Ryshia Kennie ...a world you never imagined!: The Real Killer

Monday, February 8, 2021

The Real Killer - Stereotypes

The other day I was reading a social media post. It was a post where a writer was requesting suggestions for a scene in a book they were writing. They wanted to know what a grandparent's house might smell like. An incredible amount of people chimed in, which is great. Well, at least I thought it was great until I started to read the comments. Then, I couldn't believe it. The comments were unimaginative and ageist stereotypes. At first, I thought the first batch of comments were not reflective of the whole and skipped over them only to discover that the tone of the comments wasn't changing. They were all a reflection of the one previous, at least as far as making me shake my head. They all said the same thing in different words. Grandparents equalled old, stale, smelly and unhealthy.

Really?

What's wrong with that?

I'm sure most of you already know what's wrong with that and will be shaking your head right along with me. Except in a hundred comments, not one seemed to see what was wrong - yikes! There's something very wrong with that.

Now, to be fair, the comments never exactly said that grandparents were old, stale, smelly or even unhealthy. Instead; mothballs, cigars/cigarettes, staleness and other words were a popular inclusion in the suggested descriptions.

What's wrong?

Assumptions like that are not reality. I don't know about you but I've yet to walk into someone's house, no matter what their age or sex, and smell mothballs. I don't even know if you can buy them anymore - okay probably, but I don't think that they're on most people's to-buy list. And cigarettes/cigars, some people still smoke but rarely in a house and whether you're one generation or another, we've all heard of the hazards of smoking and most of us are dodging that bullet.

Anyway, those were just a few comments that unfortunately repeated themselves. The others didn't get any better. I couldn't believe what I was reading but I kept going through stereotype after stereotype. There was nothing original, nothing individual about any of the suggestions. It was like they had balled it all up into one ageist group. You're a grandparent, therefore, you're old and, you do this. They were like descriptors from a box pulled out from under a ratty bed where the cobwebs had been blown off to reveal a treasure trove of ageist phrases.

Either way you look at it, that's not fresh writing, nor even true or fair writing. At the least you're heading for a not a very exciting book. Especially if the other descriptors for characters fall into the same stereotypes for their perceived sex, and/or age, etc. In this case, what surprised me were the number of people that chimed in adding one dull metaphor after another. I was literally yawning and know I would never want to step foot, in this dully and wrongly described grandparent's house.

What if the grandparent in question was a fifty year old corporate executive or a sixty year old ski enthusiast or a seventy year old vegan novelist? Or even an eighty year old pool shark/cross country skier?

If you read a story where the heroine was the stereotypical and so completely wrong, "dumb blonde" and where the hero was always saving the day - would you not be rolling your eyes and quickly putting the book down?

As a reader I know the quickest way to kill a good story - load it up with stereotypical descriptors. As a writer, I'm doing my best to hunt those stereotypes down. So if you spot them in "my world", go ahead - let me know.

Til next time!

Ryshia

www.ryshiakennie.com

...a world you never imagined!