ThePoetSky Archive

Following Wings of Hope and Love Is…, I decided to do courage next. As I did with Love Is…, I started with “courage” and asked myself “What is courage?”. The phrase “The ability to act in spite of fear” came to mind, but in my life, fear is what keeps you safe.

That’s where I started. I reflected back on my life and asked “Why am I so afraid all the time? How many times have I been held back by fear?” The answer is “a lot”. As I reflected on these times, I began to write about them. The times I’ve wanted to thank someone. When I see someone doing something nice, I freeze up when I want to say “thank you”. What was there to be afraid of?

Fear and anxiety tells me everything that could go wrong. They tell me all the horrible things people could do. They tell me all the reasons not to trust people. Is courage not feeling that?

In the end, I settled on what I thought courage was. As I wrote in The Equation of Courage and Fear, it wasn’t the lack of fear. It was standing up to fear and telling it “no”. In my life, that’s one of the hardest things for me to do. One day, I hope I can stand up to it.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

The gay best friend comes up a lot in romance films. It’s the one character that has no life outside of the protagonist, and specifically his or her love life. Oftentimes, especially when the protagonist is female, this is an effeminate male character assumed to be gay. This trope also comes up in other movies with the wise black man, who, once again, has no life outside of the protagonist’s troubles, but is full of helpful advice to overcome those troubles. They amount to the same thing: a minority with an infinite fountain of advice and/or wisdom for the main character.

Why does this happen? Overcompensation. I wrote a few weeks ago about the dangers of carelessly writing “the other”. If one isn’t careful, the only representation of that minority group is further marginalized. To avoid this, many writers will elevate that minority to unreachable standards. They are wise beyond their years and selfless beyond all reason. But that’s not helpful either. Not only is it a bad idea to have a character who doesn’t exist outside of the plot, when writers do this over and over again, it ends up squeezing a minority group into a specific role. It’s bad storytelling, and it’s harmful to people already struggling to show that there’s more to them than a bunch of stereotypes.

An example of this being done poorly is the movie Dear Santa. In it, a wealthy socialite is told she has to get married otherwise her parents will cut her off, so when she finds a girl’s letter to Santa asking for a new mom for Christmas, she decides she’s going to become the girl’s new mom and marry her dad. The role of gay best friend is played by her new friend Pete, a chef who wears a pink uniform and lip gloss and tells her that what she’s doing is fine and that the dad’s devoted fiancé is just an obstacle she has to overcome. That’s all there is to him. He has no life outside of her stalking this man’s family. Even if the intent was making a likable minority character, he ends up as a two-dimensional stereotype.

So how can this be avoided? Give them a life outside of the plot. Give them hopes and dreams. Like I said in last week’s post, don’t think of them as black, gay, or whatever minority they’re supposed to represent. The main character isn’t the only one allowed to make mistakes, so long as the side characters don’t steal the show. A good example of this being done well is Shepherd Book from Firefly. At first, he seems like the wise black man there to give advice to the main characters, but as they frequently point out, he knows an awful lot about crime for a preacher. He becomes one of the most interesting characters because of this intimate knowledge and the mysteries surrounding him. He says, “I wasn’t always a preacher”, making the audience wonder what he was before all this.

The best way to avoid this is to have more than one character representing a specific minority. If that’s not easily done – say you only have a handful of characters and you want more diversity – then at least make them all three-dimensional, with lives outside of the plot. Remember, this is for your writing; it’s worth the effort.

#Essay #Characters #TheOthers

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

Following Wings of Hope, and being a huge Digimon fan, I got the idea to write a series of eight poems, each with a theme from one of the eight crests. Number one was hope, held by my favorite of the eight main characters. After that, I decided to do love.

I sat down in my room one morning with the theme of “love” in my head and nothing else. And I began to write. I wrote about the love I’ve seen in my life. The love shared by all of the odd couples I know. The love of two people living far away. The love of parenting, and of accepting people for who they are.

