Besides all of the excellent stuff on representation, there’s this:

“the secret to becoming a published writer… was, simply, persistence. Not talent, not skill. Those things can be learned. What you needed was the persistence to keep going long enough to learn those things, and to scale all the obstacles before you, to get up after every rejection, to keep writing, keep writing, keep writing, until you carved out your place in the world.”

Originally shared by Daniel Swensen

“Note also the “one woman” part. You see the singular woman thing happening in a lot of media still, where the writing team was like, “Hey, we have the Tough Woman! No need for other women!” We need to see more female representation all around, especially of women of color. Where are the female friendships? The extended generations of female relatives? I’m tired of the one tough woman trope. I’m ready for real people. I want worlds that look more like the one we actual live in, to start. As for the ones we could live in, yeah, we have a long way to go yet. I see a lot of failure of imagination as far as creating future societies goes in media right now. “

http://www.themarysue.com/interview-kameron-hurley/

This strikes me as a careful and thoughtful approach.

Extensive resources.

Originally shared by Josh Roby

Via Murphy Jacobs.

As the spouse of a disabled person, I think his point is extremely well made and very relevant.

That’s also partly what inspired me to write a novel in which the main romantic couple are dealing with a head injury and a permanently debilitating war wound (Hope and the Patient Man).

Originally shared by Scott Roche

Great essay on how fiction treats disabled persons. And how it shouldn’t.

I have many of the same struggles and tensions, and have come to much the same conclusions as Lisa Cohen articulates here. With the additional complication that I’m also male, so I’m extra-aware of challenging male-as-default and male-as-real-protagonist.

My basic strategy consists of writing consciously, and this collection, and otherwise mostly shutting up and supporting the voices of others who have less privilege than I have.

Via Murphy Jacobs. It’s a considerable exaggeration to say, as the article does, that there has “always” been an element of diversity in SF. Even the examples they give only go back to the 60s and 70s. Before that, there wasn’t much apart from C.L. Moore, and even the man who later became her husband started out assuming that she was a man.

But there is diversity now, and it’s growing.

Originally shared by Sarah Pinsker

tl;dr: films with two or more black actors in lead roles did better. It’s probable that this reflects a demographic shift among consumers.

I’m reading Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s Writing the Other (at last), and they mention this essay from 1949, which shows that questions of representation in SFF have been under discussion for a while. (Also, that petty, small-minded reactions to those discussions have been around for just as long.)

Via Laura Gibbs. Some of the best work I’ve done hasn’t been work I’ve done, but work done in a diverse team with different viewpoints.

Originally shared by John Hagel

Take diversity out of the legal, political and moral realm and focus instead on its productivity/creativity benefits