Alis Franklin and Sara Megibow: Diversity in fiction (and how we redefine 'normal').

Diversity in fiction has been a bit of a conversation piece of late. The fact that we have to talk about it at all isn't ideal. However, by talking about it at least we're working towards a point where one day we don't have to talk about it, and that can only be a good thing. 

Liesmith by Alis Franklin is a debut novel set to embrace the concept head on. Out today, it's an urban fantasy that concerns a "queer Loki" and... yeah, that's all I needed to say really. You've all rushed out to buy a copy, haven't you? Don't blame you.

Anyway. I'm humbled to have both the brilliant Alis and her wonderful agent Sara Megibow on the blog tonight, to talk more about the issues surrounding this important and often contentious topic. Specifically, why 'normal' in fiction is anything but, and how we can possibly redefine it...        

(Hydra 2014)

1. There has been a lot of talk of the need for more diversity in mainstream entertainment, for example with the recent WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign.  For the sheltered soul out there, what exactly is this discussion all about?

Alis: Mainstream entertainment, and culture in general, has a nasty insistence on universalising a very narrow demographic—white, straight, cis, male, and so on—and assuming that viewpoint speaks for the entire audience. I think what we’re seeing with movements like WeNeedDiverseBooks—and similar pushes in comics, video games, adult fiction, and so on—is that, for the first time, groups of people who feel excluded from pop culture are able to come together en masse on places like Tumblr and Twitter and realise they’re not alone.

It’s incredibly validating, if you grew up never seeing yourself reflected anywhere in pop culture, to have other people actually come along and say, “You’re right, that does suck, and you do deserve stories both created by and featuring people who are like you.” And not just to have them, but to have a multitude of them, presented front-and-centre in the mainstream, not just one single narrative pushed to the back in some dusty “special interests” corner.

Sara: I couldn’t have said it better myself! As a literary agent, one might consider me to be one of the (many) gatekeepers between art and “mainstream entertainment” aka “reader.” Gatekeeping is a topic for another time, but here’s how my role pertains to diversity: I am actively looking for diverse voices to champion to the publishers. What is this discussion all about? For me, it’s about bringing international distribution and worldwide publicity to diverse voices in literature. 

I am Diversity, my family is diverse, my friends are diverse and many of the voices that have touched me over the years are diverse. So, I’ll do what I can to bring these voices to readers and the WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign has helped give my vision a platform. I’ve been Pro-Diverse since before the campaign, but the campaign has helped so much because of its wonderful, passionate advocates.

2. Liesmith has been pitched as "an exiled Loki, disguised as the CEO of an Australian tech company, unleashes the Wrath of Asgard by falling in love with a man in his IT department." Sara, what exactly did you think when you saw the submission?

Sara: As always, when I read submissions for potential representation the most important qualification is that the quality of writing is superior. Alis is a brilliant wordsmith (as you can tell already by reading her words here) so I knew right away that the quality was there.

My secondary qualification falls under the “can I sell this?” category. LIESMITH stars non-white queer heroes and that was a bonus to me. However, it's also urban fantasy and that particular genre has suffered in the past several years (for debut authors) due to shelving challenges. I ravenously love books by Chloe Neill, Patricia Briggs and Jocelyn Drake and I think those established authors do well in bookstores. But, too many debut authors end up in paranormal romance or spine out in SF/F and I struggled with that while considering whether or not to offer representation on LIESMITH. No one wants to debut a book only to be told that Barnes & Noble didn’t take any copies or that a retailer shelved it weakly. So, my reaction to this submission was: Brilliant Writing! But…Can I sell it?

As a side note, LIESMITH came to me before WeNeedDiverseBooks, so the non-white queer elements were personally compelling to me but didn’t (yet) have the commercial platform that they have now. I fell in love with the writing and the diversity, but struggled with the genre.

3. Alis, you wrote an article on ‘writing a queer modern version of the sagas’ which Random House have helpfully put in the back of your book (it’s a fantastic essay that everyone should read). In it you mention that gay couples (and other minorities) don’t generally get the fluffy happy ending that others do. In fact, they usually end up dead. Why do you think this is?

Alis: First of all, thank you for taking the time to read my rambly endnotes… and thank you to my publisher for giving me the soapbox to put them in, hah. To answer your question, this is complicated, so I’m going to give the Extreme Teal Deer version, stripped down to just the portrayal of queer romance.

