Tag: literature

The relationship between a writer and the characters she both reads and writes is a varied and complicated one. Fanfiction adds a layer onto that — the original characters in question aside, most of the people we write about started out as someone else’s characters, at least before the original work went out in the world. In the hands of fans, individually or collectively, a character often becomes someone else in the process. I should clarify: I don’t mean that fans are likely to render them out-of-character. But with the space and care that fanfiction can afford, fan writers often draw a favorite world’s characters as richer, more complicated — more human.

In a new piece on @fansplaining‘s Medium, I wrote about Mary Sues, imagines, perspective in fanfiction, misogyny, representation, and more. (via elizabethminkel)

While I don’t believe there is a “precise aesthetics or style” to “queer writing,” I also do not believe it can exist outside identity politics….. “queer” to me is a particularly politicized identity, and one that I don’t identify with personally, although I have no objection to others labeling me as queer. Personally, I identify as a lesbian, which I know in 2013 (almost 2014) is a somewhat old-fashioned term. I identify as a lesbian because I identify strongly as a woman, and “queer” can erase that. And that thought led me to realize I would identify as a queer woman, just not simply as queer….. Moving on to literary endeavors, I think they can suffer from identity politics, but that’s because I’m a commercial writer trying to make a living in a capitalist economy where queerness is marginalized. I don’t write novels that are about queerness, even though my characters are queer (and I do believe my characters would identify that way). I have indeed read novels that would have been better — structurally, plot-wise — if identity politics had been less front-and-center. However, sometimes identity politics is the point of fiction, and I believe it’s disingenuous to criticize that kind of work for doing what it sets out to do.

Malinda Lo (me!) in “Queer Writing and the Strictures of Identity Politics,” part of Marcie Bianco’s Ephemera column at Lambda Literary (click through to hear from more writers about queer writing)