As moderator of this roundtable, I wanted to peek into the thought processes of other writers about writing diversely, an aspect of the craft much of the industry is still struggling with. We each bring our own unique set of perspectives, biases, and prejudices to our writing, and discussion with other writers can help us get rid of what hurts readers while keeping what empowers. So here are some questions — and their answers! — about writing diversely that hopefully plenty of writers will find insightful.
Elsie Chapman
1. Loving a culture as an outsider. Having a spouse/partner/family of an ethnicity not your own. Growing up in a country as a minority. How might any of these affect your personal approach in writing outside your own culture? Should they affect it?
Dhonielle: There are so many influences that affect my personal approach to writing outside of my own culture. I’ve been fortunate enough to live in many different countries. Also, I have grown up as a minority in the United States. I love many of the cultures of the places I’ve lived and visited. Each one of these elements have affected me because they add to my creative tapestry. They became stored in my well. They also make me careful. I know what it feels like to have my culture warped and whitewashed and twisted, so I would never want to do that to another’s.
When writing outside of my culture, I usually write or create things from places I’ve lived, spent time, or visit extensively. I’m a sensory writer and need to have visited and/or spent time in a space to write about it — or create a world from it. I need to let the place and its people get under my skin and change me. In my ballet series, Tiny Pretty Things, I wrote about a ballet school. I never went to a Russian ballet school, but I worked in one for several years. The characters come from three different racial/ethnic backgrounds: Korean American, white American, and black American. I felt confident writing a white American character because I’ve been surrounded by white Americans and their culture my entire life as a minority in the United States.
All in all, everything affects my personal approach to writing outside my own culture. All the various ingredients that make you up as an individual will show up in your writing, and even more so as you dive into cultures and spaces that aren’t your own — your biases, assumptions, and what you don’t know.
Natalie: You’ll be impacted by any sort of experience you have, so I can’t imagine any of these scenarios not affecting your writing. I think if you are on the “border” of being imbedded in a culture it can be easy to feel like you don’t have to do your research because you do know more. But there are still nuances and things you may not grasp and take important not to get complacent just because of your familiarity.
Elsie: I’m Chinese, but I grew up in Canada — as a minority in a small northern town until my late teens, then as a majority-minority in Vancouver when I moved for university. I live in Japan now, with my white husband and our bi-racial kids, and I get treated as both a native and as a tourist, depending on whom I’m with.
All of this to say, I get how it feels to belong, just as much as I get how it feels to be an outsider, and something in between, too — all affect how I approach writing outside my culture. But none of it means I get a free pass when it comes to research — I would still research Chinese culture, because despite being Chinese, I grew up as a banana. I would still research Japanese culture, because I’m not Japanese, I only live here. Still, I think research and experience only go so far, and marrying into a culture, or having POC friends, or living abroad is not the same thing as being born and raised in that culture. Writing as an outsider can actually be the best approach, and I wish more writers writing diversely felt the same way.
Sangu: I’d like to believe that if I were exposed to a culture not my own, whether due to my relationships with family or because I were otherwise passionate about it in some way, it would make me feel that much more determined to reflect that culture respectfully if I were to write about it. Should I write about that culture at all? I don’t know, to be honest. I’m brown and my husband is white, so would it be fair for him to write about Indian culture when there’s a good chance he’ll never know or understand as much about it as I or another authentic voice does? Conversely, is it fair to tell him he shouldn’t write about it at all when there are thousands of respectful, wonderful ways he could do so that could complement #ownvoices books on the subject rather than take space away from them?
I suppose that sums up my personal approach to the question of how my passion and exposure to other cultures affects my work, actually: I believe that respectful, wonderful representation is absolutely possible and it can be a great thing as long as it complements #ownvoices work rather than takes its place. So for me, personally, that means my goal is to write from the lens of voices that feel right and authentic to me but I will also work hard to represent, as part of my supporting cast, other marginalisations in ways that are hopefully respectful and hopefully complementary to the work of #ownvoices authors writing those kinds of characters from their own lens.
