What’s It Supposed To Be?

Why artists should pander to stereotypes

Last time, I wrote about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams as an example of what it looks like for an artist to be a servant. He modelled a way of thinking about how Christians can be artists, serving an audience, a nation, a church and a community of artists and musicians. It’s rather a shame that Ralph Vaughan Williams did not call himself a Christian, but you can’t have everything.

The idea of the artist as a servant is not our first though when we think of creatives. Our minds go to freethinking bohemians and impoverished painters in garrets who are pursuing their own artistic vision. In movies, we don’t call them directors but auteurs.

It’s tempting to think that any artist has limitless creative freedom to express themselves. But this freedom is an illusion. The artist is bound, to some extent, by the expectations of the audience, who have categories, genres and stereotypes in their heads. Whatever you create, the audience are asking the question: ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

Canning Laughter

My own craft is writing, most notably the sitcom. Maybe you’re picturing a writer as a thin, freezing man in fingerless gloves, hammering away at a typewriter, and throwing page after page into the bin.

That’s the power of a stereotype. In comedies and sketches we deal in these all the time. We either go with them, or subvert them. The reason for that is not laziness. (Okay, sometimes it is laziness.) It is because, whether we like it or not, these stereotypes are in the heads of the audience. We can’t shift them. We can’t ignore them. Artists do not work in a vacuum.

Here’s an example to prove the point.

Let us say our hero, Jack, is in London and, fleeing a scene in a hurry, leaps into the back of a black taxi cab. The cab driver has the radio on. What is he listening to? In fact, is it a ‘he’? What does he look like? When the cabbie engages our hero in conversation, what are we expecting the driver’s views to be like?

Now, female cab drivers exist. Some probably listen to Radio 3 and vote Green. Some may wear Laura Ashley dresses. But if Jack leaps into a cab, and the driver is wearing a floral number, listening to Sibelius and asking about recipes for bulgar wheat, that is going to be unusual. It’s a choice that will actually destabilise the scene. This cabbie character will stick out so much, the audience will wonder if we’re going to see them again. If not, what was the value in creating such a remarkable character? For that moment, the scene was a little weird and even unrealistic. That is probably poor writing.

If you don’t want to draw attention to the cab driver, you’re going to portray him as a white guy listening to talk radio, and he’s probably a Brexiteer. We know that it’s a stereotype and that there is a spectrum of cab drivers. But artist and audience alike are stuck with it.

Pigeon Holes

Stereotypes are like genres. When you’re writing a novel, you need to think about what genre you’re writing in. Is it a thriller, a murder mystery or literary fiction? (Other categories, obviously, are available.)

‘I will not be pigeon-holed!’ you may scream in reply. Okay. But people who read and buy books have categories in their heads. The same goes for movies. Is this romantic comedy? A Western? Horro? They want to know what they’re getting. They’re always asking, “What’s it supposed to be?”

When it comes to fiction, I like murder mysteries. I don’t much like literary fiction. If the book you’ve written doesn’t fit into any category, I’m probably not going to read it because I don’t know what it is. That’s unless someone I really trust heavily recommends it and even then I will take some persuasion. That’s not a good place to start for an unknown author.

These days, novels tend to be around 80,000 words. You can write one that’s 35,000 words, or 280,000 if you really want to. But neither will be published unless you’re JK Rowling or Stephen King. And even then, your agent and publisher will say to you ‘Look, are you sure about this?’.

Crosswords Ends in Violence (5)

I have personal experience of this audience and publisher expectation. While I had a sitcom on BBC Radio 4 called Hut 33 set in Bletchley Park during World War Two, I wrote a novel called Crosswords Ends in Violence (5). It was set partly in the present day, and partly during D-Day. There was also a little plot set in a gulag in 1953. It was about codewords, crosswords and chess. And it was funny. This was a problem.

My radio sitcom was quite popular. I still get nice comments about it today. It garnered an audience of at least a million people, many of whom are precisely the kind who buy books without pictures. But could my literary agent get it published?

Nope.

The main problem seemed to be this: it was a thriller, but had jokes. Thrillers don’t have jokes in them. People who want thrills don’t want laughs. At least that was the view of publishers back in the 2000s. They read the manuscript and asked the question, “What’s it supposed to be?”

Looking back, maybe it’s because it just wasn’t very good. I can’t tell, and frankly, and I can’t bear to go back and check.  In the end, it was released as an ebook, before anyone was reading eBooks, sadly. Don’t look for it. But I’ll try and make it available soon.

Genres are a reality. They’re not a necessary evil. We see them in the Bible too. There are gospels, letters, histories, poems and songs. Jesus told parables. It was a genre. We read God’s Word according to the genre. This is, therefore, something I think the Christian artist can and should lean into.

But how does one avoid being a hack? We’ll come back to that another time.

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