Last week I had the wonderful chance to attend a Book Event last week for Fat Swim, by Emma Copley Eisenberg. During the experience, Emma was in conversation with fellow author Rebecca Makkai. There discussion around Fat Swim was enjoyable, insightful, offering a wonderful platform for Emma’s narratives and I’m very excited to add into my queue of short story collections, anthologies, and novels-in-stories).
The collection has a diversity of body types featured, including fat characters and important emphasis around embodying characters of all different shapes and sizes. And in a fatphobic society, often equating health to skinniness, frequently ridiculing and punishing fat people or people who don’t fit the idealized standards, if we don’t describe our characters and embody them, our minds frequently default to the skinny/lender societal “default.” In the conversation, Rebecca elevated an interesting prompt that she explores in some of her workshops around picturing one of your characters in a particular situation, one which (like the genders and race and cultures and other aspects of their identity that we flesh out) affirms more about who are characters and aspects of their story.
Our own relationship with our body is already a complex one, so to be disconnected with the body type or how our characters embody themselves in particular situations may not be on our radar. The opportunity here is to consider the question: What are situations where you (as yourself) become more aware of your body and existing in it? These situations may be at pool (re: Fat Swim) or the ocean, a situation where you’re shopping or trying on clothes, your annual check-up appointment with your doctor and many other visits to different types of doctors, sex, eating, going to the gym or some exercise related experience, and many others. The prompt here is to start with yourself—likely taking a moment to breath and ready yourself if this is something that you don’t often think about, avoid thinking about, or hold trauma around. Reflect on 3 scenarios that resonate with you and your body and take a moment to self reflect and describe yourself, your body, and your own narrative.
After you’re done, take a moment to reflect on that experience, reread your responses, and from that, select one scenario you’d like to explore with one of your own characters. If there are limitations for your own character to be in one of the scenarios you reflected on for yourself, select another from your list. Take a moment to allow the character to embody themselves and how they move through the scenario (or greater world) you have crafted. How does this inform more of the background, their culture, and their relationship with their body?
Like other prompts, this is a chance to do a deeper dive into a character. It’s an initial question of how have you, as the writer, begun to embody the character, but also what is that character’s relationship with their own body. (This may be specific to just this character, this could be a larger consideration for most of your characters, especially your primary ones.) That character may have less awareness of that question, but as the writer, if it’s a question we ignore or bypass, we miss an important opportunity to enrich who that character is, to think about the vast differences we all embody and consider how we ensure that is featured and seen by readers.
Having an aspect of someone’s identity be invisible/ignored by default often allows the larger default narratives to take hold of things (i.e.: if character’s race or orientation or ability or economic status or religion or a long list of other things are not actualized within the narrative by the writer, there’s often a default that further vanishes character not of the majority group). Or there’s negative tropes (i.e.: gluttony or another judgment) or associations (i.e.: assigning them as a villain) or biases (i.e.: laziness, misfortune, illness) afoot when we do—how we break that comes from creating full characters that go well beyond that.
If this feels like a big exploration for your work as a writer, you might just begin with yourself, exploring the questions around your own embodiment, and take a moment to reflect on it, or even pause in some of those scenario with how you are, how you feel, and how you connect with your body in those spaces and places. For other writers, how do you explore embodying characters and how do you ensure a vast representation of bodies?