If you’re casting in a diverse way for a book, good for you. Our lives are made of lots of people who differ from us. It might be useful, though, to look around and see how your friends line up. Do you pal around with any people of a different race, or culture, or even economic status? If not, you can turn to literature, to a point.
There are two kinds of diversity to embrace. Personality and mission are the primary choices. Your book’s people can include characters for moral support of your hero, or who mirror them to reveal traits back at them. There are allies and colleagues, the bad influence, a mentor or a guru, a corruptor versus a wingman. Not to mention lovers or comic relief.
With so many story roles to fill, why not reach for diversity? Well, you might make clumsy choices for writing The Other, or just be choosing diversity because you’re sure it’s required by now. One client of mine wanted to make a supporting character Black, but there was no driving reason, and lots of research ahead to learn the life of Black people. The author wanted to be broad minded and inclusive.
We can go back to Moby Dick to find a good example of other identities powering a book. Queequeg is surely nothing like Melville in culture or social position. Alex Temblador has a book about Writing An Identity Not Your Own. The Latine novelist and journalist has two books published with Mixed characters who are half white.
There’s a great interview online about the book. In Mignon Fogarty’s podcast at one point, the idea is floated that “knowing just one person” of an other identity isn’t enough. If you are willing to see that an author will imagine salient aspects of characters, then the identity of the author means nothing. The best question in the interview about adding diversity is, “why bother?” In a nutshell, you will draw in more readers if they can see something of themselves, or their world, in the cast of your story.
Being authentic to any identity that’s not your own takes devotion and outside readers. You shouldn’t confuse this with learning about dramatization in characters. Writing The Other should be more than a litmus test, if it’s to be truly inclusive. It’s the attention to the details of the craft that matter. Reading books by people who are writing in their own identity and different than you was a good research tip. Your aim is to become a different kind of author than the self-identity writers. I aspired to be an Anglo male writing about a Latine character in my debut novel Viral Times, but the other-ness of Melissa wasn’t profound. I’ll do better next time.
