Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Hurray for stereotypes!So, yesterday I was in the coffee shop, pounding away on my Alfie, minding my own business, when...
WHOA.
Businessmen.
You know the sort. Short haircuts with a little salt-n-pepper gray (very Jon Stewart), nice dress slacks, hot blue oxford shirt, tie. Cell phone.
The hotness that is a business man. Buying coffee. Drinking coffee. Chatting about merger this and acquisition that...Patrick Bateman without the ax and blood-stained tennies....YUMMO.
It didn't help that I was writing a pretty hot m/f/m love scene.
Anyway, it got me thinking about stereotypes, and how we use them in our writing to portray heroes. Policemen, firemen, military men, cowboys...even vamps and werewolves are gaining their own sort of "image", a picture that changes from story to story and author to author (or it should, anyway) but nevertheless allows us to easily slip into familiarity with a subject.
When we read a story about a cowboy or a cop, there's an expectation. A good story will take that expectation and twist it up, switch it around, but at the same time, MEET that expectation. Satisfy the reader, who quite obviously picked up the cop story because she or he...well, digs cops.
So how, as authors, do we manage this balancing act? How do we take a stereotype and set it on its head without sacrificing the parts that work so well? After all, it makes our jobs that much easier if our readers are already prepared to love our hero, hate our villain and identify with the heroine. Yet we don't want to give those same delightful readers another rehashed version of the same old story.
This is where it gets tricky. Not all authors manage it. Some write great stories, over and over and over again...change the names and descriptions and you've got a new book. Some try so hard not to fall into the pit of stereotyping that they leave the readers disappointed -- "Hey, I thought this was a cowboy book."
As authors, we struggle to be original. Creative. We work hard to build worlds, mold characters, create lives and struggles, tell stories. The last thing we like to hear is that we've fallen back on stereotypes (or archtypes, if you want to go there) to portray those voices in our heads.
But I say, embrace the stereotype! Make it your own! Have fun with it! Because having fun with it is the key to infusing your stereotypical characters with the life and uniqueness that will make them real and more than just another cowboy, cop or businessman.
You want to write about cowboys? Rough riders? Figure out what you like the best about them. Keep that. What do you like the least? Toss it. Throw in a bit of this and little of that, and what do you know...a cowboy story that satisfies a preconception while at the same time blows it out of the water.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out how to fit a businessman in my next project.
M
