Advice Column: Write As Though You Are The Majority

A few weeks ago, I shared the image on the right from my Facebook memories. It's a Twitter screencap
from Berkeley-based novelist and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen, the text of which reads "Writers from a minority, write as if you are the majority. Do not explain. Do not cater. Do not translate. Do not apologize. Assume everyone know what you are talking about, as the majority does. Write with all the privileges of the majority, but with the humility of a minority." In response to this, Will asks "Sure, you say that. What would that even look like? How would we know?" 

When I was in grad school, there was a quote that got handed around a lot, usually without attribution, about how you should write your story to the smartest friend you have. As far as I can tell, this is from Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot (none of which I have read), who said "I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you're writing the best letter you ever wrote, to the smartest friend you have. That way, you'll never dumb things down. You won't have to explain things that need explaining. You'll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don't with to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not "audience". Not "readership". Just the reader." Now, Jeffrey Eugenides is pretty much a white dude, and was probably not thinking about writing as a minority when he said this, but it's a decent starting point. Your smartest friend is probably from at last some of the same marginalized demographics you are, and if not, is almost certainly about as familiar with that set of experiences as an outsider reasonably can be. 

For example, if you're queer, chances are most of the people close to you are also queer. When sharing an anecdote with them, you do not stop to explain what it means that someone is genderfluid, or the awkward way the lesbian community relates to trans-masculinity, or why it's funny that everyone in this story plays table tennis ("table tennis"). You don't bother telling them what the Plaid Shirt of Plausible Deniability is. Sure, every once in a while you get some inexplicably old fucker like me who's been out of touch for a while and is now like "Wait, what's stargender? When did that happen?" but honestly falling off the map for a few years only to come back and find that half the terminology has changed while you weren't looking is also a queer mood, so. I think the first and simplest part of this is to not explain anything that someone from within your marginalized community or demographic wouldn't need explained. Use the terminology without defining it, make the inside jokes, don't explain the significance of things the significance of which would be obvious to an insider. 

There is a moment in Sick Kids in Love by Hannah Moscowitz, where protagonist Ibby texts Sasha to tell him that her latest round of bloodwork shows a negative CRP and normal sed rate. Sasha texts back something along the lines of "Wow, that's really frustrating". Moscowitz does not tell us, though Ibby's first person narration, that these "good" test results mean she still has no answers or new avenues of treatment for the pain she continues to experience. She does not need to explain it, because just about every person who has had an undiagnosed chronic illness, or symptoms not explained by existing diagnoses, is already familiar with this, and the only reason to unpack it would be to make it more legible to healthy people. While Yoon Ha Lee does not have what anyone would call a sterling track record on deciding what ought or oughtn't be explained, Dragon Pearl nonetheless contains an excellent example of how this can work in a speculative context. The spaceship, we are told, has energy meridians, just as the human body does. No explanation of what energy meridians are in the human body, where they are or how they work, is provided. This is treated as common knowledge, something the reader knows or ought to know. I don't know if the same impulse underlies both of these examples. I am pretty damn sure that in Sick Kids In Love, Ibby's frustration, and Sasha's immediate understanding of it, goes unexplained in part because to explain it would be to make it alienating to that part of the readership who should feel welcomed by the text, reminding them that their experiences are generally considered to require explanation, and privileging the comfort of healthy readers over their need to feel seen and recognized. I am less well-equipped to say whether the non-explanation of energy meridians in Dragon Pearl comes from a similar place. 

Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash   

One might consider also what cultural institutions one would generally not explain - what could instead either be particularized or left totally unexamined. Obvious examples, at least for someone writing in English in the United States, include Christmas and high school. We might, depending on the piece, elaborate on the unique Christmas traditions of a character's family, or explain what Christmas might look like In Space. So too might we contrast urban high schools with rural, suburban, or small town ones, or describe the specific experience of attending high school when one is gay, or a mobility aid user, or address how high school is different in a dystopia, or a world where everyone knows magic exists. But you don't have to explain that Christmas is a public holiday technically celebrating the birth of the Christian Messiah, but that it is a) highly syncretic, with its narrative, its date, and many of its central rituals all drawing from different traditions and b) increasingly commercial and secularized, much less that a small but vocal subset of those who celebrate it are at once totally unaware of A and extremely upset about B. And even here, I've left out a great deal because you don't need to explain Christmas. Everyone knows what Christmas is. 