Heidi: You know, as a person of color married to a white person, I do sometimes wonder if he’s upset that all my villains are white men. I kid, I kid — mostly. I think that any and all of a person’s experiences will have some affect on their writing, but an author trying to write outside their own culture must always be aware of the dominant culture’s stereotypical portrait of the culture they are portraying. Does your story fall into harmful tropes? Are you thinking you’re subverting a stereotype but actually just reinforcing it?
Sometimes people think that if they love a culture, they cannot do it harm. But sometimes that can be the most dangerous situation to be in. We’ve all seen misogynist men who love women, right? So we know that just because a person loves something doesn’t mean they fully understand it.
Riley: Generally, I think that whether you love a culture, have married into a culture, have grown up in a minority culture, or none of the above, it should not affect the process of writing cross-culturally. That said, these factors often do affect people’s approach, which makes sense.
My least favorite movie in the world is Ted, the Seth MacFarlane stuffed animal vehicle that, at a pivotal point in the narrative, includes a stunningly racist sequence involving a Chinese man speaking broken English, wielding a butcher knife, storming in holding a live duck, and randomly transforming into a bald man with a stereotypical Chinese beard wearing an emperor costume. I remember being shocked in the movie theater as it was happening. I’ve never walked out of a movie in my life, but I was sorely tempted to make an exception. It was like watching something made sixty years ago, like the filmmaker had used Sixteen Candles as gospel for how to write Asian-Americans. People in the theater were losing their heads laughing. I thought, Jesus, is that what people see when they look at me?
Having felt that embarrassment and anger, being sensitive to lazy stereotypes of my own culture, I care deeply about avoiding the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in general. In the outlining stage, while assembling a story’s bones, I research whether certain arcs, throughlines, or characters might fall into something derivative & hurtful. I try not to write from a place of worry during the drafting stage, since I don’t want fearful/tentative writing, but during editing, I go back to a critical lens to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and I’m not tentative about gutting subplots or characters if they’re a problem.
So yes, it’s a process. It takes work, and for those who haven’t felt the diminishing effects of stereotypes, I can see how it would be tempting to skip these steps. But they shouldn’t, which is why in general I don’t think there should be a difference between a minority or minority-adjacent person’s research process and any other writer’s. Ideally, every writer would be equally sensitive to avoiding stereotypes, because they are boring in every conceivable way. Everybody should know that flat racial stereotypes are just bad character work, but it makes sense that minority populations — having suffered through the Teds of the world, etc. — would be more aggressive about sidestepping that trap.
Amanda: Of course they should affect it! What creates the wonderful tapestry of writing voices is that we’re all coming from a unique world perspective. We’ve experienced things that others haven’t, faced different adversities or challenges or cultural roadblocks. The best way for others to learn that the world is vibrant and varied is through reading what others have to say, particularly marginalized voices. And while we may write fiction, the truth of the world around comes through what we write. It’s so crucial that we write to not only give voices to characters that challenge readers to rethink their world views, but to write characters that readers can see themselves in, intricate and unique characters that show each person is an individual, not just a stereotype or a cut-out in a sidekick role.
2. Let’s say you’re about to go on sub with a diverse manuscript. What might be some of your thoughts regarding potential readership, reception from editors, the manuscript’s overall chances?
Sangu: I’m in that position now! And I will say that I am filled constantly with doubt. My hope, no matter what story I write, is to create great stories and wonderful characters who feel real to readers. But I also try to represent diverse characters in my work and that, sadly, does make the issue more thorny. Of course there are representation issues that I worry about because I want to get things right for readers, but in terms of subbing to the industry in particular, there are a slew of other doubts. Is the book too diverse? Is it not diverse enough? Have I tried too hard to find a middle ground between “diverse” and “mainstream” or have I perhaps not tried hard enough? Can a new book by a brown author sell or will a publisher prefer a book about the same culture or themes written by a more marketable white author?
These are difficult and often disheartening question to have to ask yourself when all you really want to do is tell a story you love, but that is unfortunately the case for many marginalised authors. We don’t usually get to “just tell stories” because our stories are assessed in different ways.
