Thursday, March 16, 2017

Planning on writing a gay novel? (expanded version)

If you are planning on writing a gay novel, take this simple quiz to see whether you should proceed.
  2. Will you expose the reader to intricate details about the characters’ partying and sex lives but never tell the reader what they do for a living?
  3. If you do tell the reader what they do for a living, will it be limited to entry-level jobs, despite the characters' ages?
  4. How about the military or the police, unless relevant to the plot?
  5. How about sex work?
  6. Will you just make your characters independently wealthy?
  7. Will you make a character a student but never say what his major is or what he plans to do with it?
  8. Will a plot point be set in a location that you have never visited and cannot be bothered to research?
  9. Do you dismiss out of hand the need to research any location that is not New York City, San Francisco, or a part of Los Angeles County?
  10. Will the protagonist be impossibly gorgeous and universally desired?
  11. Will he be a Mary-Sue version of you? 
  12. Will the book be centered on his inner life, even though he doesn’t have one?
  15. Will he see everything, do most of it, and never learn from his experiences?
  16. Will he bewail a fate that is a foreseeable consequence of the way he chooses to live his life?
  17. Will he pine for an unattainable man whom he attains at the end?
  18. Will his moral code effectively be "It's okay when I do it"?
  19. Will the reader know what he looks like because he looks at himself in the mirror and describes himself in his mind?
  20. Will you provide another major character simply as a foil for the protagonist’s fabulousness?
  21. Will the protagonist and his love interest be the most physically attractive men in every room?
  22. Will you tell the reader that they have buff bodies but not mention that they expend any effort to maintain them?
  23. Will they be 100% sexually compatible upon meeting and remain so over time?
  24. Will the protagonist’s partying and sex life be the only reasons for the reader to care what happens to him?
  25. Will your characters have no hobbies or interests apart from partying, sex, and either being gorgeous or admiring gorgeous men?
  26. Will one of the characters be a magical “other” (person of color, lesbian, Jew, gender-nonconforming person, what have you) who sets the white, cis, male, nominally Christian protagonist on the right path?
  27. Will one of the characters be a designated villain, even though he never does anything particularly bad?
  28. How about a designated hero, even though he never does anything particularly good or behaves no better than the villain?
  29. Will you designate heroes and villains through physical attractiveness, penis size, or, heaven help you, both?
  31. How about a crazy right-winger who turns out to be gay?
  32. How about a politically correct puritan who turns out to be a whore?
  33. How about someone with a trendy name that is unlikely given when and where he was born?
  34. How about a lesbian who coaches a sports team or teaches physical education or women’s studies?
  35. Would it surprise you to learn that a lesbian can teach physics?
  36. Would it surprise you to learn that a gay man can teach anything?
  37. If one of the characters starts out devoutly religious and later leaves his faith, you will simply state that he has done so instead of showing us his thought processes as he does so?
  38. Do you take it for granted that all gay men are attracted to the same physical type?
  39. If one character is a gay man who is attracted to a different physical type from everyone else, will you use his attraction to that different physical type for comic relief?
  40. Do you only think you know what anal sex is like the first few times? Yes, Annie Proulx, you have to answer this one.
  41. Will at least one character be a gay man based on stereotypes of heterosexual women?
  42. How about a heterosexual woman based on stereotypes of gay men?
  43. Will your novel read like a novelization of a Hallmark Channel movie, except that the love interests are both male and that there is at least one sex scene?
  44. Do you think that you can get away with converting someone else’s heterosexual novel into your gay novel just by changing the first name and pronouns of one of the love interests?
  45. If you are not a gay man, do you refuse to care whether gay men will regard your novel as realistic portrayals of gay male life?
  46. If you are not a gay man, do you think that you have a special insight into the gay male experience that gay men need to hear and that you are, for whatever reason, the one to share that insight with them?
  47. Would your novel make more sense if one of the gay male characters were rewritten as a heterosexual woman who had magically acquired a penis and wanted to try it on a man?
  48. Will part of the plot or exposition center on a religion with which you are familiar solely through pop-cultural osmosis and whose doctrines and practices you cannot be bothered to research? Yes, Christianity and its denominations count.
  49. Will the characters engage in dialog that no one would say in real life, just so that you can make a point?
  50. Will something happen that would never happen in real life, just so that you can make a point?
  51. Will you make a point simply by having the protagonist state it as a self-evident truth?
  52. How about by having the protagonist attack straw-man counterarguments?
  53. How about by appealing to ridicule?
  54. Will the protagonist often get into political or cultural arguments and never lose?
  55. Will the protagonist criticize a viewpoint that you consider to be wrong or offensive and, in the process, inadvertently defend an even worse viewpoint?
  56. When the protagonist makes your point for you, will the other characters immediately fall into line, as though you novel were a Chick tract?
  57. Are you writing your novel to make a point for which the only evidence will be your novel?
  58. Will your novel make a point that will make you a darling of anti-gay social conservatives?
  59. Will everyone have HIV?
  60. Alternatively, will your novel be set in a parallel universe in which, even though it is well after 1981, no one has ever heard of HIV?
  61. How about a parallel universe in which no one has ever heard of any STI other than HIV?
  62. Will the protagonist’s HIV status be the only reason for the reader to care what happens to him?
  63. Will you include gratuitous praise of lesbians based on comparing gay men as they live in the real world to lesbians as they exist only in theory?
  64. Do you refuse to care how human nature works?
  65. Will you willfully rewrite human nature just to make a point?
  66. Just because one letter in the LGBTQUIMOUSE+++ alphabet soup applies to you, do you consider yourself qualified to be a spokesperson for everyone in the soup?
  67. Will you have characters of multiple races, ethnicities, religions, or socioeconomic categories just as tokens?
  68. Will you have characters of multiple races, ethnicities, religions, or socioeconomic categories who speak and behave in stereotyped ways rather than being fully fleshed-out characters?
  69. Will you have characters of multiple races, ethnicities, religions, or socioeconomic categories who never express differing perspectives or opinions?
  70. Will you have an important character who is transgender but not bother to find out what transitioning entails?
  71. Do you believe that a person’s identity categories tell everything there is to know about that person, including that person’s speech patterns and that person’s opinions on religion and politics?
  72. Do you believe that you have something new to say solely because of the intersection of your identity categories?
  73. Will your characters’ religions be solely identity categories that have nothing to do with what they believe or practice?
  74. Will you use your characters’ religions as a way to designate heroes and villains?
  75. Will you use your characters’ kinks for that purpose?
  76. Will you use a character’s kink for comic relief?
  77. Does “Tell; don’t show” make sense to you?
  78. Are you writing your novel just to capitalize on the success of a popular novel by someone else or a popular TV series?
  79. Will the ending make no sense in the context of the rest of the novel?
  80. Will your novel make just as much sense if the dog eats fifty pages?
How to score: If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, I suggest that you not write your novel.
Shamelessly ripped off from Inspired by The Fantasy Novelist's Exam.

No comments: