of the story?' If it would ruin it, then I would keep it as it is. If not, then I might be tempted to change it.


- NaomiM

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Plot is driven by characters' motivations. If the jewish character's actions are motivated by her religion, or the other character is motivated by the way others treat her because of the colour of her skin, then these are central to the story.

The fact that you are questioning the assemblage of characters may be a sign that it is unbalanced.

Alternatively, it could be a sign that you are writing something close enough to the real issue to make you feel uncomfortable.

People pay good money to feel things when they read. If your writing makes you feel things, then it is important to explore that as it will make it easier for you to do the same for your readers.

As a case in point, I recently wrote a first draft of a scene that I wouldn't even let my wife look at... but when I had reworked it, toned it down, crystallised the key story point etc. I was confident to read it out to my writing group and the constrained power from squashing such a big idea into something that I could allow myself to be associated with made it into a very effective piece of writing.

Cherish your doubts.

What one of the contributors to a thread I had on the same subject said was to look at what it is that is making you feel uncomfortable and to decide whether it is just inflammatory or actually key to the story. If it is inflammatory or otherwise gratuitous, cut it. If it is key to the story, write it clearly and without shame.

Oh and...

Nabokov wrote about a paedophile, but wasn't one.
"Silence of the lambs" describes a cannibal, but the author hasn't been convicted.
JK Rowling wrote about a magical community who have at intervals killed each other in a variety of unpleasant manners. I don't think she's one of those either.

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PS:

I'm a little uneasy to have people I don't know read it

Sorry to say, but this undermines the whole business model of the industry you're trying to get into!
Start with people you trust, but always work towards a point where you are ready to present it to the world at large.

I think if you are uneasy to have someone read it then perhaps that's your instinct telling you that it isn't yet saying what you want it to say.

Could you redress the balance elsewhere in the story by having other characters with the same ethnicity but different characteristics?

As long as you are showing that you don't believe all people of this ethnicity to behave in a certain way, then I think you are ok.

Sorry, I thought this was relevant!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS_Uvg56U_o

Sorry can't play the UTube clip as I'm still on cruddy old dial-up and my computer is about a decade old!

The underlying theme of the story is not really racism but more, judge-a-book-by-its-cover-and-it-can-lead-you-up-the-wrong-path type of thing. As I wrote the story the various backgrounds of these characters enabled me to make subtle connections between characters that make the story work, IMHO, really well, but they're not glaringly obvious. I am in agreement that the story does not yet say what I want it to but that is because I have been reluctant to invest time in it if I was having to entirely re-work the people in it.

These comments have in fact made me realise some points that need highlighting in the story that may put my worries to sleep, so thanks chaps & chapettes.

I don't know if it helps any, but I recently watched Gran Torino, the new Clint Eastwood flick. Here we have a protagonist who is very racist, but it shows how a character like this is handled. American History X is another good example, cinematically speaking. I've written religiously prejudiced characters in the past, no holds barred. I don't think a story should ever be compromised by political correctness. If you think your character would realistically be a racist, even if by cultural environment rather than personal idealism, you should present that or you risk your story losing the ring of truth. It's easy to stress that you yourself are not your characters.

JB

I think you have to be able to tell the differences between authorial point of view and narrative voice and character voice(s).
If the authorial POV or a third person narrative voice is racist, that is a problem, but a well-realised first person narrative voice, or well-realised character voices should be able to be racist without the reader (assuming it's an intelligent reader) identifying that with the author.

assuming it's an intelligent reader

"not suitable for bigots and persons under the IQ of 136"

What you say makes a lot of sense and pretty much gives the author carte blanche to write a good story with a clear conscience. Least ways, you've made me feel uninhibited about what I write next!

I've had a similar problem to this. I wrote about a character who was a fascist serial killer. Eventually I toned the character down and made him more complex. I found that the extremities of the character didn't really work in the first draft as readers could not connect with him at all and found that he was repulsive.

I toned the character down and made him more complex

The latter is always good, I'm thinking about the former.

Certainly, for a MC, you have to give your readers a hook that will pull them into your MC's thoughts and beliefs. If the first time they meet the character, they recoil in horror, then it's a case of once bitten twice shy and you will never get them hooked. However, it would be a shame if the MC could never be an extreme character and I think there are plenty of examples where they are.

It intuitively feels like you need to get deep into the mind of an extreme character and to present it within their value system to your reader... But this seems to contradict the point which I agreed with a couple of posts ago about the narrator being PC even if the character was a git.

Maybe that's why so many writers have pseudonyms? Maybe I should get one?

Dunno if it helps at all, but my last novel had a family of travellers in it. I had the MC explore some negative feelings about the traveller community - and indeed gave the travellers themselves some edge - and it was all edited out by my editor because of the risk of causing offence. The overall message in my original ms was still very liberal, but I just felt I wanted to make the issue more rounded. Publishers, tough, are (apparently) very afraid of alienating readers by making them consider and confront negative stereotypes and the reasons for them. In the end, my traveller family are all sweetness and light, with no dark edges at all.

But this is a warm and fluffy genre (commercial women's fic) so maybe a more careful attitude prevails than if it were a more gritty part of the market?

Rosy

The narrator should be independent and not coloured by the character. I don't think an author should need to change their name in order to be PC. Readers should be able to make this separation between the author's views and the character's views, no? It would help if you provided an extract of the passages where you were feeling uncomfortable with the content.

It would help if you provided an extract of the passages where you were feeling uncomfortable with the content.

This is kinda abstract, for me at least, as the last thread I had on this (to do with prurience) got me to a point where I could really see the story point and so it now works...

I don't think an author should need to change their name in order to be PC.

I think where I'm coming at this from is the idea that even the narrator has / is a character. If the narrator is trying to accurately portray the thoughts of an unsympathetic and extreme character, then s/he must, to an extent, either express a judgement or to express the issues using the thought processes of the unsympathetic and extreme character.

In my own case, the society my characters live in has a _very_ different take than I do on things like corporal and capital punishment. They take certain things for granted and to avoid breaking the magic, the narrator _also_ has to take those things for granted and that is expressed in the words I use.

The novel is arguably the last form of art in which you can say anything...literally anything.

As long as you stand by your work and are willing to defend it, then ignore all pressures - internal or external - to restrict yourself.