First!

Hey! And I really was!

Edited at 2013-01-30 02:57 pm (UTC)

I totally missed the thread about Diversity, but I will try to go back and read it.

My main characters in the book I'm working on are all brown? And the nicest ones are the brownest ones? (Well, Wes is nice and has blonde hair but it's bleached.) It worked out that way by accident, but hey. My two arguably ickiest characters are (ass #1) dark-skinned but with blonde hair and blue eyes (it's a weird genetic thing, shut up) and (ass #2) significantly lighter-skinned than the other characters (I don't know why except I guess he is a Mary Sue).

Wait, is it still diverse if all of the characters are the same color? Oops.

Oh, and the neighborhood I live in is, like, half country white people and half Korean. It's an interesting mix. It also means my dining-out options are mostly chain restaurants and Korean restaurants where I sometimes get looked at funny when I come in. I choose to deal with the funny looks. :)

Edited at 2013-01-30 03:12 pm (UTC)

Usually I'm writing my personal nonfiction, especially of my youth, which leaves a lot to be desired in terms of diversity. I grew up in rural Maine after all. Sometimes I write more political type posts, where I tackle issues of racism and sexism and ablism--because they are problems that matter to me.

This week I wrote my first work of fiction for Idol. I'm pretty proud of myself for challenging myself to do something new. And I'm excited that I've had some positive responses so far. After I had written it, I realized that it had a pretty diverse cast of characters. It wasn't something that I consciously set out to do--but when I was imagining my world, I thought of people I knew... and it turns out, I know a lot of different people these days.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and she was talking about when she was young and would inevitably get asked who her favorite superhero was. She never said Storm. It's not that she didn't like Storm or relate to her, it's that every other little black girl said Storm and she wanted to be unique, but there wasn't anyone else who looked like her for her to identify with. Now she's writing kick ass fantasy novels about people of color and talking about making sure her characters have diverse backgrounds, which I can get behind.

As I was saying to Gary yesterday, some of my stories are very diverse in race, because they span large worlds and it seems natural for me that large worlds that are set on Earth SHOULD incorporate the different types of people I see around me, and living in Orlando that's quite diverse. Those stories were conceived with those characters as they are now. Aed was never not Japanese. Coombs was never not black. It's a global fight and the cast should reflect that.

However, some of my stories aren't, and I wonder if I should make them so. For instance, I'm sharing a steampunk story with a friend. It's set in an unspecified fake country where the upper class is modeled after Second Empire France and the lower class is modeled after Germany at the same time. By and large, these characters are white, with the exception of a queen from another country. I can't tell you why they're all white. There were certainly people of color all over Europe, and one of the things that drives me nuts about steampunk as a genre is that not enough people touch on the colonialism and cultural appropriation aspects of it. So am I now, even though the text of the novel explores those, just as guilty because the main cast doesn't? I feel like maybe I am, but it's too late to change them now. So I try and make up for it with other steampunk stories that I'm writing that have more diverse casts.

But that's race, and sometimes I have to go back and make sure that I'm being fair to people who don't look like me, because they deserve kick ass stories that reflect them. When it comes to sexuality, however, it is not even a question of should I, I just do automatically. Often the reader won't know, but I know, but the characters come to me as sexual beings (when they are, sometimes they aren't) and that's just the way it is. William is flamingly gay as well as being a dandy. Mattie is bisexual. It's my own personal agenda, to normalize different sexualities within my worlds as a way to make up for the world I live in which is still experiencing growing pains in that regard.

I know that logically those two things should not be separate in my world view, and I do often think about how disassociating it must be to not see people like you represented. I have a great urge to go to places and drop myself into cultures that aren't my own, just so I can experience that. But that want for understanding too, is a sort of privilege to exercise.

Basically I try and make my works reflect the diverse world I want to see and not the lacking world that I live in.

