I run a fast-paced flash fiction contest for the Codex writers’ group called Weekend Warrior. One of the top-placing stories this year was from Tina Connolly. I’m not surprised that it sold; it’s awesome. It’s at Brain Harvest, a great new sf/f flash fiction magazine.

Here, go read it. Hard Choices. It’s less than 750 words. And you might get eaten.

Since a few people asked how long it took me to do those stats: 133 characters took roughly 5 hours (some of which was fighting with Excel, which I’m not good at).

Aliettedb reports her results–172 characters took her about 2 hours. I guess she’s smarter than me. 🙂 Marshallpayne1’s results for 107 characters took 3 hours.

So if anyone was thinking about trying this, but worried it’d take too long–it’s easier than it looks. If you’ve got a ton of stories, you could limit it to only the last two years or whatever makes sense to you. I didn’t count anything in my finished drafts, for example–just published and circulating stories.

This is a follow-up to my previous post analyzing the diversity of my stories.

Countesslovlace suggested looking only at my protagonists to see how diverse they were. Good idea. So let’s see.

Gender, Race, Sexual Orientation, Age, Class, and Ability by Protagonist.

40 protagonists. For aliens, I give their age as the approximate human equivalent. Remember that straight* means they show interest in the opposite sex, but we can’t rule out bisexuality.

45.0% female, 52.5% male, 2.5% other (machine)
30.0% Caucasian, 45.0% unknown, 15.0% people of color, 10.0% other (aliens, machine)
60.0% straight or straight*, 15.0% GLBT, 25.0% unknown
5.0% age 01-17, 52.5% age 18-35, 22.5% age 36-65, 10.0% age 66+, 10.0% other
25.0% upper, 25.0% middle, 45.0% working, 5.0% other
80.0% able or implied able, 20.0% disabled

I’ll also provide raw data so you can see how the characteristics line up with each other. I average 3.325 characters per story. (These are named characters and/or significant characters, not walk-ons.)

RAW DATA ON PROTAGONISTS

female, Native American, straight*, 18-35, working, able
male, Caucasian, straight, 36-65, upper, able
male, unknown, GLBT, 36-65, upper, able
female, unknown, straight, 18-35, middle, able
female, unknown, GLBT, 36-65, middle, able
female, Caucasian, straight*, 18-35, working, disabled
male, alien, unknown, unknown, upper, able
male, unknown, GLBT, 18-35, working, disabled
female, unknown, straight*, 18-35, working, able
female, Caucasian, unknown, 18-35, working, disabled
male, Caucasian, GLBT, 66+, middle, able
male, Caucasian, straight, 36-65, upper, able
male, Asian-American, unknown, 18-35, upper, able
male, unknown, straight*, 18-35, upper, able
female, unknown, straight*, 18-35, working, able
female, Caucasian, straight, 66+, middle, disabled
female, unknown, straight*, 18-35, working, able
male, alien, unknown, 18-35, working, disabled
male, unknown, straight*, 36-65, middle, able
male, unknown, unknown, 36-65, working, able
female, Hispanic, unknown, 18-35, upper, able
male, unknown, straight, 18-35, working, able
male, unknown, straight*, 36-65, middle, able
female, Caucasian, straight, 66+, middle, able
male, Caucasian, unknown, 18-35, middle, able
male, Caucasian, straight, 18-35, working, able
male, Caucasian, unknown, 0-17, middle, able
male, unknown, straight*, unknown, upper, able
male, alien, straight, 18-35, working, able
female, unknown, straight*, varies, varies, able
female, Caucasian, straight, 66+, working, disabled
male, African-American, unknown, 36-65, upper, able
female, Caucasian, GLBT, 18-35, working, disabled
male, Arab, straight, 36-65, working, able
female, unknown, straight, 18-35, working, disabled
female, unknown, straight*, 18-35, upper, able
male, unknown, straight*, 0-17, working, able
female, unknown, straight*, 18-35, middle, able
female, Asian, unknown, 18-35, working, able
other, machine, unknown, n/a, n/a, able

One story has no protagonist: Civilization.

I decided to put my money where my mouth is. I’ve said I’m committed to diverse characters in my fiction. Am I doing it?