Heidi: I’m very lucky in that I came to publishing just before WNDB became a Major Thing, and I think by that point, industry folks were already looking for more “diverse” manuscripts. I also found just the right house for me and then camped out there — my editor has been a fabulous ally. As such, I never had to worry much about the reception for my manuscript on the editor side of things. As for readers, I have occasionally seen “criticism” that my book is “needlessly diverse” — as though marginalized people are only appropriate in “issue books” and not in fantasy or genre fiction. To which I say: NOPE. Readers do need to catch up, to understand that marginalized people can have genre fiction adventures where their marginalization is not the total focus of the plot. That might make for a mixed reception in some cases. But we can’t get to the other side of that without going through it, if you know what I mean.
Riley: Frankly? These days, I’m optimistic as hell. I know we’ve got a long way to go, but I feel like I’m seeing a sea change in the reception of manuscripts by and about POC. Especially in commercial YA fiction. NYT — bestsellers like The Young Elites, Six Of Crows, The Star-Touched Queen, the latest Percy Jackson series — these are concretely and numerically disproving the old lines POC are fed about how POC characters are a “niche market.”
Maybe editors really used to think that was true, that if they acquired a novel starring a POC cast it wouldn’t sell. But they’d be ridiculous to maintain that belief now, and I think we’re seeing the effects of these books’ success in PM acquisitions and such.
This is purely from a sales/submission standpoint. There’s a lot of conflict within the online YA community over the evolving diversity conversation. Obviously, you still see glaring oversights like the issues with When We Was Fierce, The Continent, et al. But importantly, I think, people now seem to give a damn about fixing that. As long as people still care about betterment, I’m going to cling to my optimism.
Elsie: Dualed features an entirely ethnically diverse cast, and Divided has a gay couple, but it never, ever occurred to me to worry about either of those things back when I was querying (Dualed) and then writing (I signed for Divided before I knew the plot). It’s only now, with the recent rise of WNDB and the growing awareness of how lacking kidlit still is when it comes to diversity, that I stop to think about whether or not diversity in my manuscripts might end up hurting me. Mostly because awareness doesn’t always mean acceptance, and we’re still feeling pushback from too many parts of the industry — from agents to publishers to reviewers — about what kinds of books are believed to sell, and what kinds of books readers want.
And this isn’t wrong. After all, books that aren’t published can’t sell, and readers can’t want what they don’t know. But all those books that get passed up for “not fitting into the marketplace”? I think those books are what kid readers need most right now, and it’s those same kids we write for. Sure, there’ll always be editors and publishers who will never get it, but it’s not those editors and publishers you really want to work with, anyway. The world is diverse as hell, and publishing needs to change to reflect that — so we start by writing that change into existence.
Amanda: I’ve been really fortunate to work with people who feel as strongly about diversity as I do. When I was subbing Ink, I remember that many potential houses liked the manuscript, but they felt very nervous about the Asian content, as in, they wanted to get it right, and lacked the confidence to do so. This was before “Sensitivity Reader” was an actual term, and I at least appreciated that they wanted the characters and the story to be fully realized, and not damaging or stereotyped. My husband is Taiwanese, and my daughters are biracial, and I’d become so frustrated at that time with the thin and stereotyped Asian characters in YA, so with my daughters in mind, I thought of all those readers who needed these characters in their YA. Not just Asian readers, who needed to see themselves as the heroes in way more stories, but also every reader who needed to be exposed to strong Asian heroes and heroines. As a white writer, I never worried that my book wouldn’t be accepted by a house because they already had filled their “diversity quota.” I only worried whether I’d told a strong enough story, or got things right. That’s a huge privilege to recognize, and one white writers like me need to keep in mind. I did worry whether the story would be picked up because of its content, and that just means we have further to go in terms of normalizing diversity.
Dhonielle: Whenever I go on submission with a manuscript that has a healthy dose of diverse content, I worry about how my manuscript will be received by editors, specifically. From my time as a children’s book librarian, I know that kids just want a good story, so I don’t think much about readership. Kids and teens don’t have the same hang-ups that adults do. If the story is interesting, and the book ends up with a good cover, I feel good about how kids and teens might react.
