Wrestling With POV: staying in your lane

Over the last few months, I’ve been grappling with a confluence of writing experiences related to point of view. A Twitter post by Steve Edwards (@The_Big_Quiet) pushed me over the edge. 

Interrogate POV. I don’t mean only first- or third-person or omniscient. I mean: Who *are* your characters? Who are *you* to be writing about them & their worlds? If your story isn’t informed by these considerations, you’re probably just making a list of things that happened.

Let me share two workshop experiences that precipitated my struggle. In one, a participant presented a vignette in which the viewpoint character was a gay man. The writer is a cis-gendered heterosexual woman. I had a negative visceral reaction when I first read the piece about a married gay man having casual sex with a straight woman because she asked him. When the writer was questioned about her choice of POV character, things got tense. I saw an underlying assumption that being gay also means being comfortable with infidelity. When we talked about using a sensitivity reader, she essentially said she didn’t know any gay men with the possible exception of (said without a hint of irony) her hairdresser. Who are *you* to be writing about these characters and their worlds? 

In the second workshop, the participant presented a scene that referenced George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. The character is a white woman who is nominally described as being concerned about social justice. The writer is also a white woman. The character learns of George Floyd’s murder and rushes to comfort the only Black character in the story who is (again without a hint of irony) the housekeeper and cook. The character’s actions felt performative to me. The scene reminded me of assertions that white people’s participation in Black Lives Matter demonstrations was more about being seen to be against against racial inequities than actually doing something to address them. Who *are* your characters?

These experiences happened against the backdrop of the American Dirt controversy. (Discussed here, and here, and here.) The larger problem involves how the publishing industry marginalizes BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers while rewarding white cis-het writers who adopt, or more accurately co-opt, the viewpoint of those marginalized populations. Nonetheless, the book generated a lot of discussion about writing viewpoint characters that are not of the same demographic group as yourself. McSweeney’s published a satirical piece, As a 28-Year-Old Latino, I’m Shocked My New Novel, Memoirs of a Middle-Aged White Lady, Has Been So Poorly Received by Carlos Greaves. At least for some white writers, Greaves’ article is funny in a ‘hehehe embarrassed at how ridiculous white people can be’ kind of way.       

And yet . . . 

There are myriad examples of people writing from the viewpoint of a character who does not align absolutely with their own demographic. Patricia Highsmith in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Ken Haruf in Our Souls At Night. Dave Eggers in The Circle. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. P.D. James’ Inspector Dalgliesh. Genre fiction is rife with examples. What would a romance novel be without scenes in both the heroine’s and hero’s point of view? What about fantasy? Is Ursula K. LeGuin crossing some boundary when the main character in her Earthsea series is male? 

It’s ludicrous to take ‘write what you know’ so literally that you only write characters who are like you in every way including experiencing only the things that you have personally experienced. So where is the line between appropriation and appreciation, between authenticity and duplicity?

Maybe the line is like pornography – we know it when we see it but we can’t give a clear definition. Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder. I don’t know. What I do know is my gut level feeling in my own work. 

I have a completed manuscript written in the protagonist’s POV. The story includes a gay secondary character. When one of my trusted readers urged me to write the story from multiple characters’ points of view, including his, I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t comfortable taking on the persona of a gay man. As Steve Edwards said in his Twitter post, I’d just be making a list of things that happened. Sure, I could have found a sensitivity reader but that didn’t feel right either. So the story stands as it is.     

The author of American Dirt responded to criticism by saying that her actions were well intentioned because she wanted to draw attention to the plight of undocumented immigrants. The genesis of a story that ignites conversation about an issue lies in the answers to the questions that Edwards poses. Who are the characters and what about you and your experience in life makes you the person that can best write about them and their worlds?

If you’re not the best person to write about an issue, if it’s not your story to tell, then don’t do it no matter how strongly you feel about the issue. Even if you have good intentions. We don’t need more well-intentioned people ‘whitesplaining’ or ‘hetsplaining’ on behalf of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people. Let’s trust that there are writers within those marginalized populations who have the capacity to tell the story from a place of authenticity.