Writing Queer 4: Some Tips and Tricks

 

It's been a wild few weeks this Pride Month. And it may get a little wilder yet. Because today we're heading for the wild world of writing advice, something I'm usually terrified of giving in any serious way. For the past weeks I've shown my own queer journey, my earliest attempts at writing queer characters, and a major turning point when I landed a publisher. Now I think I feel confident enough to give some tips and guidance for writing queer characters. To be clear, this is from my perspective and my experience. Everyone will have a different bit of advice to offer, and no one way should be taken as gospel.

Also apologies in advance if any of this comes off as inflamatory.

1: Don't make gender and orientation the only thing about a character. This is something that can really rub me up the wrong way, the thing where some creator (especially mainstream straight) trumpets a character as queer without saying anything else about why they're a compelling character. If the story is a romance, then I think that's a usable exception. But if your character is a detective, or a magic user, or a scientist, then show that. You know, they're a gay detective, but they're still a detective.

2: Keep your representation broad. Again in mainstream, but not in fiction in general thankfully, there can be a tendency to go either gay or lesbian, treating orientation as a situation of extremes. But there's bi, trans, ace, demi, pan, and the more general queer. There's intersex, which I've always found interesting. And many other variations and classifications beyond the standard 'human' which everyone -- gay or straight -- is. Just...be broad, reflect reality. And the reality is they're everywhere, it's just the people up top who insist they're not.

3: Have more than one queer character. Obviously there are some possible exceptions people will think of, but this is also something that rubs me the wrong way. The token character, the representative to point to and say 'yeah, this good now, ook ook'. The "Gay Best Friend" is a trope for a reason, and I dislike it. If you're going to have queer, then have queer. In lots of places. Humanity is a spectrum, and a lot more varied than the Western heteronormative. So embrace it!

4: Avoid tragedy unless absolutely necessary. Again, a pet peeve of mine, the Bury Your Gays trope. From Maltese Falcon to Copycat to Left Hand of Darkness to Hermaphroditus knows what all. It's thankfully not as common as it once was, but it's deeply rooted in the Hayes Code's puritanical obsession with punishing any and all kinds of non-standard stuff. Sure, I've admitted to creating tragic narratives, and progressive voices have used tragedy to make a point, but nowadays I just find queer characters need much less tragedy. Or not at all, preferably. If you're going for tragedy, just make sure it's dolled out equally to straight and queer characters, get your priorities right.

5: Don't let "history" bully you. This applies to both ethnic and gender diversity, but if you're doing something set in a historical time period of history-inspired time period, there can be...pressure to make characters white and straight. That's bull, because even a cursory glance at actual historical records will show not only ethnic variety galore, but a spectrum of orientation either inferable or confirmed. Yes there's reading between the lines involved, and you can go too far the other way especially if you're touting history to sell a fictional scenario (looking at you, Mary Villiers from Mary and George). But on the whole, look it up. Do the research. It's very fabulous.

6: If you need to have sexy stuff, do it with purpose. You don't need romance and partnerships and relationships and steamy episodes in bed all the time. Though again, can be genre and tone dependant. I mean, children's' literature doesn't need it, but it benefits greatly from increased representation. It can be an easy pitfall because of... Well, due to pressure from fringe groups who see it as "obscene" and "degenerate", queer content has been tarred with the "filth" brush, and producers of certain media have leaned into that. But you can be queer, and sweet and wholesome. It's completely possible to do that.

And that's it! The end of my long series on this blog. I hope it's been either informative or entertaining, or both. There's more coming at the end of July, so stay tuned. And Happy Pride!

Writing Queer 3: Editor's Feedback and Real Life

 We hit the third post this Pride Month, where I delve into my seemingly both slow and fast journey through the world of "well, I'm writing queer characters now so I need to do it well/properly". I've previously chronicled my own internal journey and my early fictional stumbles. Now I'd like to go more detailed and nitty-gritty. This time, through the story of writing the book that got me to publication, I'll show I had to confront a final odd hurdle within myself and push back at that little bit of myself that was still stuck in the past.

Be warned, this article will contain references to and discussion of a storyline that involves assault and its associated trauma. There will also be spoilers for one of my books.