The person “saying yes instead of no” was me a long time ago, when I adopted my dog. When my friends asked me, I was prepared to say “no”, because I didn’t think I could handle it. But when I got there, I said “yes”. Why? Love. And I haven’t regretted that decision once.

“Hundreds of questions before the sun comes up” is my son, and “hundreds” might be an understatement. But I listen to them because I love him.

When I needed a title, I settled on Love Is…, because that was what the poem was about. What love is. What it looks like. And who shares it.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

When I started Girl in Red, I already had Rose worked out. It wasn’t a conscious choice to make her a girl, I just decided to. I’ve always liked the idea of Hermione, even if I don’t like how J.K. Rowling wrote her, and Luna and Rose were similar enough that I figured they’d get along great. So those were three of my main characters, all female. It gave me a lot of experience writing women, something somewhat more challenging considering I am male (Edit: No I'm not, but I've lived the life of a male, so bear with me). I didn’t have trouble with this, but I’ve seen characters clearly written by a specific gender of writer, so I know it’s not easy for everyone.

Something I’ve noticed with other writers, men and women, is that they describe the opposite sex as though the author is checking that person out. Every physical detail at which the author would be staring is described. Not only does this make me uncomfortable to read and write, but it makes the character obviously not the sex they’re supposed to be. Maybe it’s a female character doing this with a female author, but if it’s a heterosexual female character checking out another woman like this, she’s lying to herself.

That’s the biggest gotcha of writing the opposite sex that I’ve seen. The best way to avoid this: write them without considering their sex or gender. This is how we got characters like Nausicaä in Nausciaä of the Valley of the Wind, Toph and Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender, and most of the characters in RWBY, all of which were written primarily by men. They are treated differently than men at times, and occasionally act “girly”, but they’re so busy being awesome the rest of the time that we don’t care. Not only can you get strong female characters like this, but you don’t run the risk of it being obvious that a man wrote it.

I had two advantages that I imagine most male writers don’t have when writing female characters. The first is that my beta reader is female. She could catch anything I did blatantly wrong. The other is that stereotypical gender roles have been turned on their head in my world. My mother is the breadwinner of my house, which is why most of the families that feature in my stories have the mother as the breadwinner.

The quick fix is to not consider gender when writing. The same goes for race as well, although be warned you might still fall into a trap with either. If in doubt, find a woman in your life and ask her to proof-read it for you. It could be a cousin, a sister, your mother (who I’m sure would be happy to talk to you anyway), or a coworker. Remember, this is for your writing; it’s worth the effort.

#Essay #Characters #TheOther

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I’ve never been an optimistic person. I can be cautiously optimistic at times, but I often default to pessimism when it concerns anything about me. But at the same time, I try to see the best in people, even though negativity comes naturally to me.

In spite of that, I try to be optimistic. I try to say “I can do this”. To say “We can do this”. To smile and look at the rising sun and say “Today’s a new day. Let’s make it a good one.”

One day in September 2019, I had the phrase “Wings of Hope” in my head, courtesy of the show Digimon. I let it form into ideas about hope and optimism, and about how hard I make my life. It’s not that I have a tough life, but I always try to do things the hard way.

I put these thoughts into a poem. Not as a reflection on my outlook on life, but as the outlook I wanted to have. To see bad things happen, let them roll off, and get back up again. To rise above the darkness and shadows of life and look to the light.

I wrote Wings of Hope that day, and refined it during the week. It’s still one of my favorite poems of those I’ve written. It reminds me that I can keep going forward, no matter what. No matter how bad life gets, no matter how dark the night looks, there’s always hope. I can rise above it and keep moving forward.

Flying on the wings of hope.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

“The Other” is a term given to those not like yourself. This is most often applied to black characters written by white authors. On its face, this doesn’t seem difficult. Simply write the character with little concern for the color of their skin, and add it in later. But nothing happens in isolation. Not only is there a culture within your story, but there’s one that’s going to read your story, and it is in that that the complication lies.