I'm not sure how well I do with diversity in my writing. I often write fiction about speculative worlds where the demographics might not necessarily reflect those of the "real word." I was told by a friend "You have diverse crowds of characters around each main but most of your mains really are kinda the same." It's kind of true, as they're ALL young (teens to early twenties) and like 90% of the major ones are snarky to at least some degree. In fact, I actively struggle to write the one major lead who isn't remotely snarky because he's not. I find snark fun, but the personalities of my narrators might be too uniform?

While I have a fairly diverse racial mix in my stories, the leads often end up being white, quite likely because I am white myself. (I have some planned stories where the leads aren't white though?) The leads are also usually queer. Someone once asked me if I were using fiction to work out issues with my own sexuality and maybe? I wasn't doing that on purpose, though, but I'm sure my issues have to be making their way into my work somehow.

I am not sure the queer leads thing is a problem because over all fiction, there aren't that many queer leads. I do worry my narrators are too similar overall with their youth and their snarkiness and their tendency to be social outcasts/rebels of some kind or another.

I used to have it where all my leads were female, but now I do have more male leads. I also didn't have a particular problem writing mostly from a female perspective, because it seems mainstream fiction at least was mostly from the male viewpoint.

I will go back and read what others have written in a second, but first of all, this reminds me of an awesome TED talk I watched recently:



The gist of it is that telling a single story about a people over and over again tends to lead others into believing it's true (IE: All Africans are starving and poor, all servants lead subpar lives, etc.)

That begin said, my personal take on the subject of diversity is that I would agree with those that argue our media isn't diverse because we aren't diverse. Personally, I have a very difficult time writing about things that are completely outside my scope of experience. If I try to write something that I have never seen or interacted with myself, it comes out very stilted and fake. I have tried and repeatedly failed at this, and settled on the fact that I have to write what I know in order to a) enjoy writing, and b) have it be any good.

In addition, I have a hard enough time remembering to describe my characters, inserting an ethnic character just for the sake of inserting one would feel really clunky. "That's my friend Jane. SHE'S BLACK, EVERYBODY!!!"



Edited at 2013-01-30 03:51 pm (UTC)

Well I don't usually spell it out, but in my stories, some of the bees are carniolian (descended from bees from southern Eastern Europe), some are ligustica (from Italy), some are mellifera (that is, Apis mellifera mellifera), from Germany, and some are even scutellata, descended from the queen bees Dr Warwick Kerr brought to Brazil from Tanzania in 1956. I suppose now that I think about that that's mostly European bees, but honeybees aren't native to the Americas (there was an American subspecies but it went extinct about a million years ago), and the honeybees native to Asia and the Pacific islands are Apis cerana.

I guess the thing is, I want my readers to be able to relate to what I'm writing, so most of my stories are set in America (since that's where most LJ Idolists are I believe), and it would just be entirely unrealistic for A. m. adansonii or A. m. simenses to turn up in American suburbs (though I've heard that A. m. egyptii are secretly out in the desert.

Oh wait I do have an LJI entry about Apis mellifera capensis, from South Africa.

I'll try to work in an entry or two about my time in Nigeria and Ethiopia so we can get those adansonii and simenses bees in ;)

Well, dispite growing up in the middle of Iowa I was exposed to a diverse collection of indeviduals and I do like some diversity in my writing (and game worlds).
its really just a mater of descriptions and in some cases vocabulary. One thing I do know from personal experience is this
A diffrince in appearance or ethnicity does not neccessitate a difrint culture nor does a simularity in such mean that two are from the same culture.

I don't really think about it much, to be honest. My characters are who they are - I don't make a conscious effort to include tokens because if I don't someone is going to raise a fuss. I'm more interested in the story my character wants me to tell. If a character's race / gender / age / sex / ethnicity / preferred brand of soap is important, it will come out.

In my current work I have non-straight characters. I have non-white characters. *shrug* I've written non-human characters too.

More important to me are the biases that the reader might bring to what they are reading. Assumptions are fun to mess with.

I don't always think about this much, in that my original fiction characters don't tend to identify their physical characteristics much. The reader usually knows that they're male or female by the end of the story, but that's about it. As people, how we look usually doesn't come up naturally in narrative (especially in first-person!), and I generally don't try to shoehorn it in.

