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

[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.