Essentially, what I think’s happened is that we’re sitting in the third phase of a cultural shift. The first phase has been with us for a long time, culminating in the mid-20^th century or so, when homosexuality was criminalised and pathologised, and depictions of it in media tended to be associated with either sadistic, sexually rapacious villains or, at best, “camp gay” figures of ridicule. The second phase started in the late 70s, as a pushback triggered by things like the Stonewall riots and the gay rights movement, and focused on reversing historic prejudices. 

In film and literature, this included attempts to humanise queer people by portraying them in a more sensitive light. Unfortunately, that “sensitive light” often tended to be about the tragedy of being gay, largely, I think, because it was an easy way of guilting straight audiences out of homophobic attitudes. So you end up with films like Philadelphia, which is about a gay man but is really aimed more at using dead gay bodies to provide Teachable Moments to straights than it is about providing queer people with actual representation. I think most readers looking for queer characters in SFF from this era will have stumbled across Mercedes Lackey’s Last Herald Mage books, which are sort of the same: the main character is queer and he’s sympathetic, but a non-trivial chunk of that sympathy is engendered because all his boyfriends keep dying on him and his queer-coded traits keep him from being fully accepted by society, no matter how powerful or important he becomes in other ways.

And, unfortunately, no matter the individual merits of these works in isolation, there’s a sort of vicious cycle that’s gone on where, because tragic depictions of queer characters get all the praise and recognition from the straight mainstream, the Tragic Gay becomes the depiction. Which, yanno. If you actually are gay, is maybe not necessarily showing you the hero you want to grow up to be.

I’m simplifying hugely here, of course, and there are whole books and essays that can and have been written about this subject (and a bucket load of exceptions to the narrative), but the point is I think we’re finally at a place where queer audiences are standing up and saying, “Well, it’s great y’all no longer keep typecasting us as rapacious villains and all… but can we please stop dying all the time now? And can maybe some of our lovers survive occasionally?” So while the place we’re at may have been well intentioned, it’s not the place we need to be. We’ve done the films and books trying to get straight audiences to chill on the homophobia. Now it’s time for the films and books (and comics and video games, etc.) that show queer people for the sake of queer people, instead.

4. Okay, so we can all agree we need more diversity. Is this something writers should now be more aware of when casting their characters or should everything serve the story first and foremost, and diversity is something that should just happen naturally? (Could it be that the lack of diversity in books is a failure of the writing process, or more a lack of diversity in the writer’s own life experience, or both?)

Sara: I think poorly-represented diversity is worse than no-diversity. I’ve seen submissions with criminal misrepresentation of about every kind of human out there and that turns me off faster than a lightbulb. So, to answer your question, I think authors should write the books of their hearts and write them authentically. We don’t need anyone adding in diverse characters trying to earn brownie points with an agent or publisher. That being said, most authors have diverse backgrounds – use them! Bring the beautiful color and variety of life to your stories! No one is being turned away from my slush pile for diversity (please note, that doesn't mean I can represent everything of diversity – the book still must be crafted in a superior manner in order to be commercially viable). 

I’m actively looking for authors and stories with religious, racial, cultural, socio-economic diversity and authors/stories involving diversity of ability, age, sexual orientation and gender. Bring it on!

There are diverse books on the shelf – lack of diversity is not (in my opinion) a failure of the writing process. What we need is to buy diverse books, read diverse books and talk about diverse books. Read Malinda Lo and N.K. Jemisin. Buy their books or rent them from the library, read them and talk about them. There are two steps to bringing diversity to the forefront – one is to publish more and two is to buy/read/talk about those that are already published.

5. Part of the writer’s journey is to get inside the head of strange characters and understand what makes them tick. We do this a lot with sci-fi/fantasy, conjuring up elves and aliens and everything in between. So why is it seemingly so hard for writers to get into the head of someone of the same species, who simply exists on a different part of the sexual spectrum?  Are we subconsciously veering away from traditionally taboo subjects?

Alis: I think most of this is just the self-reaffirming nature of queer erasure and stereotyping in media in general. Writers, both queer and straight, don’t see queer characters in the books they read—and genre books are particularly guilty of this—so it doesn't occur to them to put the same sorts of characters in the books they write. It’s something that I think is changing, particularly as queer characters whose sexualities are part of the story rather than being the story become more prevalent, and awareness of the issues around erasure get discussed more widely.

