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.

You don’t know what you know you don’t…

The year is more than half over and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what tropes you should and shouldn’t put in your work, and how to use them mindfully and carefully (yes, those are different). But this month we’re changing it up to talk about the tropes you don’t know you’re using. And some familiar faces will be back for a panel talk about your personal tropes, the ones you use to define “what is a person” and how you might be making mistakes about your characters and world.

Wait, why wouldn’t I notice a trope?

Let’s jump into this month’s topic with two examples: what you should and shouldn’t try in a small town, and where Batman shops.

First, the Small Town. If you’ve been on the Internet in the past couple weeks, you’re probably aware that there’s a pop/country singer from a moderately large city (the metro area has around 250K people) who has some fantasies about what goes on in a small town and why. One of the lines in the song suggests that people aren’t “carjacking grannies at stop lights” in a small town because they know what would happen if they tried it. We asked our Managing Editor about that line, and here’s the response we got:

Ok, first of all, as Trae Crowder pointed out first… a stop light? That’s what he thinks a small town looks like? My hometown still doesn’t have a stoplight. Or a thousand people. So we’re going to start by pointing out that he can’t even imagine a small town visually. You know Google Maps has a street view option where you could walk up and down the twelve blocks that make up my hometown and just see one? Seriously. So next let’s talk about carjacking. For carjacking to be a thing that people do, you have to have a healthy chop shop market for breakdown and resale. This means a large population again, and quite a bit of infrastructure. So yeah nobody’s carjacking your granny in Small Ass, Idaho, not a real town by the way, because what would they even do with that car? You know what they’re doing? They’re stealing your granny’s catalytic converter while her car is parked in the driveway and selling it for scrap metal one town over in Medium Ass, Idaho. This isn’t lower crime, it’s different crime with different economic drivers. But this guy can’t imagine the economics of a small town any more than he can imagine what one looks like. He hears “town” and he makes assumptions about what’s in a town, like maybe it’s got a Walmart and a police station and some stoplights. But if you’re from a small town, and I’m not trying to gatekeep what’s a small town, but think for a minute, that Walmart is in the next city over, and people make a trip there once a week to go “big shopping” as opposed to the little shop you can do at the overpriced Food Place in your small town to get by if you really need some milk or cereal midweek.

We promise we’ll get to why this is relevant right after we talk about where Batman shops.

Hi, it’s Rowan again. Y’all know how much fanfic I read. Y’all also probably know that some of it’s about Batman. So I like stories about found family dealing with trauma by going to therapy, sue me. Anyway there’s nothing that will take me out of a slice of life fic faster than someone who really has no understanding of what it’s like to be wealthy. Say Bruce Wayne is throwing a pool party. Ok! Yay! Sounds fun! So the kids pile in the car – still ok, usually, but you should already be thinking “Bruce Wayne probably has an up-armored SUV rather than a Honda Odyssey” considering how often these kids get kidnapped. And they go to… Walmart. Literally why? Because the author thinks “this is where people get pool toys” and while they’re not wrong, their definition of “people” hasn’t been examined for “is this where wealthy people get pool toys” and “why aren’t there already more pool toys than they can use” and “why wouldn’t they just order this delivered by courier” and “why are they shopping at a Walmart anyway, where would the nearest Walmart be to the area of New York – sorry, Gotham – where they live? Wouldn’t they have to go way out of their way to get to this store that is incredibly unethical to shop at in the first place? Why do “people” do that if they can afford not to? Oh, right, they don’t.” Same deal with fics where it’s after patrol and they go to the fridge to get some leftovers and save Alfred time. Some thought has gone into this! Yes, it makes sense considering the inexplicably small number of staff that’s dealing with feeding like fifteen people with incredibly high caloric needs and specialized diets that Alfred would do some batch cooking of convenience foods. But is this what the ultrawealthy consider a solution? Think about what you’d do with a bunch of money: you basically buy the time to do the things you want to do. So there should also be pre-prepped foods, batch-ordered foods, etc. But the real dealbreaker sometimes is when they reach in and pull out… Tupperware. This is a thing that isn’t even marketed to people in that wealth bracket. Stainless steel or glass containers, sure. Plastic? Nope. Why would it be? They can afford the better and more durable Vimes Boot Theory solution for their food, and they would. I’m not 100% sure Bruce Wayne even knows Tupperware exists except in a vague conceptual way.

