Stretching

Last week's post got lost in the space-time continuum. Honest. I don't even know where the days went. One minute it was Friday, and I was thinking to myself "Ah yes, I must update the blog and explain about my exams". The next thing I knew, I was waking up on Monday morning thinking "Shit. The blog."

And you know it's serious when I start swearing.

So I shall take this time to say a big fat

to my reader(s?). I had my final exam for the year on Tuesday, so now I'm back on the writing scene with a vicious vengeance, baby!

It feels good to be able to stretch my creative muscles once again. I'm telling you, the weight of revision really put a damper on my desire to write. But I did manage a few scribbled notes here and there, which led me to one shocking realisation: I don't write characters of colour.

I can hear you screaming WHY NOT?!??! at me in a very large font size, so allow me to make my excuses explain.

Growing up, about 98%* of the books I read had a white main character (Charlie Enright, Twig the 'Woodtroll', Harry Potter, Lucy Pevensie, Tiffany Aching, Alex Rider, Biff, Chip AND Kipper to name a few). When I started writing my own stories, this was what I had to draw from. I knew the expression "write what you know" (I'm actually sick of hearing that, but that's for another post), and applied it in that way.

But Terri, I hear you cry, are you not black yourself? Surely this would have been the obvious indicator that writing a character of colour was for you!

Ah, normally you would be correct, nameless friend. However, I was (and still am) an odd child. Until I was about fourteen I genuinely believed that I was mixed race, to the point where I filled out forms with my ethnicity as 'White/Black Caribbean'. To clear up all confusion, both my parents are fully Caribbean - mum from Trinidad, dad Barbados. I don't know where I thought the white was coming into it.

As you can see, I was somewhat muddled about my heritage. I identified with an ethnicity I did not belong to, and as a result all the characters I created were bland reflections of what I thought I knew. Or something. I rarely, if ever, included secondary, minor or even BACKGROUND characters who were anything other than Caucasian.

However, I am working to rectify this ASAP. I know how under-represented people of colour are in mainstream fiction and have resolved to reunite with my ethnic heritage for my next story, which I am selling to my friends as a 'fantasy-sci-fi-epic'. Not sure if they buy it though. The fact that every character in it is an alien aside, there are six focal characters which will consist of two Caucasian members, two black, one multi-coloured neon and one camel-head. Naturally.

I shall invest all my energy into this project for a few reasons:

1) I'd be crazy not to. Come on, admit it. It sounds genius.

2) I've done so much research into the universe I created for it, giving up now would be like shooting my hand off after getting a manicure. Or some other clever metaphor that I didn't use.

3) It will break gender stereotypes. And that can only be a good thing.

So yeah, I'll keep you posted on my progress with that and we'll see how things go. I will totally keep to the Saturday schedule from now on (she said with her fingers crossed an honest smile).

*Figure not accurate. Grabbed out of thin air.