6. How did the NY editors initially respond to Liesmith? Is traditional publishing open to diversity in its offerings?

Sara: The NY publishers responded very favourably! We had multiple offers for publication and we had those offers very quickly (two weeks if I remember correctly). I can honestly say, from this experience and hopefully many more, that traditional publishing is 110% open to diversity in its offerings.

As I said above my biggest hesitation about this book was that it was urban fantasy. We circumvented that issue by choosing Hydra/Random House whose publishing strategy is ebook-first (meaning no worries on shelving issues). Random House gave us a wonderful, non-white hero on the cover (very representative and accurate…no white-washing here). Our editor, Sarah Peed, has been an advocate from day one. Now, we’re in the hands of the consumer. We’re bringing it to the table and gauntlet is thrown…you wanted diversity in SF/F, well here it is! Happy reading!

7. Alis, what’s been your biggest surprise with the feedback you’ve received for the book?

Alis: That people like it, hah!

8. And how has the WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign affected this debut?

Sara: I’m so proud of the author community for stepping up last spring to create WeNeedDiverseBooks. This campaign brings a tremendous platform to the voice of diversity and it has helped this debut tremendously. If nothing else, there is a voracious following on WeNeedDiverseBooks and, as an agent, I can throw my hat in the ring and say “I’m looking for diverse books!” and can also say, “and here is one now in fact…LIESMITH!” A genuine and heart-felt thank you to the WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign!

9. Game of Thrones has done a lot of redefining of how things should work in fiction lately. I’d argue that diversity was one of them. Are fantasy readers/viewers in particular more open-minded do you think?

Alis: Honestly, I think fantasy as a genre has historically been very conservative, whether it’s in its depictions of women (would you like some rape with your rape before or after you’re sold into marriage?), people with disabilities (if you didn’t want to be the villain you shouldn’t have been born with such a ubiquitous marker of Generic Fantasy Evil), people of colour (evil or non-existent, take your pick!), queer people (a winning trifecta of evil, non-existent, and/or raped!), trans people (who?), and so on.

When I was a kid my dad read a lot of fantasy—our house was stacked with SFF paperbacks—and I tried desperately to get into them as well. I think I gave up somewhere around Generic Patriarchal White Pseudo-Medieval-European Fantasy Land #38, which was also coincidentally around the time I discovered urban fantasy (mostly thanks to table top RPGs, rather than novels). UF was such a great relief, in that I could have all the swords and spells and dragons I was aching for, and could do it without having to slog through the antiquated reconstructionist cultural baggage that was used to justify people like me being relegated to, at best, perpetual victims and background decoration in the lives of men. If the explosion in popularity of UF and its spinoff genre of paranormal romance—and, tangentially, the rise in popularity of shōjo anime and manga in the West—is anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one.

Thankfully, as with everything, full-blown high fantasy is shifting into something more diverse, with voices like N.K. Jemisin, Saladin Ahmed, and Kameron Hurley. But there’s still a lot of pushback going on by conservative cultural elements who consider both the genre to be “theirs,” and the increase in diversity to be threatening; the 2014 Hugos being a recent case-in-point.

There’s still a long way to go, in other words. No pre-emptive back-patting on this one.

10. How can the rest of us better strive to redefine ‘normal’ in fiction?

Alis: Recognise that “normal” and “diverse” are different words for the same concept, not opposite ends of some imaginary spectrum!

Sara: By buying, reading and talking about books with diverse voices (both by diverse authors and about diverse characters).

Andrea Hannah: The introvert's guide to planning a book launch

Andrea Hannah is one of those writers you stumble across during a night’s procrastination and can’t help but blindly follow into the beautiful unknown thereafter.

Aside from her sublime writing advice (see AndreaHannah.com and The Secret Life of Writers), she’s also a force of charm, wit, and superhuman work ethic on Twitter (@andeehannah)—juggling a job, two kids and yet still writing more than you and me put together. (And then tweeting about it.)

Her debut novel Of Scars and Stardust releases next week (8 Oct in the US) and, as is usual with these things, there will be whole big launch extravaganza.  

