The Blunt Instrument is a monthly advice column for writers. If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.

I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community—but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore, and that the torch has passed to writers of other communities whose voices have too long been silenced or suppressed. I feel terrible about feeling terrible about this, since I also know that for so long, white men made other people feel terrible about who they were. Sometimes I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and empathize with the so-called “other”; but I fear that this could be construed as yet another example of my privilege—that I am appropriating another person’s experience, violating that person by telling his or her story. It feels like a Catch-22. Write what you know and risk denying voices whose stories are more urgent; write to learn what you don’t know and risk colonizing someone else’s story. I genuinely am troubled by this. I want to listen but I also want to write—yet at times these impulses feel at odds with one another. How can I reconcile the two?

— Anonymous

 

Dear Anonymous,

I have thought a lot about your letter. I know that you’re not the only white male writer asking these questions. As a white writer myself, I’m not necessarily the best person to answer. But this is my column, so I’m going to do my best, because I think it’s an important issue.

I want to come at your question from a different angle though. You ask whether the time to write from your experience – the “white, male perspective” – has passed. I think this is the wrong question. The white male experience was not more important in the past than it is now. In Western culture, the white male experience has been overexposed, at the expense of other experiences, for centuries. The only difference is that the culture – at least the subculture that’s important to you – no longer accepts the white male perspective as default. You can and should respond to this shift, but I don’t think the answer is to stop writing.

Instead, you should do what you can to make sure your own perspective is not getting more exposure than it deserves – that you’re not taking up more than your fair share of space. Many people have been angered, rightfully, by recent stunts in conceptual poetry that exploit real tragedies, like the death of Michael Brown, for the benefit of white artists. So I think you’re right to be concerned that persona poems could come off as a form of exploitation and appropriation; there’s also a risk of self-congratulation and unexamined complicity. Even if your goal is to learn and to empathize, one wonders why your act of inhabiting a woman’s or POC’s perspective would be more deserving of readership than writing by someone who has lived that experience? And the problem is, because of your status as a white male, whatever you do write is easier to publish, all other things being equal. Whether or not you or your editors and readers are aware of it, you get automatic bonus points. You’re at the lowest difficulty setting in the video game of life.

When the VIDA counts come out and multiple publications are shown to publish far more men than women (with the numbers for POC writers looking even worse), editors make excuses about their submission pools – they get far more submissions and pitches from men than women. Then people inevitably respond by telling women to write more, submit more, and pitch more. I think this is exactly the wrong response: Instead we should tell men to submit less. Pitch less. Especially white men. You are already over-represented. Most literary magazines are drowning in submissions. Instead of making things even harder for overworked, underpaid editors, let’s improve the ratios in the submission pool by reducing the number of inappropriate, firebombed submissions from men. You – white men – have all the advantages here, so you should work to solve the problem of imbalance, instead of putting all the burden on women, POC, and LGBTQ to fix it themselves. (And I’m suspicious in any case that perfectly balanced submission queues would always lead to gender parity on the other side.)

So here are my suggestions for things you can do – so you can “listen” while also writing, so you can write your own experience without denying anyone else’s or colonizing their stories:

Read more books by women, POC, and LGBTQ writers. Make their experience a bigger proportion of your reading, and learn that way instead of by appropriating their voices. Then amplify what you love – recommend those books to friends, teach them if you teach, give them away as presents. If you edit a magazine, make sure you’re not overexposing white male authors, giving them too much space because it’s what you relate to. Even if you don’t edit or teach anything, you can promote more diverse authors to editors and teachers you know.

Don’t be a problem submitter. When I edited a magazine, we got far more submissions from men, and men were far more likely to submit work that was sloppy and/or inappropriate for the magazine; they were also far more likely to submit more work immediately after being rejected. When you submit writing, you’re taking up other people’s time. Be respectful of that. I said in my last column that getting published takes a lot of work, which is true—but most of that work should take the form of writing, and revising, and engaging with people in the writing world, not just constantly sending out new work, which starts to look like boredom and entitlement.

