You know what pisses me off?
Okay, a lot of things, but today I’m going to get mad about generalizations.
It shows up a lot as dating advice, but it comes out in character critique, too, and it drives me up a damn tree.
“Men don’t like it when women (fill in the blank).”
“Women want (insert misogynistic BS here).”
“Children love (X,Y,Z).”
“Old people enjoy (cliche).”
“I notice your character does X,Y,Z, but I never X, Y, Z, so your character is not believable.”
Listen.
You can’t lump a group of people — ANY group of people — into this sort of black-and-white, they’re-all-the-same kind of category. And frankly, it makes me bonkers when people try. Everyone in the world is a little different, and just because you might know a couple folks that fit a cliche doesn’t mean the cliche fits everyone in that group.
The one that makes me the most nuts is the “women do/don’t always/ever do the thing your character just did.”
Excuse me?
Bras and makeup are the biggest ones, though behavior and subservience to men has come up before, too.
“Why isn’t your character wearing a bra? All women always wear bras.”
Really? Weird. I NEVER wear one, and last I checked, I’m a woman. In fact, several of my friends don’t wear them either — and yeah, they tell me they are women, too. I know women who always wear bras, too. And I even know some who wear them for certain occasions but not others. Almost like . . . individuals?
“Why isn’t your character wearing makeup? Women wear makeup.”
Again, weird. I almost never do. And when I do, it’s because it’s Halloween or because I’m going on stage for a performance. Not music performances — I usually don’t wear makeup for those, but I do wear makeup for acting or dancing performances.
“I don’t think what your character just said is believable. I would never say anything like that, especially not to a man.”
How very strange. I based that scene on an argument I had with a customer at work. I absolutely said that shit to him, because he needed to take a damn pill.
Cliches are cliches for a reason, of course, but assuming that every person in the world fits your idea of how they should be is just damn short-sighted. If anyone is going to write a book, they need to get that out of their heads right away, or they are going to write cardboard characters with wooden motives and stilted dialogue.
Half the fun of coming up with new characters is deciding what sorts of cliches they do and don’t fit, what kinds of people they are, and how you can show the reader that without resorting to things like “He was a man, so obviously he didn’t like riding in the passenger seat.” To me, statements like that reveal a lot more about the author than they do about the character. Namely that the author is the sort of person who says “How an anyone X?” Or “I just don’t understand (name) (type of person.)”
But even in real life, I feel like making assumptions about people based on age/gender/race/sexuality makes the people making those assumptions into less interesting, less compassionate people who are maybe less able to provide something they wish to provide.
As a simple example, the cook at the restaurant I worked at put a giant pickle on a little girl’s plate, because “children love pickles!” I, for one, hate pickles, and when I was a kid if a pickle touched my food I wouldn’t eat it. The cook absolutely could not believe that. She refused to let me take the pickle off the kid’s plate. So I went out and asked the little girl if she wanted a giant pickle. She made the nastiest yuck face I could imagine — the same face I probably make when asked the same question. Open-mouthed in shock, the cook took the pickle off the plate. The little girl was quite happy with her pickle-less lunch.
The cook in question loved kids — she loved having them in the restaurant, she loved making them food they would enjoy, she loved surprising them with little extras, and she loved when they left with a big smile. She almost made that little girl cry with her assumptions. Even kids can’t be lumped into simplistic categories. No, children do not love pickles! Hell, I knew a little girl who hated frosting.
Or there was my ex-boyfriend. No matter how many times I told him I don’t like cut flowers, he bought them for me all the time. He literally didn’t know what else to get me, and assumed that because I was a girl I must like flowers, and that when I said I didn’t I must be lying, because girls lie about gifts. Needless to say, he’s an ex for a reason. My current husband bought me a cordless drill for Christmas one year. There’s a reason I kept him.
Whether you are an author, or a cook who loves making plates for kids, or a boyfriend trying to do something nice, please keep in mind: there are “sorts” of people in the world, but what sort of person someone is quite a bit less broad than you might want to think.