My debut novel, Starborn Vendetta, is in broad strokes a reimagining of story elements from Count of Monte Cristo, Faust and Macbeth. But in particular, there was a character who starts off the story and forms a core part of how things progress. That character is Gaspard Atarex, a member of the Feles people in the Cluster who starts off as a guard within Prison Station d'If, where protagonist Mercedes Solari is sent. Within the first chapter, I wanted to show Gaspard as bitter, hollowed out by his duties, detached from any real passion. He is gay, has a preference for human males, and due to the prison environment has an outlet without needing another person. When Mercedes appears, her magnetic personality awakens a wish to protect her from the vindictive warden, and the only way he can do that is through someone he loathes.

The root of that became another character, a Feles prisoner dubbed Echo. Later in the story, it is revealed that Echo found Gaspard trying to help prisoners, which would've gotten him into huge trouble, and blackmailed him into a relationship. Echo is a predator, plain and simple, and Gaspard is his victim. Things happen, the d'If is exploded, and both Gaspard and Echo survive. Echo tracks down Gaspard and essentially stalks him. At the end of their combined story, Echo is killed by another character. But here's the kicker; in the original draft of the story, Gaspard never resolved this core issue and...kinda made...peace with Echo? I'm getting embarrassed remembering it.

I see that this may be interpreted as a form of internalised homophobia. We'll come back to that, but I will say it reflects a passive acceptance of behaviours and ideas of redemption that not only queer media, but other media had been pushing for decades by this point. The Beauty and the Beast trope taken to one of its logical extremes, the deeply toxic "it's okay, they're fixable" or "see there was good there" attitude which is unacceptable in real life. The odd thing is that when I was writing it, I didn't think of it in terms of them both being men. I wanted a character suffering from that kind of trauma, and either could easily have been gender-swapped. Equally the fact that Gaspard was gay didn't feel like a factor related to this, just an aspect of how Gaspard was in the world.

My editor at the time called this conclusion out immediately, saying that Echo's actions didn't merit any kind of forgiveness. They didn't ask me to do a gender flip, but they did say I needed to show this wasn't a good thing, which I hadn't originally due to how dark my original tone was. I looked through, and had to agree with their stance. I'd gone through some more writing by this time, and some more media and real-life encounters that reshaped my ideas.

The most basic change I made was that I removed any forgiveness Gaspard originally met out to Echo. Instead he very actively broke away, and when Echo died, he declares that he hates him and doesn't forgive or forget. Gaspard's emotions are still confused and he's still traumatised, but he is on the path to breaking away from that and finding a life beyond that. I also rewrote some bits to show that Gaspard's emotions towards Echo were extremely confused, influenced by being placed in a vulnerable position and taken advantage of; at his core he hates Echo, but some part of him believes Echo's statements that he actually desires the connection. I did further research into the accounts and treatment of sexual abuse victims during this rewrite (I know, I should've done that from the first), and incorporated some of that into his personality and actions. I'd like to think I managed to make him a more nuanced figure in the final draft which made it to publication.

Reading back through this, I'm thinking "What the hell?!". And maybe you've got similar reactions. I wrote Starborn Vendetta during a pretty dark period of my life. My maternal grandparents where in the final stages of their lives, my father unknown to me was also dying and only had months left, and I was struggling with other things in my family and coming to grips with my own mental health and identity. This included not being embarrassed by my tastes in media, finding my own style of clothing, and asserting myself as an individual within the family.

Prior to the revisions, several things happened. First, my father died a few months after I finished writing the initial draft of Starborn Vendetta, which required something of a mental reset for myself. Second, I became more fully aware of how many queer people were actually within my own family, which opened me up to the realisation that what I was writing needed to be respectful not just for nebulous others I hadn't yet encountered, but people within my own family.

So going forward, I was. By the time the dev edits for Starborn Vendetta came in, I'd already written or part-written the next two entries in the Cluster Cycle and it brought me face to face with elements of how I might've ended up writing elements of the next few books. Suffice to say, there was course correction, and that correction was necessary. Since then, I've always been very careful in whether or not to consider incorporating that kind of story, and what I should be researching when portraying it in a respectful and empowering manner.

For more information on the kind of pitfalls I half-fell into or nearly fell into, see Emily Inkpen's article "Writing Sexual Assault - Things to Remember".

So where do we go from here? I've talked for the past weeks about my writing journey relating to queer characters. Next week, the final Sunday of Pride Month, I'll be giving what have become my guiding principles for when I include and write queer characters. Until then, stay fabulous, stay safe, and if you're writing a story based around assault or trauma, remember to do your research. And sometimes, there can be no forgiveness.

Writing Queer 2: My early fictional attempts.

 Last week, I looked back my early exposure to queerness before I came to accept my own bisexuality. This week, I'm looking at my early attempts at writing queer characters. I won't bore you with many, since I didn't really attempt anything like that for a long time.

Many of my first attempts came from the first extremely long story I wrote, and something I initially attempted to self-publish. That was The Leviathan Chronicle, a story set within a heavily-fictionalised version of the Crusades in a separate world, where two opposing supernatural factions (the Seraphim and the Powers) used humans marked by their power to fight the holy war as a proxy conflict. And out of the five lead characters, three had some level of queerness relating to their stories or personality.

To briefly summarise; the titular character Leviathan was intersex/gender queer, and standing as an outsider to the conflict. The other two were Elathan, a spy who loses his lover Paimon and is revived after being executed once found out; and Mastema, one of the faction leaders who suffers from trauma due to a certain kind of abuse from his father. All of them live to the story's end, don't worry, but...let's just say I wasn't being very tactful with how certain aspects of their stories were handled excepting Leviathan. It goes without saying, this was my angsty era, and I was working through some stuff in my mind at that time that needed a dark outlet. The fourth lead was Astarte, a woman driven by revenge to the exclusion of all else. But I hardly consider my need to be dark that as an excuse.

Basically, because of some elements of my media exposure at the time, many of my stories were and are tragic in tone. Not completely depressing, but still tragic. A different story, which was written as a tragedy from the outset following eight reincarnated people in a fantastical Medieval Europe, had a central subplot where one was reincarnated as twins, with another seeing the surviving twin as her soulmate when he in this incarnation is gay. He survives right to the end, and isn't persecuted because of his sexuality, but the fact that the female lead isn't able to rekindle his initial incarnation's love for her is the main issue in the story. I don't want to dwell on this longer than necessary, mostly because I feel queasy knots of embarrassment twisting round me when I think about my early writing, plus this is a story I'll likely never revisit. But it's still worth mentioning, because it sums up something I was doing at the time; I wasn't being violent to LGBTQIA+ characters, but I wasn't exactly putting them in happy scenarios.

I think you can see through these examples that I was going through a stage of...how do I put this? Standard angsty storytelling? War, suffering, religious questioning, the tragedy of reincarnation, all that stuff. That didn't always focus down to specifically queer issues, but I'm sure people will see how queer characters can be magnets for them. I know this from personal experience writing. It wasn't until my earlier experiences of less problematic relationships that my own writing began to change. As I said last time, I was a sheltered type, and I was also shy of asking about those subjects with anyone close to me.

I also lacked emotional maturity. I hadn't known truly deep emotion, either for real people or fictional characters. I hadn't cried at media in any form. It took that kind of emotional connection for me to think "I want to create something that moves people and even saddens them without falling into the usual traps I'm seeing in popular media." There's enough sadness in the world of people on the spectrum, and while those are valid experiences, I wanted to create experiences that weren't built on heartbreak and abuse, tainted by sorrowful memories. I want experiences that are built in simple love, innocent happiness, the kind of thing straight love stories have held onto like vices for decades. Things are changing for the better, especially when you take a step back and look at the broader range of stories outside the narrow mainstream bubble, but there's still steps to take. And I'd like to live and see a day when both counterculture and mainstream can exist side by side, as equals.

So how did I get past this hang-up that I've outlined in both struggle and result? How did I manage to create worlds and universes that I was able to write more realistic and less tragic examples of the wonderful spectrum of existence? Well, you'll find out next week.

Writing Queer 1: unpromising beginnings

 The first of my four Pride Month posts, and it's on a personal note. It's how I began experiencing, and then writing, queer characters and story themes. I may have become relatively well immersed in that side of my writing these days, but it took some time and a few dud starts.