Think of this as something like carbon offsets. You are not going to solve the greater problem this way, on your own, but you might mitigate the damage.

I’m sure some people would tell you to stop writing; I’m not going to. There is already more writing produced every day than anyone could ever be expected to read, and producing writing is not necessarily an imposition, since people have the option not to read it. I’m not even going to tell you not to write about race or gender; you might even be obligated to. There are surely non-exploitative ways to do so; I wish I knew the formula for how. The best approach is likely to work toward good writing regardless of your subject matter; to me that means choosing complexity over obvious, trite sentiments, and avoiding self-flattery—don’t cast yourself as the white savior.

The Blunt Instrument

119 Responses

    • walter adams

      Go stand on the corner and start talking.
      If the people passing by find something of value in what you say, they will stop to hear more.
      If they don’t, they will walk on by.
      The idea that everyone else should be silent so they will have no one to listen to but you is patently offensive.
      That is the reasoning of a child.
      Value, in writing or any other field of endeavor, will find its audience, or rather, its audience will find it. People are beating the bushes looking for it. They spend endless hours in the bookstores searching it out. Editors and publishers wade thru endless garbage hoping to find it.
      If your writing isn’t selling either it’s no good or it hasn’t been found yet. With all the possible venues for written material in this brave new world it is more likely the former.

      Reply
  2. David Grove

    If you’re a real poet nothing can stop you from writing, not even being a white male.

    Reply
  3. Melissa

    I apologize for the tone of my earlier comment; I was responding more to the person that wrote to you rather than to you personally. Your advice and comment is worthy and not for me to judge anyway.

    Which brings me to my advice for your reader — No one is your judge or that of your questioner. Write the way you speak. Some people will enjoy it, others will not. To do anything else is to be untrue to yourself and will eventually be revealed.

    An editor usually won’t tutor would-be writers. Too many writers, not enough editors (or readers for that matter). It isn’t a substitute for an education.

    When I first imagined myself to be a writer, and imagined my writing to be very good, I was astonished and hurt to be rejected. I attended some writing classes, attended some history classes, and eventually humbled myself to realize that what a writer needs more than anything is something to write about, namely, experience that she has that at least some others lack and would like to read about.

    Curiously, the more I learn the less interested I am in telling the whole world about it. I earned my knowledge; go earn your own! But art, such as poetry, painting and music, isn’t informative; it is expressive. So express!

    Reply
  4. A. Joachim Glage

    I have a question for any editors out there. In the original article (which I do think many people posting here have lost sight of), there *seems* to be a connection drawn between writers (especially male ones) oversubmitting, submitting work that is sloppy or inappropriate for the publication, on the one hand, and the problem of the underrepresentation in literary journals of POC, LGBTQ, women writers, etc., on the other.

    I am not sure I fully understand the connection here, and I would love to hear a little more explanation.

    The reason I am not sure I fully understand the connection, is because in virtually every conversation I’ve had with an editor (usually these are “off the record,” since no one ever wants to admit such things publicly), what I hear is something like the following:

    * Yes, we are flooded with way too many submissions.

    * BUT, probably a good 90% of those submissions are *obviously* inappropriate for our publication (wrong genre, horribly written, spelling and grammar not up to par, the same basic story about a breakup that we’ve already read five times that day, or just clearly abiding by a different aesthetic than what we like to publish [long sprawling Faulknerian sentences when we obviously prefer clean, spare ones, etc.]).

    * Because 90% of the submissions are so obviously inappropriate, we throw most of these into the “No” pile after reading a page or two. Like it maybe takes a minute or two to figure it out. It’s just a very clear “no,” right from the start, and this in a huge majority of the submissions.

    * It’s annoying that we have to sift through all those obvious “no” submissions, but those submission are actually not THAT huge a problem, not THAT time-consuming. What *is* really time-consuming is the quantity of *good* submissions we receive: the well-written ones, the ones that do follow our aesthetic, etc., the ones that it breaks our hearts to say “no” to.

