It’s been awhile since my last post, and a lot has happened: a pandemic, protests like I haven’t seen in my lifetime, and a presidential election like nothing the U.S. has seen for 160 years.
Being a white indie satirist and fiction author, I have to admit to struggling to find my voice during this national moment, and I’ll bet a lot of other caucasian indie authors are facing the same dilemma: we want to participate in, and lift up the national dialogue, but won’t our affluent, white characters and their white people problems land as offensive and tone deaf?
That’s why I have come up with a simple, easy-to-follow 20-step plan for overcoming what I like to call White Writer’s Block. Here goes.
20 Tips on Writing Your Novel About White Suburban 10-Percenters During a National Reckoning on Race
1. First, change your characters to people of color, but leave everything else in your novel, including their biographies, alone. There, see how easy that was?
2. Now walk it back; that was a terrible f—ing idea.
3. Stop writing altogether; you have no right to a personal aesthetic in the middle of this national moment.
4. Start writing about your white characters again. You're not going to cave in to that bullsh-t!
5. Ask for your boyfriend’s/girlfriend’s/spouse’s/bestie's opinion.
6. They're right: shelve it.
7. Purchase a copy of Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Antiracist, and start developing a new story with all Black characters.
8. Stop! What the hell do you know about the African American experience? Shelve it.
9. Start work on a non-fiction rebuttal to Kendi's book, because f—k him!
10. Read the first draft. Oh my God, you wrote this? You sound like a Klansman! What the hell?
11. Show it to your significant other, just to be sure.
12. Yep, you sound like a Klansman alright. Shelve it.
13. Get a Black Lives Matter lawn sign.
14. Take the FOP booster sticker off your rear windshield.
15. But don't throw it out, because you're not looking to de-fund; you just want to be consistent in your messaging.
16. Drive four blocks.
17. Now reapply your FOP booster sticker to your rear windshield. You can support both your local police and Black Lives Matter; you're not going to be put into some socio-political box!
18. Unshelve your white character drama, your Black character drama, and your rebuttal to How to Be an Antiracist. Work feverishly through the night to incorporate all three into a brand new story that feels like the movie Grand Canyon.
19. Burn the outline. Burn it. Use Zero-pass deletion to sanitize your hard drive. Your significant other must never know you’re capable of writing something like this.
20. Turn all your energy to creating all-new social media content about your previous books. Plan to post nothing about what you're working on for the next 18 months. Phew!