Okayyyyyy so. What do these things all have in common? The writer made some assumptions, because their understanding of the world contains tropes (we all do this, it’s a shortcut our brains use to save memory, you don’t need to be ashamed but you should be aware) and they plugged those tropes about what towns look like and what people do into their stories. And when they did that, they undermined their credibility in some really fundamental ways. Another thing that happens when you do this is that you define who “people” are – and that can feel super exclusionary and/or, honestly, racist or classist or any number of ists and phobias. So let’s spend this month’s post talking about how to notice the tropes you don’t know are there.

Who do you think you are?

There are some catch phrases that you can look out for, to see if you’re plugging your own personal tropes into your characters:

• Normal people do…
• People are/go/want…
• This is how people get/acquire…
• Everyone….
• This is what people think is beautiful
• This is “objectively…” [anything].

Then you’re probably in the danger zone. What you want to not do is plug in a self-insert instead of a realistic character. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a character that thinks this way, it means you should be aware that that’s not the only way to think, and you should be choosing something that makes sense for your story. “Beautiful” means something wildly different to different people. If you want your character to be modern-US “beautiful,” and your story isn’t set there, your other characters may not react to them that way. If you want your character to be physically attractive to other characters in the context of your story, think about what that context is. You’ll likely either have a record of what the society you’re writing in considered desirable, or you can extrapolate from similar societies if you’re writing genre fiction.

And of course this goes double when writing for known cultures outside your own, both because you don’t want to lose readers from that culture and because you run the risk of perpetuating stereotypes or having your writing assumed to be “authentic” when the writing from people within the culture gets more gatekeeping and scrutiny. Sound weird? Here’s how it works. A dominant culture writer’s assumptions and perceptions about the actions and motivations of a nondominant culture’s members (sorry for sounding academic; plug in white/Black, abled/disabled, neurotypical/neurodivergent, or whatever makes sense to you here) are going to seem reasonable to other members of that dominant culture, because they come from the same information and reasoning standards. Meanwhile, a member of the nondominant culture might be trying desperately to explain the actual motivation, but because the dominant culture reader doesn’t have the underlying understanding and information they’d need to understand the explanation, they land on “nah, sounds fake.” For a real-world example, for years neurotypical parents, teachers, and bosses have explained the executive dysfunction that comes from neurodivergence or trauma as “laziness.” It makes sense to them! All they have to do is push through and do the thing, so they assume everyone can. They don’t have information that would lead them to believe that someone couldn’t! But there are lots of other reasons for executive dysfunction, such as unconsciously avoiding triggers that can cause a full shutdown or even just inadequate dopamine reward for doing little parts of a task.

Remember all the times we’ve talked about sensitivity readers? This is why they’re important. They can spot the tropes you don’t know you’re using, because they see the way those tropes play out in their daily lives. So your sensitivity reader doesn’t have to be some big deal “oh did I heck up this thing about race” question. You might just need someone who shares relevant characteristics with your characters to give you a gut check on whether this feels “real” to them or whether you’ve plugged in some of your tropes where theirs might be in effect. Not to pick on Stephen King but before he published the Gunslinger series, even leaving aside ANY of the major content gaffes, he should have talked to someone who has had to wash Black hair ever in their life. Susannah’s hair texture and behavior keeps changing over the course of even a single book, and someone should have spotted it and helped fix that. And to flip the script, there’s a reason that “it’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, $10” is still funny.  The issue of course is that you don’t want to be that character, showing the world that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.

In conclusion…

We’re not trying to scare you. This is an exercise that ethical anthropologists do all the time to ensure that they project as little as possible from their own ideas and culture onto the ones they’re studying. One fun way to do it is to write yourself up as a character. What do you look like? Why? How do you present yourself? What from your culture or background makes that desirable to you? Where do you shop? Why? Especially if you’re a member of a dominant culture, this is a great way to ensure that you’re making fewer assumptions based on “what people do” and have a deeper understanding of “people in my culture do X but if my character has different circumstances here are some other things they might do instead.” And as always it’s ok if the answer is “I don’t know” – our panel this month might give you some jumping off points for where to go with that uncertainty!

THIS MONTH’S SPECIAL GUESTS

They’re back! Kat Tanaka Okopnik, and TC Duong, as well as a special (we’re still in negotiations, we’ll let you know!) guest will be joining us this month for a panel discussion of the tropes you’re accidentally falling back on, and how that plays out in art and life. Join us!

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. This month’s meeting will take place on Sunday, August 6 at 2pm US Eastern time. Don’t worry; we’ll send out a reminder! (Not on our mailing list? Sign up here!) 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.