Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

In 2023 YeahWrite’s free workshop is going back to the basics with a focus on tropes, the sometimes imperceptible and often underrated building blocks of writing. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

An Inferno of ideas

As editors, we often hear “can I write…” and honestly we’re almost always tempted to say “you were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”

See, you can write whatever you want. But…

Every month so far we’ve told you that tropes can be, well, a trick or a treat. A building block or a lego to step on in the middle of the night. But there are some tropes that aren’t both of those things. These toxic tropes, whether through a fatal flaw in their creation or consistent misuse, are poisons that can weaken your story and harm your reputation as a writer. Not to mention that generally as writers our goal isn’t to make our readers feel unsafe and exhausted – not on their own behalf, at any rate. Are all these tropes inherently malicious? No. But they’re all outdated at best and actively harmful at worst. And you know them. You’ve probably loved at least one story that contains these tropes. But that doesn’t mean they should have a place in your work.

This month we’re delighted to welcome another panel discussion, and we’re grateful that our panelists are willing to share their time and their lived experience with us and with you, to talk about tropes it’s time to let go of. Learning to recognize and cut these tropes out of your work will keep your writing feeling fresh and accessible to more readers than ever. Ready? Take a deep breath and let’s ruin our childhoods together.

Kidding.

Nobody’s out to ruin anyone’s childhood. It’s ok to have loved problematic things. It’s ok to still love them, as long as you don’t try to push them on others, or recommend them as though they were without flaw. It’s definitely ok if problematic stories and toxic tropes helped you out when you really needed them. What you don’t need to do is make those things your whole identity, or feel like a discussion of them is a discussion or judgment of you personally. Thank the stories that kept you alive for their service, and let them go when you don’t need them anymore. Make room for new stories that aren’t a struggle to keep loving as you outgrow them.

And now… let’s do it for science.

Seven Circles of Trope

The first thing you’ll notice about many of these tropes? They mean well. As our panelists will discuss, sometimes that makes it even worse: you can see someone trying their best to write an accessible, kind story, and then using tropes that mean they have a fundamental failure to imagine the humanity of their potential readers. Let’s look at some of those.

I see red, green, and blue people… but where are the Black and brown ones?

Many writers who want to teach a lesson about acceptance and differences and values in their work put in aliens. It’s an easy way to have an “other” without having to dive into the nuances of showing real racialized oppression, and it’s tempting because you can put in whatever characteristics you want and show prejudice without hurting “real people” – right? Wrong.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

First of all, it’s incredibly difficult to use this trope without reducing the aliens to their race – a thing we should be trying not to do. When you establish “a race is like this” you set up a framework for people believing in racialized traits, which sets up, well, that’s classic racism, isn’t it? Even if the traits are nominally positive (like “attractiveness”), reducing an entire race to a set of identical traits? Not ok.

Second of all, many times these books have either only one race of humans, or a “post-racial” society that erases all but a single Earth culture. Guess which one that almost inevitably is? Yeah. I don’t know about you but I hope that in the future we’re not all from rural Iowa. Sorry, Iowa, that was reductive – you, too, have a broad and beautiful variety of people in you, including the ones who made you one of the first states to formally recognize non-cis-het marriage. Just over 4.3 percent of your people are Black, almost 7 percent Latine, and about 3 percent of Asian heritage. OK, never mind, you’re pretty white but my point stands: even Iowa is reduced too far when you talk like this. So how can you justify doing it to a whole planet? Especially one that’s not, by percentage of population, even 20 percent white USA. (It’s 20 percent Han Chinese, which Firefly almost made work until you looked around and wondered why everyone was speaking Chinese but nobody was Chinese). One of the things that keeps us reading books is being able to see ourselves in them. Erasing people works against that.

The endlessly kind magical Other

Whether it’s Dr. Strange’s mentor the Ancient One or Joe Coffey (not spelled like the drink) from Stephen King’s Green Mile, the EKMO (h/t Kat Tanaka Okopnik for the term, a replacement for one that’s somewhat outdated and not quite broad enough to cover the range of the trope) appears in a broad range of fiction. Serving as a sort of deus ex machina they unlock the protagonist’s potential to be more than they were at the beginning of the book. And they’re awfully useful for dropping rich paragraphs of exposition into a book.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

For one thing, they’re an outsider. This entire trope depends on the othering of a character, their “weirdness” or inherent mysticism, and the only consistent thing about it is that it’s “not white.” The EKMO can never be the protagonist. Heck, they usually can’t even be the best friend. There’s no place for them in the story, and that reflects back onto the real world and our perceptions of it.

