There Is No Single Story That Will Do The Work
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Sometimes when writer social media starts going back and forth about what kind of stories are best - dark edgy ones, or hopeful gentle ones; stories that sound the alarm about a social problem, stories that offer a solution, or stories that help us to forget our problems entirely - I start wondering if we've forgotten Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's classic talk, "The Danger of a Single Story."
While the talk mostly discusses Western people's stories about Africa, it illustrates a general principle that applies to many forms of marginalization. Anyone who lacks social power is in danger of having only a single story told about them, which flattens them out and obscures their complex humanity.
For queer writers - because lately the discourse has seemed particularly intense for queer writers - the discussion of what stories are best seems to revolve around tone, around light versus dark. Queer joy versus queer tragedy; “safe” queer stories versus “messy” ones. Many of the people who speak loudest seem to feel oppressed because of their preference for darkness or light. I can scroll Twitter and easily find a queer writer distraught that so many people want to buy dark, unpleasant queer stories when what we need most in these times is queer joy. In the next moment, maybe even on the same screen, I can find an equally queer writer who anguished because everyone wants light, anodyne, happy stories and no one will accept their stories of hard-hitting darkness which tackle the taboo heart of queer existence.
I hope we can all see how absurd this is?
It's fine to have preferences, to prefer one kind of story over another, or to be unable to deal (for whatever reason) with a particular kind. I’ve written about these kinds of preferences, in both directions, in “Dark Art as an Access Need.”
But there have never been only two possible moods or tones in which to write a story. Hardly anyone goes through their life with only one kind of tale that they would benefit from hearing, only one kind of thing to say about thesmselves - or only one emotional need.
When people start to argue over grimdark vs light, I'm reminded of Charles Payseur's recent experiment with the Scales of Relative Grimness. This was a subjective numerical rating in which each story (in a very wide reading sample of speculative short fiction and poetry for the year 2021) was given two ratings - a number between 1 and 5 for "content," or the level of potentially upsetting events that happen in the story; and a number between 1 and 5 for "tone," or the level of emotional hope or cynicism with which the it was handled.
The great majority of stories were near the middle of both scales.
Rather than a polarized market with a class of very light, safe, politically correct stories being pitted against a class of very grim ones, Payseur's study gives a pretty unremarkable bell curve, with most stories containing middling amounts of both danger and hope. There are more very grim stories than very light ones, but there are still notable amounts of both, and the difference between them pales in comparison to the difference between both these extremes vs the middle. (Most stories turned out with ratings in a similar range for both content and tone. There are a few stories with high grimness for content and low grimness for tone, and vice versa, but these are comparatively rare.)
So, in the starkest, most factual, most market-oriented terms, the war between light and dark stories doesn't exist. It's something a few authors at both extremes have fanned into existence to further their brand. But it's not real. In reality there is room for a range of stories, and most stories are in the middle of that range.
And if we want to talk about what stories are best politically, then there is more than one answer to that, too. The best thing for queer people is to be humanized; humans experience more than one emotion. Humans have a complexity that cannot be boiled down to any one single story. Think about the effect it would have if any specific kind of queer story was eliminated from the market:
Without stories of queer hope and queer joy, we might not know that it's okay for queer people to be happy.
Without messy, uncomfortable, challenging queer stories, we might not know that it's okay for queer people to be messy and flawed.
Without horny, transgressive queer stories for adults, we might not know that queer sex (the very thing that many people hate us for the most!) is worth celebrating.
Without soft, wholesome, family-friendly queer stories, we might not know that it's okay and safe for young people to be queer, or to be around queer people.
Without stories of queer oppression and tragedy, we might not understand how badly it hurts for queer people to be oppressed.
Without stories of queer liberation, we might not have any idea what a liberated world could look like.
Without "incidentally queer" stories, we might not understand that we're allowed to exist as full people, experiencing many meaningful things just like anyone else that have nothing to do with our gender or sexuality.
Without stories that are specifically about being queer, we might not have any way to talk about the specific experiences that make us who we are.
(This isn't a complete list. There is much more.)
No single story can do all these things. Even a single author's whole career might not encompass all these things - nor should it need to. Some authors are especially good at a particular tone or type of story, and they should be free to follow their muse.
But the market as a whole needs to encompass all of these kinds of queer story and more - because queer people are human, and humans possess every facet that you can imagine.
And a single story will never be big enough to hold us all.