Coming to terms with my own bisexuality was a longish process, but in hindsight that feels like nothing compared to my journey getting myself to properly representing people in the modern world, where diversity of gender and sexual identity is something that is important to acknowledge. I've still got some way to go, and things have continued to get either better or worse depending where you live. But here's how things started. Beginning with...my own external experience of queerness.

My awareness of LGBTQIA+ in media was...lacking, for a lot of my life. Not because I didn't have exposure or tolerance, I had both within my immediately family, but just because a lot of my awareness came from media. I wasn't much of a going out and interacting with people type for a number of reasons, so I wasn't exposed to that spectrum. I also wasn't being exposed to standard society-level homophobia, so you could say I had some advantage in that I was able to look at something without any early filter of stereotype.

I guess it's best to start with my 'awakening', even if I didn't become fully aware of my sexuality until the last few years. A lot of people in my social circle have pointed to Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weitz in 1999's The Mummy as their bisexual awakening. More power to them, but honestly Fraser isn't my type, and when I saw the film I wasn't developed enough in that direction to understand. I now realise in retrospect that my own bi awakening was with Angelina Jolie and Gerard Butler from the not-very-good 2001 film Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. I didn't know why this film was stuck in the recesses of my mind for years until recently. A: the leads' chemistry surrounding their characters' tragic rivalry made up for shortfalls in the story and script, and B: ....I found both of them physically attractive.

So...that's a start.

My first exposure to anything explicitly queer within a story was...the 1985 film Red Sonja. I've voiced my opinions on an aspect of the film, and I don't think it's very good. It's just a bog standard 1980s fantasy film based on a fantasy tradition that today feels very dated. But Red Sonja was also my first exposure to a lesbian in the form of Queen Gedrun. A pretty dodgy example, and one I didn't clock. To me it just seemed like someone who took people as servants and trophies rather than as unwilling companions. As I said, I wasn't that aware. And so we've gone from one poor movie to another, and from standard awakening to 'YIKES!' representation.

I didn't keep much of an explicit track of my awareness of LGBTQIA+ in fiction, or in real life, until I was well into my 20s. There were a few bits and pieces that surfaced, such as short films which I tended not to like as they were just depressing (finding LGBTQIA+ media that isn't depressing was like finding hen's teeth until recently). And there were some creators coming out with what I found out was called 'Word of Gay', which I've come to look slant-eyed at because... I mean, if you wanted them to be on the spectrum, just say so. Show it in a way that doesn't require you to come out from behind the curtain and address the audience in an "oh, by the way" style.

At that point, I discovered video game romances, and exploring them found several queer options. I admit that includes BioWare, as cheesy as they can be, but role-playing these characters gave me a solid sense of what I liked and didn't like. Years later as a fully awakened bisexual I played Dragon Age Inquisition, and I ended up romancing first Cassandra as a man, then Iron Bull also as a man. I also have to commend both as the most entertaining romances since they both play in good ways with genre tropes; Cassandra was played as the nervous young woman without losing her badass aspect, while Iron Bull's BDSM relationship is based firmly in reality rather than...whatever Foofta Blegh of Blegh does.

A few years after that I'd also run into...yaoi and bara. It was almost inevitable that I would do that since I enjoyed anime, and was interested in stuff beyond the obvious mainstream. For those who don't know yet, 'Yaoi' is a Western term for Boy's Love media that is often written by women and has a reputation for being slightly trashy, while 'Bara' is a subset of Japanese manga that is primarily written by LGBTQIA+ authors and frequently NSFW.

I admit, here and now, that my shelves are a little bare of LGBTQIA+ content. Partly because I'm terrible at finding things and need to be selective due to budget, but also because many of the experiences I get recommended are also depressing. It's been the reality for queer people for a long time, particularly the last two centuries, that being queer was dangerous or depressing or to live in an oppressed state. But when I read a story, I don't just want to be depressed, I want to laugh and be enlightened and see a vision of how the world could be.

My own experience with being queer hasn't been depressing and oppressed, I've been allowed to mature and experience myself. I now have a full awareness of my self and my sympathies, and while I have occasionally run into homophobia in this wild place called the internet, I've never felt any push to engage. I just turned quietly away, blocked, didn't even say goodbye, and walked on ignoring them. That, for me, is the sign of strength for my own queer experience. I also don't feel the need to broadcast my sexuality on a personal level, as I'm overall comfortable with who I am. I fully realise that's not a universal experience. But neither is misery.

