By Scott Bury 
No.
The world presented is the world that
advertisers feel they can sell to easily: white people with lots of disposable
income for designer cars, clothes and computers.
Best-selling indie author Martin Crosbie
has invited some Canadian writers, including me, to answer the question: is the
Canada he knows, that we all know, represented in the mass media?
He doesn’t see the country he knows in the
major newspapers or magazines of the country. Another writer, Karen Magill of
Vancouver, added that Canadian writers, like Canadians generally, feel an
inferiority complex compared to the media dominance of the US, and as a result
aren’t as eager to write about their own country. She writes that she as advised
to set her novel, Missing Flowers, in a US city, rather than in Vancouver,
British Columbia — her home town.
In my guest post, I wrote that neither the
news media nor entertainment media reflect the country that I see around me. I
touched on the types of professions in fiction, the settings, and about how
closed commercial publishers are to new voices.
But indie authors are also missing
something important. It seems that, in chasing that big audience, many indie
authors are aping the conventions followed by mass publishers. As a result,
indie fiction does not reflect the world that I see around me.
What’s
missing? Diversity.
I know that many of my readers are writers
themselves. I’ve been reading a lot of indie fiction lately, and unfortunately,
many writers fall into some stereotyping traps. Most of the characters’ names
are English, or occasionally Irish or Scottish. Cops are sometimes Italian or
Polish. I’ve come across a smattering of Hispanic women TV reporters, for some
reason, but almost no African-American characters.
Why is that? Whom do indie writers think
they’re writing for?
I live in a major, modern North American
city in the 21st century. The people that I live and work among come
from, literally, around the world. Almost half the people I grew up with were
immigrants, or their parents were. When I taught in college, my students came
from China, Taiwan, Jamaica, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Iraq, Bolivia, Mexico, the US;
in my neighbourhood, people come from India, Norway, Jamaica, Finland and China. And some were First
Nations, Metis or Inuit.
If you’re reading this on the bus, subway,
metro, train or ferry, look around: how many of your fellow commuters are
white, of British extraction? Or are there people you can see are Asian, South
Asian, African or Hispanic?
Think about your neighbours. How many of
them have English last names? How many more are non-English? Sure, English may
be the largest single ethnic group, but they’re not more than half anymore — I
don’t even think that you’ll find a majority of English last names in most
neighbourhoods in England, anymore.
Write
what you know
Open your eyes, and write stories that
reflect the world you live in. It’s not what’s in the mass media. And the only
way we’re going to have an impact on this warped reflection is if we start to
write about what is really in front of our eyes.
What do you think? How can writers start to
reflect the country, the world, the reality that’s right around us, right now?
Leave a comment.
Scott Bury
is a journalist, editor and writer living in Ottawa. His articles have appeared
in newspapers and magazines in Canada, the US, UK and Australia, includingMacworld,
the OttawaCitizen, the Financial
Post, Marketing, Canadian Printer, Applied Arts, PEM, Workplace, Advanced
Manufacturing and others. His books include The Bones of the Earth, One Shade of Red, Sam,the Strawb Part and Dark Clouds.
You can follow his blog, Written Words, or his Facebook page, and on
Twitter @ScottTheWriter.
Siggy Buckley