For another, when we are exposed again and again and again to a stock character, it starts to affect our interactions with the real world. It creates a standard for people who are already othered that they must be infinitely patient guides to goodness for the less-abused.

Discrimiflip

A future full of enslaved Irish. Or downtrodden Christians, afraid to pray during the state-sponsored “moment of silence.” Writer N.K. Jemisin calls it discrimiflip and while she floats the idea that it could be done, we’re right back to should you and given how high the odds are of failing, and the price of failure to your work and reputation? Probably not. Or at least, handle this one like it’s on fire, and consider Jemisin’s advice that when a discrimination reversal serves to reinforce rather than fight oppression, it shouldn’t be done.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

Discrimiflips often echo the worst of racist or dominionist fearmongering. Look, they say, here is a plausible future, and we, like the protagonists, struggle bravely to keep afloat and prevent it from happening. Surely if the atheists are left to run things, what they’ll do is oppress us the exact same way we have historically and currently oppressed others! What will be the future of the White Race if all those brown oppressors show up?!?!

These things are not only a fundamental failure of imagination and empathy, an inability to understand what would happen if the dominant cultures weren’t dominant and what the driving force behind marginalized people wanting a seat at the table could be, they’re also just another story about a person who is in a position of power in modern society. Sure, we get to hear about them being oppressed, but at the end of the day a person who looks like them is not being oppressed. So your discrimiflip story is just another story about, what, a cis het white guy? That’s not bringing anything new or interesting to the world of storytelling.

And there’s usually another failure of imagination in the methodologies of oppression. Discrimiflip stories tend to caricature the “oppressor class” and make every character in it display personal hatred for every member of the “underclass.” Tell us you don’t understand how systemic exclusion works without telling us you don’t understand how systemic exclusion works. If you really want to write this story, it should be more complex than one of the old after-school specials with the abusive dad who’s also a bonus racist because of course he is. He’s also probably a fat alcoholic because why not.

Folk knowledge and the alienization of magical traditions

ok ok ok look. This one? Hard to title. We don’t mean to exclude magical realism, or animism, or generational knowledge, even, from stories. What we’re talking about is the constant exoticism of those things. The decentering of cultures and people for whom this is normative.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

When you pack certain kinds of knowledge into othered and alienized characters, they stop being people and start being treated like wisdom Pez dispensers. It doesn’t have to be “weird” for someone to have folk knowledge. And that knowledge isn’t just there for the protagonist to reach in and take without taking any of the context that comes with it. When you exoticize things that are part of people’s daily lives and practice, whether you treat them as impossible to attain wisdom or pitiful superstition, you’re excluding them from the possibility of their own stories, and treating them like pillars to support yours.

And while we’re on that topic…

This list of words

No, really, it’s a list of words. We’re not trying to “cancel words” but there are some words that you may be thinking about using that have become as inextricably associated with toxic tropes as certain symbols are with white supremacy. Finding these words in your work is a red flag, and you may lose your reader at the first instance. Is that worth it to you when there are so many other words and ways to say what you’re trying to say (unless what you’re trying to say is a toxic trope, in which case you should feel free to throw the whole trope away).

• primitive
• savage
• civilized
• barbarian
• exotic
• superstitious
• warband/clan/tribe for a disorganized/ disadvantaged Other
• feral/primal/attuned to nature as an “alternative” to technology or culture
• g*psy, and all associated tropes
• oriental

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

All of these words define and devalue someone by placing them in semantic opposition to northwest hemisphere colonizing industrialized white supremacy. No matter what color you end up making your aliens.