I analyzed all of my published and circulating stories. I tracked six attributes:

1. Gender
2. Race
3. Sexual orientation
4. Age
5. Class
6. Ability/disability

I looked at 133 characters. Some of the classifications were tough. What class is a human girl trapped in a deer’s body? Is an alien in the bathroom faucet part of the working class? Are deities fully able, by definition?

Anyway. I did my best to sort it out, and here are the results.

1. GENDER

42.9% female
51.8% male
5.3% other (aliens, machines, divine beings)

Pretty straightforward.

2. RACE

The trouble here is that race is often not mentioned, especially if the protagonist is the narrator. I went solely with what’s written on the page (not what was in my head as the author). Very few racial indicators are explicitly mentioned, but sometimes they can be inferred from context and story. For example, a Polish Christian is reasonably likely to be Caucasian; an 11th century Islamic ceramics merchant is pretty likely to be Arab. “Unknown” means that there are no clues whatsoever about race in the text.

33.8% Caucasian
6.0% Asian/Asian-American
6.0% Divine
5.3% Alien
4.5% Native American
3.8% Arab/Arab-American
3.8% Hispanic
3.0% African/African-American
1.5% Machine
32.3% Unknown

Given that “white is the default” and many readers assume white characters unless told otherwise, here’s another way to look at those numbers:

66.1% white, actual or implied/defaulted
21.1% people of color
12.8% unclassifiable

I’m not saying that any character whose race goes unmentioned must be white. However, it’s worth noting that some readers will perceive the numbers this way.

3. SEXUAL ORIENTATION

While sexual orientation isn’t always explicit either, I found it easier to infer a character’s identity based on their thoughts. At least that’s true in my stories, which might be because I write about love and romance a lot. So here I have two kinds of straight: Straight which is “quite likely heterosexual”, and straight* which is “the character shows interest in the opposite sex, but we can’t rule out bisexuality.” Unknown means there’s no indication in any direction.

17.3% straight
31.6% straight* (could be bisexual)
9.0% GLBT
57.9% unknown

By the same logic as above (that many readers assume heterosexuality unless told otherwise) it looks like this:

91.0% straight
9.0% GLBT

If you’re curious, it’s 4 bisexual, 4 gay, 3 lesbian, and 1 transgendered character.

4. AGE

I thought I’d see if I was defaulting to young heroes and heroines, or representing a wider part of the population. Most ages were possible to infer from the text.

12.8% ages 0-17
42.1% ages 18-35
24.1% ages 36-65
5.3% ages 66+
6.8% n/a (mostly divine beings and machines)
6.0% unknown
2.9% varies (the story covers full lifetimes)

The number categories are somewhat arbitrary.

5. CLASS

I was surprised at how easy this was to infer from characters’ access to resources, regardless of what the story was about.

0.8% ruling class
21.8% upper class
17.3% middle class
44.2% working class
8.3% n/a (mostly divine beings and machines)
5.3% unknown
2.3% varies (the story covers full lifetimes)

These categories are nebulous. I just did my best to sort characters based on their jobs, living conditions, histories, and so on.

6. ABILITY

This category was tricky, because you can’t really say a character is fully able without knowing a lot about them. So there’s only two categories here.

88.0% able or implied able
12.0% disabled

The disabilities included cerebral palsy, deafness, mental illness, chronic pain, depression, social anxiety, limited movement, speech impediments, epilepsy, and others.

CONCLUSIONS

I’ll let you draw your own.

But here’s what I learned. Diversity matters. Reflecting the real world matters. Just the act of sorting all my characters increased my awareness of these issues. It brought up questions and assumptions in my mind. Is class a matter of income, lifestyle, or both? If I write sexual orientation clearly in my fiction and race not so often, does that reflect my own experience as a queer white writer or does it reflect inherent differences in the nature of those two “isms”? And on a side note, where the heck are all my Jewish characters? Maybe that’s just chance…

Anyway, I was surprised at how many working-class and disabled characters appeared in my fiction. I was also surprised at how few people of color and older characters populated my stories.

Overall, the number-crunching didn’t take very long (perhaps five hours), and it was well worth it for the learning experience.

