Writer Talk: Representation is Scary

In the weeks since I finished my first novel draft (hold your applause for another year, please), I’ve forced myself to take a break and just write whatever I want for a while. Lately, that’s been fanfiction. What? It’s anonymous, and I can just rant-write whatever I want to happen to the best characters from my favourite TV shows. After months of developing my own characters, plotting, world-building, not to mention actually writing my own stuff, it’s therapeutic to not insist every word coming out of me is pure gold at all times. Writing a novel is pressure, writing fanfic reminds me why I put up with that pressure: the love of writing and the love of loving characters.

That said, lately I’ve been watching a lot of The Walking Dead (oh god, I can feel your judgement from here. It gets better after season 8, okay?) and I’ve noticed: the representation in this show is insane. It started off with a mostly-white cast, all straight, and a couple token Black people for good measure. There was a subplot with a racist character, but he vanished pretty quickly and didn’t reappear for another season or so.

Now, we have a multi ethnic cast that consists of all different colours of people, people with different sexualities, sophisticated levels of relationships (how often do we see men and women acting purely out of friendship in action films? Or see the concept of ‘chosen family’ explored over multiple seasons of storytelling?).

As of season 9, they have a deaf character played by a deaf actress: Connie (Lauren Ridloff). As someone with a mostly-deaf mother, it’s wonderful to be able to sit back and see someone who partially represents my mum doing badass things and killing zombies right up there with the other badasses.

So yeah, I’ve been reading and writing a lot of Connie-based fanfiction. Here’s some facts: Connie is fully deaf, reads lips, is fluent in ASL, and can look after herself in the zombie apocalypse. The writers don’t handle her with gloves when it comes to her disability, either. One of the most *Iconic* Connie moments is when she rescues a baby from a zombie, running into a cornfield. Effectively, she is almost defenseless against the zombies: she can’t hear them coming, she can’t see them through the thick foliage, and she can’t use her preferred weapon (a slingshot) because her hands are full with the baby, which is crying and drawing more zombies to her. The scene is shot partially from her point of view, putting the reader in a perspective rarely seen in zombie fiction.

The storylines and personality the writers give Connie shines through whenever she’s on screen, and begs the question: why don’t we see more characters like this across the board? We’ve all seen the basic archetypes of the zombie apocalypse: the innocent child, the victim, the sassy badass, the wise old man, the evil new leader of humanity. Why can’t we have more unique characters like Connie?

After having a bit of a mental breakdown trying to write her character (aren’t I good at taking a relaxing break after my novel), I think I know the answer:

Writing diverse characters is scary. Especially in today’s cancel culture, where so much as a bad tweet you sent out as a teenager can ruin your whole career.

I have a confession to make: I have never been deaf, a black woman, or a survivor of the zombie apocalypse. I know, you’re shocked. As a writer just at the beginning of my professional career, I don’t want to be cancelled for being ableist or racist when that is not and never will be my intention as an author.

To write a disabled or minority character, you really need to know what you’re doing. Which is exactly the problem: nobody knows what they’re doing until they’ve fucked up a few times. Any writer can tell you that. My first stories were crap, like everyone elses. My first drafts aren’t much better now, but that’s why editing exists. If Writers had to get everything right the first time, no editing done, there wouldn’t be any books on shelves.

So why do we punish ourselves so hard for not being able to capture marginalised voices on the first try? In my second semester creative writing class I was borderline berated by my teacher for writing a story in which a young black man gets shot by police for confiscating someone else’s weed at a party. The story, apparently, wasn’t at all realistic, as of course no police would ever be so purposefully violent to a black man, especially in front of witnesses. (HA-HA, MISS CONRAD.)

As a result, I put the story in my writing drawer and wrote a story about a love triangle between three white people instead. I got a good grade and I felt good about it at the time, but I always thought it was counter-productive to put the original story down just because I was having trouble with it, and to only be showing white people’s white experiences in my writing- because the world needs more of that, right?

As writers, it’s our job to empathise. If we can literally pull whole worlds, societies, and people from our brains, how come a straight writer can’t write a gay character, or a white writer write a black character? Of course, it’s important to let marginalised people tell their own stories and be their own voices- no one with 2 brain cells to rub together is arguing they shouldn’t. But white heterosexual writers make up the majority of the population and the majority of writers. If we’re going to get the representation we need in order to make stories interesting, these writers need to learn to take the risk, to learn from and empathise with POC, LGBTQ+, disabled voices and create truly diverse characters. If we tell writers they can only write characters the same as them… god, stories are going to be boring.

And we have to be prepared to fail, too. I’ve failed at writing fanfiction about Connie, and I’m willing to own that failure, because by reading comments and accounts from real deaf and black people, I can better understand what it’s like to be there, and use my priveledge to make real-life changes to the way I and others around me think and behave, which is what representation is all about. We’re never gonna get there if we’re too scared to start.