The Deserving Exception

Whether it’s in a headline or in a book you’ve seen this one: a person who is faced with seemingly infinite adversity who succeeds because of their personal willpower and talent. Often writers who use this trope think they’re countering eugenic narratives by saying “look, here’s an example of what you said couldn’t be done.” In fact, they’re (sometimes inadvertently) bolstering these narratives.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

First of all (I’ve said that a lot but first of all…) it sets up a narrative where, especially when it’s a “real life” story, people who don’t succeed are perceived to not have worked hard. Or been exceptional. And that’s not a long leap from “disabled people should die” frankly. Allowing your characters to be people means allowing for mediocrity as well as for exceptionalism. And that makes more space for people in the real world to just be who they are without having to meet impossible standards to be seen as deserving of care.

Another thing that’s wrong with this trope is that it’s almost always written for an external gaze. They are rarely designed as an inspiring story for people who share the hardships of the protagonist; it’s just one more day in their life plus an additional reminder that they are seen as lazy for not meeting this impossible yardstick. No, these are comfort stories for people on the outside, who get to experience a little vicarious oppression and the thrill of overcoming it, all from the comfort of their own chair. Meanwhile the story shapes their expectations about what people should be doing to deserve respect, because why can’t they just… and it deepens the gap, rather than bridging it.

An obvious character trope, but I read it in a newspaper before I wrote the story, ok?

Whether it’s a Mexican drug lord, a Black male sex offender, a gay pedophile, or… look, you know the list. And the defense is always the same: a person like this does in fact exist in the world, so why can’t I write about it? Why shouldn’t I (a white person from Wyoming) write realistic fiction that takes place on the South Side of Chicago?

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

It’s not that people like these characters don’t exist. It’s that these characters are already negative stereotypes that are overrepresented in our fiction and are reflected back on real marginalized people as if all of them were that character. It shapes their interactions every day, the assumption that they’re like the flat stock monster that shares exactly one trait with them. Writing these characters usually shows that you have less than a surface knowledge of what a person with that trait is actually like either personally or culturally, and that won’t reflect well on you or your writing. Find out more about people before you write them. I know it might come as a surprise to you (and to Greg Rucka, apparently) but not all Black people come from the South Side of Chicago.

In conclusion…

You can write anything you want. But what you choose to write tells your readers a lot about you and your priorities. Using these tropes is going to drag your story down, alienate your readers, and ultimately hurt whichever bottom line you care about, whether that’s readership or cold hard cash. They’re unimaginative, uninteresting, and unkind, and no amount of good intentions or effort are going to rehabilitate them for your own singular story that you want to tell in that particular way and can’t think of another way to do it. In other words you may have heard frequently enough to empathize with the idea that some things are well past any sell by date, it’s time to … let it go. Let it gooooooooooo.

THIS MONTH’S SPECIAL GUESTS

Last month we featured Angie Bee for a chat on Found Family, so if you haven’t gotten a chance to check that out, head on over to our YouTube channel (and while you’re there, consider a like and subscribe?).

This month we’re pleased to welcome Kat Tanaka Okopnik (KTO) and TC Duong to share their thoughts on toxic tropes (and what they’d love to see instead) as writers, editors, readers, and viewers. We hope you’ll join us! If you’re a pencil- or pen-tier member of the SQS, remember you can also submit questions in the Discord channel if you can’t make it to the meeting, and we’ll make sure they get covered.

KTO is a writer and editor currently curating public discussions covering the intersection of etiquette, social justice, geek culture, food, parenting, technology and politics. These topics might seem randomly assorted taken one at a time; viewed as a constellation, the tangle of paths resolves to a map of guideposts toward building accessible escape pods off this hell-bound handbasket without crashlanding on Planet SSDD. This work is generously crowdfunded by patrons at http://www.patreon.com/ktokopnik/.

TC Duong has spent his career working at the intersection of national organizations and their grassroots networks through advocacy, capacity building and organizing. As someone in philanthropy, his work is to shift social change work from transactional to transformational.

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society. 

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. Keep an eye out here and on Discord for this month’s time and date! Future dates and times TBD based on member and guest availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible. (Yeah. We know. It’s best to have a fixed time. But we think it’s even better than best to be able to accommodate a diverse slate of exciting and qualified panelists, and we hope you’ll agree.)

You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session. (The January meeting is free, but please use this link to RSVP!)
• $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
• $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.