on "writing diverse characters"

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

So I watch a lot of booktok and this week, a lot of discussion has happened around a white author who wrote an interracial (I believe?) book in which at least one of the characters used a slur. I haven't seen the author's own video, just the reactions to it, and I haven't read the book but it's made me think about the idea of "writing diversely" and "reading diversely" and how a lot of it is just performative when it's done by white people.

White readers who "read diversely" talk so much about the fact that the characters in the book are non-white, but they rarely talk about why that matters or how they connected to them. They just reference the fact that they exist and then rate the book however they do. So many of them also seem to be reading this books as if they're eating their vegetables or something. They want to do something that the community has deemed "good" and they want to get credit for being "good" as a result.

The same seems so true of white authors a lot of the time. They know that readers want diverse characters and so they put "diverse" characters in their books. But the problems arise when the author doesn't actually know any people of colour in their daily life. An acquaintance isn't a good basis for a character. Watching TV and movies won't give you true insights. That's how these authors keep writing in stereotypes. It's because they're basing their characters on a surface-level understanding of who a person actually is.

Ben Aaronovitch is a white author based in England, and he writes characters of Nigerian background. He does a great job of it (according to Nigerian creators I follow) because he is friends with Nigerians and is surrounded in Nigerian culture. If I tried to write the same thing, it would turn out horribly because I know a handful of Nigerians, but only well enough to chit chat about work and the weather etc.

"Write what you know" is a trite saying, but I kind of think it applies here. So does "write what you love." If you're including Black or Indigenous or other POC characters because you have a true appreciation and understanding of the real human beings in those communities, your characterization is going to be a lot deeper and more nuanced than it will be if you're writing BIPOC characters in order to sell books or score points on twitter.

All that said, I'm very out of my lane on this one. I'm white and I've never attempted to write Original Fiction. I don't post on booktok or booktube, and I'm only tangentially interested in the romance genre. This is just something that I've been trying to work my way through this week as I watch these creators whose opinions I value.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

This definitely seems like a pretty difficult line to walk.

Asking for a decent amount of research going into writing characters outside of your own race is an absolutely fair thing to expect! And "diversity" is so much more than just an offhand mention of a character having darker skin (and hoo boy, especially if the author descends into food descriptions). Way too many authors (and readers, as you said) use it as an opportunity to check off a ticky box on the "and I'm a Good Reader/Writer and a Good Person and have eaten my veggies" checklist.

BUT... there's also the very real trend of "diverse" media being absolutely torn apart by overzealous purity policing and demands for perfection. (Something true with non-white authors as well as white ones.) There's a lot of genuinely bad-faith criticism that absolutely proliferates on tiktok (and twitter and youtube and...)

Write what you know (and GET to know the things you don't, if you want to write about them) is fair... but because so may people treat nuance as poison, that usually just turns into "white people can only ever write about white people because they'll never *really* know what it's like to be non-white"... which is true on a base level, just like a straight person will never know what it's like to be queer, or a cis man will never know what it's like to be a woman... but saying that a characteristic like gender/race/sexuality makes you SO FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT that you can't EVER relate or write about or include someone who isn't JUST LIKE YOU is... also not great.

Basically... extremes of "diversity is just a checklist!" and "you can only write someone who shares all the same demographics you do" are both super awful. I wish more authors would put forward the effort to portray diverse characters well, and I wish more people were willing to distinguish between "well-meaning but imperfect" and "oh no, this is a super garbage attempt" in their criticism.

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I definitely agree. There's a lot of bad faith criticism and a lot of "if it's not perfect, it's garbage!" out there. I don't think you need to know everything inside and out, but I do think you need to take the time to actually see whatever group you're writing as real people with real concerns that are different from your own but just as valid. Basically, when it's just a checkbox, the writing lacks a lot of empathy and it kind of shows.

[mistressofmuses]

Definitely agreed - when it's done with shallow intent, the result is equally shallow, and asking for people to please do some actual research on things before writing them is very fair!

I just hate how everything has to be to one extreme or another! Demands for perfection (and for the same thing to be perfect to every single person) are unhelpful, but so is *just not trying*. Ugh!

[eruvadhril]

The main character of Ben Aaronovitch's current book series is based in part on his own son, in terms of general personality as well as ethnicity and upbringing, specifically because when the story made the switch from TV script to novel, he didn't feel confident enough in his ability to write an authentic first-person perspective for a woman. Since then he's done an novella and a short story from the perspective of Peter's cousin Abigail because he put in the work to *get* good enough. He identified an area in which "what he knows" was lacking, and then built up a solid understanding of it rather than just reading a couple of Wikipedia articles and calling it good.

[pikkugen]

...something I've learned from writing fic in English, which is not my native tongue: Beta readers are your friends. If I was trying to write about, idk, the experience of being Chinese in America in the 1800, of which I have next to no knowledge about, the first thing (after reading a metric ton of history about the time, place and environment) would be to find someone who DID know about being Chinese in America. (I'm pretty sure there are no Chinese immortals who were around at that time, but it's the internet, you never know.) But the worldview and the practical experience of not being of the default ethnic and/or linguistic background are something I'd want to put through the approval of at least one who knows what it's like.

(This goes for any culture, really. I've read too many fics about Finnish real people written by foreigners, and you can always see when the writer has managed to had their fic Finn-picked before posting. I should think adding a different ethnicity on top of that would add whole another level of hard.)

[feast_of_regrets]

I agree with all above; it is a hard issue. Especially since I find for myself that writing is the thing that unpacks a lot of my prejudices. I grew up in a deeply racist family; I've only realized over the past ten years or so just how racist. Reading does a lot of the heavy lifting; you can't write what you don't know exists. But creating a character and exploring what happens 'inside' is for me the thing that best begins to break down what I learned growing up. Writing is a process of becoming empathetic and also of allowing yourself to inhabit the world your prejudices denied, which means a writer is absolutely going to make awful, really screamingly bad mistakes. I know I have. But I would never publish those stories. (Not that I ever publish any of them, but you get what I mean.) I think part of the trouble is that we have very little concept of writing that is just for the writer. (And I'm sure published authors also have to think about word count putting food on the table.) But you're going to go through a time when writing for someone who isn't like you where your output just isn't fit for public consumption. Sensitivity editing is vital; I do think if an author is writing someone from another group, that story shouldn't go out the door without being read by someone in that group. It wouldn't totally prevent controversy, but it would help a lot. (I don't know what this person's situation is; maybe they tried. But it seems like someone in the know would have pointed out the slur.)

From snippets of authors I follow, I feel like the conversation has moved from 'everyone must write diverse stories' to 'we desperately need diverse publishers, who will publish diverse writers, who will get a chance to tell their diverse stories.' (That may just be the little corner I pay attention to, though.) I do think that's the better answer, though obviously a long term project that can't fix what we have immediately. In the meantime, I do think there's value in white authors stretching their craft, but they have to do the work, and that is hard work. And if they aren't going to do the full work of it, it would probably be better if they do 'write what they know'. (Although there again: the world itself is actually diverse, even in small town USA. If they aren't writing that? There's a whole other conversation to have there, I guess.)

P.S. *waves excitedly* Hi! It's good to see you again!

[thewickling]

I fell that if someone wants to write as you put it "shallowly" then then need avoid writing stories about being a specific identity. You cannot write shallowly about the experience of living within a specific existence. You can possibly write shallowly about characters of an identity where the story does not focus on being that identity. (In some cases that leads to its own problems but it's a different set of problems with different solutions. No story has to achieve everything)