Asking for What We Want in Our Lives ““ And What We Deserve in Literature

Kathrin Hutson

We are not defined by our mistakes, and we deserve to reach beyond our dreams until they become reality.

This is a pervading theme in everything I write, morphed into various forms through story and character but no less poignant from book to book. It’s an incredibly important message I strive to offer my readers in whatever different flavor each story brings, because it’s a message I have lived through personally. And I know I’m not the only one.

As a wife, a mother, and a queer female author navigating the literary world and supporting my family solely by writing fiction, I’ve struggled for some time to find the balance between meeting needs and fulfilling wishes. For years, I operated under the belief that what I needed, what I wanted, and what I deserved were three very different things within my personal life. Trying to visualize and actualize all three was a feat tossed even farther to the winds when I struggled through an active heroin addiction in my late teens and early twenties.

I’d drawn reality and dreams so far apart from each other that only the idea of meeting my immediate needs seemed even remotely attainable. I needed to recover and rebuild my life. I needed food, shelter, comfort, community, sanity.

What I wanted and what I thought I deserved after moving through one of the roughest patches of my life over ten years ago now were two entirely different things. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to write. And I believed I no longer deserved to lose myself in the magic of writing fiction because of the mistakes I’d made, the people I’d harmed, the fear and heartache and discouragement I’d sown in myself and in others. For four years after finally getting clean and on my road to recovery, I carried with me the immense weight of wanting to write””of dreaming about writing again to my heart’s content the way I had when I first discovered my passion for it””and simultaneously believing that what I wanted was no longer within the realm of what I’d earned. What I deserved.

I hardly picked up a book to read for pleasure when I was an addict. I’d turned away from the healthy outlets I’d honed by necessity as a child and an adolescent and a teenager. And while it took me four years to start writing again, it still took me almost a year to allow myself to pick up a book and start reading again purely for the enjoyment of it.

What I found when I dove into fiction again might as well have been a newly discovered world, as if I’d just learned to read for the first time and was seeing everything again with brand-new eyes. I rediscovered the brilliance of my previous favorite authors in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novels. And I found others who stoked a new curiosity in me about myself and the way I wanted to operate within this world after having been given a second chance at life and working so hard not to squander it.

Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel Legacy series carried with it the new possibilities of diving into one’s purpose and fluidly acclimating to it without giving up or giving in. “That which yields is not always weak”Â (Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Dart).

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale illuminated a deeper understanding of what personal strength entails, when an individual’s needs aren’t anywhere close to what a human being deserves and are in fact pitted against basic human rights. “I am not your justification for existence”Â (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale).

Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster revealed my first glimpse of awareness that I wasn’t alone in my inability to mold myself to any number of binary definitions””as a recovering addict, as a writer who hadn’t touched a word of fiction in years, as a queer person, as an adult struggling through life without the experiential knowledge of how most people perceived a “natural progression” without having screwed it all up first. “Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other”Â (Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster).

When I did finally start writing again, I did so with zero expectations and a hesitant shyness, not of what others might think of me for writing again but of how disappointed I thought I would be in myself. That if I strived for what I wanted and it wasn’t in fact what I deserved, I would have lost the single defining aspect of myself I’d carried with me since I was ten years old””Kathrin as a writer and nothing more.

What I found when I dove back into a freshly unexplored wealth of experiences I now had to draw from was that I could more easily create what I wanted to see in fiction than what I felt I deserved to receive from a life worth living. The first book I wrote after my four-year hiatus, Sleepwater Beat, became not only my first venture into LGBTQ+ fiction with queer characters at the forefront but also the first truly raw piece of fiction that exposed to myself and the entire world who I really am. As Dystopian fiction so often does, this book highlighted the things I saw in society, all while I wondered if I was the only one who saw them and simultaneously hoped I was not.

I wanted to see strength and hope blazing beneath a gritty top layer of darkness, despair, bigotry, xenophobia, and injustice. Just as I’d seen it, somehow, through the darkness of my active addiction and the underbelly of society exposed to me as a result. I wanted to see characters like myself””those who were not defined by their mistakes, their pasts, their upbringing, their race, their sexual orientation, or their truest identity but who did not hide from the value each piece of themselves provided to the whole. Those who had absolutely no idea what they were doing beyond the fact that giving up simply wasn’t an option. Those who could stare their own demons in the face””either by choice or by necessity””and carry on no matter the consequences.

After Sleepwater Beat became an international bestseller in 2019 and then what is now the first book in the Blue Helix series, I realized how much easier it was for me to ask for what I wanted in fiction than what I wanted in my own life. The more I realized I was not the outlier in wanting to see more characters like me within the pages of speculative fiction, including Dystopian Sci-Fi and Grimdark Fantasy, the more I came to understand that this stretched so much farther beyond myself.

Yes, I write what I know. So much of what I know is a long line of having defined myself by all the “wrong decisions,” the “bad mistakes,” the “inability to conform.” And the more I heard from readers who picked up my stories, the more I learned that I was writing what we deserve to see of ourselves within the context of fictional worlds, or eerily paralleled versions of our own reality, or the “unexposed underbelly” of society. Within the context of identity, shared experiences, real and raw interpersonal relationships, and the too-often glazed-over horrors of isolation and alienation instead of belonging.

As a result, I’ve grown so much more aware of what it means to pursue what I want and need and deserve as an individual person within my own life. These things aren’t mutually exclusive, and one is not more important than the other when we’re navigating the obstacles tossed into our paths. Now, I write because I want to and because I deserve to fulfill that desire with the gifts I was given and my own obstacles turned opportunities. I write because I want to see the types of stories, darkness, struggle, pain, hope, and breaking down of barriers and stereotypes that people like me deserve to see reflected from within such stories.

