Writing Outside "Accepted Boundaries"
“When I sit down to write, I am often plagued by that old question: ‘Why me?’ But then I remind myself of all the words that made a difference in my life—on love and grief and fear and triumph—and how they were all penned by people. You have a story to share, and you needn’t have experienced an alien abduction or won Olympic gold or scaled Kilimanjaro to be worthy of telling it. You are a human appealing to humans. That is more than enough.”— Caroline Cala Donofrio (interviewed in “Beyond”)
As a reader, I’m fascinated with literature that crosses accepted boundaries. Although sometimes I need the predictable, I’m more bored than soothed by it. I crave narrative that forsakes the known and narrators who face challenges to their security or accepted beliefs. Do you?
And as a writer, do you push your writing towards a similar edge?
We are driven by passion for a subject, a desire to explore the unknown. But what if it takes us into potentially dangerous territory?
Back in 2009, I wanted to write a story about a young woman crossing her personal boundaries of love. For many, even librarians, booksellers, and publishers, diversity was just tiptoeing in as a desirable aspect of our literature—or so I perceived. I tried to sell my novel to mainstream houses, but I heard back from publishers that it was too niche. Gay literature was listed by gay publishers. End of story.
I did find a publisher but I didn’t like the niche separating me from readers who might have seen a larger story than sexual identity—as I did. Traveling and exchanging chit-chat on a plane, I’d mention my novel.
My seatmate: What’s it about?
A young woman who discovers she’s gay when she falls in love with her best friend the same summer her brother is in a serious accident.
A pause, then: Sounds different/ interesting/ like something my weird niece might read. Not my kind of topic.
Privately outraged, back in 2009, I changed the way I described the novel. I described it as a family saga (which it was). Even now, it was not unreasonable to “sneak” my beautiful story under the radar, make it appear palatable to those who’d brush aside it because of one of its topics.
In 2023, things are different—or are they? Consider the success of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid which has 200K ratings on Amazon. Published 9 years later—maybe an indicator of how times have changed, that so many mainstream readers embrace a narrator who is a bisexual Hollywood star. Is it the Hollywood aspect? Is it the author’s fame? Is it times changing?
When my new novel, out next month, began its pre-publication journey and reviews started coming in, I felt a tiny flinch of dread. Would I be “punished” again for sharing one aspect of a character’s life—their sexual choice? Three women narrators, one hetero, one lesbian, one bi. Readers, and reviewers, came back with universally positive responses, so far. Amazing responses, by readers of all races, sexual identities, and class divisions. Have we evolved as a reading culture? I hope so. Maybe people just want a good story.
My outlier topic entered the book because I wanted to write about a belief—love is love—that runs strong through my life. It’s my story to share, as Donofrio says in the quote above.
But being an outlier, even in this small way, is not always comfortable. Now that my book is out in the world, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So this week, I interviewed two other authors, Jean Hey and Suzanne Dewitt Hall. Both have broken out of accepted norms with their writing, driven to write topics they feel they must share. I wanted to hear how much they felt times have changed—and what kind of risk us outliers still face.
What risks do you face in your writing today? Do you avoid writing topics you need to write, to keep the risk low?
Jean Hey comes from South Africa where she was a journalist. She’s published personal essays about living in South Africa under apartheid as a white woman, what that system of racism does to a person, and her experiences living in the U.S. as a white African American. She writes book reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books, which she says works an entirely different part of her brain. But at the moment all her energies are going into rewriting a family drama set in South Africa.
Jean: In 2019, I landed an excellent agent on the strength of my novel manuscript. But she wasn’t able to sell it. Publishers didn’t want to take a chance on a book about race written by a white woman. My agent actually said that had I been Black we would have had a far greater chance of success.
The whole issue of race had become such a lightning rod at that time. Publishers were afraid of selecting a book that might backfire on them.
Working on it again, I’ve made several improvements, including a key character recast as an American woman who can reflect on race from an American perspective. The novel is certainly stronger in this version, which shows the value of setting work aside for a couple of years and revisiting it.
Is writing about race a topic that specifically interests you? What’s it like writing about race in your life, as a South African?
Richard Russo once said at a conference that a person’s first eighteen years will influence what they write about for the rest of their life.
In my case, what I experienced growing up in South Africa was a culture steeped in the most blatant form of racism, and I struggled with how to live as a white person in that environment and how best to push against the system, which led ultimately to my coming to the U.S.
So I wouldn’t say that race as a topic specifically interests me, but rather, race is the hand I’ve been dealt. I write about it because I have to write about it.
There are so many topics that would be easier, particularly as a white woman, because how can I claim to truly understand a Black person’s perspective and what he or she has gone through? In my personal essays, I’ve wrestled with the insidious ways racism infiltrated me at a young age, and have had to do my own reckoning.
In your novel, which I’ve had the privilege of reading in draft and revision, you write very skillfully from the pov of black women. Does this cause any feeling of unease or risk for you? Why or why not? Why do you want to include the South African black pov in the book?
The first draft of this novel did not have a Black person’s point of view because honestly, I didn’t feel I had the authority or ability to write from a Black African perspective. But then I realized that to write a novel that deals with race and only have white voices made no sense. Now the story is told from several points of view, including a Black domestic worker who witnesses the fracturing of the white family that she works for and goes through her own crisis. The hardest part for me is portraying this woman in her own life away from the white family. I’m always apprehensive that I’ll get something wrong because I haven’t lived this woman’s life, or that I’ll stray into some sort of stereotype.