Now, I don’t know about you, but the idea of having to be social or sell myself usually shuts down the writing side of my body, so that I become a limp, awkward mess. And I already knew that Andrea was a self-professed introvert. So I decided to ask her FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S GREAT AND GOOD, ANDREA, HOW THE HOLY HELL DOES AN INTROVERT WRITER PREPARE FOR THE MOST PUBLIC OF PUBLIC THINGS—BEING IN THE SPOTLIGHT FOR THEIR OWN BOOK LAUNCH?

And, fortunately, she answered...

(Flux 2014)

It’s no secret that I tip toward the “I” on the introvert/extrovert scale, as plenty of writers do. On any given day, my Twitter feed is usually flooded with my borderline obsessive need for one of the following: quiet, alone time, a nap, a book, alone time, to shut off my phone, cake*, and alone time. Not to say I don’t like people and all that, but...yeah, alone time.

So when I was planning my very first book launch signing, panels, and parties, the thoughts flitting through my mind were: “But there is no alone time. What will I do? Will I shrivel up and die? No, seriously. WILL I DIE?”

Good news! I’m a few days away from my launch party and panels, and I’m still alive and well. I’ve collected a lot of life-saving advice from fellow introvert authors, and figured out how to avoid some pitfalls on my own along the way. Here are my top five tips for getting through (and even enjoying!) the marketing part of being an author:

1. Let your swag work for you. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to invest in a ton of swag when I started planning my launch, but I’m glad I did for several reasons. First of all, I can convey a whole bunch of information on my swag if done right, and that means there’s less talking/selling I have to do in person. Example: I had these gorgeous oversized postcards made with SCAR’s cover on the front, and a synopsis, contact information, and types of events I’m available for (Skype interviews, classroom visits, workshops, etc.) on the back. These things have been gold thus far. I’ve given them out to librarians, teachers, and booksellers and have only needed to be friendly and social instead of trying to sell my product and services. Which brings me to the next two points...
2. Ask other people to do the selling. I don’t know about you, but I’m always way more excited to talk about other authors’ great books than my own. Again, I think it goes back to my aversion to “SELL! SELL! SELL!” One strategy that’s worked to get the word out about my launch parties and signings is to pull in as many awesome people as possible. Social media is a powerful force, and word of good books and events spreads like wildfire. Let some of your friends tell everyone they know about your book and launch party so you don’t have to over-promote. And speaking of other people, why not set up some of your first events with other authors? My first two panels will be with seven other YA authors in my area and even though they’re live events, I’m really looking forward to them. More people = less pressure.
3. Introverts need a street team, yo. Related to the point above, a street team will get people to your events without you needing to beg. Because of my local street team members, I have a bunch of extra people coming to my launch that I don’t even know, and several local libraries have ordered my book. (And they also ordered my launch cupcakes for me. How cool is that?) Plus, even more valuable than that stuff is the sheer goodwill they’ve showered me with over the past few months. All of the supportive texts, emails, and phone calls have helped get me through this crazy time, especially since I know they’ve got my back.
4. Prepare, prepare, prepare! I can’t emphasize this point enough. I’m an introvert, but I’m not shy, so I’m not super worried about screwing up in front of the spotlight. What I’m really worried about, though, is crashing and burning after an event because it takes so much energy to pull off one of these things. The best way I can not go into a coma afterwards is to prepare my speaking points as much as possible. Re-read your excerpts before an event. Write out a short introduction and practice it. Play around with how you’d answer some common questions (Ex: “Where did you get the idea for this story?”). This way, I can conserve all of my energy for mingling and being generally charming the day of the event, instead of over-thinking my speaking points and expending energy I don’t have to spare.
5. Assign someone to run interference. When it comes down to it, all introverts need down time to function; it’s pretty much in our DNA. So the weeks leading up to the event, and after, I’ve assigned my husband to run interference from energy-drainers for me while I rest up. This includes physical energy drainers, like my screaming toddler, but mostly includes any kind of stimulus that keeps me from recharging. Some of these things, for me, are: excessive texts/emails/phone calls, unannounced visits, unnecessary social obligations, and anyone who’s a vortex of negative energy. My husband is great about letting family and friends know that I’m busy and will respond to emails later, that visiting isn’t a good idea right now, and then delivering me a bowl of ice cream in bed.

I’m sure I’ll come up with some other tips and tricks as the events get closer, but these ones have kept me alive and well for now. Got any I’ve missed? Share them in the comments!

*I guess extroverts can like cake, too.