And it's with that strange combination of isolation and personal certainty, and growing frustration of a fictional norm of heartbreak and misery over happy endings, that I truly started putting queer characters into my writing. Next week, I'm planning an exploration of my journey to writing my own brand of queer representation in my writing. Its rocky beginnings, and its currently and hopefully much smoother reality.

If you want to know more about my general writing journey, I created a podcast/video on the subject, including me reading out some of my less cringy early writing to show how my style and approach evolved. It even includes a sample of my upcoming novel The Murderer's Lament, now expected to release in 2027.

The latest Author Talks: M. R. James

 It's the first Sunday of the month, so it's the day when I release the episode of my one-person podcast Author Talks, guaranteed no AI included. This time, it's a look at an author I've recently delved into both in his fictional writing, his life, and analysis of his work. That person is M. R. James, a father of the modern folk horror and maestro of the ghost story. Not only do I look over his work and what makes his work appealing, and how aspects of him and it haven't aged that well, but I also give an abridged reading of one of his stories. That story, 'The Mezzotint', is possibly one of the best introductions to the M. R. James short story.

YouTube link

Spotify link

Starting tomorrow: My Pride Month endeavours.

Third year in a row I've done this. A celebration of the beautiful rainbow of human experience many historians stubbornly insisted didn't exist for some odd reason and they also need therapy. For the month of June, AKA Pride Month, I decided in 2024 to highlight different people during the month's thirty days. I first focused on a mixture of novellists both old and new, then last year on other artistic groups including composers and painters. Now, for my third year, I....couldn't. I couldn't actually get anything together for either historical figures (so tragic) or mythological beings (plenty but oh boy the work). If I were completely on top of things, I would have been doing this. But I've been severely ill, and now I'm literally one day away from publishing this as I write it, so instead I'm going to do something else. Since there are four Sundays in the month this time, I'm going to be publishing a post each month. These posts will be talking about my experiences as I moved into writing queer characters in my own work.

My writing as it stands is stuffed with queer representation. The Cluster Cycle has main characters that are somewhere on the spectrum, my radio play The Angry House has a male lead, and I've written other shorter pieces that feature them. I'm also bisexual in real life, and while I'm prone towards pessimism when it comes to society, I truly feel that we can push back against the absolute BS that's happening in the world right now. We can stop this, if we just stubbornly refuse to be classed as lesser.

The first Sunday of the coming month will also see the release of the second in this year's Author Talks podcast episodes, which means there will be two posts on 7 June. I'm hoping I'll be back on my feet before the end of next week, and that I'll be able to give you some extra bits and pieces through my socials. I might even have an update on my third much-delayed Cluster Cycle book, The Murderer's Lament.

But for now, here's some interesting people I found while drafting my intended list of people to show on my socials for each day of Pride Month.

The Chevalière d'Éon, a member of the French court who lived as a man for the first part of her life, then switched in both dress and gender identity to a woman for the rest of it. A spy, soldier, and successful diplomat who sadly fell foul of the French Revolution, their legacy lives on.

Zhou Wenren (or Zhou Wen or Zhou Ren), the Director of Palace Attendants during the reign of Emperor Jing of China's Han Dynasty. While the information we have is a little spotty and comes from a single source where Zhou Wenren is listed among "Male Favourites" of the Han court, it's recorded that Emperor Jing favoured Zhou Wenren above all other officials around him. And unlike many other imperial lovers, Zhou Wenren managed to live to a cushy retirement under Emperor Wu.

Michael Dillon, a Merchant Navy doctor and later Buddhist monk. While he is more commonly known as the first recorded trans man to undergo phalloplasty, his life is interesting beyond that. From his time in the Merchant Navy during WW2, to his life as a monk under the name Lobzang Jivaka, to his writing on both his own life and his experiences or Tibetan Buddhism, Dillon is a fascinating individual to research.

Philolaus of Corinth, a Corinthian lawmaker who lived during the 700 BCE. Lover of the chariot racer Diocles, the two left Corinth and settled in Thebes, staying together for the rest of their lives. Philolaus is attributed with creating laws in Thebes which allowed two adult men to remain together as a couple beyond the time when pederastic tradition insisted they parted. He can be seen as a proto-gay rights lawmaker, though we must remember the times he lived in.

