Status Updates From Writing an Identity Not You...

“For instance many Latine communities have a strong connection to Vick VapoRub” GIRL! I went over this line and immediately remember being told that my mom’s Abuela believed it was the cure for everything!

CONT’D: “Women’s dialogue tended to have a more positive affect, and use language that was associated to family values, whereas men used words related to achievement and death, and swore more frequently than women characters.”

“In 2017 nearly 1000 film scripts were analyzed by researchers at the University of Southern California to see how stereotypes relating to gender race and aging are reinforced through dialogue. […] When it came to race, the researchers found that Latine and mixed characters used more sexualized language than characters of other races, and black characters use a higher percentage of swear words.”

Exercise: “Fill out the following list as if your character were filing it out. Be as specific as possible. Name, age, birthday? Gender identity, race and ethnicity, sexual and romantic orientation, physical description, health history, address and home type, previous addresses and home types, nationality, disabilities, relationship status and relationship history, …”

Note to self: everything up to the end of the first chapter is context. The helpful notes don’t start until after then. Worth reading if you want to check the author’s qualification to write about this, but I was trusting from early on and the constant reaffirmation felt redundant to me.