I’ve spent a lot of time in South Africa observing, and talking to people, and also have done a sizeable amount of research into Black township life. Then, as with all character development, I used my imagination and skills of empathy to get inside this particular person’s experience. There’s still the risk of the publishing world turning down the manuscript (again!) because of concerns about appropriation. We all know what happened to American Dirt. But I know this story needs her voice, so I’m willing to take the risk.
I also find myself bristling at questions of who has the right to tell what story, because fiction is all about imagining lives that aren’t ours, and the more we all imagine lives not our own, the more likely that we can have empathy for one another.
How have you personally broken past the accepted boundaries for writing about another race, especially in pov characters?
I’m not sure I have broken past the boundaries for writing about another race, but I’ve tried to convince myself that it’s no different than writing about someone of another social class or gender, or someone whose belief system is very different from mine. Another character in this novel is a white supremacist, although he’d never use that term, and I’ve had to imagine my way in to him. Having said that, race is certainly a fraught issue in the U.S. because we’re finally grappling with the country’s ugly past. I’m hoping there is space for different voices, including mine, to reflect on the complexities of race.
Does race feature into any of your stories? Is it a challenge to write characters of other races—do you shy away from doing this?
Race is one complex issue, certainly, front and center in our lives today. Gender identity is hot topic on many of our community stoves. Suzanne Dewitt Hall writes about transgender people and the hate crimes committed against them in a way she hopes will shine “a light on a key issue of our day: the politicization of transgender identity, and the resulting (often faith-fueled) violence against trans people.”
In Suanne Dewitt Hall’s recent novel, The Language of Bodies, the wife of a murdered trans woman of color sets out on a journey of revenge as a way to survive her grief and guilt. She moves to the Midwest to run a wax museum which stood as a monument of vengeance and violence, and plots how to get back at her spouse's murderer, by harming his wife.
Suzanne: This book began with setting. I came across a western-themed wax museum from the 1960s which was so remarkably unaware of its kitsch that I knew it needed to appear in fiction. I also knew the engine for forward motion in the story would be revenge, and when a young transgender woman named Ally Steinfeld was murdered not far from where we lived in Missouri, something clicked. That event and the reality of violence against trans people became the axis around which the action spins.
Did you encounter any times of feeling at risk, creatively or otherwise, when you were working on it or releasing it into the world?
Creatively it felt risky because it was critical to handle the violence in a way that didn't glorify or center it. And I wanted to center the wife (Maddie) rather than using a transgender character's first-person point of view. I identify as non-binary, and my husband is trans, but it didn't seem appropriate to speak as a trans voice, because trans voices need to be uplifted and centralized. So all of that felt risky.
As far as getting the book out, there was a lot of risk. The novel is odd, dark, and deals with a subject many agents and publishers don't want to touch. There's always the risk of writing something which comes from your very soul, but no-one wants it. Author life in a nutshell!
There was also the risk of personal backlash, but that's nothing new. I've been getting death threats and online assaults due to my advocacy work for a decade.
Tell us about your writing history in terms of topics you choose. Do you gravitate towards topics outside the mainstream, in any sense? Why or why not?
I wrote a devotional series over the course of years which always focused on outlier topics. Queer affirmation. Transgender identity. Abortion. Sex. Faith deconstruction. In each of these, I sought ways to get people to question things they may have absorbed through "traditional" Christian teaching. Those books have tended to be at the front edge of a wave, and were written because I saw the need rising.
My fiction rarely follows the common plot arc for novels, because when I read, I want to be surprised. And I think other readers do too.
What do you hope your reader will get from this novel?
I want them to find it immersive and page-turning. Then I hope they'll be drawn in by the power and passion of Maddie's love for her wife.
One of my goals was to recognize the demonization of transgender people by many Christian streams without demonizing Christianity itself. I want readers to be warmed by the care of Maria, the cookie-baking Italian Catholic mystic, shocked by the caustic effects of lingering guilt, and moved to a deeper understanding of the impact of discrimination and bias against trans people.
Any advice for writers who are taking risks in their creative work?
Be brave. Smash molds. Your uniqueness and vision has the power to change the world. We live in an era of change, and expectations about literature are shifting. So go for it.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
If you are attracted to writing about outlier topics—whatever that might mean to you—and you feel risk-reaction in your body or heart or mind as you write, assess whether it’s coming from internal or external risk. Create two columns on a page and label one Pro, the other Con. Under the Pro column write all the reasons you have to/want to write about this topic. Under the Con column write all the risks.
Next, weigh the two. Are the Pros strong enough to validate moving forward? Do they outweigh the Cons in your mind? Why or why not? Spend a little time freewriting or journaling about this.
Finally, consider the Cons for their location in your life. I like to highlight with different colors—pink for external risk, green for internal risk. Both are important but action for dealing with them differs.
For any external Cons, brainstorm what you might be able to do to alleviate them. Change the way you talk about your story, as I did, unless it feels like a betrayal? Refocus the storyline itself—maybe you can change the steepness of the risk by making it less a feature (again, if it doesn’t betray your purpose)? Find a community to share your work that’s completely safe and accepting?
For an internal Cons, decide where these might come from. Are they from past fears or trauma that could be moved towards healing with good help? Are they false beliefs, which time has made less useful?