I was at a con, talking to a lady who runs a grant program for under-represented and minority writers, and she said, “Oh you totally count. You’re still working-class in background, even if you’re white-collar now.”
I demurred, and said I’d rather more needy people applied.
It got me thinking, though, what are the disadvantages of being from a different economic background as a writer? She is right, being blue collar is something inside me, and it’s there in how I react to people of other classes. Sometimes even my best friends seem like aliens to me when they say something like, oh, “I think I’ll quit my job.”
So here are some editorial comments I’ve gotten that, to me, show class bias. These are actual comments I’ve gotten on stories I’ve written. I’m not trying to call people out, I promise. I won’t say who said them, and I know that their own relationship to money or class is fraught and complicated. (And I know I can say that as a blanket statement to all the people quoted here, regardless of their socio-economic background. “We’re the real poor,” said the woman I cleaned house for in high school.)
“Wow, I never thought a phone support person could be sympathetic! I only think of them as villains.”
Related: “Your police are so antagonistic it’s like an alternate reality!”
How we relate to other people’s jobs differs greatly by class. I was always afraid of police, a little in awe, but afraid. I never thought of them coming to save me from anything. I thought of them coming to arrest me. Yet, when I was in college, once, I and a friend were lost, and my friend said, “Oh, there’s a policeman,” and went to ask this cop for directions like he was a help desk or some shit when he was obviously busy directing traffic. I was mortified. I tried to signal “I’m not with her” heavily. And then?? He told her he was busy and she got in his face and said “No, we’re lost, who is your supervisor?” She wasn’t even POLITE. She talked to this officer of the law like he was her SERVANT.
It was one of those moments in my life where I realized oh hey, class is a thing, and I have one. In my class, you speak to a police officer respectfully, carefully, humbly. You call them “Sir” or “Ma’am.” You basically treat them as if they are above you. Seeing my fellow teen girl treat this cop like he was beneath her was shocking to my core.
And so it is with other jobs. I’ve worked a help desk and I have many friends who have worked help desks or complaint departments or store counters. When I think of customer service, I think of mean customers and endlessly-suffering employees, because that’s how I’ve always interacted with that situation.
People from the lower classes are used to having to do all the self-service humanly possible before calling, and then will apologize to the phone worker for not having fixed it ourselves, because we see that phone person as slightly above us in that they have the knowledge we’re seeking. People from more comfortable backgrounds look down on support as people not as skilled as them, and demand to speak to a manager.
Not that everyone is defined by their class. I’ve known poor people who demand to speak to managers, but on average, from my point of view, the employee is sympathetic and the customer can jog on.
I secretly suspect my help desk story had to wait until it met an editor who had worked support before.
“Nothing is at stake in this story where your protagonist faces losing her job.”
Related: “I don’t get it. Why couldn’t he have bought [thing] to solve the plot?”
Fiction is about stakes, and you’d think economic stakes would increase tension, but certain readers seem immune to them. They are so used to having an economic safety net (savings, wealthy relatives) that they can’t imagine life without it.
The conversation goes:
Them: Nothing is at stake.
Me: She’s going to lose her job!
Them: So?
Me: So she’ll die!!
Them: How does that follow?
The very question, “Explain to me why this person needs their job to live” hurts. If you are blue collar, it’s intuitively obvious. Jobs are oxygen, and losing them is getting put out the airlock. Yet, time and again, I’m told that “economic stakes aren’t exciting” or that I have to “really show the lack of options.” And every time I die a little.
Being asked to explain a basic fact of life, again and again, is humiliating. So I gave up writing stories about someone fearing losing their job, even though, to this day, job insecurity is a major preoccupation of mine.
Imagine being told the thing keeping you awake at night isn’t compelling enough for fiction? My whole childhood was filled with layoffs and unemployment lines. I got my first job at twelve and have never been unemployed since, save a few nightmarish weeks when I spent the entire time unable to think of anything but my increasingly frantic job search.
It’s more than the economic need to keep putting food in the belly. We are taught, again and again, that to be unemployed is to be less than human. To have a crap job is a hellish purgatory, but at least you aren’t a “lazy moocher.” (You’re still considered a crap human, though, so don’t stop looking for the “good enough” job in what little free time you have!)
