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Getting It RightJuly 29, 2006 I've been corresponding with a fiction-writer friend about the challenge of creating characters who are different from you. And I just put myself on record (again) as writing about Martha's Vineyard, On top of that, I'm copyediting a wonderful collection of essays, mostly reprints, by Roy Blount Jr. My new ambition is to be the Roy Blount Jr. of Martha's Vineyard. True, the stereotyping that Southerners encounter is far worse than I or any Vineyarder of my acquaintance has ever faced, and it's generally easy for Vineyarders to "pass" when we fall in with people spouting ignorance about where we live. However, Blount has a deft and usually tactful way of dealing with self-congratulatory white liberals who chant "Celebrate diversity" and are quick to jump down the throat of anyone who utters a possibly racist remark but make the most appalling generalizations about Christians, Southerners, people who voted for Bush, country people, and anyone who lives in a "red state." I'm regularly roused to near-homicidal rage by such comments -- the nearness to homicidal varies in direct proportion to the speaker's smugness -- and am studying Blount for insight and technique. For instance: "The point of irony, after all, is to say things behind people's backs to their faces. If you look around the poker table and can't tell who the pigeon is, it's you." The question of "getting it right" -- if you're, say, a straight woman writing about, or (even more risky) in the voice of, a gay man; or a black man from the Caribbean writing about or as a Chicana from New Mexico -- is worth discussing. But first ask yourself: Is it really useful to think in terms of "getting it wrong" and "getting it right"? What's wrong and what's right, and who sez? I have fond memories of a few Gaylaxicon panels in which one panelist would swear that Straight Author A had got Gay Character Z "all wrong," and another panelist would interrupt with "Character Z is totally believable! My first boyfriend was just like that!") What I want is to get it plausible. The members of Group Z -- any Group Z -- are a helluva lot more diverse than most people, even members of Group Z, realize, or are willing to admit. When I moved from Washington, D.C., to Martha's Vineyard, my baggage contained quite a few generalizations about gay men and lesbians. Most of them turned out to be, at best, incomplete. Some were self-serving or downright bogus. Plenty of people think Martha's Vineyard is a pretty homogeneous place. Their certainty about this varies in indirect proportion to their distance from the island and/or how much time they've spent here (if any). The longer you live here, the more complex it looks. The characters in The Mud of the Place are a diverse lot. I'm a native New England lesbian feminist writer from a downwardly mobile old WASP family. I started writing the novel when I was about 48 and finished when I was 52. There's not a single native New England lesbian feminist writer from a downwardly mobile old WASP family between the ages of 48 and 52 in the book. The cast does include men and women; lesbian, gay, straight, and sexually ambivalent; Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic, and from an assortment of ethnic backgrounds; waiters, ex-fishermen, artists, journalists, social workers, real-estate brokers, housecleaners, cops, town officials, an MD who made it big in pharmaceuticals, and one writer (he's an asshole). Ages range from about 9 to about 80. Some of them came easy; others took a fair amount of work. The easiest was Pixel, the Malamute-Samoyed cross who's Rhodry's alter ego. The biggest challenge about Jay, one of my two co-protagonists, wasn't that he's male, or gay, or a Vineyard native; it was that he belongs to a tight-knit family and would (almost) rather cut his own throat than cause them grief. (Me, as far as family goes, I tend to see myself as one of the few survivors of a sinking ship.) Did I get it right? Did I get it wrong? The possibilities for right are great; the possibilities for wrong are very small. Martha's Vineyard may not be large by some standards, but it contains multitudes. I think I got it plausible.
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