WRITING GAY

By Sharon May

In the poem “Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes asks “So will my page be colored that I write?” I can’t help but wonder if my writing will be gay. How much does our experience, our gender, our sexual preference, color our pages? 

Obviously, when I write lesbian characters I come to it from personal experience. I don’t know all lesbians but I have a first row seat into lesbian life. As a result, I should be able to create complex lesbian characters.

Despite that experience, I find writing lesbian characters difficult. I struggle to find Cindy’s voice; she is the young intern at the newspaper in the novel I am writing. Is it because she is too much like me that I can’t see her clearly? Or do I have too much material to choose from? Or does my memory of how young lesbians talk and act in the late 1970s escape me? I write female characters who are straight, and they are distinct in motivations, language, and conflicts. So it is something about lesbians I struggle with.

Ironically, I have always found male characters easier to write. It isn’t simply that I find them fascinating; I find women fascinating too. I can‘t say that I understand men or women any better than the other. I don’t identify with men more, though at 12, I had a lot more in common with them than I did my schoolgirl chums. I just can get into male characters quickly, and they are different from one another.

So what role does being a lesbian play in my writing? Am I supposed to write gay because I am gay? I am a lesbian, but I live in a world that is predominately straight, and extraordinarily male-centric in politics, literature, and power. So I walk in both worlds, my own private world and that of straight, male-centric society. I am the Other, just like the African American, Native American, and even the woman writer. As the Other, we usually are expected to normalize our world while capturing its flavor and uniqueness.

Preston has been called a stereotypical gay character by some straight readers as he hates sports, loves to cook, and is a mama’s boy. There are men, straight and gay, who fit this description. Am I stereotyping or capturing a reality?

I do wonder how the gay community will react to Preston as it prefers gays to be depicted as “normal,” like straight characters – if you can call them normal – concerned with daily life, work, and love, not drag shows, bars, and sexual hook ups. Not like Preston, who in the years just prior to AIDS/HIV, spends his time cruising and only looking for sex. He does settle down in the end, so maybe that will satisfy the uneasy reader.

I doubt “straight” writers wonder how their sexuality affects their depiction of their world. They probably don’t feel an obligation to the “straight” community to depict it fairly and justly.

AUTOBIOGRAPGICAL INFLUENCES

Bonnie Stanard

In preparing for an appearance at the SC State Library, I asked myself if my novel What MissingMeans is autobiographical. Without thinking about it, my answer was “no.” The events that occur in the book didn’t happen. I didn’t base the characters on people I know. But after some consideration, the certainty of my “no” has wavered.

The novel takes place on a farm in the midlands of SC, which is where I grew up. Childhood details, such as chinaberry fights, throwing sandspurs, climbing trees, that sort of thing, parallel my youth, but they were typical of any youngster on a farm, so does that make it autobiographical?

We see the story of the Reinhart family through the eyes of 12 year-old Lily. She is not me, nor anybody I know. While working on the manuscript, I wasn’t conscious of writing about any person. But now that the book is published, two characters are familiar, though their plot lines are not. Grandma Angeline is like Grandma Eliza Shumpert. Her unmarried daughter, Aunt Theda, brings to mind Aunt Winnie. Mmmm....

One character is named “Uncle Freeman” and I had an Uncle Freeman; he died when I was three years old. I knew of him but I don’t remember him. Despite the common name, they’re not the same. And I consciously named Lily’s cousin Ina Marie as a tribute to my sister Ina Jean, who died at the age of three.

The floor plan of the house where the extended Reinhart family lives is similar to that of Grandma Eliza’s house. I added two bedrooms for Lily’s big family. Does that make the book autobiographical?

The atmosphere and tone of What Missing Means, despite my intentions, wanders into the autobiography camp. To be clear, the plot is purely fictional, but the story portrays rural life in the 1940s, a time familiar to my family, and by extension to me. Only after the fact and after thinking about it do I realize how much my past provided background for the story.

SPEAKER @ THE CENTER

My thoughts on autobiography came from my preparations for a talk at the SC State Library, which supports local writers and publishers, especially through their Speaker @ the Center programs. Each month, an author is given the spotlight in the intimate environment of their recently remodeled conference room.

The programs are scheduled at noon, usually on Thursdays, to allow Columbia’s business community to bring a sandwich and take a literary lunch break. Parking is available in a multi-level garage located behind the Library building at 1500 Senate Street.

In today’s world where media is produced by far-flung and well-heeled concerns, it’s a challenge for underfunded artists to get a toe-hold of attention from either the press or the public. This makes the Speaker @ the Center all the more appreciated by writers like me. Thanks to Anderson Cook and the SC State Library for this service.

Fostering an Addiction

By Kasie Whitener

Last week I quit a novel. Not one I’m writing, one I was reading. Ranking right up there with when I stopped calling myself a “girl,” learning I could quit a novel was a Grown-Up Moment.

