Where is the dividing line between describing a character’s physical characteristics and stereotyping him or her? And should this be an issue for teen and young adult fiction?
Some children’s writers have commented that they don’t go into their characters’ physical descriptions to avoid saying fat, plump, skinny, thin etc, unless their book is addressing the issue of eating disorders. This is because apparently many more kids today suffer from eating disorders. That might well be true, I don’t know.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t see the “fat/thin issue” as being an issue in teen/young adult literature.
I’ve got an overweight boy in my current WIP. He’s black and he’s being bullied. It’s not the central theme of the book. I describe him as plump, but incidentally. Another character in my WIP is very skinny. Neither of them suffer from eating disorders. It’s just the way they are. Their weight is not an issue in the book and it’s not an integral part of the story. The overweight character is not bullied because he’s overweight. He’s not particularly lazy or greedy. The very skinny character is not anorexic. I could take out the descriptions but I’m reluctant to because they are relevant in our understanding of the characters and how we see them. Also because I don’t think I’m reinforcing any stereotype or somehow causing offense or upsetting younger more vulnerable readers.
When kids are under 10 they rarely notice things like the size and colour of their classmates – it’s almost never how they define them. That awareness comes in at some point in middle school and is definitely there by secondary school. Under 12s look for different things in fiction because they’re still seeing the world in a very different way. Yes, their outlook is far more innocent. By the time they reach their teens, their awareness of the distinctions that so pre-occupy adults has increased, and they are less innocent. So maybe as a writer for younger kids, the line between describing a character and reinforcing a stereotype is closer.
One of the commentators on the blog last week was a teen who said she quite liked reading about spotty teens because she was a spotty teen. Reading about spotty characters didn’t give her a complex about being spotty or make her feel that she was being singled out as a stereotype. Reading about an overweight teen does not equal lazy teen or bullied teen or greedy teen. A skinny teen does not equal anorexia or bulimia or body image paranoid teen.
The world is populated by all sorts of different people who are all sorts of different sizes and all sorts of different colours. Describing a physical attribute is not the same as pigeonholing that physical attribute with a way of being treated or viewed by people.
I guess stereotyping people should be avoided, but not to the extent where writers become afraid of describing how they look and who they are.
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