Historical accounts today and in olden times are chronically underwritten when it comes to women of any kind, let alone those on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Doesn't help that many initial English translators for non-English sources lived during a time of (if possible) even greater discrimination and phobia. But I hope you can look these few up and get some interesting information about them.

So, here's to Pride Month, starting tomorrow. And may we reclaim and enshrine for good the rights that are being slowly stripped back from us by idiotic, short-sighted, and/or prejudiced politicians and lawmakers.

Short story - Maybe Tomorrow

 Apathy is my attorney, and my prosecutor. My liberator and my jailer. As I approach a bus stop on the rainy street, a van decked in neon placards drives by. It’s showing part of a phrase which I read before I can tune it out. ‘Fifth consecutive term for...’. I know the name, don’t bother to think about it any more. Elections are a joke, votes are merely displays like damage numbers above an enemy that will respawn no matter what you do. And unlike in video games, life doesn’t give you a restart button, cheats, save states, or the ability to just put the game down if you’re too frustrated with it.

I stand at the bus stop, looking at the faces around me. My mother told me once that this place used to be diverse, full of people from across the world. Now Pantone 720 is literally everywhere. Even the beggars are card-carrying members of the great colonial host. So I am, on the surface. But my soul is not, though that counts for little. They digitise souls now in the great silicon farms that we must conserve energy for lest they lose a few nanoseconds of profit. The same music plays. They don’t import music any more. Or anything. They don’t export either.

I step aboard the bus, settle down, watch. Something shows in the bus screens, a new update from someone I don’t need to remember. It is a declaration that we are strong, we are beautiful, we lead the world. No-one has left our country for nearly a decade, and no-one visits us any more. But that doesn’t matter because I am told everything is good, everything is perfect. We founded this country, we reached the Moon, we discovered everything that the rest of the world insists it did first. Our leaders won fair and square even when people say they didn’t.

I say apathy is many things. Because it coddles me from what is around me, and stops me from doing anything else. There is much that I might say, but I do not. What is the point for me? Others do speak, and I believe they are findable amid the new AI actors and AI films and AI bibles and AI policies. They’re throwing another AI ball next week for the Silicon Giants. I’ll never be invited, but I watch. That dress is nice. That suit is nice. Why is that person at the back being clubbed? It doesn’t matter to me. That shirt is nice.

Somewhere a siren howls. Somewhere people are screaming. I don’t look at the bus’s bulletin board as it flashes red. Maybe the leader needed to talk about their latest social media post. They do that a lot these days, from their wheelchair with pipes covering all parts of their body. How old are they now? It doesn’t matter, they are healthy and always will be healthy. They aren’t riddled with heart trouble, dementia, or anything else. They are healthy, and we believe they are healthy.

My apartment is at the top of the building, where no-one can get to for cleaning. I accept it, it is my pay grade. I accept that this world will not change, that people will not change. People used to talk about change, but that shifted. Someone said something about rigging, another person said germs were good, another said life began before it began and must be respected. My mother died giving birth after someone made her pregnant against her will. We don’t mind. It is as we are told, and as we are instructed to believe.

My social media feeds are exploding as I ascend in the lift. A new trend, a new mega ultra super important thing is happening somewhere for someone. I must be part of it or I shall be missing out. Play this game, be outraged at this comment, follow this fashion trend, scream this song at the top of your voice. This is the new hotness, and I can’t smile. Why smile at something that has happened a million times before? And always with the same words, rearranged to fit.

I enter my apartment. It smells odd, but then it always smells like something. We are told the situation will improve, that we shall be fed more, that we shall extend into the infinite horizon.

The smell is coming from the further side of my apartment. I look at the hole there. It wasn’t there before, a hole I barely remember. It is a hole in my room, in my world, in my life. A hole through to the next apartment, which is blackened and melted into nothing. Somewhere again a siren is howling, somewhere else again people are screaming. Nothing for me to worry about. No-one on my social level has anything to worry about.

I lie down on the bed, and go to sleep, ignoring a new blast of sirens in the streets. Something very bright happening outside. Maybe I’ll find out what happened. Maybe tomorrow.