I’m not sure at what age (40?) I first started quitting novels, probably right about the time I started getting thrown out of book clubs. At some point I just realized my time was too valuable to waste on the wrong-fit book.

I’m picky. I want to love the book I’m reading.

The books I love have me ignoring my family. If I’m going to create a rating system, I’ll make the highest rating “Ignore my family.”

While discussing the books I was reading with a friend, I told her how ashamed I am that my literary selections don’t keep me as engrossed as my commercial picks. For example, last year I read The Leavers which is an incredibly crafted, heartbreaking novel. But I wasn’t reading it at intersections.

When we wandered through Barnes & Noble last Saturday, I’d read almost all of the facing-front novels in the Literary Fiction shelves. But none of them had me staying up past my bedtime. I read Circling the Sun and Into the Water, The Aviator’s Wife and The Nightingale.

But I once hid in a conference room pretending to have meetings so I could read The Bronze Horseman. Last fall I packed my laptop in my checked luggage so I could read some T.M. Frazier books while traveling.

I read The Supreme Macaroni Company and Euphoria last year and they were excellent books, really. But I didn’t tell my husband to queue up “The Grand Tour” on Amazon Prime while I huddled in the corner of the couch to read them. I did that for all of Sarah Maas’s Throne of Glass books.

When it comes down to it, the books that keep me engrossed are the ones I recommend. They aren’t usually deeply layered, literary works of genius. I confess I’ve never finished a David Foster Wallace anything. When I told my friend, a creative writing professor, that I was glad my Kindle hides the titles of the books that take me out of family time, driving, and TV watching, she laughed.

The ratings are: Ignore My Family, Read at Intersections, Stay Up Past Bedtime, Hide From Work, and Forget TV Exists.

“They should all be like that, shouldn’t they?” my friend asked.

Yes, all published books should be so amazingly good we can’t put them down. And they all are. For someone.

There is a reader out there who can’t get enough of the characters I’m writing and the story I’m telling. I just have to find that reader. And hope she’s also a literary agent. Or a publisher.

In the meantime, I’ll be taking notes on those things that keep me glued to the page and try to model my own work after the ones I love.

I quit!

By Raegan Teller

Several years ago, I participated in a writing workshop with the late Jerry Cleaver, author of Immediate Fiction. At that time, I had started and stopped writing a couple of different mystery novels. I was frustrated, and his feedback, though fair and accurate, frustrated me even more. I can still hear him saying, “More conflict. You need more conflict in your story.” When I confessed to him that I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to write a decent manuscript, he gave me some of the most valuable advice I’ve ever gotten: “Quit writing.”

I was stunned. There I was paying him good money to encourage me, coach me, help me write that elusive book. Yet, he told me to quit. I wasn’t sure whether to be mad or ecstatic. Mostly I was confused. When I finally got the courage to challenge his advice, he said, “Writers quit all the time, including me. But if you’re a real writer, you’ll have to start again. You cannot not write.”

After letting his last comments sink in, I then became afraid. What if I quit and never wanted to write again? That would, according to Cleaver, mean I had never been a real writer anyway. Nonetheless, I did quit. I mean, I totally quit with the intention of never writing fiction again. I avoided anything related to writing and went about my life. At first, I was giddy with the lightness of not being a writer. No more worries about plots and characters—or conflict. I could enjoy reading a book without analyzing it. The freedom of not being a writer was intoxicating.

After a couple months of not writing, the impact of Cleaver’s message finally hit me: I needed to reevaluate why I was writing. As simple as that sounds, I had been focused on outlining, story structure, and all the other nuts-and-bolts of the craft. Was my goal to write the perfectly structured novel, worthy of an MFA thesis? While I wanted to write a quality novel, what I really craved was to write a novel that readers could connect with.

When I eventually returned to writing, I wrote the story I really wanted to tell. While I didn’t ignore all the workshop advice and education I had acquired over the years, this time, however, I began writing from my heart, not my head. I wrote for my readers, not for other writers.

About three years later, I published my first novel, Murder in Madden, which recently received Honorable Mention in the Writers’ Digest Self-Published Book Awards. And my second novel in the series, The Last Sale, will soon be out.

During the past year, I have enjoyed the book signings, festivals, book clubs, and other interactions with readers. I’ve never had so much fun. And each time a reader tells me about her favorite character, or someone says, “I couldn’t put it down,” I thank the writing gods that I found the courage to quit.

As a first-time blogger on this page, Raegan's bio follows.

The Latest Addition

Meet the Newest Columbia II Blogger

RAEGAN TELLER


Raegan Teller is an award-winning mystery author in Columbia, SC, where she lives with her husband and two cats. Her debut novel, Murder in Madden, received Honorable Mention in the 2017 Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Her second novel in the Enid Blackwell series is The Last Sale. Both books were inspired by real-life cold cases in her hometown. Before writing fiction, Raegan was a business writer and copy editor, executive coach, and insurance manager—among other things. While working her way through school, she even sold burial vaults at a cemetery. How apropos is that for a mystery writer!