But children’s book publishing in the United States is very homogenous — white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, heteronormative — and this has affected the odds of manuscripts with diverse content from being published. I’ve received coded rejections: “I just didn’t connect with your main character,” “The story doesn’t fit with my current list,” “This is just a matter of taste, and your book doesn’t fit,” “Publishing and taste is subjective.” But when taste and the tastemakers of publishing govern the industry, and those people in power all come from one dominant group, the products also reflect that homogeneity. A type of censorship takes hold. Unfortunately, all of this makes me feel like manuscripts with diverse content must be better than all the others.
Natalie: I would say it’s better now than when I first subbed a diverse manuscript, but there’s still a ways to go. I think the readership is the most open, but there’s still barriers in the industry and in our overall subconscious as a society that stop manuscripts before they even get a chance. I won’t lie that it’s still a challenge because I see it happen and it’s happened to me, but I also see it getting better and that gives me hope. If you’re subbing a diverse book, keep up the fight! Nothing can change if we don’t keep providing amazing diverse material.
3. Sensitivity readers look for different issues in a manuscript than regular beta readers. What’s the single most valuable piece of insight you’ve ever gotten from a sensitivity reader? Something that made you seriously sit up and go whoaaa, yes, thank you, I would never have seen that, and in that particular way, from this particular perspective?
Riley: My 2017 novel, Noteworthy, involves a girl who cross-dresses to infiltrate an all-guys’ a cappella group. I hired an (amazing) sensitivity reader who had actually cross-dressed as a guy in day-to-day life for years. She brought up the tension and internal conflict of cross-dressing as a cis person. Her notes opened up dimensions of thinking about gender identity/expression within the novel that I hadn’t considered before.
Elsie: I have a great author friend who pointed out how in one scene of Along the Indigo (out Spring 2018), my POC character’s perspective didn’t actually read as POC. Because why would my Asian main character deliberately mention her own race, as well as the race of another POC character, without also then noting, right there in that same scene, that everyone else was white? As an Asian, I am always very aware of who around me is white and who is not — so why didn’t I think to see it this way on the page?
I think some of it comes from growing up feeling white more than half the time, and some from a childhood filled with books and movies envisioned through a white lens. But I also fault my own laziness for not doing better at writing outside the “white as default” trap. Writing diversely well is work for everyone, and it’s work to not screw up — mistakes happen, but they don’t have to. Good sensitivity readers force us to see through gazes not our own.
Amanda: There was one thing that was so important to me in my Paper Gods series, and I was really fortunate to work with a team that totally agreed with me — my story was NOT going to have a “white savior.” There was NO WAY that a white girl in my story was going to come in and “save Japan.” That just wasn’t okay with me. So I had to think outside of the box and come up with ways that my protagonist could reach her goals and grow and the story could go where it needed to, without having it all come down to her. It is so important for writers who do have white privilege to look at our stories from every angle, with sensitivity readers to fill in those blindspots, and to understand how damaging a narrative like that could be. I love Japan, and I lived in Japan, but that’s precisely why I can’t be precious about it. I need to step back and realize my limits, and reach out for help to get around them, and to tell a story in a way that’s empowering, and fun, and not at all damaging.
Natalie: She wasn’t a sensitivity reader, but it was my editor for Fish Out of Water. The MC is half-Japanese and I spent a lot of time there trying to get that right, but there were other POC characters that I worked hard to get right but they were secondary characters and thus I didn’t delve as deep and with my MC.
In edits, my editor mentioned that one character, Shreya, was “bobbling her head” too much and it would be offensive to Indians for that to be pointed out as much as I had. It was a stereotype. I had completely missed that! I deleted all of that and was relieved she was savvy enough to catch that for me because she was totally right. So even with a lot of effort you can miss things and need extra eyes!
Dhonielle: Sensitivity readers are a cornerstone of the writing process. I need them as much as I need beta-readers. My co-writer Sona Charaipotra and I had five Korean sensitivity readers for our Tiny Pretty Things series. One of our main characters, June, is Korean American, and neither Sona nor I are from that background. One of our readers told us something so invaluable about the dynamics between many first-generation Korean kids and their mothers, particularly about food and school. Sona and I realized that our own respective cultures didn’t have the same parallels even as minorities in the United States. It was a lightbulb moment for us. Our versions of being minorities in this country — though there are many similarities — often have different nuances.
