Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 351
“the unmarked state,” is drawn from literary criticism. It denotes the state of possessing only those characteristics that are literally not remarkable. A character in the unmarked state has a certain transparency; he (and we use the pronoun advisedly) allows readers to read the action of the story without coloring it with his particularity.
Location 418
You need to know who has privilege and who doesn’t,
Location 460
slight shifts in your viewpoint characters’ positions vis-à-vis the unmarked state will change how they look at the world, at themselves, and at the concept of the unmarked state. In fact, in addition to the dominant culture’s version of the unmarked state, each of us carries around our private take on what is “normal.” This definition adheres much more closely to our own specific characteristics.
Location 475
Depending on their immediate context, your characters may perform similar mental acrobatics when thinking of those they come in contact with—or when thinking of themselves. They may identify with the dominant unmarked state though lacking its characteristics, or they may reject it—conditionally and partially, or without reserve. They may be conscious of privileges they lack or possess due to their ROAARS traits.
Location 513
liberal perception fallacy. This fallacy originates in the tenet that we shouldn’t judge people by their membership in a category, which is what we do when we assume, for example, that a person must be a bad dancer or good computer programmer because he belongs to the Euro-American group. The fallacy arises when a person (often but not always a liberal) decides that, because it is bad to judge people in this way, it must therefore be bad to notice there are any differences between different groups or categories of people, or between people who are members of different groups.
Location 621
ROAARS traits are not always in the foreground and that they interact with each other and with non-ROAARS traits to form complex portraits. Keeping those portraits in mind even when you’re not pointing out their details to your readers can make your work stronger. It can make it more authentic and lend it greater depth.
Location 657
Group membership does not inherently determine, predict, or predestine anything about any individual—or any character. Various group memberships can influence behavior. But none of these categories’ traits need have a constant, overriding influence on your character. Do you spend every waking moment thinking about your ROAARS traits? About your high blood pressure? About being a science fiction writer? About the town you grew up in? No. And neither should your characters.
Location 767
To help herself as an author connect emotionally to her own heroine and to increase her readers’ ability to empathize with her Nisi focused on some specific non-ROAARS characteristics she and her audience might have in common with Belle. She made her a picky eater. She described her as deeply in love—a condition not everyone is in all the time, but one potent enough to remain a vital memory long after the actual experience. But the main congruency Nisi established between Belle and her creator/consumers was the character’s intoxication with words.
Location 796
don’t make a secondary character’s main trait be his gayness and then portray him as a bitchy, effeminate San Francisco florist with a great collection of disco-diva CDs. There’s nothing wrong with a character’s being gay, or effeminate, or a florist, or a disco fan, or a San Francisco resident. But when every trait you ascribe to a character points to the same group, you’re just promoting a widely-held stereotype. How about a secondary character who’s a bitchy, straight florist who has a pet house rabbit and thinks rap music has gone way downhill since Public Enemy’s third CD? Or who’s an African-American computer programmer and classical oboist?
Location 859
Writing is considered speech; it helps to have more than one person considering what you’ve said—before publication.
Location 868
Learning boils down to making mistakes, seeing what you’ve done wrong, and making corrections. If you’re going to be a good writer, if you’re going to improve, you mustn’t flinch from this process. Do your best. Eventually, you’ll figure out how to make your best better.
Location 1502
the best point of view from which to recount a transcultural tale is one that in some way mimics the tale-teller’s position vis-à-vis the culture: that of an alien. The correspondence need not be exact. The pov character need not be the author somehow transported to the story’s setting. Such a character’s distancing can come from other factors. Perhaps they’ve been raised by someone reluctant or unable to share cultural knowledge, as in Due’s The Good House. Perhaps they’re a member of a racial minority within a non-Western culture, who yet identifies with that culture, as does Chung Mae, ethnic Chinese heroine of Geoff Ryman’s Air, which is set in the mountains of Karzistan. Or they may have been isolated by a disaster or the act of a colonizing power. And of course, the narrator or pov need not be the story’s protagonist. (A caveat: having a character merely incorporate the author’s reaction to that character’s own culture will not give you the sort of perspective I’m talking about here. In fact, it will almost always detract from the story’s verisimilitude.)
✏️ I’m am Arab Aramcoan. I’m an immigrant from Aramco to Arabia. 🔗 Location 1502
Location 1556
However, any connections I make with unfamiliar cultures must be more than one-way. When acknowledging benefits derived from a cultural source I also acknowledge that I have responsibilities to that source: the responsibility to recognize it, to learn from it, to protect it, to serve it, to enhance it somehow if I can, to promote it to others.