Take for example The Tombs of Atuan, the second book in the Earthsea series. It focuses around the character Tenar, a girl who was taken from her family at a young age and raised in The Place, a temple where they worship the Old Gods. While she is considered a religious figure in the temple, she has little in the way of rights. This was written intentionally by a female writer, but the problem comes in the means of her escape. She escapes that way of life with Ged, the main character of A Wizard of Earthsea, the previous book. As Ursula K. Le Guin herself pointed out, from one perspective, this has the message that the woman needed a man’s help to escape. The way Le Guin looked at it, they needed each other’s help, because Ged was also trapped within the tombs.

This is the tricky part of writing the other, or any character who would be marginalized in the society reading the book. No matter how you write them, you’re sending a message of some kind. If it’s that women are helpless without men around, that’s bad. On the other hand, this may be a point of growth for the character when she realizes she doesn’t need them and solves the problem on her own. This is much the case in the later books in Earthsea.

It’s a particular problem when a particular sex, race, religion, etc. is represented by a single character. That character then bears the burden of representing an entire set of people. For example, gay characters are often written as stereotypes, gay men in particular. We’ve all seen it: the lone effeminate male character who loves clothes and singing. Not only is this offensive to gay men, but to effeminate straight men who like clothes and singing and are tired of being called gay.

The best way to avoid this is to do research. There are plenty of people willing to help if you ask. People are helpful when you tell them you’re writing a character like them and you want to get it right, because chances are, they’re tired of seeing it done wrong and have a lot of opinions. I myself have a lot of opinions on writing dads, single dads in particular, programmers, smart characters in general, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and ADHD. It may be hard for some of us, but this is for your writing. It’s worth the effort.

#Essay #Characters #TheOther

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

At the end of 2019, I was still going to Open Mic at FBC. I’d long since become an expected feature of Open Mic, and at least one person asked if I had any poems for the holidays. I’d been tossing around poems in my head, but nothing had stuck yet.

One of my favorite songs to listen to during the holidays is Winter Wonderland. In middle school choir, it was the last song we’d sing for the winter concert. All the choirs would squeeze onto the stage and sing it together. That’s always been the way to start the holidays for me.

As I’ve written more poems, I’ve begun to notice that the words of other people don’t cut it anymore. They describe how they’re feeling or what they see, but not always what I feel or see. It might be close, but not exact. So I began to write.

I grew up celebrating Christmas, but not all of my friends do. So when I write poems for the winter holiday season, I focus on celebrating winter, not the holidays. A time to look out and see another layer of beauty in nature. To huddle together to fend off the cold. To put aside our differences and come together in a shared spirit of joy.

That’s what I focused on for Snowfall. Snow, winter, and happiness. Because to me, that’s what winter is all about.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

In Dungeons and Dragons, there’s a creature called a Nimblewright. Basically, it’s an animated suit of armor with intelligence and personality. In year three of Girl in Red, Rose made two of them to guard Gryffindor Tower against Sirius Black. Their names were Taltria and Alavel (“Blade Dancer” and “Knight Sword” in Elven). After third year, they continued to patrol Hogwarts and look after the students. Alavel was terse, serious, and kind, while his sister Taltria was more carefree. Following Rose’s orders, Alavel looked after Harry.

At first, Harry didn’t get along with Alavel. Alavel was just the latest in a long line of adults telling him what to do and how to live his life. While Alavel tried to connect with Harry, Harry was having none of it. It wasn’t until Harry broke up with his then girlfriend Ellie, breaking down himself, that he opened up to Alavel. Harry cracked, and Alavel happened to be there as someone to whom he could vent. Harry finally wanted help from someone, and Alavel knew just what to say. That was the end of fourth year.

Throughout fifth year, Harry went to Alavel for help and advice. On paper, Alavel was working as an assistant to Filch, but he functioned as a guiding hand to the students. Harry talked to him about everything: Quidditch, school, dating, Voldemort, his friends. When Harry started teaching younger students Defence Against the Dark Arts, Alavel was there to support him, and lent them some credibility by having a staff member present. When Harry saw Sally-Anne slipping away into Umbridge’s clutches, Alavel was there to put things into perspective so he didn’t come to hate her. That lasted until Umbridge took over Hogwarts and sacked Alavel. This was one approach to removing Alavel and allowing Harry to grow on his own, although it didn’t go well for Harry. He blamed Sally-Anne for Alavel being sacked (it was in part her fault, and that wasn’t the only reason he was angry at her). Under different circumstances, Harry might have grown, but with everything else happening, he couldn’t.