Sangu: A sensitivity reader mentioned something to me once that made me realise I had approached my characters all wrong. She pointed out the tired and problematic trope of “the only POC main character in the book dying for the white protagonist.” Now I have to admit I was baffled at first because this isn’t actually the case in that particular manuscript; four of the six main young characters are POC and while one does indeed die “for” the main character, it’s worth noting that the main character is one of the four POC in question.
What I discovered from that feedback, however, was that I’d done a poor job of conveying to my readers that these characters were in fact POC. My sensitivity reader had made an incorrect assumption when she pointed out a problematic trope, but it was entirely my fault she’d made that assumption in the first place. It shed light on what I would argue was an even bigger problem with my representation of my characters. It was a really incredible moment for me and I’ve been revisiting the manuscript repeatedly since then to find new ways to ensure that it’s clear to readers what these characters really look like and who they really are. It’s also the kind of realisation that has had me thinking more deeply and putting more effort into clearly describing characters in my newest work too.
4. A writer says to you they should get to write whatever they want when it comes to writing diversely, as long as they have the best of intentions. What are three key pieces of advice you would like to give them before they start?
Amanda:
1) Best intentions are great and awesome, but first of all, feeling you should get to write whatever you want is a problematic point of view. Yes, tell the story you need to tell, but find ways you can do that respectfully and authentically. That may mean realizing you’re not the right person to tell a certain story. The world is not against you — in fact, we’re all in this together! So please don’t feel like you’re being boxed in and “oppressed” by criticism. It takes a great deal of courage for someone to stand up and say hey, your story (or character, or premise, etc.) is problematic. Don’t be combative; listen, hear what they’re saying. Learn to step outside yourself and see where they’re coming from. The great thing about being readers and writers is that we make an art of stepping away from ourselves and looking at things differently.
2) Do crazy amounts of research, and then do some more. Listen to your Sensitivity Readers. Intentions are a great place to start, but it’s content your book will be judged on. You don’t want to do harm, right? You want to contribute positively to the reading/writing community. Awesome! So do your homework and get it right, and fix things that need fixing. Quick point — as a Fantasy author, I really want to urge you to be aware of the deep-seated racism and marginalization of minorities in Fantasy writing. It isn’t enough to slap a label on a culture and call it Fantasy. We draw from reality into any of our works, and your readers are from THIS world. Don’t exoticize, don’t stereotype. Diversity has to exist authentically in your Fantasy worlds, too. Again, learn to step outside your worldview and learn from others.
3) This isn’t a competition. We’re all in this together. Readers can read more than one book! So take any place of privilege you may have, and USE it to boost OTHER writers, particularly marginalized and minority voices. We need to contribute and we need to speak up for each other. #OwnVoices is a great place to start. And don’t just boost other writers — read them, review them, learn from them. It’s together that we can challenge each other’s world views and build respect and understanding. If you come to writing with this collaborative and respectful mindset, then you don’t need to feel intimidated to write diversely.
Dhonielle: A writer should never approach writing diversely with good intentions. Good intentions pave the road to hell. And hellish representation is something we don’t need. There’s already plenty of it. Three key pieces of advice I’d give a writer before they jumped into writing diversely are:
1) Check your privilege. Know that you don’t know anything, and even when you think you do know something, remember that you don’t know anything. This will help you come at the writing from a humble place.
2) Live a diverse lifestyle. Look at your friend group. Are they all from the same groups? Surround yourself with all sorts of folk who don’t look like you. The best way to learn is when you’re not writing.
3) Your stories are entering an industry that didn’t include marginalized people or publish marginalized voices, so what you create has consequences. The stories do not exist in a vacuum. Your mess-ups have weight. Proceed with caution and care and bravery.
Natalie: Intentions are all well and good, but I would tell them that actions speak louder than words. If they truly have the “best of intentions,” they will do their research. They will consider if the story they want to tell is one that particular POC community needs and will see as helpful and respectful. They will spend time listening to POC and internalizing their words and experiences instead of trying to trivialize them. They will read diverse books and learn what is and isn’t problematic and why. They will ACT with respect if their intentions are truly the best. So if those are things you’re doing, I say go for it. But if you’re being defensive, maybe take a step back and try to understand why.