    If the above is true, then I’m not sure how all the sloppy, oversubmitting writers complained of in the article are really doing any of the harm here. It seems those writers’ submissions should easily and quickly be spotted and weeded out. The hard part, rather, is all the *good* submissions the editors receive.

    And if in fact the hard part–the time-consuming part–is sifting through all the *good* submissions; and if what results from that process is still an over-representation of a white male perspective, then doesn’t the responsibility for that overrepresentation belong to the editors, and not the writers? They’re the ones doing the picking, after all. If out of a thousand submissions, only a hundred are really good, and if the editors still end up picking out of that hundred only white male perspectives…I don’t know, it seems like that’s more an editor issue than a writer issue.

    I’m genuinely curious; I concede straightaway that I might have a truly warped view of the editorial process. All I can draw upon are some conversations I’ve had, and my experience as a reader for my college literary magazine some twenty years ago….

    To put this all in a maybe-too blunt form: Lets say the obviously sloppy, bad, inappropriate submissions suddenly stopped altogether–would that have any real effect on the underrepresentation problem? How?

    Reply
  5. S.M. Stirling

    Writing fiction should not be autobiography; thinly-disguised autobiography is almost universally boring crap.

    Your writing should not be about you. Don’t be self-referential. You’re not particularly interesting to others and there’s no reason beyond egotism that you should be to yourself.

    I don’t read (or write) to “see myself reflected”. If I want to see myself reflected, I walk into the bathroom and face the mirror and turn on the light. This works like a charm and is far less work.

    Reading to find yourself is to the true experience of literature as masturbation is to real sex. You read to find out things you don’t know and people who aren’t like you.

    Nor does anybody have literary “turf” because of their personal experience. Write whatever the hell you feel like and about whatever the hell you want and whatever types of characters you want — I certainly do, and anyone who doesn’t like it can do that other thing.

    An infant thinks it is the universe. A baby thinks it’s the most important thing in the universe. An adolescent thinks the vast yeasty emotions pullulating in their breast are of cosmic significance.

    A basic part of growing up and becoming a worthwhile adult human being, rather than a childish, narcissistic waste of otherwise perfectly good oxygen, is realizing how profoundly unimportant you are. Your feels, even less important. It’s a big universe; you are not a significant part of it.

    Reply
  6. SherrieMiranda

    I loved the tongue in cheek point of You Don’t Need My Name. I am a white female American. Privileged? Maybe, now that I married my Filipino husband whose father taught him to be thrifty and whose mother taught him to give a wife everything she wants and needs. Luckily he married a woman who doesn’t want or need a lot, but still he generously gave up his cottage to buy a historic home in our 100 year old town.
    The gentleman above makes a good point: If you have never suffered, you should not be writing as readers want to see that a person has worked through an issue and come out better on the other side.
    Are there many people in this world who have not suffered? I wish the answer were “yes” but suffering seems to be human’s lot in life. Although I have suffered to some extent, I am well aware that it is nothing compared to many, not only outside the U.S., but inside as well. Being a teacher, I have heard stories that would make the hair on your neck stand up. Despite experiencing homelessness for a short period of my life, my suffering is minor compared to many.
    When I first thought about writing the story of the Salvadoran civil war, I planned to tell it from the point of view of a Salvadoran teen. I finally decided to tell the story from a visiting American’s POV which gave me a lot of freedom. Because I am a good listener, I was able to tell many people’s stories.
    So the question to ask is “Why are you writing?” If you have a story to tell about someone encountering a difficult choice and finding the courage to overcome it, that is a universal story that most of us can relate to, whatever the skin color and sex of the writer.
    Writers break barriers and surpass boundaries all the time. There’s no reason why any of us should be counted out.
    Sherrie
    Do you know a/b my debut novel “Secrets & Lies in El Salvador”? A young American woman goes to war-torn El Salvador: http://tinyurl.com/klxbt4y

    Reply

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