People say horrible things all the time about the poor and act like the poor don’t hear it, don’t internalize it. Not only does the working class person need their job more, they value it more, emotionally. They’ve been told it’s the summation of their worth as a person.
No, I’ve never sold a story about someone being afraid they would lose their job.
“A person like that wouldn’t know who Jane Austen is.”
Related: “You need to explain how someone in that environment would have that skill.”
People from higher economic backgrounds have this weird idea that money makes you smart. They will bumble through their lives with no especial curiosity, have only one book in their house (Chicken Soup for the White Anglo Saxon Protestant Soul), and yet genuinely believe their Trivial Pursuit knowledge is unobtainable across the tracks?
JANE FUCKING AUSTEN?? Dude, they’re called Libraries. It’s also called TV. Maybe you’ve heard of it. There’s no ivory wall blocking all high-brow knowledge from lower income neighborhoods. For fuck’s sake, there’s better access to Austen in the projects than recent best-sellers. People are always donating their Greats in paperback form after they get that BA in English. Penguin Classics are thick on the ground at libraries and schools and community centers. At least they were when I was growing up. Even if they weren’t, I knew who Jane Austen was before I picked up a (free, library) copy of Pride & Prejudice in tenth grade (of public school.) She’s in cartoons and jokes and MEMES.
Let me put it this way, my father the laborer wouldn’t deign to read anything as low-brow as “commercial fiction.” He called my C. J. Cherryh paperbacks “Junk Food for the Mind.” The only fiction book I ever saw him read was “The Divine Comedy.” In his denim coveralls, with an un-ironic can of cheep beer, probably listening to Tchaikovsky.
Yet, if I had a construction worker in a story quote Dante, you’d probably ask me how he knew it and I’d be here waving my hands at the very real laborer’s reading habits.
“Oh,” you say, “Your dad is an exception!”
And do you know how much it hurts that, every time you do well you’re an exception, and every time you do poorly you’re a statistic? We’re robbed even of the chance to use ourselves as examples in breaking stereotypes, because the stereotype is stronger than we are.
I also run into this when I have a poor person skilled in STEM subjects. Yes, there is a huge advantage if you grow up wealthy enough to have a computer at home … but these days computer literacy may as well be called “Literacy” and trust me, I have worked alongside rich white boys who had every advantage and couldn’t program their way out of a freshman textbook.
Also, I have met people below the poverty line who dreamed of designing a new form of solar-powered car, or had an idea to reduce emissions or wrote computer programs on paper, looking up syntax in books. Stop with the “But how could they know?” If a person is interested in something, they will go out and find the knowledge. There are geniuses out there, struggling, beat down by circumstances but still finding time to steal that fact, that idea, that dream … and most of them will never have a single opportunity to use it. (I deeply, heavily, depressingly digress. Yeah, never sold the story about THAT, either.)
If an editor says I have to explain a skill, well, they are the boss. I throw in a line to explain, “She treasured that community college course she took.” I don’t like it, and I try to make sure I’m explaining why middle-class white guys know what they know, too.
This blog post is getting kinda long. I’m afraid I’ve gone from the initial question to a personal set of grievances. I’ve sold over sixty short stories, so I can’t say being blue collar has held me back, but there are places I feel it has snagged me.
For example, for years I had to work myself up to send paper submissions because of the cost. I was wasting money! Upwards of four dollars sometimes! That could buy you lunch! (These days I just dislike the waste of trees.) I also didn’t go to conventions because it was just too much money. To this day I get anxious about the expense, and I no longer worry at all about making rent. (I over-paid my mortgage last month. Seriously, I’m fine, but that habit of scarcity never goes away.)
I spent my twenties making rent. I remember how angry and helpless I felt about my writing then. There was no energy left to do it after my two minimum-wage jobs with hour-long bus commutes. Every day I felt myself beaten by work, and helpless to escape the situation. I wrote when I could, stories about the fear of losing one’s job, about having one’s mind overlooked because all that mattered was the strength of your back. Stories no one bought, nor will ever buy. I still feel the loss of that decade. There’s a song in the musical Working that really speaks to me on this subject. “I coulda been something, if they had just let me go where I had wanted to go when I wanted to go back then… god! What I coulda been.”
Maybe my background gave me a slower start. Maybe it’s why I have more luck at Analog than Asimov. I honestly don’t know, there’s no test-me from another class.
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