World Encyclopedia

My notes for my stories are pretty messy (yes I do more than just read).  So I've decided to catalogue all of my stuff here.  Then I can put it in a nice order later on, if my penchant for perendinating doesn't get the better of me.  And, to avoid confusion, I'll stick to doing it for one story.

One of the first stories I started writing; I was about ten when I first began working on this story; it's evolved a lot since then.  Now it's just a vestige of the original story.  I'll embarass myself for a moment and share what it was about.  Originally it was about six kids who get trapped in a magical world; that evolved from some mortifying Xena.  I called it S.U.I.T.S, Secret Unified Interdimensional Travel Society.  And it was about these kids that had the power to travel between dimensions.  Basically and learn how preserve the laws of nature (matter cannot be created or destroyed) using that rule, one could not take stuff from one deminsion to the other unless it was designed for interdimensional travel.  Anyway, so there were people who would take stuff like gold across dimensions and they had to be stopped.  

I scrapped that story because the premise, in my opinion is pretty dumb.  But I kept the characters and consolidated them with many others from previous incarnations of the story.  With that I begin my world Encyclopedia.

White Writers and Effective Black characters

I am midway through the book House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia.  The full review will come when I finish it, but I would like to discuss how brilliant a writer Sedia is.

The story is told from a first person perspective by a black American girl of Zimbabwean immigrant parents.  The author effectively captures her struggle between two cultures and the struggles of being black in an academic environment.  After researching the author, I was surprised to discover that Sedia is very white and very Russian (though she now lives in the States).

Sedia is one of the most remarkable writers for this reason alone.  She created a very real black character.  Many white authors who create black characters that are principal to the story don't write from that characters perspective.  Most who do write from the perspective of a black character, write a black character in the same way they would a white character.  (Justine Larbalestier is another notable exception) They write very "colorblind"; their black character's blackness is something easily forgotten and overlooked especially when it's not central to the story.  When their blackness is central to the story; it's still central in a very disconnected way.  The only problem is; the way things work for a white person do not work the same for a black person.  Blackness is not something that a black person forgets.  Writing from a realistic black perspective means the author should not let readers forget.  Others who write from a black perspective create characters that wear their blackness like it's black face; their characters' being black is constantly thrown in the readers face as if being black is the only thing a black person thinks about.

It is this lack of true understanding of blackness and internalizing the black experience that make white writers rarely able to have a character that is black and is real.   Sedia has enough talent that she could create a character that felt the black experience; and remarkably does it so well that it is as if she herself were black, dropping insights on such things as white indifference and shying away from black culture, literature and history.  Hopefully Sedia will have many more novels to come.