I've written some gay/bi characters (mostly men), and in my mind, the character in You Are Here was black, but I don't think the reader would necessarily know that.

I should think about this more, though, because diversity is also richness of detail. The trick is doing it right. :)

I'm having a REALLY bad day, I appreciate the chance to get it off my mind.

I agree with occasionally in that I usually write personal non fiction. I've written fiction before but rarely (I'm beginning to really hate what I wrote this week and stress about it so I probably won't do it again for awhile.)

I can't say I was submerged by diversity growing up. We did have a very few people of different races but certainly noone of a different sexuality and none that I can remember of a religion other than die hard Southern Christianity. So naturally if I'm writing about my childhood my world is not going to sound diverse.

But since I've gotten older I've embraced so many different cultures, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, etc...maybe it's time for me to write some of that. Hmmm....

In my historical stories, the characters are usually white or European, because those are the people that mostly populated Toronto at the time of the photos that go with the stories. However, I've written some Native characters (the protagonist in my Butterbox babies) and I'd like to try the POV of a black character in one of my historical stories, should I get to stay in LJ Idol awhile!

In other stories, I've written from the POV of gay characters a lot. And I write a lot of personal non-fiction as well.

Okay, now that I can finally sit down and comment, I caaaan.

When it comes to the issue of diversity in my fiction, I just go by what the characters tell me they are. I grew up in a fairly diverse area (just outside Philly), and my friends are fairly diverse, as well.

However. most of the worlds I write in are based off ours but don't have the same cultural divides as we do now. The Tomorrow 'verse in particular is likely the most different -- most of the people in that 'verse are POC. Queer folk end up in my work all the time -- as a bisexual myself, it drives me nuts that some people think I don't exist. Gender variants don't show up, but that's because my er, "fantasy self" is male. I haven't been good about representing women in general, but I do try to make my female characters strong in their own right.

But really, I have them act as people. Not as their stereotypes. They're just people who happen to be whatever they happen to be. Because really, the best representations are ones that are treated as people and not as a way to say LOOK HOW DIVERSE MY CAST IS.

I make a conscious effort to include as varying people as I can in my work, whether it's heritage, class, sexual identity, age or other things. Ans I grew up in whitey mcwhitey rural sweden. The thing is, people are people, and if you feel insecure, bloody research. That's a writers job. And if you get slammed for doing a shitty job with let's say magical negroes or feisty latinas, then suck it up, take another look and learn to do better.

If you only write yourself or your friends, then you are a lazy writer. 'nuff said.

Gary, I had no idea you were feeling so unwell until I read this:

That we (US culture. Apologies to the rest of the world culture for the generalization

You're not only admitting that there are alternative cultures to the USS, but apologising for the generalisation? There, there. Have a cup of tea and a lie down ;p


Coming late to the party as I am, I guess most other people have probably touched on what I have to say, but I'd add that sometimes, especially in TV, it feels as if the diversity is forced. As if someone has sat down and worked out the relevant percentages of race and religion. It feels so contrived. Maybe I'm reading too much into it? I would just prefer if there were good characters, and some of them happened to not be white.

Just gonna put this here even though the discussion has long been done. This is the price I pay for being in a play!

I don't think writers are obligted to write about anything but what they want to write about--or, if they're writing for hire, what they're paid for/commissioned to write about. My biggest issue is with the lack of diversity in the mainstream media spaces we encounter and with the lack of representation of the diversity that is undeniably a part of our culture. When I watch a television show like Girls, I actually don't mind that the characters are all white. What I mind is that white is the default character and when someone non-white is cast in a role, their casting tends to be precipitated on their non-whiteness as opposed to their person/acting-ness. And I get that I'm setting up the impossible. I want to see more non-white casting as just the norm, but that means that casting directors and producers and all those folks have to be intentional about casting non-white actors in roles that are just roles--not only the roles that specifically call for non-white people.

And I'm sure I have more to say, but I'll just leave this here for now.