Later that year when the main characters escaped Umbridge’s clutches and ran into the Forbidden Forest, there were Death Eaters waiting for them. Despite their best efforts, the main characters were only students, ill-prepared to handle twenty and change trained killers. That’s when Alavel stepped back into play. He brought a few others with him, and together, they were able to fight back the Death Eaters until Voldemort himself arrived. Even then, Alavel stood against him, determined to stop him from hurting Harry. For a while, he was winning, until another Death Eater stepped in and killed him.

I made the decision to kill off Alavel for a few reasons. First, to allow Harry to grow without him. Unfortunately, I’d made him too responsible and wise, able to solve Harry’s emotional problems too quickly. Second, I wanted to cement that specific Death Eater as a threat, because in reality, that Death Eater was Rose. Due to Slytherin’s influence, she’d had to join the Death Eaters, and she had to convince them she was against them. Killing one of her own creations, something she’d already been dead set against in previous years, would convince them (and my readers) that she’d changed.

Even after Alavel’s death, he was never forgotten. Harry worked to be like him, becoming the primary source of emotional support for his friends, as Alavel had done for him. He always asked himself what Alavel would do when faced with a problem. It’s because of this that he’s able to rehabilitate Ginny when she loses her mind in sixth year, and stand by her as she recovers in seventh year. Despite having to kill off Alavel to make this happen, it gave me the opportunity to see Harry grow in a way that wouldn’t have happened with Alavel alive. This also provided the inspiration for the poem I Know I Can Fly.

An effective mentor is tricky to write. I had to ensure that Alavel was there as needed, thus staying in character. Harry couldn’t open up to him immediately because it wasn’t in Harry’s character. Sacrificing himself for Harry was exactly the way Alavel would’ve wanted to die, if he’d had to die at all. I like how it turned out, and I hope other people can learn from my work.

#Essay #GirlInRed #Mentors

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

I have always been a little odd. This makes itself obvious in many forms, but on this particular day in August 2019, it was pouring rain. While sitting in a cafe, what did I decide? “I’m going to go to the park”.

In my area, there’s a park called Highland Park. It’s beautiful at any time of year, and on this day, I decided I wanted to walk around in the rain. I found shelter under a tree, and began to think.

As I thought, a poem began to form. Thoughts of the rain, the trees, the flowers, everything swirled in my head, and under the branches of a tree, I wrote a poem.

That poem became The World of the Rain and Trees. I wrote of the comfort I found among those I know never judge me for being different. They offer me shelter and love, and ask for nothing in return. In my first years of college, whenever I’d get stressed out, I’d talk to the wind and trees. I found it relaxing to be away from people to clear my head.

People may call me odd, and I am. But I found a place of peace among the trees. When it’s raining, and no one else wants to be outside, that’s when I can be alone and at ease. I know that there’s always a place I can go to get away from the world when I need to. When life gets to be too much, it’s important that everyone can have a chance to get away from it for a while.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA

In 2019, I was traveling for work a lot. During the summer, I was gone about every other week. I didn’t like it, and neither did my son. As much as he liked getting to stay with his grandparents, he hated it and wanted me to stay home.

I was still in college when he was born. I was there on the day (luckily he was born over the summer), but a few months later, I had to go back to school. I didn’t get to hear his first words. I didn’t get to see his first steps. And so being away from him again and missing more of his life, especially at the time when he still wanted me to be a part of it, was hard.

While I was traveling, I wrote Coming Home for You to express how I felt. When I got home one day and tucked him into bed, I read it for him. As hard as parenting gets, especially when I started so young, I still miss seeing him. I still want to be a part of his life, no matter what.

#StoryBehind

© 2023 Sky Starlight CC BY-NC-SA