It’s so much easier to write what I dream of in fiction. But when I do, asking for the things in life that bring me abundance, joy, peace, and a sense of purpose through the one thing I know I was born to do becomes that much less difficult along the way.

International Bestselling Author Kathrin Hutson has been writing Dark Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and LGBTQ Speculative Fiction since 2000. With her wildly messed-up heroes, excruciating circumstances, impossible decisions, and Happily Never Afters, she’s a firm believer in piling on the intense action, showing a little character skin, and never skimping on violent means to bloody ends.

In addition to writing her own dark and enchanting fiction, Kathrin spends the other half of her time as a fiction ghostwriter of almost every genre and as Fiction Co-Editor for Burlington’s Mud Season Review. She is an active member of both the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and the Horror Writers Association. Kathrin lives in Colorado with her husband, their young daughter, and their two dogs, Sadie and Brucewillis.

For updates on new releases, exclusive deals, and dark surprises you won’t find anywhere else, sign up to Kathrin’s newsletter.

Website: KathrinHutsonFiction.com
Email: Author@kathrinhutsonfiction.com
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Treading the waters of diversity is tricky because we never want to disrespect the struggles that women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, or others have had to endure. As writers, we often want to include people like this in our stories because their stories are powerful and can make a difference. This sometimes manifests itself as ‘the gay friend’ or ‘the black friend’ or if you’re really batting for a home run ‘the gay black friend’. This character is great for diversity. He shows that those people exist and that we shouldn’t be afraid of them. But over time, if we see the gay black friend over and over it creates a subliminal message that all gay black men behave a certain way, and that can damage the community. I think we should allow those characters to break the mold and keep it to themselves.

Gender identity, skin color, and sexual orientation don’t affect your ability to do things. Period. There’s no reason a gay man can’t be a hardened combat veteran and there’s no reason a straight man can’t enjoy ballet. The fact that we use these stereotypes reflects our perceptions of society. It acts as a shorthand for the reader / viewer to go “Oh, he’s the gay guy, I get it!” and we can immediately paint a picture of who that person is without digging any deeper. While it’s great to include someone like this in your story, you may actually do more harm than good by treating them this way. Why? Because you’re adding to society’s confirmation bias. If every time someone sees a gay man on TV or reads about them in a book and they behave like a giddy teenage girl, then we will continue to think that’s how all gay men behave. Not that there’s anything wrong with a flamboyant personality, but it can be an oversimplification of the gay community.

What if, instead, we put a gay man in a position of power? The NBC show Brooklyn 99 does this with the character Captain Raymond Holt. He’s a stoic, calculating man that comes off cold but everyone loves him anyway. Just because he lacks flamboyance doesn’t make him any less gay. He still has a pride flag on his desk and there are many episodes with his husband, but he’s not treated any different because of his sexual preference. Yes, there are some episodes about his struggles as a gay black man in the NYPD because that is a story worth telling, but his skin color and sexual orientation never interfere with his ability to perform his duties. That’s because they literally have no bearing on his performance, and his entire team treats him the same as they treat everyone else. Imagine the impact that has for people who have never met a gay man like him. For some people, it never occurs to them a gay man could behave that way. For some people, that character is eye-opening and possibly life-changing.

Wizards of the Coast, a gaming company that owns Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering (among others), often portrays people of color as their flagship heroes. They even have several prominent non-binary characters, which they’ve supported despite friction from some members of the community. Imagine the impact when someone who’s never played one of these games, in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white dudes, thumbs through one of the rule books and sees a heroic character that looks like them. The imagination stirs as we consider the possibilities of being that character. It makes us feel like we could be part of that adventuring group, part of the epic story that will be written as a legend in years to come. All because of some simple artwork!

Placing these characters front and center, without necessarily making their differences the focus of the narrative, can have a profound effect on society. By having these characters represented in our stories we are saying, “This is how life is, these people exist and they don’t need to be treated any different than you or I.” This silent diversity becomes powerful representation for these communities. It reinforces the idea that we are all equal. If a child sees a hero that looks like them on the cover of a book, or on a movie poster, it tells them they could be that hero. It tells them there are other people with their unique traits in the world and that those people can accomplish great things. It tells them they aren’t alone.

You know what’ll never get old? Seeing representation in games. I used to be one of those people that said it didn’t matter but every time I see someone that looks like me on screen its a feeling like no other. pic.twitter.com/FwdP5rukHE

“” ThatBronzeGirl (@ThatBronzeGirl) November 20, 2019

Does this mean you can’t tell a story about a person of color’s struggles? Of course not. Am I suggesting that a woman’s climb to the top of her field isn’t worth hearing about? No. I’m saying that if we fast-forward through the struggles these people face every day and portray them as successful heroes then maybe society will treat them like heroes. In the end, we all want equality. We want a world where our gender identity, skin color, sexual preference or any other part of our being is accepted without a second thought.

Why not nudge society in that direction by telling stories where that is already true?

BIO: Kyle Winter is an author who is terrible at writing about himself, especially in the third person. He considers himself a genre-fluid author, dabbling in science-fiction, fantasy, pulp and others. He is an avid gamer, whether it be video games, tabletop RPGs, miniatures, board games or card games nothing is safe. For the past nine years he has routinely gotten beat up at his Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes and enjoys every second. You can visit his website www.TheKyleWinter.com or connect with him on Twitter @TheKyleWinter.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!