I certainly don’t think writers should shove diversity in people’s faces. But there’s plenty of ways to give subtle cues that work very well. Like these:

Blatant bad example: “Johnny looked in the mirror. Yep. Still Mexican.”
Better example: “Johnny smelled home when he entered the kitchen. Only his mother’s cooking smelled like roast turkey, enchiladas, and horchata on Thanksgiving Day.”

I’ve heard the arguments that class/race/whatever is often irrelevant to a character in a story. Sure, that’s true sometimes. I hate stories where a character “needs” to be female (for example) simply because she must fall in love or get pregnant, and heaven help us if we have a female starship captain just for the heck of it.

But really, all these social elements influence a character’s outlook and interaction with the world. And while sometimes they aren’t explicit, they do influence the character’s experience. They’re part of that character and they deserve our respect as writers and readers.

Effectively, here’s what this means for writers: If you know your character’s background, you have a tool for making that character come to life in your story. If you don’t, that character will tend to reflect your own experience–and that’s often why characters come out flat or indistinguishable, rather than as individuals that readers love as real people. And for readers: Question your assumptions. Are you assuming that character is just like you? Did you stop to think about it?

Comments? Questions? Other stats I should try to pull from these numbers?

I just re-submitted 7 stories to various markets this morning. I have 2 that I’ll send tomorrow (the markets don’t open until June 1). I have 2 left in inventory that I can’t find a home for at the moment, but I’ll keep looking. I have 4 stories that are nearly ready to send out for the first time once I finish revising them, which I hope will happen this week.

To quote Rayman Raving Rabbids, “DAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

Everyone else who got the con crud at WisCon is saying, “It’s only a minor cold, not a big deal.”

I haven’t been this sick since norovirus. Now my voice loss is total, and I’m coughing up all sorts of crap and sleeping most of the day. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like a very small brick had lodged itself in my sinuses.

Not that I want anyone else to be sick too, but this sucks!

In other news of whining, I may have to take a sledgehammer to the laundry room. It’s not like the machines ever work anyway.

A fantastic con, as always. I’m home now and I’ve got con crud. It’s a nasty cough, sore throat, and near-total laryngitis. I’m prone to losing my voice. It happens once every 2-3 years or so. It always feels weird to me when I can type but not talk.

Beats the hell out of norovirus, though. 🙂

Hello to everyone I met this year!

Fri 9 AM -12 PM Writers’ Workshop

Sat 11:30 AM – 1 PM Journeyman Writers’ Discussion

Sat 4 PM – 5:30 PM Taboo 2: Electric Bugaloo

Sun 2:30 PM – 4 PM Young Writer Q&A

Mon 10 AM – 11:30 AM Getting It Wrong Gracefully

I’ll be reading in Taboo 2: Electric Bugaloo. It’s the sequel to last year’s Taboo reading. We’ll read our edgiest work and won’t pull any punches. The readers are myself, Ted Kosmatka, Rachel Swirsky, and Jennifer Pelland. Last year, we made the audience cringe–but everyone stayed to hear more. Stories involved worshipping feces, kissing dead dogs, and other taboo topics.

Taboo 2 will be from 4:00-5:30 PM on Saturday in Conference Room 2. We’ll be raffling off prizes again. Come hear what our new Taboos are.

I’ll be reading “Fulgurite,” which is published in the brand-new Sybil’s Garage #6.

Here’s the opening paragraph.

Fulgurite
by Vylar Kaftan

JULY 11

I will be struck by lightning on July 13. I know this because I saw a unicorn in the desert sky earlier tonight. Its cockroach body and feathered wings cast shadows on the ground. Lightning forked from its horn, like decisions in my life. Decision to move to Phoenix: fork. Decision to finish my degree: fork. Decision to date Maddoc: fork. All the lives I rejected flash across the sky and are gone, except the one that will strike me. In two days, on a Thursday. Thursday the Thirteenth.

You’ll hear the whole story at the reading.

The 16 most horrific human growths of all time.

Work-safe, but not for the faint of heart. Seriously. I warned you.

And it’s further proof that I’m only squeamish about movies/motion. Still photos are pretty much fine, even when they’re gross. I feel sympathy for some of these people, especially the ones who can’t afford surgery.

I think the pine tree inside the guy’s lung is the one that freaked me out the most.