Sangu:
1) If someone were to argue that they should get to write whatever they want because their intentions are good, I would gently point out that their intentions will not matter to a reader who is hurt or harmed by bad representation. (I say this from experience. An author’s good intentions have never made me feel less hurt or angry about the damaging representation of a fundamental part of who I am.) So please do ask yourself whether you feel confident in your ability to be respectful and authentic to the diversity in question before you start writing.
2) This is not to say that people shouldn’t write what they want to. Just that it’s not helpful to hide behind good intentions. It’s more helpful to be confident that you’ll get it right. My second piece of advice would therefore be to say “put the work in. Show me your good intentions by making sure you’ve examined your own biases about the character in question, done the research and put the necessary work in to create a character who feels real and true.”
3) This last piece of advice is more relevant to what happens after you’ve written your story, but: please listen to the concerns of your marginalised readers! One hurt or angry reader does not necessarily mean you’ve got things wrong because readers are individual people with a vast range of experiences and triggers, but it’s still worth listening to their concerns and taking the time to make sure you haven’t actually made a mistake that could be more broadly hurtful. And if you’re getting the same concerns from multiple people in the same marginalised group, please do consider that you may have indeed made a mistake and act on that if you can.
Heidi: The first thing I want to say is back up and rethink, because when I hear that phrasing, it means the person’s focus is all on themselves and not on the people they are writing about. Centering “intentions” over “impact” is centering the self over the rest of humanity. Are you going to write a good “diverse” character if your first concern is your own intentions rather than the impact your writing has on your audience? This is really the only piece of advice I would give a writer like that. Question whether you’re coming to the idea with the right focus.
Elsie: Intentions mean nothing. I don’t want to hear another author defend something in their book by saying they meant it as a compliment. Or by saying their one POC friend said it was okay. Or that it was how it was when they were growing up, so it’s a valid point of view. Just, nope.
1) I would ask how they would feel if their book ended up reinforcing negative stereotypes about a culture rather than opening it up to readers. Does the possibility more upset or insult them? In other words, I would ask that they really dissect why they wanted to share a particular story, and if they really are the writer with the best perspective and/or experiences to do that.
2) I would tell them to seek out good sensitivity readers who aren’t their friends, to really listen to their advice, and to remember that as an outsider, their own viewpoint is largely meaningless.
3) I would suggest they read multiple books that did diversity well and then read ones that didn’t. Are they able to see how those mistakes happened? How confident are they that they can avoid making those same mistakes?
Riley:
1) Do five times more research than you think you need to do. This includes reading many works from authors of the culture you’re writing. Basically a listening-before-speaking sort of a situation.
2) Acknowledge that whatever culture you’re writing isn’t a monolith. Get specific. E.g.: the experience of a first-generation Japanese immigrant will be vastly different than second-generation. The everyday of a Muslim American in small-town Iowa will be vastly different than that of a Muslim American in New York City. The life of a black character who has all-white friends and navigates white-dominated spaces, e.g. idk, the comics community, will be different than that of a black character whose friends are all black too. And so on.
3) When you’re building a character, don’t place race at the core of their being and try to build outward from it. Personality does not consist of race; race is a shaping force.
Okay this sounds vague. Example. Let’s say you have a character who wants to be the world’s greatest basketball player. Their driving force is going to be, what, fear of insignificance? Pure ambition? Eagerness to impress? Let’s say their core is pure ambition. Now consider how the world might perceive those things through the lens of their identity. If she’s a woman, she may have been conditioned to perceive her own ambition as unappealing; people may assume she’s capable of less. If he’s a black man, nonblack strangers might think that he’s playing basketball because he’s a black man. If she’s Chinese, her family might question the validity of this dream as opposed to other more ‘valuable’ professions; others might assume she doesn’t have the aggression for sports. Are these aggravating or diminishing forces for the character’s ambitions? How would each of these perceptions shape the character’s self-perception? In their personal sphere, what’s the dynamic between the character’s individual identity and the identity of their culture?
All this stuff needs to be known. Maybe it’s not on the page, like fantasy worldbuilding iceberg theory (the reader only sees a small part of what the author develops). But considering all this is vital to writing from that place.
