I wanted to wrap up my series on sensitivity readers—which admittedly went down quite a few hopefully helpful rabbit holes—by offering some practical advice besides hiring a sensitivity reader if you’re venturing into writing about a marginalized community you don’t belong to yourself.
In everything I read on this issue, I could find nary a voice that said writers should only ever write about people just like themselves. That would be extremely limiting! Obviously. However, it’s a bigger challenge inherently to write something outside our personal experience.
So how can we, as writers, best go about this work?
What I’ve compiled here is some of the best advice I came across while researching this topic. I’m not positioning myself as an authority but more as your helpful guide. I encourage you to read the things I’ve linked to here if you’re going about this. I also suggest getting a copy of Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward: a short, funny, extremely helpful book with fun exercises and excellent advice. And if you have additional advice to share (or if you think I’m just ass-backwards about something, I am humbly yours for the feedback, my friends.
SO, how does an author who wants to do it right go about this?
Interrogate Your Motives
I laughed aloud when I read this interview with Dhonielle Clayton in which she said that whenever she asked an author why they were writing a character of a certain identity, the person always responded by saying they just walked into their head that way. I laughed not at this hapless author in question but at my own damn self because I probably would have answered that question the same way. Oh no!
The truth is that the alchemy of writing fiction is mysterious and we can all get cute about how real and whole our characters are. I feel that way! I feel like they live in my head in a way that is beyond my control. But, of course, we’re all pulling from something in the world that’s inspired us and I think in the case of writing about a marginalized community, it’s important to know what that is for you so that you approach this with integrity. For example, if the answer is something like “well I think racial equity/ LGBTQ rights/ immigration is a hot topic right now and it will help me sell my novel”? Walk away slowly. Have a talk with yourself and then, you know, please don’t.
If you don’t ask yourself why you’re doing something, the likelihood of you having blind spots is so much worse. And hey, if you don’t want to mess with first draft mojo, you can ask yourself this question a draft or two in. That’s what the revision process is for and why that whole argument about this inhibiting creativity rings so false to me.
Read All the Books
If you’re writing about a community that is not your own, or writing a central character from a community you’re not a part of, you should be reading dozens of books from authors in that community: novels, memoirs, nonfiction, all of it.
Not only is this great for research, it’s just great overall! It’s a massive failing of our industry that books from marginalized communities take more work to seek out; but the Bookstagram community is on it. People such as The Stacks, Lupita Reads, Spines and Vines, and so many others feature great #ownvoices content regularly.
You should do lots of other research including watching movies and shows and reading blogs, but books are especially important because they’re so effective at building empathy. And…
Empathy is Everything
Let your heart and your imagination guide you through this process. I can’t possibly say it better than Brandon Taylor does in his excellent essay on LitHub:
“There can be no story without empathy. Our stories begin because we are able to enter the lives of other people. We are able to imagine how a person might move through the world, how their family might operate, what their favorite foods might be, how their nation works, how their town works, and the smallest, most inconsequential aspects of their lives rise up to meet us at our desks. You can’t write if you can’t empathize. Solipsism is anathema to good writing.”-Brandon Taylor in LitHUb
I think this gets an essential truth that getting characters with different identities right is just about good writing, which is always about empathy and detail.
Understand Stereotypes and Tropes
There are so many stereotypes that are so baked into our culture that we as writers may reproduce them without even meaning to. Even positive-sounding stereotypes like the “overachieving Asian person” or the “strong black woman” have ugly roots. This isn’t to say that characters from marginalized backgrounds should be sanitized to perfection and sainthood, no! All of your characters should have the messy humanity of real people, that’s what makes fiction compelling. But tropes are not just offensive, they’re tired, so know which ones you’re dealing with and avoid them like landmines.
Get Feedback
Whether you go the route of a sensitivity reader or a trusted writer friend or colleague who shares the identity of the character you’re writing about, don’t let your book wend its way through publishing without this step. As we’ve discussed, publishing has a bad track record in this arena and it’s your name that’s going to be on the book
You’ll never write a book to everyone’s liking and no one says that you must take every single piece of feedback but be open to it. And check your fragility at the door, please and thank you!
It’s just writing
At the end of the day, writing outside your own life experience is a bigger challenge than writing from within it. But it’s still just writing. There’s no special trick or technique here other than the diligence you would put towards anything else.
Books full of tropes and stereotypes have always been gross, and have always done harm, long before Twitter existed to form hashtags about it
It can be amazing and enriching to write outside the boundaries of our own life experiences, so go forth and be brave. Just be compassionate too!
Read More:
Fundamentals of Writing the Other / Buzzfeed
How to Unlearn Everything/ Vulture
There is No Secret to Writing People Who Do Not Look Like You / LitHub