(*Looks pointedly at the guy in the third row with his hand up* Yes, yes, you could explain it, and potentially do so to good artistic effect because defamiliarization is a real thing. You're very clever. That's not what this post is about. You may be excused for the remainder of the period to try your hand at writing it. Let this narrative conceit of this digression stand as evidence that you don't need to explain high school either.)

I would go so far as to suggest that the kind of extrapolation and particularization described above is, if not actually dependent upon, certainly facilitated by, leaving the general structure and function of a thing unexplained, if only because the general explanation will take space on the page, time and attention, away from the specifics. So, one way this might look is to give your own cultural institutions, whether that's celebrating Mabon or hanging out at the drop-in center, as little explanation as you would Christmas or high school. Get into this specifics of this coven's Mabon ritual, or the rules at this drop-in center, if it matters and it's interesting, or simply let it exist as an unexamined backdrop to the story, book, or scene you're writing, proceeding as though the implications and impact are clear. 

The tendency to explain everything that isn't generally normalized and widely understood within the majority culture can be oddly difficult to check, and to differentiate from the way first-person and close third focalizers often explain and interpret their own lives to themselves as though go through the events of the story. If you have access to a classroom full of creative writing BA or MFA students, one approach can be to respond in a deliberately perverse manner to their feedback. Where they say "Oh, this is so interesting, I wish you told us more about this" absolutely do not explain further. Consider revising to explain less. Where they say "I don't know what this is" or "I don't think the average reader would get this" make a note of it, and include more of whatever that was. If they say they think this ought to be its own story rather than a subplot (or a subplot instead of an offhand detail), include whatever it was as an incidental element in your next several pieces. Be a little confrontational about it, and then keep doing the parts that feel good. (I wrote 2/3 of a novel, constituting the whole of what I feel was a pretty solid Master's thesis operating almost wholly on the principals described in this paragraph). 

Photo by Parastoo Maleki on Unsplash

What shorthand, vocabulary, or actual languages do you and your friends, or your family, all have?
What quotes, songs, stories and names would everyone immediately recognize. It may feel awkward or vaguely inappropriate, to include that stuff without translating or explaining, so if you find that it doesn't quite come as easily as the leaves to a tree, try doing it on purpose, even making and editing pass just to add it in, or to remove explanations, and then see how you feel about the result. (See, the leaves thing was a Keats reference, because I am a mostly-white English major, and I have therefore every reasonable expectation that I can reference Keats without an explanation, or even a citation, and more or less be understood. I would have gone for Shakespeare, but I couldn't readily think of anything applicable.)

We're trained from the beginnings of our literacy that some information, some ways of looking at the world, are normal and obvious, and others must be explained to the reader. Before we are expected to write more than short answers on a worksheet, we are given a framework for which lived experiences fit tidily into those spaces and which require more words, an extra sheet of paper, perhaps an alternate assignment. (I am thinking here of questions like "Where did your family come to the US from?" and anything that assumes you have two parents of different genders). When we begin writing essays, we are told that we need not cite common knowledge, and given some pretty specific ideas about what that is and isn't. On the one hand, this creates a kind of linguistic and creative muscle memory that we will, in this endeavor, need to work against, but it can also give us a starting point for what writing as though we are the majority might look like. The sense that what we are saying requires additional explanation, or even defense, can guide us towards exactly what needs to be presented matter-of-factly, without catering to the unfamiliarity a reader from the majority might have, without apologizing for being different or indulging their fascinated desire to be let into a world that isn't theirs. (There is, of course, a place for stories meant to give privileged readers a window into our worlds, it just isn't what we're talking about here, and it's important to remain clear in our purpose one way or the other, and to resist feedback that assumes this must be the focus of any story that describes, explores, or even includes our experiences as marginalized people). 

You asked how we would know, and personally the internal sensation I find most reliably indicative is a kind of spirit of Fight Me, similar but not identical to the one that prompts me to put cacti and pencils in an epic fantasy novel. Anxiety about being misunderstood can be another indicator. If you don't find that your emotions are a reliable guide, and you either don't have access to a bunch of condescending white people or straight people or whatever, or prefer to work from a less contrary principle, you can also try running your work by members of your own community. You may need to explain what you're going for, to get the input you need. 

So, to quickly recap:

• Use your terminology without defining it. 
• Invoke Moods specific to your demographic. 
• Make in-jokes
• Reference your community's texts and history like everyone should know what you're talking about. 
• Treat cultural institutions, spaces, events, and rituals as though their basic significance and activities are well-understood. 
• Run your work by people outside and inside your minority group, to make sure the former are confused and the latter get what you're talking about. 

I hope this helps. Remember to send me questions for next time. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.